Blizzard dropped a bombshell on the World of Warcraft community earlier this week when they announced paid faction changes are in the works.  At the moment it looks like this is just an extremely tentative announcement with no dates set in stone.  There has been speculation that the transfers will hit along with Patch 3.2 sometime in September, but judging from the tone of the blue post I’d say it could be longer than that.

The meat of the changes are:

  1. Faction transfers will create a “roughly equivalent” character.  Presumably this means gear and skills, the core of a character, but there’s no word on how Achievements and other ephemera will work.
  2. You can only switch to a race on the opposing faction that is allowed to play your character’s class.
  3. You can’t transfer back to your original faction with a different race.  You must return to your character’s original race.
  4. Blizzard isn’t telling us anything else at this point.

This is something that has the potential to drastically change realm balance, but at the same time I wish that they’d implemented something like this years ago.  It definitely would have saved me some time leveling new characters to play with friends.  I imagine there will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth on the forums when this goes live from the “Warcraft is too easy” crowd, but I for one welcome it as a service that eliminates needless leveling for people who just want to be able to play with their friends without going through the 1-80 grind again.