Blizzard allows Battletag changes… for a price

For those of us who may not have liked the Battletag that we chose way back when we first started playing World of Warcraft — or simply want something new, there is good news. Blizzard is now offering Battletag name changes, but it won’t be free. The cost for a Battletag change is a $10 fee. 

Head to the Battlenet store to begin the Battletag changing process, if you so desire. The option to change your Battletag has been offered by Blizzard before as a one-time thing. Now, you have the option to change your tag as many times as you desire — provided you pay the fee first. However, the first Battletag change is completely free, according to the official post by Blizzard. Of course nothing else will be affected by the change of your Battletag. Your friends list and everything else associated with your account will remain the same.

This does raise an interesting point, however, in that Blizzard appears to charge for many things that most MMORPGs take for granted. For example, to swap characters in World of Warcraft from one server to another it costs $25 USD. Users also have to pay a fee to change a character’s race/class or faction. This can get prohibitively expensive over time, especially if a user has multiple characters they want to alter. 

On one hand, making such things as server change, race change or even faction change something that costs a fee to access can act as its own deterrent, preventing players from changing servers and characters around en masse. On the other, it makes it very difficult for those who want to say…move a character to a server their friends play on. They have to carefully choose which one to change servers for if they have multiple characters. 

In any case, users will definitely enjoy the option of being able to change their Battletag to something more desirable should they decide to do so. At least you get one change for free, which is nice. It remains to be seen what other features Blizzard may implement and set a price tag for. Let’s hope they are reasonably priced. $10 for a Battletag change isn’t bad, but its still a bit pricy all the same.