I heard it last night on Twitter. For thirty real world bucks, you can turn your stout female dwarf into a beautiful slender blood elf, or your giant tauren warrior into an adorable little gnome.
I’m really curious about where the dust is going to settle after the flurry of initial faction changes. I can only assume that most faction changes will be from Alliance to Horde. Am I wrong? It seems like a lot of people make Ally toons when they start out, then they either stay Ally because their friends are there or they’re so invested in the character. Then they hear about how cool the Horde are, but they’re stuck. I have no evidence of this. I’m only led to believe it from my own limited experiences, the podcast community chatter, the hearty Horde warcries at Blizzcon, and the “For the Horde” nod on TNT’s Leverage. It just seems like the Horde are the cool kids and the Allies are the goody goodies.
But I hope I’m wrong. Because Fenwick the gnome rogue is staying where she is. The only possibility of her changing I could foresee is a bizarre engineering accident transforming her into a goblin. But you know, her engineering isn’t THAT bad. And when I play a goblin, it’s gonna be from the starting zone we’ve been hearing so much about.
UPDATE:
Mike Schramm over on WoW.com wrote a piece about this, with polls. I urge everyone to go take them, so we can get a better handle on the population shifts.
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I’m really looking forward to the RP opportunities that this new feature will create. I plan on rolling a human and have him be “turned” by the plague. Then I’ll just follow all my guys Ally friends around like a zombie stalker.
Oh great idea! I have to say, while I’m all for Blizzard offering this service, the whole idea of it really turns me off….unless we come up with great RP situations like that one.
The changes are interesting and hopefully will bring a few mates back to play.
I am alliance but they are all horde they said they would come back to wow and play alliance when this came live so here ishoping that by tonight i’ll have some RL friends back and playing.
I’m thinking that the people (like me) who rolled alliance because that’s where our friends are will likely stay because even if the original friends aren’t playing any more, we’ve made new friends and are attached to our characters as they are. But even if there is some shift from alliance to horde, that should only be for the best, as I believe the populations are currently fairly imbalanced in favor of the alliance anyhow.
I will prob be switching to horde. A long time ago I started this game as a NE hunter, but after my first 2 guilds fell apart and small group of friends decided to reroll into horde on a new server, shortly after BC came out. We’ll after a realm transfer, a new xpac and 3 guilds failing, I am very happy at the chance to switch to my orginal character but still play with my friends that I have built in WoW since I started playing, some of which I have been playing with for 3 years =).
So yeah, I’m pretty happy about this, to bad I can’t carry my griffin and Kinght-lt. title over to the horde side. It would’ve been cooler if players were able to keep their races!
I’ve been hearing about Allied vs. Horde population imbalances. I’ve rolled a tauren on Elune (PvE) and, so far, I haven’t been seeing the disparity. Of course, I’m only level 23 and haven’t hit Northrend so we shall see if this balances out the population.
On the other side of the coin, I’ve seen fairly even number of both sides on Wildhammer (PvP) where my main resides. So a significant shift there would unbalance the population. It probably all comes down to whether you like playing as the Alliance or the Horde.
As a side note, the Alliance needs a rallying cry. “For the Horde” is getting tired.
Thanks for the comments everyone. I like hearing about how people feel about this and what your plans are for faction change.
@HardWearJunkie: Yeah I think for Alliance it’s “Grab your swords and fight the Horde.” But that’s kinda sing-songy. Doesn’t have the gusto of “For the Horde.”
On Turalyon that difference is really noticeable in wintergrasp. The alliance alwasy out number the horde badly. IF you were a NE your battlecry would be easy… “For Elune”, but as an alliance as a whole…. I dunno, to be darker… ‘Death to the horde”.
I thought “For the Alliance!” was already well-established as an Alliance catchphrase. o.o Or is that only with the NPCs?
I have one for when the Alliance goes on a charge: “Alliance: FORWARD!”
I like it when it’s yelled, but not when it’s written. Back to the drawing board.
I could have used this last year. I found out my brother in law plays WoW in a very active horde guild. I would have loved to have taken one of my alliance 70s over to play with his group, but instead had to level a new character instead.
I’ve seen that same situation play out several times with that group. They’re a church-affiliated guild, and the first result that pops up when you google the church name and wow, but lots of people who showed up had several alliance characters that they couldn’t use and had to reroll.
I just switched my Gnome Deathknight to a Troll Deathknight, and I must say that leaving behind my awesome gnome-ness was a hard thing to do. I also know many friends who play horde, so these were some main factors for my switch. I may end up getting a race change to a goblin when it comes out because the short races are, of course, the best. All that to say, if you don’t have a really good reason, DON’T SWITCH FROM A GNOME!
They are too fun…
I prefer EQ2′s version. More in game, but its less of a money grubbing tactic. Everyone knows blizzard is just so poor it needs more cash.
I started playing Horde and switched to Alliance after a couple of weeks and still play my human warlock and I’ll never delete her (I mean, my succubus is named “Domantia”. How could I afford to lose her?). I tried Horde again in another server, but grow tired of it. Believe me, Horde’s not cooler at all. You’ll find stupid little kids in both sides (specially playing undead rogues, I hated them as an allie and hated them as a hordie). The only difference is that Horde players seem to be a little more violent, and don’t stop yelling “FOR THE HORDE!!!!1″ in the general channel until you can’t stand it anymore. So, no, don’t switch. After all, nothing is cooler than a pink-pigtailed rogue gnome… well, maybe a pink-pigtailed death-knight gnome. Or a blonde-pigtailed gnome priest, in Cata. Speaking of Cata, expect lots of Horde switchers who want to play a worgen.