The deed is done. My weeks of waffling (no pancakes!) on the subject are finally at an end. You see, I made a painful decision on Monday. I was going to leave my friends, and go play the game with some other friends. A while back, Oh I don’t even remember when, August? I got an email from Drew. He was “getting the band back together”. I jumped at the chance. Spent my $25 and moved Maerdred over to Lightninghoof to play with two of my oldest and greatest friends in WoW. Probably the best thing I have taken from my time with this game; my friendship with Liz and Drew.

I moved to their server and Drew’s plan was to build a small, tight knit 10′s guild. Sadly, this didn’t really happen. The guild dwindled to 6 people, maybe 7. I’d log on for hours at a time and have nobody to talk to at all. Liz and Drew would log on and we’d chat while each did our own thing, and it was cool to be with my friends, but It was pretty lonely 90% of the time. I had moved to be with my friends, and to play the game with a great group of people. That group never materialized. I was alone, not having fun. So, I made my choice. I’d leave Drew and Liz yet again.

Feeling horrible about it the whole time, I talked to Liz and told her of my plans. She was very understanding and was completely right. We have IM, Email, Facebook, Twitter, Blogs. We’re not going to stop being friends. We’re not going to stop talking to each other. We’re just not going to party up and kill bad guys in WoW together anymore. Who knows, when the cross-realm communication they talked about at Blizzcon comes out, we’ll have our own chat channel anyway, I am sure.

With my decision made, My application accepted, I logged in to the account management and purchased another server transfer. This time for Maerdred. Kael’thas bound, Maer was ready for his guild invitation. I had applied and been invited with open arms on Monday with my new DK, Nightmaer, and also with my newly transformed Dwarf Paladin Fohrbin on Tuesday.

Maerdred was now ready to become a member of the Sidhe Devils; a guild which I had heard great things about from reading Bear’s blog, and talking to some current members in BlogAzeroth chat. Friendly, mature, active, casual. All things I hope to be. Log in once a month or all day every day. They don’t mind as long as you’re good people. There are always people around to chat with and that’s what the game’s about. Making new friends and being social. When Maerdred made the move, I got very excited. I even /squeed. Though that was more for Jess’ benefit than my own.

It’s a weird kind of feeling being happy when you just left your friends behind, but as Liz said, We’ll always have Facebook. I’ll miss playing with them, but I’m already sure I won’t regret my decision to move to the Sidhe Devils. The people have been very welcoming and I am sure that soon it will feel like a second home.

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Tuesday night, I decided to bite the big one and move my Blood Elf Paladin to the Alliance. It was in preparation for something I’ll be telling you about in a future post, possibly to be posted later today. Some of you already know what it is.

The first thing I did was log in and make sure I had all of the items I wanted to take with me to the other side. I cleaned out the mail, emptied the bags of useless stuff. Made sure I had some gold from my banker alt. That type of thing.

I then screenshotted everything I could think of which may change during the process so I had some point of reference. I took pictures of my bank and bags. I looked at Reputation and Honor. I looked at Talents and skills. I forgot to look at my quest log and my achievements, which was rather silly of me. I looked at pets, but not mounts. I checked my character pane and even the currency tab.

I then logged out, while in a neutral place (just in case) and went about my Faction change. Once I got the confirmation which took about 20 minutes, I logged back in chose my new race(Dorf) and made him look silly. I kept the same name, because some people said it sounded Dorfish. I then logged in, found myself in Ironforge, and got a new achievement. Hmm… I toured the Fjord! Cool. I wish I had checked the Horde Achievements first to compare them. Dummy. I know I had already gotten that one.

I then made my way to Stormwind, got on a boat, rode to Northrend, and then flew to Dalaran. Once there I got to the bank and took a string of screenshots to compare. The only glaring differences were what you’d expect. Horde Reputations moved over to Alliance ones in just the way explained on the Faction transfer FAQ. I lost all my quests and Quest items. Mounts changed from the Horde version to the Alliance version, just the way they’re explained in the FAQ. That was pretty much it. Everything that wasn’t faction specific didn’t change. I did notice once I got to Valiance Keep, there were a ton of quests available. I’m betting that they offer Faction specific rep or rewards, and the FAQ does mention that certain factions will be reset, along with all of the quests leading up to them.

If I notice anything else funky, I’ll be sure to add it in here. Keep an eye out on my twitter @maerdred, where I’ll post any updates to this post.

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