Saw this on 1up (link).

We wanted to give everyone a very early heads-up that, 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.

I don't play WoW anymore, but this is pretty crazy. Even after saying over, and over, and over that they'll never allow characters to be changed from horde to alliance or vice versa, its now in the works. I remember joking about this months ago when they started charging money to change your character's name or looks, never really seriously thinking it would happen. For me its like the final nail in the coffin, that the Blizzard of old that was just interested in making good games is well and truly dead and has made way for the Activision owned Blizzard that is just interested in sucking as much money as possible out of people.

An EQ-2 style betrayal quest would have been better IMO. This just looks like a grab for cash.

...am i missing something, i dont see anywhere where it says they intend to charge for this?

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

This is Blizzard speak for give us money. They charge for a name or realm change, no way you are getting off your faction for free.

last edited by Hogfather at 17:38:05 30/Jun/09

They charge you to change your name or clothes? If I ever have any children and they play this s*** I will ban them from computers until they're old enough to get a job, move out, and pay for their own e-crack habit.

you guys are missing the point. one of the main reasons that blizzard charge people to do this is to stop all the kiddies changing their names and s*** every 10 minutes.

not defending blizzard for the blood sucking vampiric whore that they are but hey.. look at it from different perspectives

^

Yeah because timers haven't been discovered yet.

I don't play WoW anymore, but this is pretty crazy. Even after saying over, and over, and over that they'll never allow characters to be changed from horde to alliance or vice versa, its now in the works. I remember joking about this months ago when they started charging money to change your character's name or looks, never really seriously thinking it would happen. For me its like the final nail in the coffin, that the Blizzard of old that was just interested in making good games is well and truly dead and has made way for the Activision owned Blizzard that is just interested in sucking as much money as possible out of people.

A business trying to make money? How dare they!!

Guys do not forget your beloved games developers are in the business of making money and not friends.

tiny: Nintendo are clearly not like that tiny they understand their gamers.

oh blizzard how you have fallen. its bad enough youre going to make money of sequels like d3 and sc2 but now you want to do this?

I can understand them asking for money to play the game, I couldn't even imagine the bandwidth wow must take up but when you start asking money to change stuff like your name or the appearance of a character then you're just starting to exploit your subscribers.

How the hell would you even justify it? Oh yeah we need money for this because it creates such a HUGE burden on our servers every time you change your name to Pixy McSlash and change the colour of your bra to pink.

I imagine changing your alliance or whatever might eat up a few cpu cycles and the money thing might be a limit but seriously, limit it to one change every 2 months or something if your servers are so crap.

Trog should adopt this line of thought, charge people on here to change their avatars & names, there'd be enough money for the public lib. insurance for another LAN in no time!

If I ever have any children...

I think the odds of winning lotto tonight are better.

Blizzard are already working on their next mmo - a totally new story. If it's anywhere near as good as what wow was, and know Blizzards history I would say that will definately be the case.. then alot of players will ditch wow for the new one. I can see them milking wow dry as much as they can before the new one comes out, which is fine by me... I quit the s*** already.

If I ever have any children and they play this s*** I will ban them from computers until they're old enough to get a job, move out, and pay for their own e-crack habit.

My plan is to just build my children a cheap pc with minimum specs & without a video card (and hope onboard gfx are still s*** by this time) so that they can't play games very well at all.

I think the odds of winning lotto tonight are better.

Haha, this is amazing.

The line for me with WoW will be if they ever introduce RMT (ie. Official ways to pay real money to instantly get in-game gold/items). This definitely comes close though...

Guys do not forget your beloved games developers are in the business of making money and not friends.

Who do you think put Blizzard where they are today and made them all their money? Its just a shame to now see them ripping off those same gamers they used to have such a deep respect for. Used to be they'd delay a game if they were not 100% happy with it, now its all "gotta get it out before christmas". I dunno, probably just a sign of the times, and its probably inevitable, but its still sad to see it come to that.

It's simple really - If you are a TIGHTARSE?.. don't change factions! it's turning into QQgl around here.

they understand their gamers

they sure as f*** understand their MMO gamers, addictive personalities that will pay money for everything related to their addiction.

I can understand them asking for money to play the game, I couldn't even imagine the bandwidth wow must take up but when you start asking money to change stuff like your name or the appearance of a character then you're just starting to exploit your subscribers.

Obviously they do it to make money but the added bonus is that if someone steals loot they are then known server wide. If it was all free and instant then people would be going crazy stealing everything they could, borrowing gold, stealing everything from guild banks and changing names/servers every other day.

Faction change is weird. I wonder if they'll let you pick what race you end up and if so if they'll have a 30 day limit or something on it so people can't pay to swap to the FOTM race for pvp.

Who do you think put Blizzard where they are today and made them all their money? Its just a shame to now see them ripping off those same gamers they used to have such a deep respect for. Used to be they'd delay a game if they were not 100% happy with it, now its all "gotta get it out before christmas". I dunno, probably just a sign of the times, and its probably inevitable, but its still sad to see it come to that.

