Alliance WoW Race Revealed?

Kotaku is reporting that, according to some early scans, the new World of Warcraft Alliance race will be the Draenei. From the Wikipedia entry: "The Draenei are one of the three primary races native to Draenor (the others being the Orcs and the Ogres). They once populated the planet heavily, but were slaughtered by the Orcs shortly after their corruption by the Warlock Gul'dan. A small number of Draenei survived, using a recessive cloaking ability. Severely mutated in the destruction of Draenor, they were thought to be extinct, but Illidan and his forces discovered and liberated one of the last surviving Draenei villages among the wastes of what is now known as Outland." Still not confirmed, take with a grain of salt.

Comments

Blizzard has responded

[blobdole]

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?fn=w ow-general&t=6437554&p=1&tmp=1#post6437554 "Since our official announcement at BlizzCon concerning the upcoming World of Warcraft expansion pack, we've seen a great deal of speculation regarding what race players believe might be available to the Alliance faction. This topic has revealed itself to be both highly debatable and exciting, and we're definitely pleased to see so much interest surrounding this particular future addition to the game. With that being said, we wanted to take this time to remind everyone that we have not provided any information or made any announcements concerning the new Alliance race to any Web sites, magazines, or other media sources. While we don't want to discourage you from continuing your discussions on this matter, we ask that you keep that bit of information in mind. When we're ready to announce the new race, we'll eagerly share as much information as we can with everyone on our community site."

Re:Bah just more random speculation

[dc29A]

I don't think that aesthetics are really that important. I think that part of it is the overall perception as Alliance="good guys" and Horde="bad guys" than anything else.
- My personal experiences tell me the complete opposite. Before quitting WoW, I was in a semi casual guild. We had a lot of couples. I'd say that 35% of our guild were women (about an 80 person guild). They played mostly the "cutest" troll female model and the "cutest" undead female model. We had maybe 4 exceptions: an orc female model and an ugly undead female model and two taurens. No "ugly" trolls, almost no orcs and almost no ugly undead or taurens. Not to mention, we had at least 4-5 couples, switch to alliance because the gf/wife didn't like the Horde models. The EQ guild I was in before, most female players played human, high elf or woodelf models. Very few females played trolls, ogres. Even barbarians and dark elves (who looked decent) weren't that popular.

Problem with this theory: Starting Area

[VGPowerlord]

There's one problem that sticks out with the theory of Draenei as the new Alliance race: Where will the Draanei's starting area be? Beyond the Dark Portal? I don't think so! Blizzard said some time ago that opening the Dark Portal will be a World Event. This means that no one on a specific server can go through it until the World Event is completed on that server.

Another World Event that will be appearing in WoW soon is The Gates of Ahn'Qiraj.

I'm sure there are other reasons that the Draenai wouldn't make sense as the new race, too.