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Why ESO Won't Have Class Change Tokens Any Time Soon

By Andrew | 2 Feb 2023 | Share
Why ESO Won't Have Class Change Tokens Any Time Soon

Since the announcement of the Arcanist class, coming in June with the ESO Necrom Chapter, there's been a very noticeable uptick in the amount of players talking about Class Change Tokens on the Official ESO Forums. 

While ESO's Crown Store offers Alliance Change Tokens, Race Change Tokens, Name Change Tokens and Appearance Change Tokens, there is currently no option for players to change their class, short of making a new character and leveling it up from scratch. 

With the ever-increasing talk about the topic from some players, ZOS have finally made a statement on the matter, and it's not the answer that many wanted. 

ESO Arcanist Class
ESO Arcanist Class

What is Zenimax's Position on Class Change Tokens?

In response to player queries about Class Change Tokens on the ESO Forums, Gina Bruno replied that ZOS "do not have any plans on implementing class changes tokens at this time. There are a number of technical challenges with implementing them, and it would take a significant amount of time to solve these challenges efficiently and safely."

This pretty much rules out the idea of ESO getting Class Change Tokens before the release of the Arcanist Class, and probably for a long time after that as well, if we ever get them at all. 

Furthermore, I think there are more issues with the idea of Class Change Tokens than what ZOS has admitted in their somewhat vague statement on the matter, issues that they'll be well aware of but probably don't want to talk about as it's not very compatible with PR-Speak. 

Why ESO Won't be Getting Class Change Tokens

For starters, I think its pretty safe to assume that the "technical challenges" mentioned by Gina are something that Zenimax could overcome without too much difficulty if they really wanted to. At the end of the day, ESO's internal database is theirs and they can make whatever changes to it that they want to. Class Change Tokens are definitely something they could develop if they thought it was a good idea. It would almost definitely make plenty of profit.

I think the real reason that ZOS doesn't really want to talk about are what the other implications of such a system would be - most notably that it could quite easily spiral into a major PR problem. 

ESO offers other tokens, such as Alliance Change Tokens
ESO offers other tokens, such as Alliance Change Tokens

I've been playing ESO since 2015, and for all of this time I've seen the same cycle play out over and over again, at least once a year and usually more often than that. A class gets buffed either directly or indirectly in a patch, and many players switch to that class as a result for raids, dungeons and PvP. 

Then a few months later, after a lot of players complained about the dominance of said class, let's just say its Sorcerer for arguments' sake, the developers eventually hit this class with a series of nerfs, and then players will migrate to a different class. 

Now, if it was possible to pay to immediately complete this process, I'm sure that a lot of players would fork out for a Class Change Token to do it right away and save a lot of time and effort, but there are two big problems here. 

Firstly, leveling up an alt class with all of the various skill lines, mount training and guild ranks is a time consuming process, and being able to pay to completely shortcut that entire process would generate considerable animosity from the players who are more averse to anything they consider to be "pay to win". You could argue that such shortcuts already exist in the form of Race Change Tokens, however the gameplay difference and potential advantage gained in any given patch would be far greater with a Class Change Token.

Secondly, if Zenimax added these tokens to the game, they'd be inviting an absolute storm of conspiracy theories onto themselves on the Forums and in other community circles. There would inevitably be players who accuse them of nerfing classes just to force people to purchase a token to be able to remain as powerful as they were before a given set of balance changes.

ESO Warden Class
ESO Warden Class

This is a PR Nightmare waiting to happen, and for this reason I cannot see Zenimax adding Class Change Tokens until much closer to the end of ESO's lifetime, either at a point where ZOS is happy with the balance of all of their classes (if we ever reach such a point) or no new major content is planned and the developers want to put the game on "life support mode" and effectively cash out while working on other projects. 

We hope you enjoyed this article about Class Change Tokens in ESO. The Elder Scrolls Online is a massively multiplayer online game (MMO) developed by Zenimax Online Studios.

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