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Blizzard To Sell Level 90 WoW Characters For $60
An anonymous reader writes "After their online store accidentally spilled the beans last week, Blizzard has now confirmed plans to let players pay $60 to boost one of their World of Warcraft characters to level 90, the current cap. At Blizzcon a few months ago, the company unveiled the game's next expansion, Warlords of Draenor, currently in development. When it comes out, they're giving every player a free boost to 90 in order to get to the new content immediately. They say this was the impetus for making it a purchasable option. 'It's tremendously awkward to tell someone that you should buy two copies of the expansion just to get a second 90. That's odd. So we knew at that point we were going to have to offer it as a separate service.' Why $60? They don't want to 'devalue the accomplishment of leveling.' Lead encounter designer Ion Hazzikostas said, '[L]eveling is something that takes dozens if not over 100 hours in many cases and people have put serious time and effort into that, and we don't want to diminish that.'"
On one hand, I can appreciate that people who just want to get to endgame content may find it more efficient to spend a few bucks than to put a hundred hours into leveling a new character. On the other hand, I can't help but laugh at the idea that Blizzard will probably get a ton of people paying them to not play their game.
Pay an additional $50 for the new Starcraft III game and you can tell your friends you have completed the game without even playing it once.
Once upon a time WoW was worthy of the gaming geek... now it's watered down drivel complete with kung-fu pandas... who even plays this any more?
[L]eveling is something that takes dozens if not over 100 hours in many cases and people have put serious time and effort into that, and we don't want to diminish that.
I don't know anybody who values 100s of hours of their time at $60. They might not want to diminish that effort, but they have a poor way of showing it. If I played WoW, I'd be insulted.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
When it comes out, they're giving every player a free boost to 90 in order to get to the new content immediately. (...) They don't want to 'devalue the accomplishment of leveling.'
So... buy WoW, create lvl 1 character, buy expansion, instant level 90? Sounds to me like you don't have to accomplish much...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I'm sure this will be corrected by someone else if it isn't true, but a friend of mine who used to be very heavily into WoW has told me that the game only really starts once you're levelled up: before that you're grinding away at the boring tasks because you're incapable of surviving the end-game stuff, and it's only once you hit that cap that you can actually enjoy a lot of the end-game content.
As TFA said, the boost is to let people "get to the new content immediately", not bypass it. Levelling is not, from what I'm told, the main content of the game.
I played World of Warcraft on and off for a few years. I was a pretty hardcore player from the launch of Burning Crusade through to near the end of Lich King and came back casual for a while for late Cataclysm and early Pandaria. I know the game pretty well and have friends who still play it.
So I can say with confidence that you would be absolutely mad to pay for a boost up to level 90 with prices like that (and if you are a new player, mad to pay at all).
There are two types of people now who might be starting out at level 1; new (or returning-after-a-gap-of-years) players starting their first characters, or veterans levelling an "alt" (a secondary - or indeed tertiary or beyond - character).
If you are a new player, then going through the level-up process is important and you should not skip it. First of all, this is where you learn how to play your character. Most end-game content involves group-play and if you have a brand new player at the level cap staring at a hotbar full of unfamiliar abilities, it will be a long time before you are actually competent enough to play alongside others. The level-up process, during which you are introduced to abilities one or two at a time, takes you at least part of the way along that learning curve for your character. It also exposes you to a lot of the game's lore, if that's your bag (I always found WoW's lore a bit boring and juvenile, but some people like it).
And if you're a veteran player, then there are lots and lots of things you can do to accelerate the level-up process for an alt without handing over real-money. I levelled up three alts while never taking them out of "rested" state (meaning they were getting double xp from kills). Heirlooms allow you to boost the rate of xp gain even faster, to the point where 1-80, by the launch of Pandaria, was just stupidly fast. I doubt even a brand new character takes over 100 hours of game time (or indeed, anything like it). Alts certainly take much less.
So yeah, I can't imagine Blizzard would have too many takers for this. Or at least, I hope they won't.
Everyone wanting to emulate WoW's success has absolutely destroyed PC gaming. Watered down content and gameplay that is engineered to be inordinately time consuming? No thanks.
I understand that levels gives the player a sense of progress, but I see no point in them game mechanics wise, other than a "mandotory" system.
I've always hated leveling up in games. After the first character it's just mindless running around after quests... If my friend plays more or less than me, we're going to end up in different levels and eventually can't play together as the level of content doesn't allow it (and no one really wants to grind low level areas even with friends!)
