Character Re-Customization available for a small fee [UPDATED]
by Alex Ziebart 
Dec 10th 2008 at 11:00PM
The WoW launcher was updated this morning, and just now what was behind that curtain was revealed: Character Re-Customization. What does that mean? In short, for a fee of $15, you can rebuild your character, with some restrictions. You can change your gender, face, skin, hair, and name, but not your race or class. You can do hair in-game already via the barbershop, so I imagine the ability to do those via this service is just for convenience. The real draw is the gender and face options.Don't want to play your Female Undead Warlock anymore because they move funny? It's okay, turn them into a way awesome Male Undead Warlock. Sick of looking at your Male Draenei? Try out something more... pleasing to the eyes. This is a feature people have been asking for since WoW launched, so I'm surprised it took so long for it to happen. If you're taking full advantage of the feature, it's really not a bad deal considering a paid name change is $10. For an extra $15, you can more or less have a new character. Well, sort of.
The first questions that I saw come up about this is the griefability, and the FAQ handled it pretty well. What if a Ninja steals your lewts, then goes and changes their identity? Well, as long as they're on your ignore list (or friends list) they can't really escape. When their name changes, those lists will be updated as well.
The odd restriction I see is Race, because I think that's one of the biggest things people wanted from this anyway. I can understand why they wouldn't want to do that, though. Your race would be the new Flavor of the Month deal. Why? Racials. You would have raiders going Draenei for the Hit aura, or PvPers respeccing their race to whatever the best PvP racial is that arena season. My fellow RPers, let's be honest. How many people on your server would be swapping to Draenei for a few months for some bizarre demon posession and/or impregnation storyline, then going back to Human or Night Elf whatever later. It would be a lot of people.
This would very quickly change from something fun to something you'd feel like you're forced to spend good money on regularly. I don't think they want that. I don't really see a problem with this service at all, I think they took a pretty classy approach to it all.
Update: It seems they're still trying to get a few bits and pieces of this working right, so I'd wait awhile before trying it out.
[Thank you to all that sent us tips about this!]
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Blizzard, News items
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 8)
Minamori Dec 10th 2008 11:22PM
I know I'll be changing my level 80 DK to get one of the cool skins that I didn't know about until I was around level 70.
mattarin Dec 11th 2008 1:44AM
Same here. I have a troll death knight and it is blue and looks more like a warrior with glowy eyes instead of an undead minion and i saw one with brown skin and thought that looked bad ass. So i asked him and he said you have to hit randomize a few times until it shows up. Good job Blizz :P
Redski Dec 11th 2008 1:57AM
@Mattarin
I will try to explain this the best that I can. You know how the troll face paint options are affected by the tusks option and from there, you can change the color by the hair color? The undead-looking DK skins are similar, but you get to them through the face option. After that, you can browse through the three of them using the skin option.
Zelius Dec 11th 2008 2:04AM
@Redski
Actually, you can also just scroll through the skin options and find them there. There are about 3 extra death knight skins per race and each of those skins also has a few unique faces.
Max Dec 11th 2008 7:17AM
Don't just hit randomize. Scroll through the faces. There are a set of about 3 DK exclusive faces that will also sort of change your "skin set" to a choice of 3 very dead looking skinds - but only when you have that face selected.
Flavio Dec 11th 2008 7:19AM
@everyone
Redski is right, you have to scroll through the faces first, until the skin changes color, then, while on those "three or so" faces, you can choose between the new skin colors
or Blue hair
NoTomorrow Dec 10th 2008 11:29PM
Where will you change it from? Will you do all your appearance changes on worldofwarcraft.com or will it automatically direct you to a screen similar to the character create screen on your next login?
Sumanai Dec 10th 2008 11:37PM
After I've paid, how do I go about selecting the new gender, face, name, and so on for the character?
After your payment has been processed, you will see a new button when you log in to World of Warcraft that lets you re-customize the character's features (and name, if desired) at your convenience. You do not have to re-customize the character immediately.
http://us.blizzard.com/support/article.xml?tag=CRCFAQ
NoTomorrow Dec 10th 2008 11:37PM
D'oh. Just read the FAQ.
W: From [self]: Read before you make an idiot out of yourself again!
Lorade Dec 10th 2008 11:41PM
WOW SEX CHANGE
Ricardomon Meletanskiokriskov Dec 11th 2008 8:40AM
Hells yeah foo'!
I hate my male dranei shaman. I hate how he gallops around, i hate his stupid dance, i hate his stupid laugh, i hate his stupid ugly tentacle FACE!!!!
Female dranei for the winzors.
bob Dec 12th 2008 9:02AM
Except that they're both goats. No matter how much you customize them they just... no.
Nauwkie Dec 10th 2008 11:41PM
Female gnome for life.
Imm Dec 13th 2008 7:50PM
I filled out the form successfully on the website. Logged into WoW and I didnt see anything different, I'm not able to change anything. Is there a wait even after it being successful?
