Now that we have race changes, faction changes, server changes, appearance changes, and so on, one topic I’ve been thinking a lot about is whether or not Blizzard would ever allow us to copy our characters to new realms. I’m not referring to character transfers, where you take a character, uproot them from one server and then land them in their destination – I mean copy, duplicate a character that’s currently on one realm and make a copy on another realm.

It would be a paid service, of course, but I could see it being in exceptionally high demand with two classes of people, both of whom would make Blizzard a lot of money:

1. Entire high-end and raiding guilds that are focused on progression who would be more than happy to duplicate their characters on as many servers as their core raiding team has money to do in order to achieve world-firsts and titles on as many realms as they can.

Clearly this would make Blizzard a ton of money – a lot of high-end progression guilds have real money behind them, as we’ve seen with entire guilds that do faction changes or server transfers, but if you tacked a $25 or $30 USD fee to a character copy you might see some guilds do it two, three, or four times before their ranks run out of actual cash. Or alternatively, they’ll keep doing it every so often as long as they can raise the money in the interim. Blizzard could mitigate this by capping the number of copies for a character, or putting a relatively long time-limit between copies, like 3-6 months.

2. Casuals who want to try their hand at raiding or join new friends on another server in new guilds without being forced to roll alts and start leveling from scratch on those servers.

Sure, they could just roll death knights, but don’t we have enough of those already? Also, don’t we already see people rolling DKs on servers where they’ve made new friends so they don’t have to level to 55 but also don’t have to transfer their main that’s happily at home on another server, possibly in a guild where that person already has friends?

I’ve seen more DKs join my guild because they came to spend time with a friend on our server than I’ve seen character transfers, and I’m personally in the same boat – I have friends who play on two different servers than the one my main is on, and while I love my main to death, I’m bored on my server. I don’t want to leave the friends I have on my server, but I also balk at having to level up to 80 from scratch on another server. It would be great if I could copy my 80 hunter to another server, join my friends’ guild there, and just move on with life, without having the pressure of pulling my main out of my guild on my current server and leaving my friends there with alts.

Granted, this crowd of people may make Blizzard less large sums of money, but probably more money over time than the previous group. If you could copy your 80 to a new server where, for example, you just met a coworker who plays WoW and could use your class in their weekend raiding guild, wouldn’t you? Especially if you could still leave a copy of that same 80 on your current server in your current guild that raids on weeknights?

Is this a good or a bad idea?

That being said, this idea also fosters laziness that some people say is running rampant in the WoW community. No one apparently wants to level or experience the game pre-level cap anymore, so if Blizzard allowed something like this, would it just cheapen the leveling experience? Would someone level to 80 and then just copy their character around instead of rolling new classes and trying alts? Also, the disincentive to this is that you could save yourself the fee entirely by just leveling a new character on the server you’re considering playing on – it may take more time, but it at least doesn’t cost money.

Also, this just marches down the path of cheapening choices – you made a choice to play on a server, should you be held to it, and punished if you want to move, either financially, through only having one of your character on each server, or by being forced to level on any future server you choose as home?

I’m of multiple minds, obviously – I admit the example of my 80 main and the two servers I’d love to play on is real, and my personal conflict about not wanting to pull my main out of my current guild is also real. I could fix the problem easily by just rolling new characters on those servers and leveling them, but part of me wonders if I’m the only person who’s had this thought – and if I’m not, are there enough others who are willing to pay money to make this idea worthwhile to Blizzard?

What do you think? If Blizzard allowed you to, for a fee, copy a character to a new server, leaving the existing one intact and just making a duplicate, would you spring for it? How many times would you make the copy? What if there were a time limit between copies? Let us know in the comments!

Well it’s finally happened: we said they were coming, but they’re finally here! Race Changes are now live on US realms! That means if you have you’re looking to change your human to a night elf or your gnome to a draenei, you can do it now – for a fee – $25.00 USD, to be exact.

You’ll be able to change your race to any other race in your faction that supports the current character’s class, and you can change your race again to go back to the original if you don’t like what you chose, but it’ll involve buying another race change – so it’s one way: make sure you know what you’re doing before you switch! Read the full FAQ here.

That all being said, it does come down to the whole notion of whether or not choices still matter in WoW – now you can change your faction, change your race, change your server, change your appearance – the only thing you can’t do right now is change your class. I wonder what’s next!

Blizzard just hosted its first ever #Blizzchat developer chat on Twitter! The @warcraft twitter account took questions from other WoW fans on Twitter and took time to answer them all in a nice huge blue-laden forum post, posting the questions and answers as they went along!

