World of Warcraft Newbie Guide 2d: Customizing Your Look And Choosing Your Gender

In this section you will choose the gender of your character and create a look that appeals to you based on various highlights of the character, such as through hairstyle and skin tone.

Or   ?

Gender choice is largely up to you. While it is recommended during normal play to play a gender that matches yours, I'm not going to judge you if you choose a character of the opposite gender for a variety of reasons. One behavior, however, I am going to address, is pretending to be the opposite gender by playing on the assumptions of players, especially males pretending to be female. During normal play, living a lie (seriously) like this could prove disastrous and damage your reputation with the realm community. It is simply better to be honest. However, it is acceptable to roleplay as a character the opposite gender of yourself. This is because during serious roleplay players won't look beyond the characters themselves.

On the other side of things, because of the nature of the gaming community and numerous experiences of deception, I would recommend automatically assuming any given player is male regardless of their character's gender during normal play until proven otherwise. I am not trying to be sexist in any way, but rather trying to cut down on any more embarrassing or potentially dangerous situations (i.e. teenage boy tries to seduce player playing a female character but player turns out to be a "predator"). I am hoping that someday I won't have to give out this kind of advice, but such is the nature of online interaction.

Characteristics

For characteristics I am not going to give too much advice. There's always five different available features for each given race and gender. Thus, you can choose whatever appeals to you. Keep in mind some features are more permanent than others, as it is possible to change some characteristics like hair style and color at barber shops in-game (although it is possible to do a full re-customization if you're willing to pay some real life money). If all else fails and you don't know what sort of characteristics you want for your character, you can randomize it. You can now also check out each set of features individually at character selection (changed in 5.0.4).

To go to the next section to create your character name and final notes, click here. Click here to return to the main article.