Blizzard Explains World of Warcraft's Paid Character Customization

With Blizzard having confirmed that some sort of "paid character customization" will eventually be offered to it 11+ million World of Warcraft subscribers, the famed developer has offered a few new details on the controversial feature.

"When you create your character, often times you wish you'd done things differently. You wish you were on a different realm, you wish you'd had a different name or you wish you'd chosen a different look and feel," Blizzard's Paul Sams told Eurogamer.

"We want to give you the ability to do this, but we don't want you to do it all the time," added Blizzard's Lee Sparks. "The same thing goes for [the existing] paid character transfer, we don't want people bouncing back and forth."

Paid character customization will be more about modifying previous character design decisions instead of adding more customization options to the MMO, Sparks noted.

No specifics were offered, but Eurogamer suggests the paid customization could apply more to fundamental changes--facial features, skin color--over superficial things like haircuts, which were recently introduced to the game.

Sams noted his belief that paid character customization will be "a good value for customers," explaining that "it's not like we're going to go about pricing it in such a way that it's unfair or inappropriate."