An Idea on Gender Swaps

[bardbrain]

Not posting this in exploits because it's unconfirmed. But I noticed something last night...

I got the Engineering Transporter debuff that turned my Ally human into Horde for an hour. Some of the Horde forms he took were female.

I popped an Orb of Deception when I was a female blood elf and became a female orc.

Now... I was thinking... The Orb naturally does not reset gender when it goes away based on my limited understanding of the game mechanics.

SO...

- If I have a male human who becomes a female blood elf, I wait until the the transporter malfunction debuff has two minutes left.

- I pop the orb of deception (which lasts five minutes). I'm guessing my gender remains female for the full five minutes based on previous exploits I've seen, which keeps me female after the engineering debuff goes away.

- Now, when the Orb buff expires, I'm guessing I'm still female, at least until I logout or zone.

Assuming all this is true, this makes me ponder how variables like gender are stored in the game files. My guess is that it's a variable that's backed up... and that when I do something weird that changes my gender, that's essentially a change that only exists "in RAM" on the server, so to speak.

HOWEVER, they do backups shortly before server maintenance. I've even had situations where a daily quest completed but the honor was missing... or where my position was reset but my gold total was intact.

I'm thinking that if I got my human male to be female for several hours before maintenance and stayed logged in until the server shutdown, the backups would all have my character as female. Which would mean that when the server comes back up, permanent gender change.

It will be a week before I can test this out since I realized this all a bit too late last night. But if it works, there are possibly some other implications to it, perhaps involving some combination of the Engineering Debuff and the Old Hillsbrad Buff.

(Ie. Dwarves don't normally change in Old Hillsbrad. But a Dwarf who becomes an Undead through Engineering MIGHT. If THIS happens then if the server goes down with the human disguise on the dwarf, the backups may be confused about the Dwarf's actual race or at the least may jumble a few of his facial/skin options since different races have different settings for these.)

All speculation but I'm just putting it out there for everyone to try and test the next time their server has maintenance.

[Trauts]

Cool idea. It might just be crazy enough to work! :P