f13.net

Link (http://us.blizzard.com/support/article.xml?tag=CRCFAQ)  One time flat fee to change gender, face, skin color and name.

Doesn't it just seem like this actually encourages account selling/trading?  Or am I just some old-timer who thinks avatars have some attachment to the people behind the keyboard?

gender, face, skin color?  No reason to get worked up there.

Name?  THAT is very, very bad for obvious reasons.  Hint:  Such reasons involve the words "jackasses," "consequences," and "evading." 

I just changed my butt-ugly male night elf hunter to a reasonable looking female NE hunter.

Now that I can handle looking at him ...erm, her, I might finish levelling it up.

Kept the name though, I always liked the name it had.

 :drillf:

The latter.


Paid character name changes have been a part of WoW for over a year now (http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=2512090701). Not only that, but there are server transfers and, you know, alts. This notion of "jackasses" having to face "consequences" is basically a fantasy and always has been.

EDIT: Also, like the EQ item shop, this is another case of "UO did this years ago and, even among people who cared about the game, nobody really gave a fuck, the world didn't end, etc."

Someone can get their name changed, but they'll still remain on friends/ignore lists, just under the new name.  So really, it's not a totally new identity or anything.

Attachment to the avatar has always varied from player to player and game to game.  Making it more malleable and a profit center will rankle some who ARE attached, as it breaks some of that attachment, but it shouldn't lessen it any more than any other service that emphasises "Hey, this isn't real life, it's entertainment."

I like that I can put boobs on my Death Knight at some future date, should I get tired of being a Him.  Now I await the Race and Faction changes that will TRULY cause delicious tears from all sides.

I have a hard time imagining they'll allow race changes without changing the human bonus faction racial first. There'd be way too much rep-grind-as-a-human-then-change-to-what-you-actually-want going on.

That would be a problem for Blizzard, why?   If anything you've just described a bonus for them as min-maxing folks pay a minimum of 2 fees (race & faction) per character, or 4 if they're an established Horde character.  (who still would have to rep grind as Horde)   If it truly were a problem, then it just becomes "reset their factions" when such a change is done.

Blizzard has a history of actually giving a shit about game balance enough to not do it, I think.

Allowing name changes is the part that concerns me.  I'm still of the belief that all characters on an account should share a common last name... I call it an asshole tax. 

Changing new servers from 6 months to 3months until transfers are allowed, and then without announcing specifically to a ongoing server involved that the server is now open for paid char transfers which ruined the AQ gates for those that rerolled to get it. They opened the drakkari server 2 months early. Allowed 5 people to pay to transfer onto server to get the Bug Mount and title.

Allowing RAF on brand new level 1 servers.

Both examples tell me they could care less about game balance. Or more specifically they could care less about server communities.

All hail the paid transfer fee as a guiding light to their pocket books which plenty of gamers are willing to pay for.

Add on not caring about faction to faction ratios on pvp servers tells me they don't care about game balance as well.

Because anyone gives a fuck about ahn qiraj?

Again, name changes have been in for over a year but honestly there is so little potential for griefing in this game that it hardly matters anyways. People who are complete assholes are still easily spotted.

The whole idea of accountability is flawed because no one REALLY wants that. Sure they may want accountability in others but in themselves? fuck no. People want to be able to make others accountable for transgressions they perceive but who becomes the arbiter of those transgressions? Should we just tie everyone's account to a real life photo and address to their homes? 

Sandy vaginas please head to the door on the left.

There's no game balance issue involved with the vanity feat of strength AQ bug mounts. The RAF thing is more iffy, but not in the same territory as race respeccing for maximal gain IMO.

Please, explain how races are a balance issue.  Blizzard cares about balance in two places. Endgame Raiding and PVP - Primarily Arena PVP.  That's it.  Respeccing races to make faction grinding a little easier isn't a balance concern, it's a "I had to grind, you should, too." Problem.

If you're saying that there's a superior race for anything and are concerned that everyone would suddenly BE that race; then, well the game isn't balanced and Blizzard isn't as good at it or care as much about it as you're implying.

Races are situationally advantageous. Allowing players to spend cash to gain situational advantages is a big big difference from anything they've allowed so far, and their own comments on the matter seem to indicate that they will keep that dividing line.

The issue isn't that 'now everyone will become a human.' The issue is that players being players, you will see a segment that will go spend money on it the same way you see people hearth and respec for a single fight in leading edge raid guilds. A main tank with stoneform might be very advantageous on a specific fight with a giant bleed effect or whatever - spend a few bucks and now you have one. When you introduce PVP into the equation, that means players can spend real money to gain competitive advantages over other players, and I just don't see that happening in WoW.