Among some of the questions, well, there’s the one above sadly (click the image above to embiggen) – it means my hunter will never have a level 80 druid to love. But seriously, the questions are fabulous and the answers, while not always forthcoming, are entertaining to read. Of course the thread dissolves into your standard WoW-forum behavior after too long, but the blue posts are more than worth it. It’s clear that Blizzard is planning to do this again and make more use of its Warcraft Twitter account in the future, but for the time being? We have some amazing questions and answers.

Over at the World of Warcraft Livejournal Community, frequent poster zhiva_the_mage brings up a very interesting point by claiming that authenticators and migrating to Battle.net won’t necessarily add much more security to your account, mostly due to the nature of how they work: your World of Warcraft account allows you to keep both authentication factors secret (your username and password are both things that you create), whereas your Battle.net account uses your e-mail address (public) as well as a password (private). Standing on its own, that would imply that a Battle.net account is less secure than a WoW account because one of your authentication factors is now public.

Add the authenticator and now you have a third authentication factor, one that’s now private, essentially returning you to the previous model, and its security.

This is true if you were staring at it from straight ahead, but it discounts to some degree the level of security that an authenticator adds to your account as opposed to a private username. They pale in comparison when you look at levels of security. Whereas a private username relies on security through obscurity, an authenticator adds an authentication factor that is not only a numeric code with RSA encryption behind it, but it changes regularly. They’re simply orders of magnitude difference in levels of security, and the presence of an authenticator makes the privacy of a username pale in comparison.

Don’t get me wrong, ideally all three authentication factors would be private and you would be able to log in with a private username, a private password, and an RSA encrypted authenticator code, but given Blizzard’s plans for Battle.net (a la a Steam-like service where you can connect with friends and likely make game purchases) an e-mail address is another way to create unique users.

update – another LJ user, strangetwn-god, points out that I failed to mention a very important concept at this stage of the article: why a “private” username isn’t really private, and why it keeping it secret, as in the ever-present “security through obscurity” model is inherently flawed. He points out:

A dictionary, a phone book, and a perl script can discover a few million usernames over the course of an afternoon. Discovering a specific username if you have personal information likewise can be done in a minimal quantity of time. The sad thing is, a dictionary and a phonebook will also grab at least 50% of the passwords even with all the abundant warnings to not do that.

Of course, dictionary attacks are no longer really needed given browser vulnerabilities and social engineering hacks that can return hundreds of username/password combinations anyway.

He hit the important points, but it’s also worth mentioning that with username/password combinations much more security is inherently given, both by the system and by the user, to the password. Frankly, you’ll never hear anyone ever put up a MoTD when you log in to WoW that says “a Blizzard employee will never ask for your username.” Username dialogs are never starred out to avoid shoulder surfers picking up on them, and users don’t immediately rush to change their usernames when they get the feeling someone else knows it or they hear of a security threat.

It’s not an excuse for not making it as obscure as possible, but it’s definitely a legitimate point. Your username is not secret, most users don’t treat it like it’s a secret the same way they treat their passwords, and while it may not be a direct rationale for moving to a blatantly public authentication favor like an e-mail address, you’re certainly not losing any real security by going in that direction.

Livejournal user Arwenoid makes a very interesting response to the notion that Blizzard has horrible security because of the need for authenticators and the number of people who have had their accounts hacked that I think is worth re-posting:

People seem to think that blizzard has terrible security. They don’t, THEY’VE never been hacked (well, that we know of.)

This is YOUR account, and therefore, your responsibility. This isn’t victim blaming, this is about personal responsibility. The only way people are going to get your password is through your actions anyway — and don’t get me wrong, there are some damn clever ways that people use to get your passwords — but they’re not getting them from Blizzard, they’re getting them from *you*.

Seriously, authenticators are $6. They even ship to Canada now — I picked up a couple when my partner’s account got hacked. No big deal, some minor inconvenience, one missed raid, and he got everything back. It’s just a warcraft account.

What surprises me is that more banks don’t require authenticators for their logins. You know, something that’s actually important.

She’s absolutely, completely, and positively right. The end-user will always-always be the weakest link in any information security system, simply by nature of the fact that there are always more users than operators.

To that end, let’s look at the security around the authenticator and why the direct comparison doesn’t really add up, although the original poster does have a point also:

Authenticators are essentially branded RSA keyfobs, which almost every organization that’s serious about remote access uses to secure everything from VPN and remote access accounts to internal systems that protect personally identifiable data (I work in an organization like this – I can’t tell you what we use them for, but suffice to say it’s important and personal data) – the problem is that forcing people to get RSA keyfobs for access to external services presents a significant logistical challenge to most companies that have large user-bases for their web services, and requires an infrastructure upgrade to suppport RSA-authenticated login at all times.

However, all of those things are do-able, and because of the nature of RSA encryption and the fact that your keyfob is essentially changing your password every 30 seconds or so, makes it a very very attractive option for banks and credit unions and such, companies who probably already use them internally for their own employees to protect data security on the inside.

