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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.
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
Guild Wars 2 solved this issue beautifully I felt.
When you enter a zone your hp, damage etc gets scaled to the level of the area. Only down-scaled however so you cannot just jump to high level areas immediately.
This DOES mean that your friends at higher levels can play with you though,which a bunch of my friends did. Worked great.
Sadly the game didnt really 'last' for us for a variety of other reasons.
Perhaps a better way to look at it is: UO made huge news when it broke 200k (final peak was a bit more) geeks with accounts; EQ upped that to 500k (final peak was a bit more) geeks/fantasy rpgers with accounts; WoW opened up MMO's to anyone that wanted to play, not just the geeks/rpgers/hardcore gamers... and hit what12 million? I'd suggest that instead of blaming WoW for the bad things they merely imported from their predecessors (and FYI: it was much, much, much worse in EQ, if you don't already know that first hand), you might give them a little credit for making it so that all games have a vastly larger MMO player base now days.
Don't get me wrong, i enjoyed WoW for the couple years i played larger because of a few friends playing, and because i'd come off a 6 year stint in EQ. It was nice and slow and overall somewhat entertaining. EQ (if you didn't play it) on the other hand, felt like a 17 hour a day job, with a root canal appointment during lunchtime, crammed into 3-4 hours of playtime (by the end of my playing days of it). UO, well... it's summed up with just one word: griefers.
Each of those three had it's merits, and each it's detractors, but you have to see them as the stepping stones of the industry and realize that each was designed to take time to play; that was how the companies made money. The richness of content is somewhat subjective though. If they didn't have enough content, they wouldn't have had people continue to pay to play them (see SWTOR), and while they were filled with bugs and bad juju that sometimes popped up, they had enough merits that people tolerated the few issues (see Age of Conan and Vanguard).
For the issue at hand, i think the one line pretty well sums it up:
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.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
I dunno, I kind of like it. I have 11 level 90's, but I'm not addicted.
I could give it up any time. Seriously.
No, really.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Pay-to-win isn't - quite - what's on offer here. Blizzard haven't yet gone that far.
If you've played WoW for any time, you'll know that the game only really "begins" once you hit the level cap. Certainly, there isn't much point in comparing yourself to other players until you hit the maximum level. What Blizzard are selling here is the opportunity to skip the extended tutorial/storyline hybrid that comes before the game starts in earnest.
Genuine pay-to-win would be the sale of any kind of advantage, be it gear, increased access to instances (such as a waiver on weekly lock-outs) or any kind of character power-boost or income-boost once at the level cap. So far, Blizzard have not gone in that direction (though many other MMOs do). I think Blizzard still understand that would be a step too far for the player-base they've built up and would likely kill their cash-cow. MMOs that do use that model tend to have relatively short lifespans, while WoW is still going strong after the better part of a decade on the basis of a subscription model.
In fact, the pure subscription-model is by no means as dead as many people seem to think. There was a real worry, after the disaster of the initial Old Republic launch, that the model was no longer viable in a world of free-to-play-pay-to-win. But the re-launch of Final Fantasy XIV late last year was extremely successful (and remains successful several months after launch) on the basis of a subscription model with no microtransactions at all.
Could it be because they pandered to that audience?
Disclaimer: I played from beta up until last year. Pandas, really???
Just another day in Paradise
No, but its name was very apt when you know German. "Mist" literally translates to "Rubbish".
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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
and this is why these freemium models are ruining gaming. Logging in and finding that the idiot in your guild that can't even figure out how to work the chat window properly suddenly, over-night, out-leveled the entire guild and now is wielding a vorpal blade, makes wanting to actually play the game and achieve all those things glaringly pointless.
One confounding factor: There already exists an illicit(but ill-controlled) market for assorted paying-to-not-play-the-game services. The Chinese Gold Farmer is the stereotypical classic; but if you want it and somebody can either grind for it in a country with lower wages and costs of living, or hack accounts for it, it's for sale.
$60 is a value likely chosen to be high enough to pad Blizzard's pockets, and discourage truly casual purchase(which would mean that Blizzard basically wasted their time with the lower-level content, and now has to scrounge up enough 'epic level' new content to satisfy everybody, not just the powergamers); but also chosen to be ruinously low for any non-Blizzard seller who has to work, rather than just twiddle numbers on the server, to provide the product.
It isn't my game; but my understanding is that people generally loath the famer-for-profit guys, so they may be delighted to see Blizzard blow them out of the water with economics, rather than comparatively feeble attempts at banning.
The real problem then is all the interesting content is end-game.
Guild Wars 2 has an interesting take on it - your level is scaled down to the area you're in, and because of this players who've progressed past an area somehow can still go back and enjoy the content. You even get experience/drops that are useful to you.
You can't really do that in WoW, you'll insta-kill everything and get nothing for it.
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...