The human faction thing is just the first thing that leaps to mind, there are plenty of other balance issues that surround it.

My Orc Male Warrior is now an Orc Female Warrior! Hooray! I am back to playing the most underplayed race/gender combination.

Since I never got to design this warrior (a friend made it on my account, leveled it to 57 and got bored of it), it was nice to be able to design it. Into something awesome.

Naw, dwarf female will always be the least used.

Yeah I always get "wtf" tells in BGs, instances, or just standing around cities on my female dwarf paladin.

Lame argument.  I would have a cooldown like any other of their money sinks.  And, as i said, if that race is so very much preferred for that situation that folks are spending cash to be it, then it's imbalanced to begin with.  Not to mention if it WAS the sole reason to do something, folks could just, oh, level the character from scratch.  All a pay-to-rerace does is eliminate the pain in the ass and time sink.  Oh noes.

Short form: until now you've never been able to do this at all. So it's not like they're replacing some common activity with a for-pay one. Nah, we leave that to SOE  :grin:

I think you are forgetting another very important balance that Blizzard care very much about.

The most important balance of all is the tyre pressures in their Ferraris.

(Keep paying for all this extra bullshit guys. We could all use a bigger yacht)

Not true (http://blog.gamerdna.com/blog/2008/10/17/bartle-gender-and-wow/)! Look at the player gender breakdown by race. Orc Girl beats out Dwarf Girl by a tiny, tiny margin.

Also - my first character was a level 60 dwarf female warrior (http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Tichondrius&n=Nonentity). So, I've played both sides of the 'least played' fence.

Trust me - I've done my research.

My priest is a dwarf girl.

Frankly, I don't see the point in all of this - when you're covered from head to toe in glowing armor complete with a full encasing helmet and are hovering 5 feet off the ground, it doesn't matter what your facial features look like.

But it does matter if you have boobs or not, and that's the point.

Armor is scaled differently on the different genders and races - when you see a dwarf girl or orc girl, you know, even when they are piled with armor.

As evidenced by the glitch in one of the TBC patches that swapped the female orc shoulder scale with the male orc shoulder scale, giving all the burly male orcs very tiny shoulder armor.  The amount of QQ and laughter that ensued as male orcs everywhere were demasculinated was quite a riot.

I never wear my helm graphic on either of the races, too, so that helps.

Also! There was a bug back in the Blackwing Lair days that scaled the right shoulderpad larger than the left shoulderpad on dwarf females.

(http://www.thenonentity.com/non-wrathshoulder.jpg)

I miss that bug, to be honest. We were as lopsided and strange as possible!

I only wear the helmet graphic if it doesn't interfere with my beard. There are a lot of helmets that don't work for me graphically. :(

Get Sjofn in here to look at my dwarf girl.

I want her to know that I ALWAYS KEPT IT REAL.

Lady dwarves cheer at each other on my server. I don't get tells as my dwarf warrior though.


EDIT: And Non, your dwarf girl is adorable. <3

I also love lady orcs, but we don't play Horde very often, and I wound up leveling a BE paladin (bleh) to 70 first. Second place is a tauren shaman. I am a Horde failure. :(

Yeah, I got suckered into the Blood Elf Femme train, because I wanted a Paladin. At least I didn't go for the pom pom pigtails like ever other female Belf pally I see.

However, my Tauren female Druid just hit 80. I now have two of the 'ugliest' horde female races.

Hooray!

More important than boobs, is not being a fucking ugly, gangly, disproportionately-limbed night elf male with cocks for ears.

I'd have gone Dwarf male, ideally, for the hunter (it's level 42, not exactly play to max for the advantage then respec FTW!) since I like the look of Dwarf males, but NE femmes look far, far better and more proportionate than the males.

I'm not sure you want to trust anything in that article.

Um, she's comparing the numbers to a similar article on WAR (http://blog.gamerdna.com/blog/2008/10/10/does-your-bartle-typegender-influence-your-class-choice-in-war/).

Is she? Well... that article sucks too!

But I digress.

I'd pay for a race change of my Tauren warrior to an Orc. Ever since they nerfed the Tauren extra-large hitbox, it's been a pain in the ass with all the "out of range" messages unless the mob is actually inside my pants. Also, it'd be nice to actually get through a door while mounted.