I'm sure someone out there could develop a levelles system... Like individual skills could get better over time (with a realtime diminishing system that would lower your skills if you don't use them?) and make the gear make your character more powerfull (everyone loves a good loot!)
So that someone who has played for an hour, could have a (tiny) chance on beating someone who has played 100 hours (in a fair PVP fight)... Try to do that in WoW, lv 10 vs. 90 ... you won't even hit, and if you do, you do 1 out of 2000000 damage.
Gonna wait for a 600 dollar one and carry it with me and my iphone.
It's tremendously awkward to tell someone that you should buy two copies of the expansion just to get a second 90.
A bit of searching shows that in the past WoW expansions were introduced at $40, so why wouldn't a player opt to buy the expansion twice rather than buying the level upgrade for a second character?
Note that the pricing for this expansion hasn't been published yet, but I doubt they're going to price it at $60, since people expect a full game for that price.
After four expansion packs why not? The game really does begin at the level cap, especially when each expansion pack only give you 10 (or more recently, 5) levels.
Also note that your 'instant ezmode level 90' still has 10 levels to go to reach the new level cap of 100, which will be available at the same time as the 'pay to level' feature.
Unfortunately this means that Blizzard will benefit from making the leveling content as boring as possible. I always considered that the fun part of the game, the rest is just a repetitive cycle of running the same dungeons over and over.
Turbine destroyed MMOs and many other games when their DDO shitbox went F2P and then they switched their flagship LOTRO to it. Every greedy fuck wit the world over saw their success. Now almost everything is F2P which means intensely inflated grind with cash shop options to cut it back that amount to pay 2 win such as Rift. Such that even new games outside this traditional genre do this shit like WoTs and War Thunder.
I played both LOTRO and Rift before and after F2P it's like Detroit before and after the auto industry imploded. The new standard business model is to come out with a $60 - 120+ box and a traditional sub, wait 3 or 6 mos until you've milked all the early adopters and pre-orders and then switch to F2P with a cash shop. Couple this with shit like Star Citizen who get millions up front without even having a product by naive hopeful adult gamers hoping for something that isn't complete shit to come out and you have the mossy bleak cesspool of multiplayer PC gaming.
There are still rough diamonds out there but htey're not for everyone. I'm writing this while sitting with 2 accounts in Dark Fall Unholy Wars.
'Why $60? They don't want to 'devalue the accomplishment of leveling.'
Could also be regarded by many of us as...
"Why $60? $60 for every new character pushed to 90 (which will take probably less than 1/2/3s CPU time from WoW Servers) is sweet."
Every day I am more amazed of the new ways to take money from people for things that are virtually worthless. Like calling a script to change level to 90, change attributes and award skill points / gold / whatever.
BTW: I dont think most people nowadays really enjoy grinding and leveling on a 8 year old MMO. I played WoW 4 or 5 years ago, and it already felt like wasting time just to get to Level 80, where all the current end-game content was happening. As for the items and stuff you get on the way... the gold you get will be a little amount compared to Max level and the equipment will be useless after you get a couple of levels more.
Blizzard has always held that WoW is a social game. To play with your friends. They offered this as a way to get close to your friends to play with them, rather than taking a whole bunch of time to catch up. In the next xpac, the max level is 100. The boost brings you up to the beginning level of the xpac. Everyone gets a free one with the xpac, and then after that, you can buy it. Originally, this was not going to be offered, but Blizzard listened to its players and offered it. Why is listening to your audience bad?
Paying to skip the whole boring leveling process is going to be a wet dream for a lot of impatient wannabes. But from my experience with MMOs based on leveling skills, you pretty much need to go through the leveling process to get to know the class, limitations, effective playstyles, rotations, and so on. Starting at max level is going to mean that you know nothing about the character class, so you will be a waste of a group/raid slot.
Cue lfg messages where the caller asks for members who have not bought their max level character...
Can I get lvl 70 Elf instead?
This is more than cheap, completely worth it IMO.
I'm self employed, I run my own business (and it takes a LOT of my time) - but I still like to relax - which sometimes involves gaming, needless to say though I can't dedicate hours a day to a game, so I'm quite casual.
A fair amount of my time is contracting my services to other people, at around 180 AUD/hr depending on the client.
In my uni days, it took me about 9 months to get to level 60. But this was before any expansion - I know it's almost an order of magnitude less now, so less say you can get to 90 in 20 hours (which is 4.5 levels/hr - which is unheard of, but lets be liducrously generous, to prove just how great value this is).
