Changes, and Why I'm not so Keen on Some of Them

So you don't like being Alliance.. or you're tired questing "For the Horde!' It looks like Blizzard may be offering to allow folks to switch sides,with an equivalent-ish character.

-

For a fee, of course.

-

LINK

-

At first glance, this seems like a REALLY good thing. ESPECIALLY for the more casual players. But then some of my more serious gamer associates started complaining, and in the process brought up some VERY good points. Well, there are multiple aspects, but it all boils down to one issue: Balance.

-

As I have mentioned in my posts about the BattleGrounds, the Alliance doesn't do very well in my Battlegroup. I think I had one win in 20-odd games.

-

Picture that type of lop-sided-ness on a PvP server, where you are always at risk of being ganked by higher level players. There, faction balance plays a crucial role in not only the BGs and Raids, but in the day-to-day questing as well. If there are too many of one faction, simply moving from city to your quest area becomes a dangerous proposition. If your Faction has fewer people, you are less likely to have someone around to help/prevent a ganking.

-

And if you are on a server that already has an imbalance, it will likely get worse, as people move to avoid it. If you're trying to do the "For the Alliance!" or "For the Horde!" raids, being on the low side of an imbalanced server will be brutal.

-

And with the proposed change, it could get worse...

Tanaris: A Whole New World

"Here" on Velen, we are starting to have a weekly tradition: while most other servers go back to normal after the weekly server maintainance, Velen gets to be one of the 10-20 servers that ALWAYS stay down for an extra 10-12 hours... "due to hardware issues". The last couple times it happened, I just hopped onto my XBOX 360 and played RacePro, or Quantum of Solace.

This week was different.

My girlfriend started a new charachter on a different server. We both had threatened to do it, before, but just never felt like it. This time we went with the "suggested realm" and both chose to be humans on Tanaris. And we both chose a character class we don't much care for: the Rogue. I was feeling REALLY odd, so I decided to do a first: do a little gender bending and make a female character. And in a fit of petulant nose thumbing at Blizzard, I decided to create a name that's likely to get reported, but gets me giggling like a 6th grader: Aureola.

I spawned into the starting area and there must have been a HUNDRED new characters running around, many with obnoxious names like mine (StayFree is one that I recall, but I didn't see Kotex...) And everyone was running around doing the starting quests, but it was, BY FAR, the most social, light hearted experience I've had in WoW. One guy (with a female character named Lauren) started a guild on the steps of the building there. It was a Gilligan's Island guild, with all the guild levels named after characters ("Skipper" was guild leader, and us peons were either "Ginger" or "Mr. Howell". It was a lot of random running around, helping each other out, and hysterical conversations.

It was fun to run around in a huge group of people, who were all just screwing around and having fun. No twinks, no PVP, no crude, nasty trade channel conversations, no 10 minute jogs to Lakeshire, with a 10 minute slog back... just a ton of fun. I even had a little fun learning the Rogue a bit (though how much can you learn in 6 levels...)

I think I have my own Tuesday evening tradition now...