As others have said, if you don’t like the idea, don’t take advantage of the service. Just because you don’t know anybody in RL on the opposite faction you want to play with doesn’t mean that there aren’t many other who would love the opportunity to switch to play with friends. Spending a few bucks to switch a toon rather than spending a couple of months levelling a new character from scratch seems like an excellent tradeoff to me.

Personally I’ll never move my main – my shaman is just a great character, I’m in a fantastic guild, and the Draenei always seemed like an alien cludge to me. But I’m getting increasingly tempted to have a high-level Alliance character, as the “Blood Elf faction” (previously known as the Horde – seriously, the server population stats are depressing) becomes less and less recognisable as anything related to Warcraft I (aka Warcraft: Orcs & Humans). Probably a Dwarf, probably a warrior, or perhaps some sort of healer again. I’ve a fair few high level characters, so the option of moving one rather than re-rolling from level 1 would make it still more tempting.

I’m not really worried about achievements going poof or anything. My motorcycle maybe…That would kind of suck, but other than that, meh!

I almost garauntee that the “questionable” items will just be lost – as you said, B3, roughly equivilant. They’ll err on the side of not transferring everything rather than transferring too much. They don’t need to be fair here – fair is a word that honestly should never be used anyways. The transferee is getting something otherwise impossible, so losing some faction specific stuff while switching is the price he pays for that choice. I’m sure they’ll clearly outline what can and can not be transferred.

However, we’re all talking about it now, my close friends and I, just moving en masse over to horde. Not sure if it’ll happen or not. If they don’t, I’ll still absolutely move one of my other toons (not my druid main) Fortunately, I’ve never made an effort to get shiny faction specific stuff on my alts, so there’s nothing I’ll care about losing there.

Then again, I’m of a mind that you should be able to change your class and server at will (with no cost) for similar reasons; to make it easier for players to jump in and *play* the game, rather than grind for months so that they *can* play. Instant level capped characters and free respecs are also on my shopping list. It makes sense for a microtransaction game to use this sort of thing as a revenue stream… but WoW? It’s double dipping, since I consider these things to be core game design elements, not frippery.

It will be interesting to see how many people change and how often repeat customers change. I wonder if that data is mineable outside of Blizzard databases…

I’ll probably do it with at least one of my toons.

fair. if you accept the switch, you accept that you’ll have no faction specific anything yet and you’ll have to start from scratch with all the new factions/tabards/rep/quest lines for achievements/etc. it would be a purely personal choice to just join friends and/or start over. people would do like you and switch a high level toon just to have one – but i highly doubt any mains would switch.

for you gold making gurus out there – when this option gets more viable and actually starts to come to fruition – time to start a new level 1 fake guild bank just to hold a couple tabs of runecloth…….