Please reexamine AR unlocks and Faction Changes

Okay, Blizz.

In light of now having seen several cases where folks are opting to spend the cost of a Faction Change to unlock an Allied Race on the opposite faction, I think y’all should take a critical look at the incentive you’ve created there.

If your customers are feeling so daunted by the idea of spending more time unlocking races they want access to (on a faction they have until present not played) that they’re willing to throw the full price of your game at the issue to make it go away, you need to stop and think about what it is about the idea of unlocking the races normally that is causing them to resort to cheesing it with a paid character service.

Obviously, I don’t have access to your sales numbers, and even if I did, I wouldn’t be able to run the analytics to find out how many of those faction change purchases immediately unlocked an AR after completing the service, but I suggest you look into it. If that proves to be a high percentage of cases, you need to do something to address that problem.

Faction changes aren’t designed to act as a paid unlock of ARs. If that’s what people are using them for, then you as a business need to do one of these things:

A) Allow ARs to be purchased for a flat cost or as a bundle.
B) Unlock corresponding ARs when the player’s main faction unlocks its opposite.
C) Remove rep conversion from Faction Changes for reps associated with ARs.

Obviously, I would prefer B, but I will acknowledge that acting on B would be shooting yourselves in the foot at a time when you can ill afford it. For that reason, I think A would be acceptable, while C would be stupid and frustrating but would ultimately solve the problem.

A Faction Change wipes out character quest progress in BfA and parts of several other expansions. That is a lot of progress to lose, and this is absolutely not a sacrifice your players should have to make to get around your gating on ARs. Find a better solution, please.

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Nah that’s extra money for innovative Shadowlands developments. BFA 2.0.
Let the whales fund the content.

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I’m fine with that. But let them fund it without screwing up their existing characters to do it.

This is why they need to remove ARs altogether. Want to introduce new races as a selling point of the expansion? Awesome, go for it. But stop introducing new reskins of old skeletal models and calling them new races.

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The only real reason to faction change would be to save time farming rep. The quest chains and war campaign stuff can all be knocked out in a few hours.

Yeah, that’s what I’m getting at. If that’s the reason people are using the service, then that should be the service or a service should be offered that actually meets that need directly instead of messing up a character’s quest completions.

Ever tried to do stuff at the Argent Tournament after a faction change?

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Somewhere along the line they got the bright idea that they’d get more aggregate game time out of customers by locking “new” races behind activity walls.

Personally, I don’t really have a problem unlocking things. Ideally, I’d prefer that unlocking the Horde ARs also unlocks the Alliance ones, and vice versa, but I do understand that Blizzard’s revenue stream might not be able to afford the hit of removing reasons for people to purchase stuff, so I’d be okay with them just selling ARs for like five bucks a piece and letting people buy them.

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I get them all whenever they come out because I already have the rep… And I don’t have statistics but my intuition is that they turn more people off than they entice.

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I agree – I also suspect this is the case.

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I have a hard time agreeing, because if it weren’t for AR’s we likely would’ve never gotten Dark Irons, even as a regular dwarf customization option and I would bet anything that the only reason we’re getting Wildhammer customizations for dwarves in Shadowlands is because of the pressure created by adding Dark Irons as a playable race (“we got dark irons, time for wildhammers now”).

ARs have their place, they just need to have their unlock mechanism reevaluated, and I say this as someone who has most of the ARs unlocked.

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I would agree with this as well. I doubt we’d have gotten many of these races without the concept of AR to push them.

It’s just, now that they’re here… Blizz needs to have a serious sit-down-and-think about the unlock process and what sort of behaviors its current iteration incentivizes.

What makes sense to me is something like:

  • When an allied race is “new” (current xpac), require completion of main campaign and relevant race quest line to unlock. With this, to get both factions’ AR’s all you have to do is level a character on Horde and Alliance to cap and not skip stuff.
  • Once an allied race is “old” (previous xpac), require a pared-down piece of the xpac campaign relating to the race and relevant race questline.

Just take reputations out of it altogether. Make each race’s questline longer maybe to compensate, I doubt anybody would mind that since then acquiring the race then depends on player laziness rather than the player signing in regularly for timegated rep grinding.

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Not sure that I can see eye-to-eye with you on this one, OP.

My point of contention with this is my unlocking Dark Iron Dwarves hasn’t had me do anything or had any involvement in that of the Mag’har. Why should I be given them?

The huge plotline behind bonding with the Kul Tirans and re-uniting them with the Alliance, why should I be given the Zandalari when what I’ve done has nothing to do with them deciding to join the Horde?

If the unlocks were just like pathfinder then maybe? But they’ve gone down this path of making races ones you earn instead of getting down an expansion and the effort they’ve put into the quest line for these race would also be wasted content.

I think it’s more likely they’ll just give the allied races without an unlock requirement in a future expansion whether it’s Shadowlands or whatever they call 10.0 at the point which BFA would be old news.

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You might want to read what I’m asking for more carefully. I’m not concerned about the ARs themselves, their lore, etc. The only issue I’m attempting to address is stopping people from screwing up their characters irreversibly in the interest of unlocking ARs faster.

If you’ve got a suggestion to that end, I’d welcome it, but, “But the lore!” is not a relevant argument in a conversation that seeks to address people buying a character service they don’t need and don’t really want in order to bypass a rep grind.

They give a warning about what a character change will do. All ARs can be earned in game by playing the game. If someone makes the choice to skip earning an AR by using an optional service can also deal with the consequences of their decisions.

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waves paw hey… me, I’m guilty of this. I did it!

Id do it again. Even with rep already at exalted, unlocking Kul Tirans felt like a marathon… whew!

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Couple of questions for you, then. Did you faction change back when you were done? Additionally, if you could have paid the same amount you did for this to accomplish the same goal without faction changing your character, would you have gone that route instead?

Nope, let the character I faction changed stay and leveled their equivalent from scratch on the , then, absent faction to make sure the void was filled.

Would I just flat out pay? Yes, I would have.

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Thanks. It sounds like your situation was exactly what I wrote this thread about. I hope they listen and think of something better.

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