Friday 14 March 2014

$60 level boosts

So Warlords of Draenor reorders are out and with them the paid boost to 90 service.


The price? Sixty dollars. Slightly more or less based on currency conversion.


Personally I think it's a bit high. Most games hot off the shelf go for $60. One character is not a whole game. For the price of wow plus a monthly subscription I could level fifty characters to level ninety, or one hundred once Warlords comes out.


Well you could say that I'm paying for it via monthly subscription. I say no. That is for maintenance of the game world. I mean are we paying Blizzard to level our characters? No, we are paying them for the content. We are leveling the game characters. It is our time that we are putting into leveling one or more characters.


This gets me confused when people try to associate a price per hour or per level or what not to come to the $60. I don't normally pay someone at every level that I make or every hour, so why should that factor into the price of a boost.


I have heard people say that it's for those people that want to return to the game to play with higher level friends. No it is not, as if this was the case then the single free boost to ninety that was offered with the purchase of the expansion would have sufficed. Yes you can say that people would get around that by buying more copies of the game. But that would not be free either. More than likely these copies would be only purchased for the boost and you'd have to pay for account transfer.


The thing for me with the boost to ninety was that I'd be able to skip the old content. Do I believe the old content is bad? No, but it's also old content. I have leveled many characters through the old content so it's not like I would be missing out on anything or smacking the developers in the face by not taking in their hard work. I have taken it in, many times. And I enjoy it, and would have no problem doing it again. My issue is that having 98 characters to boost to 90, at $60 I'd have to pay $5880 to so.


Yes I know I'm more than likely a rare exception, but still, it's the way I play my game and should we all not be able to play our game the way we want to? I think if we were all told that we could only pvp or only raid or whatnot this game would be less enjoyable.


Another complaint I've heard is that it will introduce a whole bunch of players that do not know what they are doing into LFR. Well that's the way it was before the boosts so what is the difference? I have heard many people say that leveling does not necessarily teach you how to play your class.


I believe the official reason is along the lines of not wanting to invalidate leveling. Well I  think this is a bit silly. For several reasons.


One, you are not forced to boost your character so there will still be people leveling their characters. I have heard many people state that they like doing this. I like doing this myself. I fully planned on leveling the long way one character of every class before I started boosting those classes. For example, prior to boosts, I only was missing a Mage, Monk, Rogue, and Warrior level 90, so I would not boost any of my characters of those classes until I got one to 90 by leveling. Also I planned to have characters that I would level slowly through all content.


Two, leveling was already invalidated. How so? Well I have found that every time a new expac was launched, the xp that was required to level through previous expansion content was slashed big time. For example, I would be leaving Northrend to go to Cataclysm content in the middle of Dragonblight. I didn't have to do the whole expansion.


One thing I've always heard on podcasts in regards to this, is that the game creators wanted people to see the new content. So they provided a way to get there faster. And slashing xp was not the only way. Heirlooms. Gear, that currently goes from levels 1 to 85 that each give a percentage of increased xp. The more you have the more xp you get which means the faster you level.


Eventually the Darkmoon Faire gives you the ability to boost xp. Then with Mists of Pandaria, if you played a monk, you would get a daily that would give you boosted xp daily for one hour.


All these experience boosts. So people are zipping through leveling. Furthermore, how many peoples ideas of leveling are getting as many of these boosts as they can then dungeon crawling? I'm sorry but this is not really what I think of when I think of non-invalidated leveling. This is just as "invalidating" as boosting a character to 90. A way to speedily get through old content that one has done over ... and over .... and over again. Again remember that you are not forced to boost so if you want you can level. However slow or fast that you want to do it.


They also introduced the Death Knight class that starts at level 55. Then the scroll of Resurrection that allows a returning players to boost a character up to 80/85. Oh and then the recruit a friend where you get triple xp. More ways to skip old content and get to the new current content.


The fact is, in my eyes, is that a person boosting a character to 90 does not hurt the game nor other players, so quite frankly there is no reason to make it inaccessible to players. That being said I don't think this price point will change. But I had to get this off my chest.