Leave the Horde Behind

Blizzard will allow World of Warcraft players to swap factions.

---

By John Gillooly on 30 June, 2009

Years ago, Blizzard said that it would not implement character transfers in World of Warcraft (WoW). It was possible – a friend had sneakily managed to get his character transferred to our server – but it wasn’t something that Blizzard was going to open to the public. It later reversed that decision, opening up not only a new revenue stream by charging US$25 a pop, but also dramatically changing the population load on many realms.

Next on the list of ‘will never happens’ was the ability to transfer characters from player versus environment (PVE) servers to player versus player (PVP) servers. Arguments against this largely revolved around the belief that PVP servers made levelling a character harder, thanks to the constant threat of attack from the other faction’s players. This caused a problem when one’s friends played on a PVP server – if you wanted to play with them, you would have to level a new character on that server no matter how many high level ones you had elsewhere. Blizzard reversed this decision last year and opened transfers to PVP servers.

Players have been asking for the ability to change race or faction for as long as WoW has existed. Like the transfers changes beforehand, Blizzard has repeatedly said it would not happen. Just like the changes beforehand, Blizzard has now changed its mind about transferring characters between factions, having just announced on its forums that it had started working on a process to do so.

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. Players who ended up creating and leveling up characters on the opposite factions from their friends have been asking for this type of functionality for some time, and we’re pleased to be getting closer to being able to deliver it. 

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. We’ll go into much more detail on all of this here at www.WorldofWarcraft.com as development progresses. In the meantime, we wanted to let you know that because this type of functionality requires extensive internal testing well in advance of release, you may be seeing bits and pieces of the service in the test builds we use for the public test realms moving forward.

This will open up many possibilities for players. Those who already have high level Horde characters, but now play Alliance, will be able to bring their characters over. But like the PVP changes, it also makes it much easier for people to play with friends. By removing the absolute faction divide, Blizzard has essentially removed the last barrier to this – and while it will likely charge its standard US$25 fee for the privilege, a lot of players will likely take up this option.

Depending on how it is implemented, this could well cause a massive shake-up of populations on some realms. Despite the cost, the transfer system has shown that people are more than willing to fork over the cash to move. Odds are that this system is still months away from implementation, but Blizzard never announces something unless it is deemed a certainty.

• Login or register to post comments

---