Blizzard-tard: For the Traitors!
posted Wednesday Jul 1, 2009 by Jon Wurm
A long, long, time ago in a... oh excuse me. I was just praying to the Tech Gods that Star Wars: The Old Rrepublic will be somewhat redeeming and forgot I was writing an article about WOW... well back to reality, for now. As a long time WOW player I am put in a bit of an awkward position with some of the recent changes that have taken place over the past year or so and especially now with the changes WOTLK has brought. Thanks to the new mana regeneration, healing is a breeze. You can get mounts at level 30 now (wtf?). Arena, mostly 3v3, has almost ruined PvE and dual specking has killed it. I remember when RFD was the end game dungeon and if your guild could clear even half of it you were 1337. Leveling used to be fun and challenging. Now, mounts and good gear are thrown at you and all the old instances are only used to PL your alts. I am only 23 years old, but I imagine this must have been how my grandfather felt talking about the old days.
Up until now there was a cardinal rule that WOW and its' players have lived by and was sworn to never break: No matter what race or class you wanted there were two choices. You pledged your loyalty to the Alliance or your allegiance to the Horde. In the future this will not be so.
Blizzard released a statement saying:
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... 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.
Some people may benefit from this or even embrace the change but to me, faction switching is just another nail in the coffin for both there being any chance for me coming back and for the game overall. It completely undermines the point of choosing Alliance or Horde. To really enjoy all the game has to offer you should have to (or want to) level up at least one character on both sides, if not just for fun and story line, then to at least find out which suits you best.