Melchior Dec 10th 2008 11:47PM
I would only ever use this service to change my Alliance toons to horde. I used to play Alliance exclusively and have two level 70 alliance characters. I would love to be able to play them as horde characters because I will never level up another palladin and hunter- the leveling process is too time consuming from 1-80 for multiple toons for me. If I could pick them up at 70 where I had left them I would. As the service stands now it will be an option i'll pass on. I don't know they charge for these services anyways. They don't actually have to do anything except for rewrite some code. Give me a service that will change my female night elf hunter that will transfer her to a new realm as a male orc hunter with a new name and I would probably pay for it. As it stands though... Blizzard seems to be casting Rupture on all it's customers wallets to see how much more money they can bleed from us... as if they haven't gotten enough already. And please don't post Blizzard does this to prevent abuse... blah blah blah... That's a cop-out. They could easily make it an option for once every six months or once every year... Which would easily prevent abuse of the system. This isn't a "value added" either. It should be something that comes standard with my $15 a month subscription.
Shasmo Dec 11th 2008 12:55AM
'it's just some changing of the code'?
Yeah, and why do Microsoft charge for Windows? It's just a bunch of 1's and 0's thrown together! Why would Adobe MAKE people pay money for their products, since it's just some crappy code?!
You, sir, are a fool. They don't have to offer this service at all if they see fit not to. They are doing it as an additional SERVICE to their CUSTOMERS. If you don't think you would like it, then you are well within your rights to not do it.
You know what comes standard with you $15/month subscription? Being able to roll another class/race/gender while keeping your current one. Anything extra is just that, an EXTRA. You don't see Toyota throwing in body kits and bull bars and in-car 10-speaker surround sound stereo's and headset-dvd-players for nothing, do you? You PAY for the EXTRAs.
Nathral Dec 11th 2008 1:52AM
Agreed, the ability to change race would be huge here. I don't care so much about changing class and I can see their argument there. But race would let be bring back some long neglected toons on the other side.
Wither Dec 11th 2008 7:10AM
@Shasmo
Sorry I've been a professional programmer for over 10 years and your argument is simply ludicrous.
Some things are easier to change than others, an extension of this capability to race and faction would be absolutely trivial by comparison to the effort of creating new content.
Additionally profits are weighed in more than the flat subscription rate and incidental fees. You have to consider the volume of the people using those services to come up with an expectation of income. If services attract more customers (without raising the flat incident fee) then the additional revenue can exceed the development costs and individual customers do not have to pay any extra.
Bionic Radd Dec 11th 2008 8:08AM
Professional programmer, eh? Yet you assume that allowing race and faction changes would be trivial without seeing a single line of code or knowing the first thing about how Blizzard programmed those two aspects of your character into the game.
Your race and faction affect a huge portion of your experience in WoW. If I changed from Dwarf to Gnome, how does that affect my faction with the Gnomeregan Exiles? That is the hardest racial faction in the game to grind, even for gnomes. I am sure a lot of Dwarves would swap to Gnome to have easy access to the mechano-strider. If I swap from Horde to Alliance, how is my rep distributed? Do we say that Orgrimmar Rep becomes Stormwind Rep, now? What happens to all my race-specific mounts? How about Faction specific Achievements? Can I go kill all the Alliance Leaders on Horde and then switch to Alliance and have the cheevo claim I killed Thrall instead?
In all honesty, just from an outsider's view, race and faction are so big a part of the character code, I would wager allowing people to change it would cause problems like you couldn't even believe.
h8rain Dec 11th 2008 8:47AM
In Wither defense:
(Warning this is speculation, but I am very familiar with databases, with is (again speculation) the backbone of WoW. If you don't "get" then this is just going to confuse you, and you are going to flame me.).
Again this is my speculation on how the data is stored.
Your character is a main record that has many linked records. This record would contain a ID, so it can be tracked through name changes. This record would also contain fields for RaceID, HairID, FaceID, SkinColorID, and etc other features. Those fields are just numbers/IDs that are passed to the client (your computer), so it knows how to render it. The actual "picture" of your character is never transmitted (that would take too much bandwidth, which is why WoW can be played on a slower connection).
The spells (including racial (which I would assume it just "stored" a spell that is auto added when the toon is created) are stored in another table that link back to CharacterID. So if they were to allow you to change race (now I will admit the change from Alliance to Horde would be more complicated), there would just have to be code in place to remove the existing "racial spell" and add the new one. The rep would not need to be altered (at least I can't see why). Mounts would pose a problem if changing from a gnome/dwarf, but again code could handle that exception.
So, if you changed the RaceID, then the client would just render it with the different race. A Human pally is no different from a Dwarf pally other than the racial spell and appearance. From my perspective I would not see how that would be very difficult. But how easy something is *NOT* relative to how much you charge. Do you think the entire expansion pack, which is $40, was just a bit more harder to program than a character transfer, which is $30?