World of Warcraft Paid Level 90 Boost Will Cost $60

[Ninmecu]

To the number of people saying "This is the end of wow" or "lol pay to win lololol". Have you leveled to 90? It's a pointless grind at this stage of the game and with a level cap of 100, it's made even worse. The first time, hell, the second time maybe, that you level to 90, it's pretty fun, interesting visuals, cool places to see. But guess what happens then? Third time around, you're doing the exact same quests you did the other two times, (The only possible exception being in the 1-60 bracket because the leveling areas are so diverse it's beautiful.) from 60-90, you're just retreading old ground, repeatedly, only way out is Dungeons and PvP. To make matters worse, they now have Cross Realm Zones, which is a fancy way of saying "Oh? You want to level the old fashioned way? Too bad, let's just put 10 or so different servers into the same zones so you have to camp one mob at a time for your quests and wait for respawns that still wait on the slowest server connected rather than speeding them up to a fair level." The 90 grind is obnoxious. If anyone says "Well dur, how else do you learn your character?" I've leveled every class up to at least 80, I've played them all and seen how they do. I've read how to play the different specs on Icyveins.com(The place to go if you're learning how to play a 90 raiding toon regardless of class/spec). The differences in playstyle between a level 1-89 character and a level 90, are staggering. This changes nothing. It's not "pay to win" because an ilevel of 483 is going to be utterly crushed by a dedicated raiding main like mine with an ilevel of 561(To put that into perspective, ilevel 483 MIGHT break 100,000 damage per second, while a well played ilevel 561 can easilly break 250k on the same fight.) Also, from what has been said in the past(They might not go through with this mind you.) These newly made "90's" will be going through a tutorial island of sorts geared towards learning how to play the class as a max level. Which is a good thing for all involved, since there's no such thing in the game.

TL;DRThe level purchase is NOT a pay-to-win service. It does not invalidate anyones leveling. It sure as hell won't "Gimp" the game. If anything, it will attract more subscribers because with Warlords of Draenor everyone gets a free 90 out of the box because blizzard realizes it's cheaper to do that than to go back and make 3 expansions worth of quests relevant. They tried it with Cataclysm and the end game suffered for it, they don't want to make that mistake twice.

OT:60 bucks is ridiculous. The 483 gear is easily replaced by timeless isles gear(If you're an idiot, if you're smart, you'll take the timeless isle gear to artificially buff your ilevel so you can hop into Siege of Orgrimar Looking for Raid difficulty off the get go.)

Edit: While I'm ranting. If that's the price they want to throw down, you're better off just getting a new battle chest at 40 bucks, would come with everything up to MoP once Warlords drops, then pay 40 for warlords and just recruit a friend yourself. You get a free 90, another account tied to yourself and dual-boxing is pretty easy. Plus, you get triple xp up to level 85 with that for 3 months, plus a free month and if you throw in another 15 for another month on the new account, your old account gets a month free. So win-win.

 

[Kargathia]

I can see a lot of people being peer pressured in terms of guilds to basically have all characters just to make sure they can always raid.

Unlikely. It'd only be very high-end guilds who'd demand this level of commitment, and they won't need or want to. Leveling a character is trivial compared to the investment of gearing it up.
Not to mention that while WoW has seriously dumbed down since I left it, it'll still take time to master a class to the degree required to raid at the highest level.

 

[Kukakkau]

Now this is the problem if new players want to join the game and max level fast to play with friends. They can either buy the newest expansion and pay $60 to get there, or buy all the other expansions then grind.

Either way they've got to pay a lot to get into the game and even then skipping 90 levels of learning a class is going to lead to a lot of bad players in a community that already has a lot of people who somehow haven't learned basic mechanics (stay out boss' mega death attack is pretty hard I know... with big warnings on the screen... and huge particle effects...and a guide to beat each boss in game...)

 

[shintakie10]

And so marks the end of WoW. It's usually a bad sign when a game allows you to pay extra to not play it. Can you imagine how many noobs you're gonna find at level 90.

The cost is about 6 months worth of game time. So let's break this down. The paid leveling which basically means I don't have to play the majority of the game, will cost as much as an actual AAA game per character.

So for the cost of playing a game that's actually fun and interesting I could pay to not play a game that I obviously find boring and tedious (otherwise why would you want to skip so much content?). And this is just for one character.

The exact reason this service was even created was in response to the question that was asked many times at Blizzcon and after. What's stopping someone from buying the game a second time, getting a second license, boosting a character to 90, then transferring them to your main account.

Blizzard's answer at the time was that there wouldn't be anything stopping you from doing that and they didn't seem to care. The question, however, was asked so many times that they figured they might as well make a far less obnoxious way to do it because people were goin to do it anyway.