There are a number of companies who are actually closely watching Blizzard’s use of of RSA keyfobs with their playerbase to see if it’s feasible for them and their users. The other mindset with a number of these services is that the cost of the added security simply doesn’t outweigh the support and logistical requirements on the organization, or alternatively they — directly to your point — would rather spend their information assurance budgets to make sure they don’t screw up internally than worry about their users screwing up and getting themselves hacked, thus exposing a lot of data to the individual, but nothing of consequence to the organization.

It’s an order of magnitude issue: does the company spend security dollars making sure all of their users, each with access to a small amount of data but collectively make up a lot of data, are each as secure as they can be (which may not be much), or do they spend the money on their own internal employees and processes? Which is the bigger bang for their buck? Blizzard – and most companies – agree it’s the latter.

A tip of the hat to WoW.com, who broke the news that Blizzard has unveiled its own YouTube channel, already stuffed full of the animations and cinematics that we’ve already seen up to this point. If you’ve been following the trailers for Cataclysm and fondly remember the opening cinematics for Burning Crusade and vanilla WoW, and if you’ve experienced some of the machinima trailers for different in and out of game events, you’ve seen everything posted right now.

Still, the fact that they’re all on a custom YouTube channel implies that Blizzard is planning to release more videos in the future that won’t necessarily live on the World of Warcraft site, and we’ll likely see videos and trailers for other games in Blizzard’s portfolio as well. We’ll just have to wait and see what else they put up.

I didn’t think it was going to happen, but I suppose that the fact that faction changes became a reality means anything is possible: Blizzard did say they were contemplating giving you the option to change your character’s race among the choices in your faction, but according to the WoW Account Management page (I screenshotted mine above) the button is already there, just marked with “coming soon.”

It kind of makes sense: faction changes were probably harder to implement and included a lot of the mechanics needed for race changes. But it goes to push the point I mentioned in my post: Factions, Classes, Genders, Haircuts: Do Choices Matter Anymore in Azeroth?

As soon as this is live, I don’t think there’ll be anything about your character that you can’t change if you’re willing to drop the cash. Do you think this dilutes the choices you make at the beginning of the game? Are you willing to drop what will probably be $20 or $25 dollars to change your character’s race? Shout it out in the comments!

The beauty of my post, Additional Instances Cannot Be Launched: A Technical Perspective, is that it appeared to come right on the heels of Blizzard completing its datacenter upgrade to add capacity and rid themselves and their players of the dreaded “Additional Instances Cannot Be Launched” error forever.

In a blue post on the official forums, Crygil announces that you all shouldn’t see this error ever again and that the upgrades should all be complete. Seeing is believing of course, but so far so good in my experience, and I haven’t heard people complaining about it recently, which means there must have been an impact. Blizzard’s done good by their customers on this one, especially if the errors really are gone – people have been complaining about this for a good long time, half of them demanding Blizzard keep them updated daily on the status of the changes and requesting way more vision into the back end of World of Warcraft than I think any company gives its users, but we should see that furor die down now that the upgrades are complete – assuming the upgrades have managed to rid us of the error.

Personally, I’m curious if the strategy I laid out in my article turned out to be true, but more importantly, I’m just glad I don’t have to sit outside an instance for a half-hour waiting to get in. What about you? Have you been able to get into all of your instances now that the server upgrades are finished?

WoW Faction Patches

Word came down yesterday that Blizzard’s awaited faction-change character feature is now live and ready for users: quietly, in the middle of the night. Blizzard didn’t make a huge fuss over it, and even waited until today to post an announcement about it, but right there along with all of the other character change features you can request, like changing gender or server, is the faction change request button.

The faction change seems to also give you the opportunity to change whatever else about your character that you may want to at the time, including their appearance and gender, and as predicted, the faction change feature is also a race change feature; but you’re not restricted to certain races. You can choose any race of the opposing faction that supports your class.

You have the option to customize your character’s appearance just like at the character creation screen, and you can change your character’s name if you choose – all of those features are included in your $30 fee.

More interestingly is the way that Blizzard has handled mounts, achievements, and rep: it was somewhat predictable, but Blizzard has defined certain “opposites” that will impact what happens to your character when you change. You can read all about them on the Faction Change FAQ, for example the opposite “city” to Darnassus is Undercity, which implies that anything specifically Night Elf you have will become Undead if you go Alliance to Horde.

The Faction Change pages even allow you to test changing from one race to another to see how your items, rep, mounts, and achievements will convert.

We put the question to you guys a while ago but never get tired of hearing: What would make you change faction? Are you ready and rearing to pick up your sword and fight the horde instead of fighting along with them? Or perhaps you’re tired of being Alliance scum and want to kill some instead? Let us know in the comments!

