Are you kidding? This is something I have said I would PAY to do, (and quite a bit of money) simply because it seems that everyone I know suddenly went horde while I took the summer off last year. (the alliance population on my server sucks!) All of a sudden I found myself at a massive disadvantage with the new content and not being able to experience it. This was kind of fixed by creating a death knight, but I am still very attached to my hunter and warrior, both who are now on the wrong side of the server! As we are getting ready for ulduar and finding ourselves short on off tanks and ranged this really stings.

I think it would be pretty easy to switch just have each faction city have the rep transferable to a counterpart and go!

I really didn't say anything about whether or not I thought it would be a good idea (I think it would be a lot of fun) or how hard it would be (I try not to make judgments like that at all since I don't know the system), or whether or not people would want to have that option (of course people would). All I was saying was that given the race swapping issue I think it would be unlikely. I'm not sure which part of my comment your "are you kidding" was directed at.

Mentioning Death Knights though does remind me that this has been a fairly decent fix (assuming one is okay with playing a DK) for people who want to play on a different faction but don't want to level up from the beginning. I would guess that there will be at least one more hero class, and who knows, maybe eventually Blizzard will allow people to start new characters of any class at higher level.

'Are you kidding' is more something that I say, but if you had to point out the part where it was actually said at something specific, it would be the part where you said that it's not something you think of. This is something that's impacted my play, and I have thought about it often. Though it does make sense that it might not be on the minds of average players, their servers not as extreme in the difference between horde play and alliance play as mine is.

Luckily the DK is a good fit for me, but I like playing ranged DPS. I am also a fairly slow leveler, and hope for more hero classes, in part to see them and in part because I love the way that dk's were implemented. But as for other classes starting at higher levels, I am not as hopeful. Blizz seems to be working too hard on making leveling go quickly to just decide that no one has to do it anymore.

But if they do, I will definately be first to make a new alt!

Oh yeah, that makes sense! For whatever reason almost no one I know plays Horde, so it just hadn't occurred to me and I haven't seen it on the forums (at least, not in a blue post). I know that I dated a guy for a while who played Horde and it would have been nice to be able to have a high level character on his server rather than starting from scratch.

You're probably right about them increasing the leveling speed being another sign that they're not likely to allow people to skip levels. I have a set of the heirloom shoulders and they really help. The chest with stacking bonus will be pretty sweet too!

I would pay stupid amounts of money to be able to change faction. My then-boyfriend was the one who finally convinced me to try WoW (I'm an FFXI player that held out for several years, against cajoling from all my friends). I REALLY wanted to roll Horde, the only Ally races I like are Draenei and Nelves, pretty much all my favorite races are Horde. But my BF despised Horde so badly, he wouldn't even roll a Horde alt to play with me. So I was stuck playing Alliance. I got a spacegoat mage and then a Nelf hunter to 70, raided with his guild, etc then leveled to 80 when Wrath came out. Did Naxx and VoA, got geared. Maybe a month or so later, we had a bad breakup, and I left the server, and A-side, so I could finally play how I wanted. So now I've got almost a full slate of Horde toons.

The problem is, while my Hordies were starting from scratch, now I've got an 80 mage with T7 and epic flight with an ungodly /played time literally collecting dust because I have no interest in A-side. The hunter is at 70 in T5, languishing in the same dust. Not to mention the fact that I have a number of BoA items on those toons, including a Big Blizzard Bear I paid $40 to DirecTV for, and heirloom shoulders for a lowbie shammy. I would give anything if I could make 'em both trolls and transfer them to my current server.

Switching factions could have potential, but with the potential for abuse, it should not change your race. Nor should it allow your factions to automatically change. Think of it this way:

Supposedly you could betray everything you stood for and defect for the other side? Doubtless the ones you betrayed would hate you immediately (think the Wolvar/Oracle or Aldor/Scryer). However, i think also your new faction would be mistrusting of a "turncoat" and your faction rep would be very low (like unfriendly).

A quest chain would allow you to switch factions and build your new cities up to neutral (so you could do business).

That's the sort of faction switching I'd like to see. The RP potential would be fantastic and it would allow you to change sides if you needed to or wanted to, but it would not be something to take lightly