Blizzard still dictate to publishers. If they don't think a game is ready and really need to hold it back they will, and the publishers will say "ok old chaps". Mostly because the publishers know they do almost everything incredibly well which makes them a goldmine.

last edited by Syco at 20:11:54 30/Jun/09

^^^^ What he said. Show me where Blizzard have said they're rushing SC2 out for Christmas? Pretty sure most of their comments to that end have been that "they'd like to have it out before the end of 2009". They said the same thing when The Burning Crusade was due to be released, but then that got pushed back 2-3 months to allow some more work to be done to get it up to their standards..


Also, ITT Blizzard fanboys defend their beloved company.

tiny: Nintendo are clearly not like that tiny they understand their gamers.

as much as i dearly love nintendo, their latest console was aimed squarely at the market most likely to make them money - casual gamers, not the gamers that had been enjoying their games for the last however many years

tiny: Nintendo are clearly not like that tiny they understand their gamers.

Actually Nakor, both you & Greazy are right on this bit - Nintendo *do* understand their gamers. Specifically they understand which gamer demographic they were missing out on - the same demographic that the Nintendo DS started to capitalise on, then exposed totally by the launch of the Wii. In the same breath though, they've managed to turn away a lot of old school followers by taking this approach. Stuff like No More Heroes, HOTD: Overkill!, Twilight Princess or Metroid Prime 3 (and I guess the new one too - other M or whatever it is) go some of the way to appease those of us who cut our teeth destroying gamepads back in the NES/SNES days.

I don't see people complaining that they are releasing SC2 in 3 parts...thats 3 different games you'll have to purchase to get the full effect.

An EQ-2 style betrayal quest would have been better IMO

s*** yeah. I remember posting something along those lines on the official WoW forums ages ago and the amount of people who got s***ty with the idea was huge. Like once you get to say lvl 40 you could do some epic quest that would let you swap factions. I've got a few lvl 70 toons on alliance that I havent played since BC came out and wouldn't mind changing them over to horde.

Also, I did a paid name change a couple of weeks back. When I finally got the chef title on my hunter, I changed my name from Anzak to Ramsay.

Who do you think put Blizzard where they are today and made them all their money? Its just a shame to now see them ripping off those same gamers they used to have such a deep respect for.

This is a silly notion. I remember the majority of players in WoW had no idea about the history behind certain characters because they never played any of the warcraft games.

The really retarded thing is this: this s*** should have been the norm because from the start the factions weren't meant to be solid and blizzard was meant to implement a system were players from both factions could come together and form a guild (therefore nulling the effect of factions all together).

An EQ-2 style betrayal quest would have been better IMO/

That would be pretty cool. Maybe making people undead through some epic quest chain. Or even keeping your race, but just being horde.

How about an undead holy priest with alliance gear? Yeah.. that would groovy! I'd start playing again if they did that.

It seems fairly obvious to me that Blizzard have changed their business model; replacing the heads of their development teams with marketing types. It's no longer about making the games good or consistent, it's all about the dollar.

Some people may say "they're a business, it's their right", which is not untrue. But I've always felt that you need to strike a balance between the quality of your product and your revenue. Finding that balance no longer appears to be a high priority to them.

Or even keeping your race, but just being horde

Yeh, this. As long as it was suffiently difficult to complete the quest you wouldn't have hordes (lol) of Taurens chilling in Ironforge anytime soon, and it would add to the flavour of the world.

If old mate Wrynn can declare that some death knights are cool, why can't he do the same for Horde who prove themselves to the Alliance? Vice versa for Thrall.

It would also give the endless grinders something new to do as you could start with all the city factions at minimum unfriendly - you can't trade with that level can you? I'm sure there's a suitable mount or title they could give to anyone psycho enough to grind up the other faction to max Ally.

Wait, for all those up in arms about "vampiric blood sucking ways" and, oh the plight of the gamer, how are we to ever respect blizzard again, these are all completely optional things to do in the game, and you're all completely over re-acting.

You don't HAVE to change factions from horde to alliance, you could just level an alliance character.

You don't HAVE to change your name, you could just, play on.

The money aspect is as much as deterrant to people as it is also a penalty, you're not playing the game as intended, but if you REALLY want to, you can!

Not to mention which, there is an entirely free option available to you, to be able to do all of those things, you just choose not to take that path. Instead the people that pay are saying "i'd rather pay x amount then have to put in the effort again". Which for alot of casuals is the best thing they could hope for.

If i were all of the players i'd be alot more worried about population imballance becoming alot more noticeable and hope that blizzard put a cap on it at 60/40 or something.

What is the point of a faction change?

I thought a race change would have been a better option.

Race and sex change please, I want all my horde chars to be female blood elves so I can strip them off and go /dance in Dalaran with other naked female blood elves.

You can do an einstien, just no race changes.

Tbh the thing i liked about mmo's was u stuck with a char on a realm and built it up.... xfers were alright to get off s*** realms...

But fkn faction changes? Just another money grab, sure it's a smart idea but ffs what's the point of making a character if you can go and change it's fkn species / race.

Also i quit like 2 months ago, WTS some accs PM me :)


SOMEONE TEACH ME THE TRICKS OF SPY IN TF2.. WTFUX

speaking as a wow fanboy, my first question is do I get to keep all my shiny purps

12/26/04 is when i first started playing wow.

