Free Faction Change

Allybeboba said:
Hopefully the following will answer many questions concerning the transfers.

"It looks like Blizzard is ready to try something new to address long battleground queues, starting with a test on US-Barthilas.

As it stands, Barthilas has roughly 18.6k players with a Level 90 character on the realm. Around 14.7k of those characters are Horde and 3.9k are Alliance, resulting in a population that is 21% Alliance and 79% Horde.

Looking at characters rather than players, there are ~41.7k Level 90 characters on Barthilas now, with 34.3k Horde and 7.4k Alliance, for a 17.8% Alliance and 82.2% Horde population."

Just to give a comparison the realm population of other servers are Aerie Peak 85k, Bleeding Hollow -186k, Cenarius-93k, Tichondrius -299k. As you can see, it(Barthilas) is a low population server that is very imbalanced.

And some tweets from Holinka:
Something to keep in mind about free faction transfers: The primary objective is to balance faction populations at the region level. (holinka)
Nice little attempt to give players corrective abilities to balance their own realms. Good luck on Mal'Ganis...
Again, the intention isn't to correct realm imbalances, but region imbalance. It's unlikely Tichondrius would become 50/50. (holinka)
Do you think starting with smaller realms to balance the regional overflow (not wanting ques) would work?
We're starting with one server to ensure we can be responsive if anything unexpected occurs. (holinka)
What if you don't get good results? Will you try another server? And thank you for listening to us
if things go well we will expand to other realms and regions. (holinka)
My question was if they don't go as expected on that one server, will you still try another?
We started with one server to evaluate the process not player response. If the process works properly we will expand it. (holinka)

what is the incentive though? why would anyone at this time choose to go to the side that lower pop, and lesser racial abilities?
We're trying to remove barriers first. People faction transfer all the time. They may not need added incentive. (holinka)

So horde->alliance is probably all we are going to see initially?
Yes (holinka)

but what about when all the alliance go horde like they've slowly been doing since faction change was implemented
We aren't offering alliance to horde transfers for free. (holinka)
how is that helping to solve the alliance dominance on my server then? Horde is dead on my server ..
it isn't meant to fix that problem (holinka)

I wonder why they started with Barth? are we the guinea pig server? but I am excited. Ashran!!
It was a good size and had a horde/alliance ratio we thought might attract faction changes. (holinka)
/cheers

Sweetsidney...
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Strange answers but if you look at things currently it makes sense. Data gathered from guildox, as well as oqueue suggests horde dominate both pvp, and pve. Even at blizzcons there are far fewer Alliance attending. Apparently, faction transfers further support this theory. I wonder what it is if you could break down. Couldnt be something simple as racials. Im really curious though, even back when i started (early bc) horde always appeared too dominate in pvp. Is it perception thats led to imbalances or something else entirely. Super interesting stuff. I wonder if everyone rushed too play the "underdog" which in turn led to the Horde never being the underdog.
 
Rollop said:
Strange answers but if you look at things currently it makes sense. Data gathered from guildox, as well as oqueue suggests horde dominate both pvp, and pve. Even at blizzcons there are far fewer Alliance attending. Apparently, faction transfers further support this theory. I wonder what it is if you could break down. Couldnt be something simple as racials. Im really curious though, even back when i started (early bc) horde always appeared too dominate in pvp. Is it perception thats led to imbalances or something else entirely. Super interesting stuff. I wonder if everyone rushed too play the "underdog" which in turn led to the Horde never being the underdog.
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Horde racials were vastly superior even in the ''Golden days of LolTBC''. EU faction shifted heavily towards Alliance as soon as Night Elves and Humans were buffed.
 
Rollop said:
This question has been asked and answered on every page of this thread.
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I'm sorry, I just can't be bothered to read over the thread.
 
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Rollop said:
Strange answers but if you look at things currently it makes sense. Data gathered from guildox, as well as oqueue suggests horde dominate both pvp, and pve. Even at blizzcons there are far fewer Alliance attending. Apparently, faction transfers further support this theory. I wonder what it is if you could break down. Couldnt be something simple as racials. Im really curious though, even back when i started (early bc) horde always appeared too dominate in pvp. Is it perception thats led to imbalances or something else entirely. Super interesting stuff. I wonder if everyone rushed too play the "underdog" which in turn led to the Horde never being the underdog.
Click to expand...
More "serious, mature" players tend to play Horde for some reason. A small psychological study was done. Excerpt from that study below.
"Overall, the demographic differences between Horde and Alliance characters are minimal. There are no gender differences. Male and female players are equally represented on both sides. There is a statistically significant, but substantively trivial, age difference. Players who prefer Horde characters (M = 27.5, SD = 8.0) tend to be slightly younger than players who prefer Alliance characters (M = 28.7, SD = 8.6).

