No Inter-faction Race Switching
July 3, 2009 by Angelo Fernandez
Filed under General WoW News
One of the biggest announcements in all WoW history was made this week concerning a paid service to be able to switch your WoW character’s faction. Once this is made available, Horde players will be able to switch to the Alliance and vice-versa. Players will not keep their race in the faction switch as some people were thinking. instead you will have to switch a race in the opposing faction that carries your class. Therefore you’ll never see a Human Paladin turn into a Tauren Paladin.
faction switching
According to CM Nethaera, while cross faction transfers are going to be allowed, inter-faction race switching will not be allowed. This is a bit shocking for me since logically switching races within your faction is a smaller step than crossing over to the other faction. I remember reading their justification (can’t seem to find it anymore) went something like this. Making a mistake on faction choice is a more forgivable mistake than a mistake on racial choice.
It’s definitely sad that we won’t be able to switch races between our faction. I know several people who would have wanted to change races. Even I was thinking of changing my Blood Elf warlock to an Orc. Who knows though? If they’re allowing faction switching already, it just might take a little time before they give in to inter-faction race switching.
I remember a statement being made at the time they offered character gender/name/face swaps that explained their stance on this. Essentially, they were worried that arenas were already being filled with races that had handy pvp talents, and to allow race switching would see races like the Forsaken and the Tauren boom in population while the others suffered. Whether or not that’s a fair assessment is a matter of opinion I suppose.