character-re-customization
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5 awesome ways World of Warcraft has improved since day one
I've been known to wax poetic about the good old days of vanilla World of Warcraft from time to time. I have lots of crazy good memories about the early days of the game -- exploring the world, playing through quests that are now long gone, raiding old content when it was current, that sort of thing. And I've followed the story of Warcraft along the way, delighting the various ways its changed and shifted over the years. It's no secret that I loved the early days of WoW -- heck, I've been playing this game for seven years now. Something's kept me sticking around, right? Every now and again, I'll have a conversation with a friend that starts with said friend asking, "Hey, Anne! You like vanilla WoW. If they ever released a server that was just vanilla WoW with nothing else on it, would you play it?" And then there's a moment where I think about that. I think about the first day I was presented with the character selection screen, going over my choices with wide-eyed delight. I think about the night elf druid I made, and the months spent exploring this shiny new world. I think of my Forsaken priest and the hours of fun I had raiding with 39 other people. And then I say to my friend, "No. Oh, no no no. Heck no."
Breakfast Topic: Real life Character Re-Customization
I first changed my name in high school. From Sakay, I flipped it over to Hugo, my given name taken from my father (and his father, and his father's father). In college, I went by Kensai, a name that stuck for a while since most of my current friends were from that period in my life. For a brief time an ex-girlfriend's circle of friends called me Saint (both from the Kensai and the movie Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead). When I entered the workforce, I swapped that over for the Zach that's on my byline now. That little idiosyncrasy has actually allowed me to remember people from where I met them. If someone says hi and calls me Sakay, for example, I know I met them in elementary school. I'm sneaky that way.It's character re-customization in real life. Or paid name change. Except I didn't actually have to fork $10 to get it done. We re-customize ourselves all the time, changing clothes more often (hopefully, anyway!) than our characters upgrade their gear. Some changes are more drastic -- losing or gaining weight, shaving our heads (it worked for Justin Timberlake), or even changing jobs or moving house. It's all part of how we continue to re-customize our lives.If we could re-customize ourselves as easily as we could the way we change our characters, what would you change and why? Or maybe you've just gone through a makeover recently -- from a haircut to the whole shebang -- tell us about it on this drab weekend morning. Now if only we could get real life Gold just as easily...
The limits and possibilities of Bind to Account
Aeuis brings up an interesting point over on the forums: even though some of the items we get are called "Bind on Account" (or, more properly, Bind to Account, even though most people use BoA as shorthand) they're really not that, because you can't actually send them across factions or realms. Of course, that's pretty obvious to people who've been playing the game for a while -- Blizzard has never really encouraged cross-faction interaction at all (you can "send" items through the neutral AH, though even that is a bit of a hack, not really the intended purpose). So BoA items are actually bound to account, server, and faction.But Wyrxian is surprisingly open about "future possibility:" he does say that while Blizzard could allow us to send items between factions if they wanted us to, they also wanted to leave things open just in case the functionality came into view in the future. That doesn't mean we can expect a change in the next patch, but it does seem to mean that Blizzard is still open to the "possibility." You'd think it be tough technically (character inventories are all over the place, especially cross-server), but considering that we can now have cross-server battlegrounds, all it would probably take is a tweak to the in-game mail system. One character sends an item, another character receives it.And really, the only possibility that might come open is just ease-of-use -- that's why BoA and Heirloom items are in the game already, and if Blizzard determines that it would be easier to have you share items between your characters' factions and servers (perhaps if they upgrade the character re-customization feature to include a faction change?), then it will likely happen sooner or later.
World of Warcraft's rules for RMT
There's been a discussion going on at our sister-site WoW Insider regarding RMT (real-money trading) and their favorite MMO, World of Warcraft. Now wait a minute, you might say, WoW doesn't have RMT! While it's true that you can't just cough up real money to get that epic piece of loot you've been dreaming about, Blizzard has its own version of RMT with name changes, server transfers, and the new character re-customizations. They aren't alone in the industry with these for-cash perks -- plenty of other subscription-model MMOs do exactly the same.The main reason that this has been brought up now is due to a recent thread on the official WoW forums, where a Blizzard poster actually detailed some of the company's rules (over a number of different pages) for adding the existing and any future premium services. They won't start charging for something that used to be free, and the pay features should be superficial conveniences and not 'integral to the game', ruling out item sales. Another very simple reason that they charge for certain things is to stop players from doing them too often -- no quickie gender-changes to beg on the Orgrimmar mailbox for a half-hour. This seems to be the right way to go about things for a subscription-based MMO, or at least it has been so far. Leaving aside the debate about the future of the subscription model, would you pay monthly for a game that offered gameplay advantages to those that paid just that little bit more?
