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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.
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.
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
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.