If anythin, this service just saved a ton of people some money. The original system would have cost somewhere in the realm of 90 dollars to boost a character, and required you to do quite a bit of waitin for transactions and services to clear. Now its just 60 to boost another character to 90.

 

[Charli]

This is disgusting. The whole point of an MMO is the journey of leveling a character

So why are 5+ million people still playing at max level.

I'd love to imply there's some catch all factor to why people play MMO's but that's usually not the case.

NO ONE STARTING TO LEVEL FOR THE FIRST TIME IS GOING TO SHELL OUT MONEY FOR THIS.

Or if they were they were already so stupidly inable to play properly that they'd turn to the illegal powerleveling service or recruit a friend pitch anyway.

This is for rich, highly invested players with altaholicism. That's a fact, no one else playing the game needs it.

And the vortex of addiction is at end game. People might be highly starstuck and nostalgic for their first level through an MMO world, but do it 3-4 times and then come talk to me about how willing you'd be to make that Shaman your group needs for a specific raid mechanic or 'totally fool proof arena strat!'... You'd tell em to jog on... OR shell out the money to make your alt. Voila. Now you can.

 

[Shamanic Rhythm]

I don't care how old WoW is or who is most likely to pay for this, etc: my opinion is simply that this constitutes an admission that levelling is dull, broken and unimportant, and charging people to skip it rather than fixing it is sloppy design.

 

[Brian Tams]

This is disgusting. The whole point of an MMO is the journey of leveling a character

So why are 5+ million people still playing at max level.

I'd love to imply there's some catch all factor to why people play MMO's but that's usually not the case.

NO ONE STARTING TO LEVEL FOR THE FIRST TIME IS GOING TO SHELL OUT MONEY FOR THIS.

Or if they were they were already so stupidly inable to play properly that they'd turn to the illegal powerleveling service or recruit a friend pitch anyway.

This is for rich, highly invested players with altaholicism. That's a fact, no one else playing the game needs it.

And the vortex of addiction is at end game. People might be highly starstuck and nostalgic for their first level through an MMO world, but do it 3-4 times and then come talk to me about how willing you'd be to make that Shaman your group needs for a specific raid mechanic or 'totally fool proof arena strat!'... You'd tell em to jog on... OR shell out the money to make your alt. Voila. Now you can.

I have leveled four toons to the level cap (back in Cataclysm), so trust me, I know.

New players not using this doesn't change the fact that this is a soulless cash grab. To treat it any other way is pure ignorance. We as players should never be okay with cash grabs.

 

[Lunar Templar]

That's quite a big price for a 90 level boost.

Not really, a max level character through a power leveling service this is likely meant to fight costs two or three times that much usually, maybe more.

 

[zehydra]

Wait, so they've added a way to pay for you to skip the game? thats quite novel. Paying to get rid of most of the game is certainly a new spin on DLC that adds more game.

This is sort of my thoughts on this. If they're offering $60 to skip grinding (and if it sells well), then I think there is something fundamentally wrong with the game in the first place.

Then again, I am quite biased when it comes to this sort of thing as I loathe stat-based grinding.

The only kind of grinding I can appreciate is minecraft's, and even then, I have a limited patience for it (compared with other people I know)

 

[Bravo Company]

Too bad the leveling was the most fun for me in WoW.

I have several lvl 85+ characters because a friend and I would create a tank and healer combo then we would pull entire dungeons and leave the rest of the party behind. The worst part was getting to level 15. It did help that we had every heirloom for every class....

I mean, raiding isn't as satisfying as it used to be, and finding 10 competent people is nearly impossible these days. If you want to get into the serious raiding scene then you have to deal with assholes. My previously stated friend and I got kicked out of our firelands raid on ragnaros because we hadn't actually downed him before, regardless of the fact my friend was top 5 for dps the entire raid and I had the top heals spot by a considerably margin.

But whatever, I stopped playing wow after I got into mop heroics and had several instances of the tank just soloing the entire dungeon while the rest of the party was stuck chasing him and the inability to find even 3 other competent people to do the damn hardmord timed dungeons.

I just fall into a strange category in the MMO world. I have the ability to actually, you know, enjoy the game and dick off frequently; however, when I want to raid I would like for people to not be complete fucktards. I can handle it when you're new to the raid and aren't extremely familiar with the mechanics, but most of WoW's mechanics for a dps consist of "don't stand in bad stuff" but yet, that is too difficult.

 

[Kyrinn]

New players not using this doesn't change the fact that this is a soulless cash grab. To treat it any other way is pure ignorance. We as players should never be okay with cash grabs.

