Just a fortnight left to the introduction of the new expansion, and wanna bet a major feature of it will be advanced races?
It's never been done before, and people have been for a long as I remember, wanting to play the likes of High Elves, Dark Iron dwarves, Mag'har orcs etc etc - The thing is these aren't full new races, they're all based off playable raes. They're highly desired, and it just so happens blizzard has been working on new models for all the existing races.
Wanna bet they'd capitalize on their investment and introduce each races model with 1 or even 2 of the races racial factions? I know people talk about groups like high elves and others becoming playable races, but the truth is high elves, dark iron dwarves, mag'har orcs are not full races, they are factions of existing races. High elves are an alliance faction of the same race as the blood elves. Mag'har orcs are a racial faction of the Orc race, and Wildhammers a racial faction of the dwarf race.
So why do what they've done in the past, making 2 full new races with time consuming fresh models and months of animation and taking months to design new zones for them, when you can easily just use the work you're doing on the new models for the 10 races, and just add superficial alternative customizations like brown skin tones instead of green, blue eyes instead of green to make an advanced race. And since it's not a full new race, and they can start in their races start zone or get a phased version, you can do a hell lot more than just 2 new races, you could do 2 racial factions per Race
New Expansion feature: Play with up 20 new Advanced Races - including High elves, Human Forsaken, Mag'har Orcs, Forest Trolls, Dark Iron dwraves, Half-mecha gnomes and many more. Blizzard Entertainment's Turn of Tides Expansion coming 2014
= $$$$$ in the money from race changes and returned subscribers
and Advanced races >> New racial skins for a selling point
OPTION 1:
Introduce them as Advanced race that start at a high level. You don't meet the Mag'har storyline till Nagrand level 62, so, You can start a Mag'har toon from level 62. High elves don't play a major role in the storyline till Dalaran at level 75, so youc an play them from level 75... Dark Irons are met at level 8 now, so you can start them from that level. Some of the new ones like human forsaken and half-mech gnomes you can start with from level 1.
OPTION 2.
Introduce them as Racial factions at level 1. Races now become a Race Group instead that has 2 or 3 Racial factions. The Orc Race Group will start off with these racial factions: Normal Orc, Mag'har Orc and Dragonmaw Orc as the 3 options in character creation you can choose from essentially boiling down to the Orc model with green skin tones for normal orc, brown skin tones and a special "tribal features" customizaton for Mag'har orc, and grey/black tones for Dragonmaw. Every racial faction will have slightly different class selections, and may have different racials. They start at level 1 either in the main factions start zone, or some can have a phased level 1-6 of their homeland, example Mag'har could start in Nagrand level 1-6.
obviously high elf is a faction of the same race as the blood elves but on the alliance, they would be selectable either as a human racial faction or a night elf one, human forsaken would be a faction of both human and forsaken, but being horde it's obvious they'd be under as a forsaken racial faction.