http://us.blizzard.com/support/article.xml?locale=en_US&tag=FCFAQ

Details on how it will work and how much it costs. I must say it's shocking but a good business move. If WAR would have ever done this the game would probably be allot better.

They've kinda long since stopped giving a fuck about gameplay and are simply trying to siphon off as much money as possible, huh?

They've kinda long since stopped giving a fuck about gameplay and are simply trying to siphon off as much money as possible, huh?

Yep. And people are lining up by the millions to give it to them :(

How does that break gameplay?

Well, I'd think there's quite a few ways that have slowly been trickling through.

Remember what happened to someone who ninja looted or had social ineptness back on Ayonae Ro? We blacklisted them, they couldn't up and transfer to a new server to get away from the ridicule. Now people can even switch factions if they can't find any friends on any server.

And they have slowly been de-evolving gameplay for a while. 40 man raids were too hard to get people to do, so they made 25 man raids the max. Those needed keys and that was too hard, so they took the key requirements out. Then those 25 man raids were too hard so they made 10 man copies of the 25-man raids with slightly worse loot. But 10 people is too hard to get, so now you can get the same loot from running a 5-person dungeon. The end result: you can finish the hardest content in the game roughly a week after its launched. They have obviously spent a lot of time on the mechanics to change a person's character and race, but content comes out at a trickle. The game's population turns over faster than any other I've ever played.

Of course, as a big Blizzard fan I was exceptionally excited for the WoW release. Back then they released World of WARcraft on the premise of a war between two factions. Remember the epic battlegrounds between two factions they talked about, back before they added capture the flag and pin the tail on the donkey and simon says? http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/pvp/battlegrounds.html
A big part of playing on a PVP server was that you could only create characters of your own faction to prevent spying and the like, because PVP mattered. Now the rogue and priest vs rogue and shaman arena duel is the end-game of PvP, which I suppose is fitting because the PvE endgame is dueling in an arena as well. This is the one area I think that is hurt the most, the potential for great PvP in a game like this (massively, not instanced, as the first M in the genre used to imply) always existed, but they would much rather get a few dollars out of their customers and forgo world PvP (expanding in them letting people level up to 80 on a PvE server un-interrupted and then let them transfer over).

And of course, never mind the whole creating a character and leveling up that character making friends along the way role-playing aspect when you can make a male gnome warrior and pay your $50 and be a female orc wizard.

Its not just WoW that bothers me in this regard, mind you, I've written on here a few times about the entire "MMO" genre dipping into the micro-transaction realm or making the entire game an instance and really having no real "massive" part of it, but that's another story. WoW is the benchmark all future online games will be judged, and much like AT&T and their paper bill fee, it will probably be a very brief period of time until everyone else follows.

So it's not that new service so much as the lack of other improvements? If it makes you feel any better, the people who implemented that definitely aren't the same ones that generate or implement new content.

I'm starting to think your selective reading is a learning disability you may want to look into. The new service trivializes world PVP like killing alliance leaders and such. 1 person on the Horde side reading chat could switch to their Alliance character and have them ready well before the invasion starts. It also removes the sense of team, and all of the above.

I just ignored that part since it was nonsense. We were using cross-faction spotters in beta before the game was out.

The player base killed world PvP long before this came about. It became a high level gank fest and nothing more.
If anything Blizz is guilty of not making changes soon enough. adding XP to the BG's has actually brought back competitive play in the lower brackets. only one's whinning are the Twinks who cant get enough players in the Que for non-XP matches. (AV still blows)
I will agree with you Arenas was a bad direction to go in.
If anything Blizz tried hard to encourage world PvP with the zone objectives but the only 2 i ever saw actively played were HFP and the towers in terrokar. WG is actually pretty popular on my server.

As to this cross faction change i thinks much adoo about nuttin. the lazy people who didnt want to re-roll and level again will jump on it at first but then i see 90% or more of the players staying right where they are.

If only to add to the hate here, I'm sort of surprised there's any commitment left in the game. Why bother making people pick classes at all? Where's the commitment to any kind of character choice anymore? Its bad enough that everyone and their mother can dip into any type of role they want to now. It seems like they're blurring the class lines to the point where everyone is just one part of one amorphous blob where anyone can do anything.

Well I'm sure that's next. You'll be able to pay a fee and change your class, or pay a fee and gain a few levels, etc.

Well I'm sure that's next. You'll be able to pay a fee and change your class, or pay a fee and gain a few levels, etc.

The game is slowly turning changing into **easy welfare mode** :(

What killed world pvp was the lack of incentive, while BG's were offering all the reward, and they let you pvp on "your time" with out any of the faction imbalance. If they had done more to encourage world pvp it would be entirely different, but they do not.

Id like to add that Arena was the worst thing they ever did to this game.

And of course, never mind the whole creating a character and leveling up that character making friends along the way role-playing aspect when you can make a male gnome warrior and pay your $50 and be a female orc wizard.

This is where you crossed the line from ridiculous hyperbole to outright lying.