20 hours of my time is worth 3600 AUD!!! $3600 of my time, just to 'get' to the end game where all the fun content is (this is an MMO, to do anything fun you need other people - and they're almost all max level, doing end game content).
Lets step back, and assume I'm flipping burgers even (to see how well this applies to any pay scale) earning $10/hr (below minimum wage here, but I'm assuming USA is something like this) - 20 hours is $200 (still over 3x cheaper to buy the levels, than to do it yourself - ignoring the fact flipping burgers would suck compared to playing WoW).
Back to an earlier point, 4.5 levels an hour is all but impossible in WoW (there were/are some exploits w/ potions and power leveling, but lets ignore that or assume it's fixed) - it's probably oging to end up being closer to 1 level per hour if you REALLY know what you're doing and don't take any breaks from grinding. (Making the 3x cheaper for burger flippers, closer to 13x cheaper in reality - if you believe my 1 level an hour remark)
Calling this something for the impatient, or for people who don't want to accomplish anything is retarded. This is worth it to anyone who values their time and can afford it, and understands modern WoW is about end game content (much like it always has been, honestly) - unless you're a solo player, in which case you may as well play any other RPG out there which is far far far more rewarding.
All comments hidden O.o Look everybody, Blizzard is selling level 90 WoW characters... See? Nobody cares...
Dear WoW players. Do you remember when the DKs came to be? And how everyone was moaning how, by definition, everyone who had no idea what to do seemed to play a DK?
The reason was simply that DKs started out at level 55. These people did not, like everyone else, start out small with a handful of skills, then get a few new ones every couple levels, with plenty of time to get to know them and get comfortable with them. No, they got everything dumped on their head at once with almost no time to find out what to do and how to play because, well, how would they?
Remember those raids in BRD (for the non-players, that's the first place where those DKs would get to play with the other kids in earnest) were a bit like, as a well known person put it, "a toddler driving a Leopard II tank with a faulty differential lock into a bicycle race of bi-polars"? They had no, zero, zilch, idea how to play their character.
And now, kids, it's like that all over again. Only much, much WORSE. Remember those moans you breathed whenever someone acted like he had no idea what to do, the comment "fuck, did you buy your char on EBay?" in chat? What used to be mostly unlikely will now be very likely: Someone dropped some coin to get a char they have no idea how to play with.
The group finder just got much, much more fun. To watch. Certainly not to play.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I think we are just seeing the prolonged lifecycle of a MMORPG. Most either fizzle and die, or last long enough that they have to start going through these hoops. I think WoW is just one of the biggest/longest so we are seeing some of these ideas for a first time or at least publicized in a grand fashion. Every iteration has made the game easier and easier for players, pushed the upper levels, and introduced things that make players who played the first iteration sound like grandpa (we used to have to grind for days for a single level, up hill, both ways). This is just another step where content is being added, so how can you get the most out of it (business need)? You let players just jump right to it! It bugs me, but as someone working full time with a family, I can see how players may appreciate it.
I will shred my adversaries. Pull their eyes out just enough to turn them towards their mewing, mutilated faces. Illyria
Anyone using group finder would tell you that this is already the current situation. Since your time, raids akin to LK BRD have been nerfed to the point where the gameplay resembles Dance Dance Revolution. Where thinking of others is punished. Where strictly adhering to a constantly changing theorycraft published for you by some grognards in Kansas is the only way to play up to snuff. Where teamwork is so unnecessary that it is nearly impossible to Leroy a group (even the healer has to be incredibly off his game to create a wipe.) Where deviating in any way from a prescribed sequence of buttonpresses with slightly random variation will send you to the bottom of the Recount list for DPS.
In sum, there's an idiot in every group anyway, and it doesn't matter because you have to play like a robot anyway.
P.S.: actual robot play is banned, meaning you MUST screw up regularly.
So, we pay extra... to play less? Brilliant!
Account abandoned. I can't fucking spell for shit and Slashdot doesn't even allow time-limited edits of posts. Plus you'
I played in 2005, and WoW was A M A Z I N G. I quit after about six months at level 40ish because I was playing so much I was getting depressed (not enough social life/sunshine/etc)
I played in 2011, and WoW was disappointing. I quit after a few months, having become level 60 without much effort. It wasn't much fun.
