Let’s start with the blizzard side. Blizzard ultimately needs to make money.
Then there is the meta slaves side. They all want to go human.
Then there’s the purist side. They don’t want faction and race changes or at least want to keep it to a minimum.
The obvious answer is what is great for blizzard. Keep the faction and race changes down by charging a lot of money.
Faction change: $150 usd minimum.
If it is important enough for people to spend $150 then maybe we should let them faction change. But it absolutely should not be cheap where people just do it willy-nilly.
I feel that is the reasoning behind the current pricing (though, I don’t think it has changed since it was introduced, so could potentially be updated, if that’s still the reasoning). However, I wonder whether or why this even matters.
Because unlike retail. The different factions mean something. Horde actually hates alliance in alliance actually hate horde. There is a certain RP aspect in non retail.
It should be a big deal to be able to simply change factions
Fair enough. I’m not sure if this is really strongly felt in the game design, but it’s an interesting point of view.
It definitely seems different from the design direction they have recently gone with Retail, where you can now party cross faction/realm and run pretty much all instanced content together!
I could very well be wrong but I don’t think that meta cockroaches are whales, not in appreciable numbers anyway. $150 might be too high. I’ll agree they could/should charge a bit more though.
The only thing "Troll"ing here is our race and faction change we are proud to offer!
In a wonderful blue post a couple days ago, detailed plans for race and faction change are coming to World of Warcraft Wrath of the Lich King launching on September 26th!
If you want to be a troll, you will now have the option! Or a gnome! Even the ever so scary undead! ouuuuuuuu.
Did you know night elves can do flips?! How wonderful!
We are so fortunate to have such wonderful leadership at World of Warcraft Wrath of the Lich King launching on September 26th. See you in Northrend friend!
Regardless of marking the price up that high to deter switching—the amount of work that goes into changing faction/race is extremely minimal. It’s probably completely automated…and even if it wasn’t it’s literally pressing a few buttons. I think that’s why it’s as low as it is (and I agree it should be this low)—the “labor” you are paying for needs to be reflective of the time/effort the service takes.