Blizzard To Sell Level 90 WoW Characters For $60 253
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.
Arg Pandas (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Value (Score:2, Insightful)
I find this sort of good. I have a problem where I like playing games with my friends(WoW was previously in there) but I don't play NEARLY enough. I might play 2-3 hours a week. So, it would take forever to get the point where I could play the game with friends. At the time, WoW considered to get fun and more playable at level 60. But getting to level 60 takes a long time. I would give someone some money so I could play with friends and get some more entertainment out of it without having to invest a lot of time.
I guess the best way to describe myself is a casual gamer of hardcore games.
Re:Arg Pandas (Score:2, Insightful)
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?
7.8 million [joystiq.com] people.
The kung-fu pandas joke is old.
Wrong incentives (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:WoW Ruined PC Gaming (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Value (Score:2, Insightful)
Guild Wars 2 is is still a fantastic game, and they constantly bring out new content, all voice acted, very nice.
WvW is still fun..
You just have to totally forget about the "gear-treadmill" mindset.
Devalue WHAT???? (Score:2, Insightful)
'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.
Pay good money to get there, but be bad at it? (Score:2, Insightful)
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...
This is already happening. (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:Value (Score:5, Insightful)
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.