FRAG Blog

It appears that Blizzard has been listening to the horders of gamers sucked in by our favourite mumorpuger, World of Warcraft – either that, or they’re attempting to emulate South African politics. If MyGaming is to be believed, Blizzard has revealed that they’re working on a service that will allow Alliance characters to switch over to the Horde, and vice versa.

Blizzard have elaborated as follows:

“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.”

To say that this service will be programatically complex is a bit of an understatement. For once, you probably won’t end up with a night elf on the Horde side; your character would more likely become whatever the closest equivalent is. That spills over into race specifics and dynamics – what would happen to anything that’s race specific? Then, consider that if you’re on a PvP realm you’d have to convert all your characters at the same time, and you get the idea: this is not going to be an easy thing for Blizzard to pull off. Still, they’ve got the skill and raw talent to do it.

Due to the aforementioned complexity involve, as well as Blizzard’s release standards (“it will be released when it’s ready, and not a moment sooner or later”), I wouldn’t expect to see this any time soon. Still, it would be welcome for the poor sods who choose the Alliance, only to realise that all their mates are Horde and are quite happily ganking them.