But I have friends on PvP servers that are dreading this. As others mentioned, on the lopsided servers, there is likley to be a significant switching of sides, simply to avoid the over-prevalent ganking, and the near impossibility of raiding:

http://bang-n-blame.blogspot.com/2009/06/changes-and-why-im-not-so-keen-on-some.html

Its’ a great announcement anyway. I have five toons I’d love to switch over to Horde

The part of me that hates this is those that are sick of the ratio variance. They get on a server, invest in a toon, become attached to that toon, but are then upset if they are constantly outnumbered by the opposite faction. So they may find this a way to take care of that. However it will just add to the problem. These people are probably the minority. And honestly this change will more than likely not affect me what so ever. Except of course for the above.

Bring on the change!
Kirei – Gamer of Sorts´s last blog ..Video Games and The Female Audience

Personally, I am curious to what degree things will swap. Will my faction with SIlvermoon City become faction with the Exodar, or will I lose everything? Will I be able to take all my Horde mounts and mini-pets with me? Will I lose anything like my mount that has racial restrictions, or will it be replaced with an equivalent alliance mount? It would not surprise me if part of the terms of this is that you lose faction specific factions/items – with no equivalents being provided on the other faction, simply to ensure this is not abused.

I assume that the real life monetary cost of this will be high (it wouldn’t surprise me to see it upwards of $50-100 as there IS a large market that would pay those prices), and that the cooldown will be very long.

It interests me to see what this does to end game raiding, as you will now effectively have double the applicant pool as before.

I assume you be allowed to pick your race, as there is no even match up for which races can be which classes (ie: Gnomes are the only race in the game that can’t heal). This may open it up for Blizz to remove the racial restrictions to classes, but that’s a HUGE can of worms that I am not certain they want to be opening. The casting/gear animations already exist – but after 4 years of Gnomes being restricted to being creatures of destruction, will Blizz ignore the lore and allow them to be Paladins? Unlikely.

A truly intriguing possibility would be if your character didn’t actually change race – but instead followed a quest line to defect. That would certainly make BGs a mess “But…. that Paladin that killed me was a human, just like me!”

Regardless, this change can’t come soon enough.

On another note…this makes me start to wonder when this will be available. I love my night elf druid, but I just started up a tauren druid on another server, both for my amusement as I’ve never had the opportunity to level through horde areas, and because my GM can be extremely trying and being able to play somewhere he can’t see or talk to me can be worth my sanity sometimes. But is it even worth leveling the new cow now, that I could just switch my night elf faction when this comes out and swap servers?

I really hope this includes intra-faction race changes. I rolled an Undead shadow priest because at that time Devouring Plague was Undead only, however that (and fear ward) is now class wide, and I’ve been considering re-rolling BE because of the awesome racial.