World of Warcraft to Give Away Level 80 Characters

[dubious_wolf]

I don't like Blizzard. But I'll admit I'm a little bullish on it. sure they are dropping 600 employees but I blame that on greater individual productivity and further integration with Activisions Is it going out of business, or in some way in trouble? That seems a stretch... I mean WoW still has 10 million users, it's now part of Activisions (or vise versa I can never remember) and CoD is still printing money with 40 million users, Their EPS is increasing and has a decent projected outlook. Diablo 3 is (sort of) on track.
And they are pulling $1.36 billion in revenue from WoW alone, which is an increase of $100 Million as opposed to 2 years ago. In fact 2010 at the subscription high it seems they were pulling less money from online subscriptions indicating that current users are more willing to pay more cash. So yeah it's still solid.

Wait a sec...
This isn't one of my finance websites....

Harga blarga blarg! Blizzard's going down the drain!! They smell bad! and WoW is not any fun!
There we go, that's more appropriate.

 

[Zukhramm]

Why not? Blizzard has spent the every update and expansion making the leveling part of the game faster, and more pointless and irrelevant. Why not let people just skip it?

 

[Mike Fang]

Challenges? BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA... You're kidding, right? I can literally SLEEP through the content before lvl 80, it is easy, tedious and quite frankly, thanks to the extremly fast leveling through exp cuts even disappointing when you reach a level where all quests in an area are grey and you still have over 20-30 left to finish it.

*lets out a disgruntled sigh and gives Kasp a glare.* Yes, I supposed I should clarify that what I described is the way it's SUPPOSED to work. But that is another thing Blizzard's screwed up on, in addition to catering to the aforementioned game-addicted shut-in crowd; making the quests and dungeons and what have you -way- too easy. It's rarely, if ever, a question of if you will succeed, but just how long until you do.

 

[Taunta]

This title is misleading. Blizzard "giving away level 80 characters" implies that just anyone can get up to level 80.

I think a lot of people are missing the point. The promotion is only for old players who have gotten burnt out on the game, not new players. It's for people who (presumably) already know their class. It's not about skipping over the redone zones. If I had quit wow for a while, why would I come back if all I had to look forward to was more grinding?

Also, you're only allowed to call something "the final nail in WoW's coffin" when WoW is not the biggest kid on the block.

 

[Jofarin]

Maybe, just maybe, The Old Republic stole a little more subscribers than Blizzard is comfortable with,

Lots and lots of wishfull thinking? And maybe some money from TOR to say that? While it's obvious that WoW loses players, TOR isn't the source of the problem. I think TOR will be dead nearly as fast as AoC, WAR and the others.
WoW bleeds because it isn't changing much. Achievements are done, new graphics has been seen for a long time and not a lot of exciting things to do left.

 

[Macgyvercas]

The gold trimming on the World of Warcraft logo has begun to tarnish.

I really hate to be "that guy", but as a chemistry major, I'm obligated to point out that assuming the gold around the logo is 24 karot (i.e. pure gold), it wouldn't tarnish or corrode, seeing as gold is inert and doesn't undergo spontaneous reactions easily.

 

[Evil Alpaca]

WoW's subscription has dropped from 12 to 10 million! Oh no, they'll have to use rubies instead of diamonds for their jewel encrusted throne.

I think the drop in numbers is less from SWTOR or any other MMO and more WoW showing its age. Most of the lore bosses from Warcraft 3 are dead. When Cata was announced, my first thought who is this dragon again and why is he so bad? When your only exposure to WoW's lore is the previous Warcraft games, Blizzard is running out of content. (An Old God might be a bit more menacing if you hadn't already beaten two of them.)

Wait, so they spent an entire expansion re-invigorating the 1-80 content, and now they're encouraging people to skip all of it?

My thoughts exactly. One of the major appeals of Cataclysm was the revamping of old zones. Now people can skip them? Does that mean that Blizzard is admitting that Cata revamping was a mistake?

I kinda wish they would do something similar to the death knights starting. Let the players start at a high but nowhere near the capped level. 55-60 seems to be a decent place to start the game.

Although this does kinda make sense given the amount of xp bonus gear blizzard has been releasing.

 

[CardinalPiggles]

I think when Guild Wars 2 comes around, WoW will take a massive hit. GW2 seems like the first game to come out that's enough like WoW, but has enough other traits of it's own to really make a WoW player want to switch.

For the moment, WoW is holding pretty strong. $15(?) a month from 10 million sources? lemme do the math here... carry the 3... I'd say it's roughly a fucking ton of money.

 

[DarklordKyo]

WoW is in trouble, Blizz is taking a hit requiring 600 people to be fired to maintain current straits, and now they must be in real trouble.

Just... wow.

WoW is a sinking ship, panderia looks like SSDT (same as cataclysm), SWTOR lied to our faces, now we all just 'wait for GW2' which is spreading due to word of mouth.

They need to decide whether to appeal to hardcore fans, or casual fans, they cannot do both much longer (the hardcores like to think they're better than everybody thus need content hard enough on a game big enough to prove it, whereas casuals just want to chill out, so they have to appeal to the kind of freaks that can clear content in a week to those who will get around to it in a few months).

