Sick of wandering around Ironforge getting continually pestered by 10yr old beggars and gold thieves? Or have all your old skool Strat/Scholo buddies jumped ship and gone over to the dark side? Well fear not, because this week Blizzard announced its intention to introduce faction transfers in the near future.
Faction transfer has always been a contentious issue with the forum trolls of Azeroth. Many posters on the Blizzard forums believe that faction transfers signal the end of the world as we know it; where as the majority of others posters reply with the standard ‘omFg l33t yexplX tytyty’. The hardcore cynics out there suggest that it’s just another Blizzard cash-cow designed to squeeze the last gasp out of an ageing MMO, and let’s admit they may have a bit of a point on this one.
So who’s got the right of it? Are faction transfers necessarily a bad idea?
Many of the European servers are currently completely imbalanced, often the Alliance outnumbers the Horde by about 3-1, and some servers have even higher ratios. This can cause massive in-game problems, especially in battleground scenarios. Balancing faction numbers has always been in Blizzard’s interest, and perhaps the only true failure of WoW’s release is that they never implemented a system which controlled server faction population.
At present Blizzard haven’t announced when the new service will be implemented, or how it’s going to work. There are hundreds of factors that need to be ironed out before it can be released and it is yet unclear whether it will involve race changes. As one poster put it ‘there’s no way in hell I’ll let an Orc in my city!!1’.
Here are some excerpts from Nethaera’s original forum post;
“In response to player requests, we’re developing a new service for World of Warcraft that will allow players to change their faction from Alliance to Horde or Horde to Alliance. There’s still much work to do and many details to iron out, but the basic idea is that players will be able to use the service to transform an existing character into a roughly equivalent character of the opposing faction on the same realm”
“As with all of the features and services we offer, we intend to incorporate the faction-change service in a way that won’t disrupt the gameplay experience on the realms, and there will be some rules involved with when and how the service can be used. The number of variables involved increases the complexity of implementing this service, but we plan to take the time needed to ensure that it lives up to expectations before officially rolling it out.”
As an old skool Alliance player who doesn’t really play anymore the option to move over doesn’t really interest me, but I can see the benefits that it may bring to unbalanced servers and existing players. Speculation suggests that the option to transfer faction will be made available towards the end of the year.
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