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!

Fair warning: I’m about to go full geek on you guys here. I don’t work for Blizzard, otherwise I don’t think I’d be able to make a post like this. Not that I’m giving away anything here; this is all highly speculative, but I can happily say that when I’m not writing, I work in the management team of an IT department at a multi-million dollar company. We’re not huge, but because of the nature of what we do, we make an incredible investment in technology – both new, bleeding edge tech that really hasn’t been vetted out (and yes, we pay for it sometimes in man hours and product failures) and in finding out that a lot of technology available simply isn’t up to the task of the work that we do. Our datacenter easily has over a petabyte of data at rest, and servers with four quad-core processors and 128GB of RAM in them are a normal buy for us…and we buy them so often because our production jobs on those boxes still take days to complete.

Now we’re heavy on processing data, crunching information, re-arranging bits and bytes. We’re no Blizzard, with its round-the-clock uptime requirements (although we don’t get a weekly all-day maintenance window like they do) and 11 million customers banging away at our applications and hardware every day. But I do know a little something about capacity planning, and I do know a little something about resource management, and I think I can throw Blizzard a bone here on the whole “Additional Instances Cannot Be Launched” issue as well as help players understand why Blizzard is being so hush-hush on the nature of the problem.

The “Additional Instances” problem has resurfaced to a large extent recently, with the new patch, new content that presses players to go back and experience older instances and content, and across a number of different WoW-related blogs and podcasts I’ve heard all but consistent grumbling about it. Over on the WoW Insider Show (the podcast of WoW.com), I heard Michael Sacco (who used to work for Blizzard and is under NDA) explain that Blizzard is taking it seriously and doing some cool stuff to try and fix it. That got me thinking: “What kind of cool stuff is my company doing to optimize our datacenter? Maybe we’re similar to Blizzard?” Over on RawrCast, I’ve heard Stompalina and Haf complain about it several times.

That’s not to say there isn’t something to complain about. It’s downright frustrating not being able to play the content you pay to play. At its heart, I think it’s a hardware problem, and here’s what I can infer: (I leave open the possibility that I’m completely wrong, by the way.)

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The brood queen herself is back, so sayeth the Blizzard!

To celebrate World of Warcraft’s 5th anniversary, Blizzard has completely updated and re-worked the Onyxia dungeon and encounter for 10 and 25-man groups, complete with the same gear just updated for level 80 raiders, and tweaked to present a challenge to endgamers now! The announcement was made last night by Zarhym on the official WoW forums:

She has lurked in her lair and done battle with the many brave adventurers who travelled to that familiar location over the years. Now, in honor of the World of Warcraft 5-year anniversary, the dreaded brood mother Onyxia is being revamped to make a return to the forefront of Azeroth, as part of our big plans for the upcoming 3.2.2 content patch.

This permanent update to Onyxia will convert the dungeon into 10- and 25-player modes. We will be adding new items to Onyxia’s loot table that have the same model as some of the classic loot from this dungeon, like Tier 2 helms, with stats updated to match the current level of content. There will be a special new item too: a normal drake-sized 310% speed flying mount modeled after Onyxia herself called Brood of Onyxia. We will also be updating the encounter mechanics to be more fitting for modern raiding, but we can guarantee players will get to experience the frightening horror of deep breaths once again.

Then for a limited time, after the 5-year anniversary event officially begins in November, anybody who logs in will receive an Onyxia Brood Whelpling pet.

We’re very excited to bring this classic encounter back to provide a fun new experience for both new and veteran players. Further details will be available in the near future, and we will be setting up the Public Test Realms soon to help test out this fight along with all the new content we have planned for the patch. Keep an eye on the forums for updates!

Happy 5th, World of Warcraft! I can’t think of a more fitting way for Blizzard to celebrate the event with us – I for one look forward to taking Onyxia’s head. Again.

I know I’ve been talking quite a bit about the upcoming Warcraft-based movie, but this tidbit from Wired’s Underwire blog called Alt Text: Sam Raimi’s Warcraft Movie Production Diary was just too good to pass up.