Players who prefer the Horde score significantly higher on the Advancement, Competition, and Mechanics motivations than players who prefer the Alliance. In other words, players who prefer the Horde tend to be more achievement-driven, more likely to enjoy provoking and challenging each other, and more likely to be min-maxers. On the other hand, players who prefer the Alliance tend to score higher on the Role-Playing and Customization motivations than those players who prefer the Horde. '

Keep in mind, this was done quite a long time ago. There have been numerous studies done on WoW and it's effect on society
Nothing to do with racials, unless you are talking about the person picking the character.
/cheers

Sweetsidney
 
Aradiel said:
Seeing as free realm transfers do work, as long as you're not an idiot, this could work too.

Can you tell me how to use it?
I tried your link : us.battle.net/account/management/wow/services/character-services.html?l=WOW1&r=US&s=FCM
Did not work, just showed me : "An error has occurred. Back to Battle.net Management"
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elffies said:
Aradiel said:
Seeing as free realm transfers do work, as long as you're not an idiot, this could work too.

Can you tell me how to use it?
I tried your link : us.battle.net/account/management/wow/services/character-services.html?l=WOW1&r=US&s=FCM
Did not work, just showed me : "An error has occurred. Back to Battle.net Management"
Click to expand...

It only works when there are free character transfers. It doesn't work when they aren't offering them. Also, replace WOW1 with whatever your account is called.
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It's supposed to be active now, 10am PDT, but there's no free faction change link. Anyone with game time tested out if it's just done through the normal faction change, but without charge?
 
Aradiel said:
It's supposed to be active now, 10am PDT, but there's no free faction change link. Anyone with game time tested out if it's just done through the normal faction change, but without charge?
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Saw a couple users post on Blizz forum that only 90s are flagged for free change. But it is early days.
 
Yes, I was reading the comments too, but most of them seem to have no idea what they're talking about. Half of them don't realize it's only on Barth.

Xivere 4 hours ago
It's live. You have to go to your character selection screen

The above comment suggests that it is live, and rather than being activated from the web interface, it's like the PTR, and just lets you do it as you log in. I can confirm that F2P login does not show it.

Nøtlucky 4 hours ago
Is this only for 90s? I'm not seeing any option to faction change on Barthilas.

The one above there, is posted by a, P2P playing by F2P rules, lock. At least they understand that it's only on Barth. It's not looking good for F2P, or even sub 90s. Was worth a shot, and giving people enough warning to level before it closed. For now, I'm leaning towards it not being available for F2P.

I also tried by entering the URL of my character in the web interface, and it just dumped me back again, which I expected it to do. I was only expecting this to work if they had a free link, in the same way as the free realm transfers.
 
A shame that doesn't show the levels of the characters. It's possible they're all 90, but most people don't have that many 90s on the one realm and the same faction. One thing is for sure though, it's not made through the web interface, and not available to F2P.
 
But it is early days.
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There is absolutely zero reason to think they would enable faction swaps for one level range of characters and then change their mind later on and let an additional level range of characters faction swap as well. Not to mention the fact that F2Ps normally don't have access to character services anyway.
 
Since it's easy to RAF a F2P account and multibox....

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I didn't check at 19 to see if it was available. But it certainly wasn't at 18.

Go forth and try to exploit it folks ~_~
 
Since there's no way to do it through the web, the only way to get this to work would be to temporarily upgrade the account by paying with a CC with insufficient funds, or chargeback. I'm not seeing any other way to exploit it at this point, but I'm perfectly happy to be proven wrong. If someone comes up with a method, feel free to post.

Nice to know it works at 20. Considering the advantages to 19s twinking, I think that's a reason why they would not allow it at 19.
 
Hey, sorry I'm late to this thread, but I could transfer a pay to play level 20 (sorry my robotic friend had problems so it took a little while) using this method. I was not able to do so on a F2P. :( I might try this chargeback thing but it just feels scummy to me.

Also welcome back Kale! What happened to your BWL char?
 
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