In my opinion, seeing this service as cashgrab only is pure ignorance. This boost to 90 fills the demand of old players looking to resub but feel like they are too far behind and don't want to bother. Boom, Free 90 with WoD. The $60 pricetag of additional 90 boosts does 2 things:
1)Gives players a direct method of getting the 90 boost. People were going to make more accounts, buy WoD, then server transfer the 90 over to their main account.
2)Gives players who have seen the levelling content the ability to get to where they want. This also has the side benefit of competing with gold farmers/power levelling services.

Does it need to cost $60? Probably not. However, the price does need to be substantial enough to ensure the game does not get flooded with end-level players. This is just another service that came about due to WoW's size and age, just like server transfer and faction change.

Also, players are in charge of their own wallets. This service hurts no one and benefits some; so let the players decide if they want to use this or not.

 

[anthony87]

but do it 3-4 times

Or 5....or 6.....or 14.

Personally I've got a massive pain in my tits with levelling at this stage but I'm still in two minds about the boost. In the end it'll probably come down to what the final price actually is.

(Hint: Not 60 quid)

 

[Aussie502]

If they allowed this service only for accounts which already have a level 90 character, then i'd be fine with this. Also $60 is far too expensive.

 

[MrMixelPixel]

This should be limited to those who already have a level 90 character.

In that case this would be a huge and convenient way more characters up to speed.

Yeah, this is my only real complaint about the option. Though I'd maybe lower that to a level 80+ character. I still want people who didn't play the more recent expansions to be able to jump back into it.

It gets a bit tiring to see a bunch of people who don't even play the game to complain about an optional feature. It's understandable where the complaints come from "The game costs 60$ to purchase with expansions, you pay 15$ a month to play it, and now you're paying 60$ to skip a lot of the content?" Pretty much yeah. End game is more fun. This is especially true for people that want to join their high-level friends quicker.

That's not to say that the grind to 90 isn't fun the first or second time. After that though... it's pretty much just a chore.

 

[Phantom Kat]

This can fuck right off. So sick of having shit like this in subscription games, especially when those games have like 6-9 month periods were they release fuck all content.

 

[kaizen2468]

The idea of paying them $60 to let you skip vanilla wow+4 expansions when you already paid for all of them is pretty silly to me. Here's another 60 bucks let me skip everyone i already bought! it's insanity

 

[Abomination]

The idea of paying them $60 to let you skip vanilla wow+4 expansions when you already paid for all of them is pretty silly to me. Here's another 60 bucks let me skip everyone i already bought! it's insanity

Actually when you think about it you just buy the game's previous expansions + final expansion. You can't buy just vanilla World of Warcraft anymore, if you buy it you get World of Warcraft, Burning Crusade, Wrath of the Lich King and Cataclysm, and then you buy Mists of Pandaria.

This 90 level boost will be available when Warlords of Draenor is out and then when you buy World of Warcraft it will include Mists of Pandaria. Your first character in Warlords of Draenor will already be a level 90 if you should so wish. If you want another boosted level 90 you can pay $60 for it. Or you can do the leveling yourself.

It's a choice.

It's not insanity.

 

[Charli]

This is disgusting. The whole point of an MMO is the journey of leveling a character

So why are 5+ million people still playing at max level.

I'd love to imply there's some catch all factor to why people play MMO's but that's usually not the case.

NO ONE STARTING TO LEVEL FOR THE FIRST TIME IS GOING TO SHELL OUT MONEY FOR THIS.

Or if they were they were already so stupidly inable to play properly that they'd turn to the illegal powerleveling service or recruit a friend pitch anyway.

This is for rich, highly invested players with altaholicism. That's a fact, no one else playing the game needs it.

And the vortex of addiction is at end game. People might be highly starstuck and nostalgic for their first level through an MMO world, but do it 3-4 times and then come talk to me about how willing you'd be to make that Shaman your group needs for a specific raid mechanic or 'totally fool proof arena strat!'... You'd tell em to jog on... OR shell out the money to make your alt. Voila. Now you can.

I have leveled four toons to the level cap (back in Cataclysm), so trust me, I know.

New players not using this doesn't change the fact that this is a soulless cash grab. To treat it any other way is pure ignorance. We as players should never be okay with cash grabs.

Oh I'm NOT refuting it as anything less than a cash grab, the same way the mounts and pets are, but I don't think it's a sick prophet of doom out to rip out the foundations of the way the game functions presently like some are implying.
It's just another 'character paying alteration'.

And so expensive It's cheaper to move a guild to another realm. Who even would. But I suppose it discourages overuse or excessive use of the system.

(And I have 6 max levels at the moment, I was just outlining when I got bored of it, my friends had to drag my druids limp carcass through the cataclysm areas because I was just so bored of it)


But yeah, it's nothing new here. It's a feature, one I don't think many will make use of, but if it makes blizzard money on the side, then I guess I can't refute it too hard, after all it's paying the artists who are making the new character models and we saw the Orc female yesterday and despite me being a straight lady, she is bangin'.