I stumbled on this a couple of weeks ago and immediately thought it was hilarious. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have a preference in faction really – my first world of warcraft character ever was a Tauren Druid, and my second was a Night Elf Hunter. Granted, I’ve come to play mostly Alliance characters these days, but that’s just because that’s where my friends have been. (If you play horde and know some nice people on a good server, let me know! I’d love to meet you!)

But that being said, there’s no debate that there are simply more Alliance players in the game overall than horde players, and the old stereotype that horde players are a little elitist doesn’t come for no reason. A lot of it’s been diluted since Burning Crusade, but old habits are hard to beat.

Speaking of stereotypes, it looks like there’s some validity to the whole “Alliance players are all kids” one, as proved by the first episode of Alliance v. Horde:

Whew. I’m not that bad thankfully!

one of these things is not like the other...

Now that Blizzard has announced that soon you’ll be able to change your faction, a lot of people are thinking about doing it and even more are talking about how it’ll work. Blizzard has all but said that you’ll have to either keep your class so you’ll only be able to change to a race that has that class, but they haven’t said if they’re doing one-to-one changes or any mage can choose an opposing race that supports mages.

Some guilds are talking about switching faction en masse – either to get better racial bonuses (horde to alliance) or to take advantage of high/low pop servers (a horde guild on a low horde pop server switching to a high horde pop server to find more people to recruit, for example), and other people are talking about switching just to get a chance to play with friends who are on the other side.

What about you? What would it take for you to take one of your characters now and change their faction as opposed to just leveling an alt of the opposing faction or rolling a death knight?

I recently heard someone (I’ve forgotten who – sorry!) on The Instance mention the Draenei in the context of the other Alliance races – what is their deep, dark secret? Every other Alliance race has a tarnish, from the gnomes’ senseless forays into uncontrollable technology to the elves’ storied flirtations with dark forces. But the Draenei seem to lack a shadow; they come across as big, blue, hammer-wielding teddy bears.

As a kind of answer to that question, I offer two narrative points: that the Draenei don’t need a dark history and that they probably shouldn’t have one.
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O hear me, Lord Warcraft-Equivilent-God-Figure-Whose- Name-I-Don’t-Know-Because-I’m-Too-Lazy-To-Learn- Any-Of-That-Lore-Stuff!

Please take care of my beloved boar, Orson. He knows not what he does. Most of the time.
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Hey folks, the patch 1.11 test realms are live and with them we get news of the new 40 man instance Naxxrammas. As you can see from the image below, attunement looks like it’s going to be pretty expensive. f you’ve got the gold handy I’d recommend buying the crystals before the patch goes live and prices skyrocket.

If you play World of Warcraft long enough, you get develop a certain amount of personal association with your character – even in a game with very little character customization, your character is yours.

This can lead to all sorts of interesting developments. For instance, you might vigorously defend the virtues of your hunter against the “Hunterz r on EZ” folks at the official forums. You might also claim to be one of the few players with a true appreciation for the gnome race, a personal connection borne from the struggle against constant /pat harassment.
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No, this has NOTHING to do with WoW. Except that the guy was logging into WoW when his neighbor “accidentally” shot through his bathroom drywall. For the record, there’s no such thing as an accidental shooting, a .44 magnum is a double action, so it can’t go off the way the neighbor claims, but it’s fun nevertheless what comes up when one searches on Yahoo for RL implications of WoW playing.