I played in 2013, and WoW was no longer a game. I quit after a week. There was actually no skill involved *at all*. As a priest, I seemed to have infinite mana. WoW is a game-shaped object, not a game. Games require skill.
These days, I play on Rebirth, a vanilla (pre-TBC) private server. WoW as it was.
This won't kick in until the expansion comes out, so it won't be to max level. You'll still need to level it through the expansion. So there will be some learning involved still.
Hopefully the expansion leveling takes a bit of time. I was up to 90 after just two zones in MoP and skipped most of the rest of the zones.
My question is, can a new account do this right away or do you need to get at least one character to 90 the hard way first?
Right. So two hours of my time pays for 100 hours of leveling?
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
I think they should give it as an option only to players who have reached at least 70 or something. That way you get through almost all of the "learn your character stuff" before jumping into LFR under-geared and retarded.
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
If you don't have lots of free time why would you play an MMORPG?
My wife and I. We enjoyed it. We knew we were addicted. It was okay. At some point we lost interest. We've tried to go back with the last two expansions but both times we both lose interest so fast. We will not be going back this time. If we were to make the mistake of playing another MMORPG together it will be something else.
Blizz has completely destroyed what was once a pretty great game.
The only thing blizz did right in the last two expansions were the stories in the quests. Everything else was a disaster.
Now, if someone could just take the stories and add them into a game that felt like the first three expansions... wow would die out.
The problem with the VAST level-spread is that, even with millions of players, low levels in WoW are a lonely wasteland most of the time for new players.
While I tend to solo-play in MMOs fairly often, I occasionally get a hankering for some group-based ass-kickery. So, if I wanted to play with my friends, I could either invest however many hours essentially soloing a character to catch up, or I could drop $60 and have rough equivalency. They'll still probably outclass me as they have a better handle on their powers having leveled up and gotten used to them, as well as better classes of gear. But, at least I'd be in the ballpark.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
There has to be a level playing field. Payouts for advancement are a slippery slope. Battlefield 4 has premium double XP days as well as all the additional perks and upgrades they get. Nothing turns away fans more then seeing some guy twinked with "free market" loot.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Posting anon so avoid undoing mods.
There was a restriction on DKs whereby you had to already have a lvl 55 or above character. So you wouldn't get brand new players picking them unfamiliar with how the game played.
So as long as the same restriction applies to getting a lvl 90 character...
And what good did it do? Seriously, tell me, what good did it do? Having a different class at max tells you jack about the new class you just picked up.
I predict a LOT of dds-gone-tank (since, hey, tanks get front row seats in GF, I'll be a tank now!) who think aggro management is the idiot boss they have to deal with at work.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
But ... but ... why should I buy the level 90, then? I wanna raid, I wanna have epics, I wanna be imba, I FUCKIN WANNA! I'm entitled to be in your group because I paid 60 bucks for it! Now go, peons, and drag my sorry carcass through the raid and by definition I get to get every item because I NEED it!
Just watch out for new YouTube videos that will create heaps of amusement. For the people watching, at least.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
That's not always true. In my case, I used my scroll of resurrection to roll a prot warrior (used to main mage). I really hunkered down and tried to learn as much as possible about how to do prot warriors right early on, and I've continued reading the forums about them even now. It's been about four or five months and I seem to be doing fine, I've had the healers say I'm easy to heal and such. Contrast that with the other tank in our guild who has played DK since Wrath and was quite literally (as in, I checked on world of logs) taking twice the amount of damage as me in every single fight. I figured some of that was probably just how DKs are, but his gear's better as well, and the healers were saying he was REALLY hard to heal (he /gquit recently, not a big loss, really). So while what you say is probably often true, it's not ALWAYS true, and there are still individual differences to account for.
/. profile? I can't find that anymore...
Also, what happened to linking your armory page in your
"You've found a broken 'I.W.I.N. Button'. If only it worked. Wait, this one isn't broken!""
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Blizzard has completely hosed the game. I started out when there was less than 500K players, it was a tough, buggy game.. but way fun. You had to really WORK to level and get the gear to do the raids. You had to be in a guild, socialize and actually learn to play with others and learn how to do the raids. Everyone had a part to play. The whining baby trolls that didn't do the time and LEARN how to play their character and play well with others were left out in the cold. Yeah, I remember falling off the boats, the 10 man and 40 man raids. The PITA grinding for a few days just to get one item or skill. This was a fairly good system, not perfect by any means, and hard as hell sometimes but compared with what it is like now, it was excellent.