So all of the rumors, all the leaks, they all turned out to be true.

This morning, Metzen got on stage at Blizzcon and made official what Warcraft fans on the Web have been arguing about for the past week or so. The next expansion to World of Warcraft will be called Cataclysm.

The Maelstrom roars and rips Azeroth apart: all starting zones are being reworked, and as a result of the chaos and world-changing events, zones that were previously off-limits and closed to us will now be open. The Greymane wall has been shattered, and the Night Elves step up to bring the Worgen into the Alliance. The Goblins of Kazzan (one faction of Goblins, not all of them) who lives on islands out to sea have fled their homelands because of the trauma, only to become refugees in a strange land they’d never seen, fighting enemies they don’t know (like the Kul’Tiras) – and when all seems lost for them, the Orcs step up to offer a hand of friendship and bring them into the Horde.

The Cataclysm is truly cataclysmic: Darkshore is re-made, Auberdine is destroyed. Ashenvale falls and Astranaar is firebombed by the horde. Lava runs where the Barrens used to be. Desolace is now a vibrant, lush place, and ruin exists where cities once stood and vice versa. As a result, the Horde and Alliance battle even more to secure scarce resources as the world is turned upside down. Races adapt new classes to keep up the fight (also as leaked), and finally you can fly in Azeroth.

And above it all? Deathwing has returned.

From the site:

An ancient evil lies dormant within Deepholm, the domain of earth in the Elemental Plane.

Hidden away in a secluded sanctuary, the corrupted Dragon Aspect Deathwing has waited, recovering from the wounds of his last battle against Azeroth and biding his time until he can reforge the world in molten fire.

Soon, Deathwing the Destroyer will return to Azeroth, and his eruption from Deepholm will sunder the world, leaving a festering wound across the continents. As the Horde and Alliance race to the epicenter of the cataclysm, the kingdoms of Azeroth will witness seismic shifts in power, the kindling of a war of the elements, and the emergence of unlikely heroes who will rise up to protect their scarred and broken world from utter devastation.

It’s on, kids.

Watch the announcement trailer shown at Blizzcon today here and check out the new Cataclysm site: [ World of Warcraft: Cataclysm ] where you can see screenshots, download wallpapers (you know you want a shiny happy Deathwing on your desktop), and read all about the new Goblins and Worgen.

update: The WoW Class, Items, and Professional Panel just with the man, the myth, the legend, Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street, just ended, and there were HUGE announcements. Just a teaser? Armor penetration? Gone. Mana per 5-seconds? Gone. Defense? Gone. Block Value? Gone. Hunters use focus now instead of mana. Everyone gets a stamina boost. Itemization is going to change. Want more info? WoW.com was liveblogging the entire panel – read all of the announcements here!

With all the news about Cataclysm leaked, about race/class restrictions being eased or outright lifted, upcoming race/faction changes, and the fact that you can already pay to have your server changed, your character’s gender changes, Cadistra, author/artist of the webcomic WoW, Eh? brought up an excellent question over at Twitter (you can follow her @Cadistra, and I’m @halophoenix!):

Do choices matter anymore?

She’s got a point. The majority of the WoW community is incredibly excited for race and faction changes, and the ability to change them whenever you want (for a price, of course). We can already change servers whenever we land on one we don’t like. We can even change the gender of our characters if we decide that bulky Draenei male is too cumbersome to look at and would much prefer the swaggering tail-butt of a Draenei female, or if your male guild leader gets too much crap for playing a female character. It wasn’t such a big deal then, but she’s got an excellent point: don’t like your character’s appearance? Hit the barber shop and spend a little in-game money to change it. Don’t like your server? Transfer off. Don’t like your faction? Soon you can change it! Don’t like your race/class combo? Soon you’ll be able to make whatever you want!

While I don’t think anyone disputes that World of Warcraft is Blizzard’s game and they can change it as they see fit (and that the players reserve the right to pay for it or not pay for a game they do or do not like), there does seem to be a watering down of the restrictions that Blizzard put in place when the game was new. Now players can create Horde and Alliance characters on the same server even if it’s a PVP server – and players, especially old school ones, are realizing that some of the cherished walls that the game originally put up originally in order to make sure that when you created a character, you were making a commitment to something.

Now, with World of Warcaft up to 11 million subscribers and counting, Blizzard may be reducing the importance of those choices in order to provide flexibility to its player base, which may not understand or care about those commitments or the lore and story around them and are just in a mad rush to play, experience content, and get to the end-game raiding.

What do you think? It’s clear that the choices are being diluted, but do you think they still matter? Why do you think Blizzard is so ready to drop the barriers between races, classes, and factions now, of all times? Shout it out in the commnents!