$600 so far is what it has cost for my account. Wowzers.

$600 US that is.

speaking as a wow fanboy, my first question is do I get to keep all my shiny purps

I would assume so.


PS all horde move to Barthilas and join our only raid twice a week 'cause we have lives guild KTHX.

Is there even any point in raiding if you only do it 2 times a week?

So far tonight we've been raiding about an hour and on Iron Council so with an hour a half left we should be up to Thorim or clearing to Freya.

(I'm in same guild as Syco)

A 2-3 night raid guild can pretty much keep up with content releases these days can't they?

Haven't been in the game in a few months but my old guild was killing Malygos before Uldaman came out, and they started raiding a couple months after the xpac came out.

Granted you probably need 4-5 raid nights and a few key players moonlighting in pub / open 10-mans and s***, but unless Uldaman Ulduar changed everything a 2-3 night guild seemed workable?

Edit: haha Uldaman, I suck/

last edited by Hogfather at 22:56:09 02/Jul/09

i like how this thread has pulled lits and nakor out of a deep deep black hole lol

Is there even any point in raiding if you only do it 2 times a week?

Holy s***, I am sooooo glad I never bothered raiding when I played WoW.

2 is probably heaps nowadays.. The main reason we only do 2 nights a week is anymore is just too time consuming. The guild all has wifeys/girlfriends, jobs, etc so nobody really can be arsed spending more than a few hours a week in Ulduar.

Gotta gear up and get ready for that next epic raid instance they're patching in, where you stand in the middle of a circular room and fight not one, but TWO giant worms. Sounds epic.

So far tonight we've been raiding about an hour and on Iron Council so with an hour a half left we should be up to Thorim or clearing to Freya.

(I'm in same guild as Syco)

...posting while raiding. This is why you died on Iron Council wasn't it? hahah

Edit: Yeah 2 is fine IMO. We just have issues keeping heals in a 10man guild (they grab gear then take off to 25's) which slows us down a heap. If we had a full 10man run of non-douches and people who knew the fights could probably finish Ulduar in 3-4 hours (if you rushed it) faster if everyone was geared. I mean it's not really as big as Naxx and that can be done in 3. Then I guess hard modes come into it and make it go longer..


last edited by Syco at 01:40:23 03/Jul/09

So far tonight we've been raiding about an hour and on Iron Council so with an hour a half left we should be up to Thorim or clearing to Freya.

(I'm in same guild as Syco)

That's fair s*** for a guild dude.. we had a pug grp that could clear ulduar :)

But really... wow sucks stop fkn playing it... arena is terrible, bg's are mindfks and to beat the pve side of the game.. u find 25 non retards and make a group.. it's actually really hard to find 25 non retards :D

That's fair s*** for a guild dude.. we had a pug grp that could clear ulduar :)

In an hour? He said "we have been going for an hour and are on Iron Council", he was posting here while raiding.

Edit: With pugs :( Seriously people xfer to Barth :)

last edited by Syco at 01:44:34 03/Jul/09

2 is probably heaps nowadays.. The main reason we only do 2 nights a week is anymore is just too time consuming. The guild all has wifeys/girlfriends, jobs, etc so nobody really can be arsed spending more than a few hours a week in Ulduar.

I run a casual raiding guild, and I raid 2 nights a week. We current are doing Ulduar 10 man content, and its keeping us pretty entertained. Now that the content is actually doable with 10 people and without the most extreme gear, you can get into this kinda of content without a poopsocking time investment.

this game sounds like a job more than having fun playing a game

f***ing s*** game.

I quit wow after 2 long stints and although I sometimes want to hit it up again, I try to remember what a time sink it was, and that I'll never get that time back again. It should really come with a disclaimer.

Paid faction change would be cool though.

last edited by kappa at 09:25:02 03/Jul/09

this game sounds like a job more than having fun playing a game

I reckon following around wow threads commenting on the game sounds like a job, less fun then playing a game at least :)

mm.. Just realised that I'll be able to shift my Paladin across to Horde now & save me having to level another goddamn pally (swear 20-60 was the most painful experience.. so very slow, at least back in classic WoW it was).

This is a good thing.

Across to Barthilas horde right darkjedi ol' buddy ol' pal.

Come to Eldre Thalas and join The Panty Raiders!

ahhahahaha.. Unless you guys start raiding around 8-9pm, I'm not going to be much use anyway :)

if u cleared to IC in an hr.. it aint that hard... FL takes 10min, razor takes like 6, ignis prob takes about 15 with trash, XT takes about 8 with trash.. clear some trash to IC and you're there.

but yer, raiding is like another job... unless you really enjoy the guild.. which few people do.. it just get tedious.

+ nothing better then jumping into tf2 and been able to compete easily cause you aren't fkn out geared, not that that was really ever a problem in arena anyway because of the amount of tards :d

Are any of you lot on frostmourne? I resubscribed and started levelling a character. Hooooo boy. It's like a f***ing ghost town, the world's worst single player game. I haven't played since the good old days of raiding MC and I feel like these young hoodlums are all up on my damn lawn.

:-(