Some of the highlights? Check it out:

Day 1
I’ll say it: I, Sam Raimi, am a genius. My decision to hire actual World of Warcraft players as extras was a stroke of brilliance. We get lots of publicity, they work for free and some of them are bringing their own swords! This is going to be great.

Day 2
OK, problems. To start with, there’s a huge line of extras waiting to get on the set, and every time we get a bunch of them in, the scenery crashes. My technical advisers say this is normal for a launch, and they’re working on it. In the meantime, they suggest that I build several identical sets, and encourage the extras to transfer to the other sets.

Oh, and that’s only the beginning. It gets so much better.

A while back I put out the call to my friends on Twitter and at the end of this post about Sam Raimi directing the upcoming Warcraft movie asking what a Warcraft-themed movie would actually be about. I’m personally more interested to find out who’s writing the movie than who’s directing it, as the writing will give me much more insight into whether the screenwriter’s portfolio is full of smart, interesting work or dry, stale bread.

Some of the feedback I got was particularly interesting; @greyseer, of Lorecrafted fame, had perhaps one of the most poignant thoughts: that whatever they do the movie about has to both be appealing to current players, and also can’t require that the viewer has played through three games to understand it.

In other words, don’t expect some huge moment in Warcraft lore to be played out on the big screen – something that you’d only know if you were a hardcore PvE-er, or played through Warcraft II to see the ending. Don’t expect any re-enactments of The Sundering, don’t expect to watch the slow seduction of Queen Azshara by the combined influence of Sargeras and her own lust for more magical power, don’t expect a recap of the Tauren v. Centaur wars.

Do, on the other hand, expect the thrilling adventures of Elling Trias, Master of Cheese and secret agent for SI:7! Do expect to watch an “adventurer” who might be the role of the “player” meet figures well established in the current game and in lore and maybe go up against the Defias. You see where I’m going.

The folks over at CurseNetwork on Twitter (of Curse Gaming) thought that it might be the story of Varian Wrynn, which I think might be a little too “new” for a lot of WoW fans, but may still make a good story that brings people into the game now and still appeals to lore fans who already know Varian’s story.

Whatever the movie about, I hope it doesn’t fall too heavily on one faction or another, as in entirely from the perspective of the Alliance and portraying the Horde as savages, and I hope they don’t wind up retconning something in the process. There’s a wealth of suitable topics that would make the current World of Warcraft fans happy while simultaneously tickling the sweet spots of serious lore fans.

You may know him as the man who directed the travesty that was Spider-Man 3 or the man who directed the hilarious brilliance of Army of Darkness and Evil Dead, or perhaps the writer behind the scenes of the short-lived but fantastic TV show M.A.N.T.I.S (okay maybe I’m the only one who remembers him from that), perhaps the producer behind the long-running Hercules and Xena TV shows (and that Cleopatra 2525 offshoot, meow!), or perhaps you’ve only heard of him recently through the Spider Man movies, his traditional horror background, and the recent success Drag Me to Hell.

Regardless of how you know Sam Raimi, you’ll hear a lot about him in the coming days if you haven’t already – it’s being reported that Raimi will be directing the Warcraft or World of Warcraft-based movie that we all knew was on the way. Whatever it’ll be called, Raimi will be behind the scenes, and depending on your perspective this is good or bad news for fans of the Warcraft franchise.

Some people have already started weeping for the future movie, claiming he’ll give it the Spider-Man 3 treatment, and others are cheering and hoping he brings the Army of Darkness/Evil Dead wit and some Drag Me to Hell intellect to the screen. The movie has barely been formally announced, and I think this amounts to as much as a formal announcement as possible – previous accounts of a Warcraft movie have been largely speculation – so we don’t know anything else about it or what the movie will be about or what part of the Warcraft franchise it will live in. Will it be completely based in World of Warcraft time, or pick from an important moment or moments from Warcraft lore?

Thanks to WoW.com for the tip off! Blizzard, late to the party, has issued a press release confirming the news after it was broken by Ain’t It Cool News.

Over at the venerable WoW Insider, Senior Editor Mike Schramm stirred up quite a controversy by pointing out something that’s been rumbling in the WoW community for a while now: should Blizzard get rid of/bolster and rework Vanilla WoW?