I quit several years ago just after the Death Knight Fiasco, went back after a year or so, quit again, went back after Panderia was relaesed then quit never to return. It is so awful now, PVE and Raids are a joke and they are force feeding PVP (which I really dislike) to everyone, even on the RP servers. The prices for everything had skyrocketed and the economy is completely broken with all the gold sellers.
With the Battle.net account being required for a WoW account, buying the expansion once will update the "status" of your account to include the expansion. AFAIK, you can't apply multiple copies of the same expansion to a single account. So no, you wouldn't be able to do a "3 for the price of 2" deal via expansions, at least to a single account.
They're doing a great job of maximizing revenue from a declining game. Instead of just coming out and offering everything on the store, they just offered pets and mounts at first. The implication was in game purchases would be limited to "Cosmetic items", and of course those willing to buy just cosmetic items did, since there were no functional items competing for their money.
Now they've crossed the Rubicon and will allow you to buy levels, as long as you buy the expansion. It's a good way to increase profits when you have a declining playerbase.
Blizzard tried to appease multiple groups of people at once and reward, as they saw, appropriately for what was being done. There's effectively three levels of raids, Looking For Raid, the standard 10/25 man, and the variable raid.
Looking for Retards is exactly as you describe it, a bunch of morons with no real idea how to play get togethor and form something loosely resembling a herd of turtles running across a back patio, with a couple bosses thrown in. The "team" doesn't have tight communication and many don't know one another, so the requirement for cohesion is much less, the enemies are dumber and have the appropriate amount of health. You also get the crappiest gear.
The variable raid (or whatever it's called) is scaled somewhere in between and is designed for those groups that don't have the full 10 themselves and don't mind teaming up with another 2 or 3 subteams. A little more cohesion, maybe more communication, and a little bit better gear.
Then you have the classic 10 and 25-man raids that cater to the more hard-core teams with Ventrilo or Mumble going. More communication, smarter bosses, higher health, requires greater skill. You also get the highest level rewards.
Did they do the best job with what they set out to do? Maybe, maybe not. I still don't like the dumbing down of all the classes in the name of accessibility to the masses. However, from a game design standpoint, it's hard to try to balance 10 character classes each with 3 or 4 unique specializations. It's even worse to try to balance those 30 different play types with full-on ability trees. The theorycraft is gone, the low-level RPG elements and customization are neutered to reforging. All that aside, it's still good enough that millions still play.
I mean, they said they didn't want to 'de-value' the leveling process which can take 100 hours and their price puts people's leveling value at 1.66/hr.
Do they really value people's time so cheaply? lol
On live, level 90 is the cap. The for-sale 90s are intended to be brought to the new expansion, which goes up to level 100. Since all the content is at level cap, this move makes some sense. The summary should at least mention that level 100 will be the cap when these things are for sale. Pretending that "the game is the experience of leveling, after which you have won" can be forgiven, but leaving out the actual level cap? Shenanigans.
I am not the OP. But here is my answer.
I loved GW2. Played two classes through PVE to max level, and partially leveled a few other other classes. Played PvP too.
I stopped playing because:
1. Dungeons require 5 people, and I only have two friends that played GW2 with me (and only 1 regularly). Dungeon running sucked whether we tried to PUG or run with a guild (we tried a few different guilds too) because the experience was always the same: the other members of our group always wanted to race through the dungeon without telling us anything about the tactics of the fight. They got mad that we didn't already know. They often skipped content and ran off and left us, and we didn't know the routes well enough to avoid the trash mobs that overwhelmed the 2 of us. They refused to play at our pace, and we could not play at their pace, and there was no way to scale a dungeon down to a two player difficulty level.
2. The world plot, which you CAN do with just two people, ends after the final fight. It only has so much replay value, and it is not being extended regularly enough to hold our interest.
3. In local pvp, we cannot both stay on the same team. It keeps randomly pushing one of us to the other team to balance the teams out. I recognize the benefits, but, we aren't interested in it if we can't stick together.
4. Too little variety of local pvp. Control the resources, and that's it. No capture the flag, and no conquer the fortress. One game gets old.
5. World pvp is silly. For all its variety, the experience boils down to: find a commander, follow him kill whoever you find until a bigger group finds you. Numbers always determine victory, and so it gets repetitive fast.
6. Crafting is boring. Crafting is always boring, though. You have to build a bunch of stuff you don't care about in order to get the one thing you do care about, with a long slog and inventory glut to deal with. I always skip crafting in MMOs, I haven't yet seen one with a crafting system that I actually like (some that came close were warframe and TOR, since they had npc's doing the work when you were offline).