If only to add to the hate here, I'm sort of surprised there's any commitment left in the game. Why bother making people pick classes at all? Where's the commitment to any kind of character choice anymore? Its bad enough that everyone and their mother can dip into any type of role they want to now. It seems like they're blurring the class lines to the point where everyone is just one part of one amorphous blob where anyone can do anything.

Huh? The amount of hybrids hasn't changed. They simply made some of them less shitty. I have zero idea how making specs that have been in the game since day one more viable is a bad thing. If you're talking about spreading out raid utility, then you obviously never had to deal with that problem. Forced class stacking was so fun! :rolleyes:


Honestly, someone having any kind of problem with this just befuddles me. A guy spends 4 years playing his orc warrior, but has new friends that play alliance. Now instead of having to reroll and lose all that time due to some silly rule preventing him from transfering, he can go play with his friends. How dare he not have to grind out a ton of hours of gameplay he already played through to make a carbon copy of his previous character with different color skin and flightpaths!

We used to try really hard to get world PvP going but usually it ended up us wandering around doing PvE clearing and hearing crickets while waiting for alliance to respond engage us. hell i remember once we, as a group of 30-40's repeatedly cleared south shore for about 2 hours and not once did the Alliance come to the rescue!
World pvp was never intended to be a means of advancement but a sideline to the grind.

I'm well aware of what forced class stacking was, though I only really had to experience it a few times, when I was the guy getting tossed because a soulstone/healthstone/portal whore was already in the raid.

It shouldn't have been an issue in the first place, but instead rather than fix issues that engendered the problem, Blizzard chose instead to muddy the class lines and give stuff like mana regen to everyone who could possibly want it. Bottom line for me is that it feels way too much like Blizzard panders to the lowest common denominator, especially with the changes being made to non-primary stats on the horizon.

I agree that Arena's are crap and ruined WOW pvp... but I think the real problem with the lack of world pvp is the player base and not Blizzard.

We used to raid southshore and tarren mill, and had epic battles at orgrimmar and Ironforge LONG before honor was even put into the game.

The players got lazy and now will not do ANYTHING unless there is a tangible reward for it that they can equip and look cooler with.

I guarantee you though... get 15 people together and raid Ironforge, and you will find ALL the World pvp you can stomach. Not blizzars fault nobody does it, hell they even introduced achievements to get a mount if you kill all the opposing sides faction leaders.

Regarding the 10 mans, 25 mans and such...

Sorry but as much as I miss the old 40 man raids, the 10 mans really give a small group of friends the chance to experience ALL of the games content. I really wish I could have fought against Illidan, and because I wasn't in a LARGE guild good enough, I never did... Wasted content imo.

It shouldn't have been an issue in the first place, but instead rather than fix issues that engendered the problem, Blizzard chose instead to muddy the class lines and give stuff like mana regen to everyone who could possibly want it. Bottom line for me is that it feels way too much like Blizzard panders to the lowest common denominator, especially with the changes being made to non-primary stats on the horizon.

Thankfully there are still some at Blizzard who obviously started to pull away from massively (ha!) online games with their upcoming titles Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2 which both are being designed as primarily single player/online co-op and single player/online pvp, respectively.

I'm well aware of what forced class stacking was, though I only really had to experience it a few times, when I was the guy getting tossed because a soulstone/healthstone/portal whore was already in the raid.

It shouldn't have been an issue in the first place, but instead rather than fix issues that engendered the problem, Blizzard chose instead to muddy the class lines and give stuff like mana regen to everyone who could possibly want it. Bottom line for me is that it feels way too much like Blizzard panders to the lowest common denominator, especially with the changes being made to non-primary stats on the horizon.

What exactly would have been a better way to fix the problem? I still don't see the issue with giving a near-required buff/debuff to more then one class.

The changes to stats make a ton of sense and likely should have been done sooner. Neeing to use something like this (http://code.google.com/p/simulationcraft/wiki/HowToRun) just to figure out if a piece of loot is an upgrade or not is ridiculous.

You're fooling yourself if you think the future of MMOs is not how to make a buck besides normal sub fees. SoE has been doing and continues to do it. Blizzard is doing it, Champions even has it. The fact is no one wants to play a game like EQ1 anymore, no one has the time and game companies are out to make money. All choices made are done b/c of that.... to make money.

I don't care if people can switch factions, if anything it has allowed more of my friends to come together. Everyone merged last night after years of being split up, folks transferred and we're all together again. More fun for us this way :)

WinterGrasp is srsbizness on my server. It's packed every time it queues at least for Alliance.

New Blizzard announcement:

"And now, for the low, Low, LOW price of $69.99, you can purchase a character of your choosing at lvl 85 with all the best gear in the game for that class! You'll win at everything! BG's! World PvP! PvE! Arson! Baking Cakes! Girls! And even Art!"

To be honest I think WoW has simply become a testing ground for what Blizzard should and shouldn't implement in their new MMO. People playing WoW are gonna pay the money anyways, might as well use them as guinea pigs, right?

I don't see anyone bitching about how horrible eq is since there are servers where you can actually buy gear and plats, but a faction change in wow for people who want to play with friends is disgusting!

