For those who did not notice the tweet, I am officially unemployed. Job search is underway; I have little doubt that I will find something by early August at the latest, although it might not be something ideal.
The July 4 holiday involved large quantites of bratwurst. I like bratwurst.
In the world of World of Warcraft, a couple of milestones have been hit: Hippomenes and Atelanta (Mrs. Ardwulf and my Night Elf Druids) hit level 40 after much procrastination. And Hrishnak hit level 50.
Hippomenes and Atelanta made a point of doing the Fire Festival quests. Alas, these are set up in such a way that you can only get so far unless you’re level 70ish or higher. But we did get the Flames of the Eastern Kingdoms and Flames of Kalimdor achievments through great effort (including death-walking through Timbermaw Hold,) and managed to snatch Horde flames from Undercity and Thunder Bluff as well, the latter of which was murderously difficult.
We also ran a couple rounds of Arathi Basin; Mrs. Ardwulf is not into PvP but was tempted by the shiny rewards, which are relatively easy to get if you only want one or two of them. We didn’t get very far (both rounds ended in abject defeat for the Alliance,) but may try again at some point.
Hrishnak, my solo Orc Hunter, is now at 52 and is rollicking right along. To my surprise, there was very little training to be done at 50. To my utter lack of surprise, the Hunter quest chain that opens up at that level ends in Sunken Temple, which I didn’t want to bother to do for the rewards available. I’ve been doing the Fire Festival quests (really, just honoring the Horde fires and putting out the Alliance ones,) as I’m in those areas, but the net amount of experiemnce gain from them has been fairly substantial. I didn’t go after the achievements – I judged getting into Winterspring to be not worth the effort, even though I’m of about the right level to do it the ‘honest’ way.
And I saw the inside of Blackrock Mountain for the first time – not the instances, of course, but the open-world part of it. At some point (i. e. at 80,) I’ll hit up the dungeons as well.
June 30, 2009
How Will WoW’s Faction Changes Work?
Posted by Ardwulf under Commentary, World of Warcraft[6] Comments
Tobold writes today about race changes in WoW, based on the news that faction changes will likely be allowed at some point in the future, as reported yesterday.
Due respect to Tobold, but that’s not neccessarily going to be the way it works. From reading the announcement you might think that, but I’ll maintain that an EQ2-style betrayal mechanic is also a possibility; the tone of the announcement from Blizzard implies that it’s just starting to get looked at.
Yesterday I made the statement that changing your faction would likely be a paid option like appearance respecs, but an in-game betrayal system would eliminate the need for that, as well as making more sense in the context of the game itself, and probably alleviating the need to create a rather complicated system.
The sticking point is that no race in WoW can be every single class. Say you have a Human Paladin whose player decides they’d rather play Horde. Can you just choose a race to move to? Or is that limited by your class? Can our hypothetical HUman Paladin only change to Blood Elf on the Horde side because that’s the only Horde race that can play Paladins? Or can you change your class as well? And can you freely choose that? How do things like gear translate if you change to a different class that might not use the same stuff? If you have a level 35 Paladin, can you move him over to a level 35 Death Knight?
This becomes awfully complicated, as you see. From this perspective – and possibly this is wishful thinking on my part – it becomes a great deal easier to simply alow Gnome Hordies and Alliance Orcs. Following the EQ2 model, there’d be a quest chain to complete to do this, betraying your own faction and demonstrating your allegiance with the other.
Obviously there’d be some questions to answer and structural changes to make with this approach as well, but it seems cleaner and less problematic to me. Either way you can surely see why Blizzard’s announcement sounded so tenative.