World Of Warcraft Sex Change - Only $15
By Mike Fahey, Thu Dec 11 2008
The day World of Warcraft fans have been dreaming about is finally here. Now players are able to pay a $15 fee to change their character's face, hair, skin color, and most importantly, sex.
The new service is accessed through your World of Warcraft account on the WoW webpage, just like the rest of Blizzard's handy pay services. Simply select your server, your character, and pay $15, and the next time you log in you should have a button on the character select screen that allows you to modify your character's attributes. The only two items that remain set in stone are your race and class, so your rotting corpse will still be a rotting corpse.
I stress the sex change portion of the process, but only because it is the most significant change made available through the paid character re-customization service. Accessories and hairstyles are changeable via the in-game barber shops, and paid name changes have been around for quite awhile. The main difference between changing your name via the name change service versus the re-customization service is your old name is locked for 90 days following re-customization.
So it all comes down to gender bending. I suppose there are all sorts of reasons to change your sex. Perhaps talking in your deep, manly voice on Ventrilo didn't quite seem right with your dainty female Blood Elf. Perhaps you just want something new to look at. Or maybe you underwent a real-life sex change and need your character to reflect said change. I'm not going to judge you.
Well, I am not going to write about judging you.
I meant to have a nifty before-and-after shot of my priest Medizin to accompany this post, but as of right now it seems the service isn't working as intended. The site promises an option to re-customize upon your next login, but as of this writing it's been an hour and a half since my transaction went through and still nothing. It seems I am not alone, as one lengthy forum post already has 24 pages of replies, including this one from Blizzard poster Reythur:
Hey folks,
We've tested the service using various methods, and they've all gone through appropriately. It's possible that as the service was announced a bit later than the majority of you actually utilized it, the service was still in it's setup phase.
As a result, some of you may have gotten stuck with a paid customization and no option to re-customize your character. We have determined that this is very likely to be resolvable, however, the matter will likely need to be addressed via our Billing department. If we verify another method of addressing this issue, we will provide the information accordingly.
Please contact them at your earliest convenience and they will do what they can to assist you. We will be keeping an eye on this issue and will make sure that there are no outstanding occurrences of this matter. We will continue to do what we can to resolve any issues that do arise.
We understand that our Billing department is currently closed, however, and as a result it you will be unable to alleviate this issue until tomorrow morning at the earliest. As all of you are able to login to your characters, please feel free to play as you wish; you have our apologies that you will likely be unable to utilize this service on characters that are currently 'pending'.
World of Warcraft Sex Change Broken
New service launches a bit wrong, 11 Dec 2008
Finally, Blizzard has launched a new service to let confused gamers change the sex of their World of Warcraft characters. Along with your name, face, skin colour and other cosmetic features (such as "tauren horn styles or a night elf's facial markings"), that is. All for just $15 (£10) plus tax! Unfortunately, it would seem the service is broken.
Many users have reported their payment having been accepted for the service, but no customisation options having been made available to them. Blizzard has posted a handful of steps that might help those affected get past the problem, but if that fails users are advised to contact the billing department. Which opens in four hours...
So, you pay a tenner for a service that could be made available for free with just a minor patch, then Blizzard swallows your money. Brilliant! But once that's all sorted, you can change your character as much as you want, right? Wrong. You'll have to pay all over again. It's the same deal if you want to revert back to your original name and appearance.
But you get new options that weren't available at the character creation stage, right? Nope. You get exactly what's offered to new users.
Sources: http://kotaku.com/5107143/world-of-warcraft-sex-change-+-only-15-slightly-brokenhttp://news.spong.com/article/16736/World_of_Warcraft_Sex_Change_Broken
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"If we ever get a dog and cat, they should be named "Come-on" and "Goddammit", so that when you yell "Come on, Goddammit!" you'll be surrounded by their love." -Locklear (paraphrased)
"You navigate like a blind chick." -Locklear
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