Now by “Vanilla WoW,” we mean all of the original level 1-60 content that launched with the game. You remember that stuff, don’t you? Onxyia and her whelps, Tier 1 gear, Deadmines and the Defias, Tauren fighting the Centaur in Mulgore, and of course, who can forget Barrens chat?

Silliness aside, there are two very diametrically opposed camps here; some people out there want Blizzard to open “Vanilla Servers,” where the level cap is still 60 and all of the content ends with the content released before Burning Crusade – a place where people can still wrap themselves in the original content without the treadmill rush to level to 70 and then 80, rushing through Outlands and then Northrend. On the other side of the argument are the people who want to essentially sunset 1-60 entirely, and make all characters like Death Knights: as long as you have an 80 somewhere you can roll a new character starting at level 55 anywhere. Some of those people even say you can limit it to a server – if you have an 80 on that server, you should be able to start any class at 55 on that server.

I can see both sides of this debate: there are those of us looking to gear, level, and armor up to assist our guilds with raids and instances, and for those of us who are looking to do that the original content from 1-60 is little more than a path to that, and at worst it’s an obstacle in the way there. At the same time, for those of us who really enjoy the original old world content for its rich story, lore, interesting NPCs and gameplay, the thought of removing it or otherwise toning it down or isolating it from the higher-level game content is abhorrent.

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Patch 3.1 goes live today, and with it comes the release of the Ulduar raid dungeon. My guild has been preparing for weeks to storm the instance, but an interesting thread (warning: heavily trolled) popped up on the Blackrock forums last week that has us somewhat undecided as to how we should approach the encounters.

In a nut shell, a few guilds are arguing over what criteria should be used to rank guilds in WOTLK. It used to be simple: you kill a boss, your guild moves up a rank. First guild to clear an instance “wins.” Now, however, with the advent of achievements, ranking a guild has become slightly more complicated. Encounters can be done several ways, and if you voluntarily choose to do an encounter the “hard” way you get an achievement. Clearing an instance without doing any of the optional achievements is easy by design. However, completing all of the individual raiding achievements is itself an achievement (known as a meta achievement), and guilds that do so are rewarded with a special prize. The guilds that are fighting want to have their idea of progression be the “official” method of ranking a guild. Not coincidentally, their idea of progression also happens to put them on top.

The guilds that cleared the instances on “easy” mode wants to be recognized for the simple act of defeating the dungeon first, which is how guild rankings used to work. The guild that managed to kill Sartharian the Onyx Guardian and all three of his lieutenants at the same time wants to be recognized as the top Alliance guild because they consider that to be the most difficult encounter in the game. Lastly the guild that completed the meta achievement first, which is all raiding achievements including the Sartharian achievement, wants to be considered the top guild.

On the surface, it seems to make sense that completing the meta achievement would be the logical way to rank a guild, as Blizzard itself rewards you with a special mount for completing it. However, the difficult part about completing the meta is an achievement called The Immortal. To get The Immortal, your guild must kill every boss in Naxxramas without a single person dying. It’s the rarest raiding achievement in the game, and guilds (usually the ones that can’t do it) are claiming that it’s not fair because sometimes people die to circumstances beyond their control. Now, I don’t agree with that assessment. My guild was the second guild to complete the meta achievement after Death and Taxes, and we never considered The Immortal to be out of our control. Then again, we’re not a guild based in Singapore that is plagued with random disconnects and international lag either, so you can probably see their point.

So now the debate rages on inside my guild. Do we go for the quick clear tonight, or do we work on hard modes from the get-go? We’re a leading edge content type of raiding guide; going straight into hard mode isn’t beyond our capability. But is it worth it to adjust our progression strategy just so we can juice up a forum thread? I’m really not so sure. There are already websites like wowprogress.com that do an amazing job of tracking guild progression, and they’re using much more advanced scoring techniques than any forum thread I’ve ever seen. They already rank us as the top alliance guild by achievement. My gut feeling tells me to just ignore what goes on in the forum thread, refer potential applicants to wowprogress.com and just do our own thing. At the same time, I also know that being recognized as a top raider means a lot to quite a few of my guildies. I hope we end up just doing a quick clear the first week, but we’ll see. Raid starts in 3 hours.