If only dark millennium online hadn't been cancelled.

Also: Lol @ captcha, 'cheese fries', something I can actually read for a change.

ON THE CONTRARY! They can appeal to both. By making multiple difficulty levels. Easy mode for the cry babies wanting gear(YOU NO GET EPICS DEAL WITH IT), normal for regular people, hard for the foolhardy, and legendary for the madmen. Do that for dungeons and raids and you might please everyone but cry babies will always cry because the text is not purple. Also GW2 was spreading by word of mouth for years now. Since ToR launched and everyone seemed to forget it exists GW2 is the only thing to talk about as far as MMOs and change will go.

BTW like the new captcha setup.

I like this person's idea. You heard 'em Bliz, easy for the n00bs, normal for the norms, hard for good players, and legendary for Ensidia (no offense if any members of Ensidia are reading this).

 

[Furrama]

Pffft, I didn't leave because of Star Wars. I left because GW2 looked so good that I couldn't bring myself to play anymore.

Why leave WoW for WoW with lightsabers? WoW has friggen werewolves man!

 

[Lunar Templar]

Lol at EVERYONE saying WoW is dying. You all need a reality check. WoW is still the biggest kid on the block and will be for the forseeable future. Call me when another MMO gets 5+ million subscribers.

depressingly, this :/ WoW still has what? like 10 million subscribers still?

besides, this is more insulting then tempting imo, a free high level character? really -.- fuck you, i earn my levels the old fashion way, by pulling them from the faces of my enemy's!

SWTOR lied to our faces

what lies where these?

If only dark millennium online hadn't been cancelled.

you tread into the realm of heretics with those words .....

 

[Ernie Lee]

Its just that blizzard want to milk the wow game for the last time before diablo 3 out

 

[Ympulse]

People talk about the big three, completely ignoring the fact that RIFT is still number two, behind WoW and ahead of TOR. Just sayin'

Also, I'm not surprised. Cash-grabs have always been Activision's forte' and Blizz is too focused on future projects to actually analyze and address WoW properly.

It's kind of to be expected, really.

 

[Strazdas]

"here take this item, if you use it you will instnatly get to final boss fight, we know the rest of the game is shit so you may jsut as well skip it".

Just to be clear, this would be the WoW that even with the subscriber hit still has around 10 million active subscribers, right? The largest market share (by far) of any MMO?

wow has been number 2 in market share for months. League of legends has beaten it. While i play neither of those (tried both, got bored) just dont claim wow is still the largest.

 

[Ferrious]

I think this is a good idea and I honestly don't know why it has taken this long (or why it's time-limited).

For the uninitiated:

The time taken to get to the previous level cap has shrunk drastically with each expansion, so that you can get into the latest content quickly.

The current cap is 85. It's safe to say that it takes as long to get from 1-80 as it does to get from 80-85. This is how I've always treated it. Bare in mind that in the current game:

1-60 is pretty good (new content).
60-70 is awful (oldest content).
70-80 is pretty good (personally my favourite content, but second oldest content).
80-85 is the latest content.

What this does is say "Hi there, old player. We want you to come see Cataclysm, so we've brought you up to where everyone else was like a year ago. This is so you don't get put off by all the old junk that gets in the way of the fun."

I've had so many old players say "I'd come back if I didn't have to buy all those expansions." or "I don't want to play through the old stuff to see the new that you're in.". Other than a sense of entitlement amongst the level-capped players, there's no good business reason not to do this.

It does point out that revamping 1-60 was a waste of expansion resources, but that was a lose-lose situation: new players found the content dry and stale compared to what people were discussing so were being put off, old players found that the endgame content wasn't what they were used to, so were being put off.

 

[Antari]

Yep definately a sign of trouble when they are letting people skip most of the game when they join up.

 

[Thistlehart]

Hey, this is great news for me. I'm having my roomate Scroll of Resurrection me once I get my new computer later this month.

Thing is, I've never had a character go higher than about lvl 68 (and that was in WotLK) I've never really experienced endgame content before, since I get to Outlands and then run out of steam having spent the last two months leveling a character that far (as I don't have buckets of free time to dedicate to level-grinding), then starting a new toon as that seems more interesting.

Being able to bump my Druid up to 80 so I can run high-level content for the first time in 6+ years of on-and-off play sounds like a great idea to me (yes, you read that correctly).

 

[Ashley Blalock]

I can kind of see doing the big level jump if they are wanting to sell the social aspect of the game. Let's face it if you have leveled characters after areas were no longer popular then you know how lonely some of the leveling can be in the game. Level 80 where more people are at is way better than grinding alone somewhere in Outland.

Not really enough to pull me back though. Once in a while I kind of get that urge to play but I was playing so little that it seemed kind of crazy to pay a monthly fee for a game I only played a few days each month.

 

[cobra_ky]

SON OF A *****.

i just reactivated my account and bought Cataclysm a month ago, because there was no Scroll of Resurrection offer. Screw you blizz. >:c