Posted by Spooner | 6 Comments

Faction Changes now Live

There is an FAQ site that has all the bells and whistles about mount conversions and reputation conversions and such. Also it costs $30.00.

• The faction change process is not immediate, and a character will not be available for play while a faction change is pending. Under normal conditions the process should take under an hour, but please allow up to several days for a faction change to complete.
• During this process, you will select a new character race from the opposite-faction races that have the character’s class available. You cannot change a character’s class.
• To see how character-specific information such as achievements, reputations, and items are affected by a faction change, refer to the Translation Table.
• A realm transfer is not included in a faction change. However, the restriction on having members of both factions on a PvP realm has been lifted, so you can have characters of both factions on a single PvP realm.
• A character can change factions once every 60 days.
• Not every character will be eligible to undergo a faction change. If applicable, the reason a character is not eligible will be brought to your attention before payment is rendered. For example, faction changes may not be possible on certain realms or only one “direction” of faction changes may be allowed on a given realm.
• Please refer to the Character Faction Change FAQ for answers to common questions about this service.

Quests
All currently active quests will be removed from the character’s quest log. Faction-specific quests will be removed from the character’s completed quest list, as well as any faction-neutral quest that is part of a quest chain. Standalone faction-neutral quests will remain in the character’s completed quest list. The opposite-faction version of a faction-specific questline is available in its entirety after a faction change.

Flight Paths
The number of flight points that a character has unlocked is set to certain thresholds based on the character’s level, in 10-level increments. For example, a level 70 character may have all Azeroth and Outland flight points unlocked, but none in Northrend.

Hearthstone
After a faction change, a character’s hearthstone is automatically set to the inn inside the capital city of their new race, which is also where they re-enter the game world as a member of the opposite faction.

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Posted by Spooner | 19 Comments

WoW as a sign of cultural progress.

I had kind of a long and nasty post written full of negativity and cynical bullshit. In retrospect, I’ve decided to simply shrug my shoulders and forget about it. WoW’s not a bad game at all. Its not for me to decide if these changes are for better or worse and its not as if there’s even a remotely possible chance Blizzard is listening or cares in the first place so why get so worked up?

Here’s the secret though, as to why there’s so much QQ and so much hostility flowing through the web about the recent turn of events in WoW. There’s old guard and new guard playing.

How many of you started when Wrath came out?

How many of you started when Burning crusade came out?

How many of you are like me that started in November of 2004?

WoW is a completely different game in all its core values than it used to be when it was released. Its simply no longer the same type of game. That doesn’t mean its a bad game, its just not what a lot of us were expecting when we first clicked Accept on the character creation screen so long ago. A lot of us liked how things used to be. Maybe not all the details or the lag or the brick wall you had to scale to raid, but the concept of rewarding effort in all things was wonderful.

I’m a father of two wonderful children, I know that as children they want nothing more than instant gratification. Its my responsibility to instill them with good values and a feeling of worth. Good things come to those who work hard and show patience. WoW feels to me like a bad parent, giving into every minor desire of a spoiled rotten player base. The developers are at the beck and call of us as subscribers. We throw a tantrum and get our way. They’ve thrown out pretty much all the rules set in vanilla WoW and opted for a “please everybody at the same time” business model. It works, because you make the mojority happy and those happy folks pay good money to stay that way.

So I applaud Blizzard, but as a businessman, not as a gamer.

Here’s to the new Next Gen MMO Blizzard is working on. To Diablo 3 and starcraft 2. To the days when you were Horde or Alliance and that actually meant something in the game.

As for me? Here’s where I stand on the matter:

As we’ve already discussed, we’re in the process of developing a new service for World of Warcraft that will allow players to change their faction from Alliance to Horde or Horde to Alliance. To prepare for this new service, we’ve removed the restriction that prevents players from creating both Horde and Alliance characters on a PvP realm. For more information on our Faction Change service, please visit the following link.

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=18031079410&sid=1

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Posted by Spooner | 12 Comments

[Updated] Incoming FACTION SWITCH for players…

You can read my original post after this update:

Updated* 7/1- Due to the many questions that have come up with the announcement of this new service, we wanted to take the time to answer the ones we can at this point in time.

Q. Will we be able to switch between the races on our own faction?
A.. No. Players will only be able to switch to a race of the opposite faction.

Q. Will I be able to choose the race on the opposite faction that I want to change to?
A.. Yes, but you will only be able to switch to a race that has your class type available to it. So if you play a human paladin, you’d only be able to change to a blood elf paladin.

Q.How much will it cost?
A.. We do not have further information on this at this point in time.

Q.Will I be able to switch back to my original faction but a different race?
A.. No. You will only be able to switch back to your originally chosen race.

Q.. How will the switch between reputation, gear, mounts, etc be handled?
A.. We’ll have more details for you at a later point in time, though we plan to keep these as close to a reflection of the other faction as much as possible.

Q.How often can you change your faction?
A..We do not have any information to share on this at this point in time, however we will have restrictions on the frequency by which players can change their faction.

Q. How will this affect the balance of Horde and Alliance on the realms?
A.. We are taking great care in how we implement this new service in order to maintain balance between the factions on the realms but do not have any further details to share.

Yeah uhm, WHHHAAAATTTTT!?? Yes they are working on it. This post went up a little while ago and ZERO details have been released but I imagine it’s going to be some time before this goes live. I’ll say this much though, I’m fucking beyond happy about it. I have wanted to change my 1st character (my warrior Spooner) to Horde for a very long time now. Stay tuned as I update this post with any new follow up threads.

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 http://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.

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