Why don't you try to start playing wow right now an tell me how easy it is for you to get the best gear in the game with rl money...

I don't see anyone bitching about how horrible eq is since there are servers where you can actually buy gear and plats, but a faction change in wow for people who want to play with friends is disgusting!

Why don't you try to start playing wow right now an tell me how easy it is for you to get the best gear in the game with rl money...

The problem with it is the hypocrisy, in all of the games, not just WoW. They clearly stated numerous times they weren't going to allow faction changes - yet here it is. The same can be said for the Station Store or whatever EQ2's micro-transaction system is. They said it won't be anything that affects gameplay, but when they ran out of an income from non-gameplay things, they switched. WoW is simply the benchmark since its probably the biggest and most successful, when they do things everyone else will quickly follow in the spirit of money over gamplay.

I'm pretty sure they're releasing the faction/race change mechanism simply to cash in on tons of people wanting to be a goblin or worgen more than anything else, and I can't help but think in an expansion or two they'll go the route of EQ2 and simply forget the factions entirely. Back when we played EQ originally it would be unheard of to allow people to pay some money to switch races, and much like how it'd be unheard of to "legally" buy a max level character or max level gear, this is certainly a step in that direction and I'm sure we'll be there at some point in the future. Maybe its for the better, but I don't like it. *shrug* It reaks of them trying to separate their players from their money more than providing a great service, which is very different from the Blizzard who released WoW many years ago (and many of the MMO pioneers before that).

New Blizzard announcement:

"And now, for the low, Low, LOW price of $69.99, you can purchase a character of your choosing at lvl 85 with all the best gear in the game for that class! You'll win at everything! BG's! World PvP! PvE! Arson! Baking Cakes! Girls! And even Art!"


Will they be able to outrun Kenyans?

Next you're going to tell me these games are made by for-profit businesses or something.

How long has it been since you actually played WoW Kelraz? To be honest you sound rather out of touch.

The problem with it is the hypocrisy, in all of the games, not just WoW. They clearly stated numerous times they weren't going to allow faction changes - yet here it is. The same can be said for the Station Store or whatever EQ2's micro-transaction system is. They said it won't be anything that affects gameplay, but when they ran out of an income from non-gameplay things, they switched.

The game was vastly different back then, focusing far more on the horde vs alliance war (who are now mostly working together, and changing that aspect of the game is a seperate issue), they've since come to their senses and realized there's no reason not to do it now, and many reasons to do it. Not allowing faction changes after realizing it was a good idea simply because they previously said they wouldn't do it would be downright stupid.

Ignoring very minor racial bonuses, changing race/faction is cosmetic. It in no way compares to changing classes, and the only effect on gameplay will be a positive one (letting friends on different factions play together).

They're releasing the faction/race change because people have been begging for it for years, and now they have the ability to do it. People aren't even going to be allowed to use the race change with worgen or goblin. They're giving players what they want, and yes, god forbid, they're charging for it.

I think it's wonderful and I'm a happy customer for a change! :) It's farily quick too less than 30min to get transferred had several folks do it last night and everything was great. We're all on Elune goody side if anyone is looking for some place casual and fun. I can be found as Nurta.

How long has it been since you actually played WoW Kelraz? To be honest you sound like a very out of touch disgruntled ex-player.

Just finished the Coliseum raid, and stopped playing for Champions Online / Eve. And, they haven't addressed the Worgen / Goblin issue but I'm betting that'll be a possibility sooner than later.

Next you're going to tell me these games are made by for-profit businesses or something.

Oh? So if you're doing something for profit, its perfectly ok to care more about profits than product? This is the exact opposite of everything you've been bemoaning about for the past few years - but I'm sure you're going to come up with some snappy way to not answer this later in the thread!

Everything I've been bemoaning? What in the world are you talking about now?

Blizzard only profits if they keep their customers happy. This common nerd-rage meme of an MMO company being evil because it wants to profit from its work is nonsense.

You're not unhappy that they want to profit. You're unhappy that the kind of game you think you want is not deemed profitable, because too few other people want the same.

They addressed worgen/goblin race changes at blizzcon to a degree, you won't be able to change to a goblin or worgen when the expansion comes out, so blizzard won't be able to 'cash in' on it.

but I'm sure you're going to come up with some snappy way to not answer this later in the thread!

You posted that right after only responding to very minor bits of my post while avoiding the main points. Good Job.

Seems like you have a bit end-game raider hangover going on.
While Blizz has reversed themselves on a lot things, BG xp bieng one , they sure took thier sweet ass time to do it. MMO's have to evolve or they will die fast. what made sense to stay hard line on in Vanilla WoW didnt make quite as much sense 2 expansions later.
As far as the micro-transaction business model. you'd better get used to it as the entire gaming industry is trending that direction.

Haha! Yes, they WILL outrun Kenyans! And they'll have 400 babies too!!!!

Baby Murlocs??

I dunno, I think you have to go to Blizzcon to have 400 Murloc babies.