So.....once the main plots were done, there just wasn't anything left to hold us to the game. The fun combat system isn't enough without some sense of progression or variety, the dungeons would have saved it if the community was better or if we could run with a two or three man group, the pvp might have saved it if we could stay grouped and had more variety of small scale battlegrounds, but we didn't get any of that.
Gameplay was good though. And the graphics were amazing.
If people are willing to pay $60 in order to skip a section of a game, why is that section in there? The entire point of a game is to have fun, and if a game contains large parts that are not fun then it is not a very good game.
(Also see F2P)
driving a Leopard II tank with a faulty differential lock into a bicycle race of bi-polars
That actually sounds really awesome... Um, maybe I've had too much WoT...
For 300 dollars, one of your characters will only take half damage, only $800 more to make them take no damage at all ever!
Pay 200 dollars for an "Assassin's Contract" to have one character of your choice PKed or $125 for a player to be randomly PKed.
And to top it off, for 700 hundred bucks you will get an in-game badge to display on your character that states that you are pretty and you smell nice and that you win at everything ever.
Well, remember that max level will soon be 100, so those people will still need to play some 10 levels. And they've announced that before queuing for heroic dungeons or LFR, you will have to earn a silver medal in the training grounds to demonstrate that you can actually do the job you are intending to fulfill.
If he explores all forms and substances Straight homeward to their symbol-essences; He shall not die.
They changed loot.
Now instead of there being two items. Every player has a chance to get an item when a boss is killed. So unless those terrible idiot players cause wipes, they're nothing more than a warm body being dragged along for the ride.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
If you're not max level, mana is rarely an issue. Back in Cataclysm, 80-83 was pretty much like before, but then in the level 83 dungeons, mobs started hitting a lot harder and tank had bigger health pools. It's pretty much the same in Pandaria except 85-88 is easy 88-90 can be a kick in the seat.
Dear WoW players. Do you remember when the DKs came to be? And how everyone was moaning how, by definition, everyone who had no idea what to do seemed to play a DK?
The reason was simply that DKs started out at level 55. These people did not, like everyone else, start out small with a handful of skills, then get a few new ones every couple levels, with plenty of time to get to know them and get comfortable with them. No, they got everything dumped on their head at once with almost no time to find out what to do and how to play because, well, how would they?
Remember those raids in BRD (for the non-players, that's the first place where those DKs would get to play with the other kids in earnest) were a bit like, as a well known person put it, "a toddler driving a Leopard II tank with a faulty differential lock into a bicycle race of bi-polars"? They had no, zero, zilch, idea how to play their character.
And now, kids, it's like that all over again. Only much, much WORSE. Remember those moans you breathed whenever someone acted like he had no idea what to do, the comment "fuck, did you buy your char on EBay?" in chat? What used to be mostly unlikely will now be very likely: Someone dropped some coin to get a char they have no idea how to play with.
The group finder just got much, much more fun. To watch. Certainly not to play.
I remember playing with my 3 friends in my guild. The ones who actually read what their abilities were and researched a bit on the popular websites. Yeah, they were pro. It doesn't matter how much hand holding you give someone. If they are bad they will continue to be bad. All the resources are available and yet we still have tons of terrible players.
100 is the new cap.
You get to revisit old areas perhaps not seen in awhile, run mid-level battlegrounds where gameplay is different due to limited skillsets, and the like . I doubt I'll evne use the freebie 90 boost on a character.
I played WoW for a while back when it was newer, when you had to actually form social ties and groups in order to get anything accomplished. That's what I liked, the social part of it. Much later I came back to it and realized that nobody was forming groups any more, there was this new queuing system to get you into dungeons and you got grouped up with strangers and there was no incentive to even talk to each other. I guess it was to please the 'casual' crowd. I wasn't impressed.
A year ago, Blizzard introduced something they called "cross realm play". Now realms in your battlegroup share the same leveling area. They were really just consolidating servers to save money. But this has brought back griefers en masse, and now we long for the lonely wasteland days.
I forgot to add - and already have one or two maxed out toons. It could be useful if your guild needs a healer and your shammy is still at level 70 or something...
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
Playing before it was cool, eh?
... oh, wait, did you say $60?
Never mind.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Anybody notice that these paid levels cost 66.6(666 666 666 666 666 666 666 666) cents each?