World of Warcraft's $60 insta-90 price meant to maintain value of leveling, says Blizzard
Blizzard's Ion Hazzikostas says that the $60 price point for the instant 90 upgrade in World of Warcraft is intended to keep leveling from being devalued.
Blizzard previously commented that it was considering selling the instant boost to level 90 that will otherwise be included in WoW's Warlords of Draenor expansion. But that price point has been set surprisingly high, at a whopping $60. Lead encounter designer Ion Hazzikostas says that price is set to assure that there is still some value in leveling the old-fashioned way.
The price leaked last week, when a brief appearance on the store page was caught by WoW Insider before Blizzard removed it.
"In terms of the pricing, honestly a big part of that is not wanting to devalue the accomplishment of leveling," Hazzikostas told Eurogamer."If our goal here was to sell as many boosts as possible, we could halve the price or more than that--make it $10 or something. And then hardly anyone would ever level a character again. But leveling 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."
He added that the aim wasn't to set a "profit maximizing" price, just to give an easier path for multiple characters, and reiterated that the intent is to keep people from needing to buy more than one copy of Draenor.
"We realized as soon as we came out with Warlords of Draenor boost to 90, we knew that there was going to be demand for more than 1," he said. "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."
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replySteve Watts posted a new article, World of Warcraft's $60 insta-90 price meant to maintain value of leveling, says Blizzard.
Blizzard's Ion Hazzikostas says that the $60 price point for the instant 90 upgrade in World of Warcraft is intended to keep leveling from being devalued.-
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Yeah, you can level extremely quickly with the right support now. Even without the factors that Nerdsbeware mentioned, various class buffs over the years have made low-level characters much more powerful relative to older content. You can basically tear through mobs in a fraction of the time that it took in 2005. Combined with matchmaking tools for instances and mounts being available at much lower levels, all the major timesinks are gone.
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Xp required has been dropped and cataclysm redid all of the old quests. Combine that wroth dungeon finder and you can level much faster than before. That said it still takes a lake time investment.
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Blizz had tuned this down constantly with each expansion just to help keep the churn down. It does sort of devalue the work we all up in initially, but when you consider the newer content has the cooler features it makes sense to help get players to that newer stuff rather than drudge through the older, slower, lesser fun stuff. I tried to come back and try the Pandarian race. But, I just couldn't stomach going back through all the old quests after I left the new starter area. Just did that too much. Being able to skip past all that would be nice. Though it does make for a generic character (gear).
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A week? It's much much faster than that these days.
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1-85 is a breeze. It's that 85-90 that's a slog.
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Even 85-90 is pretty fast. I did it on 2 or 3 characters not that long ago.
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Well, most people have a max lvl character already. Also, the end-game content is where most players spend their time. As big as WoW is now, leveling is only a tiny fraction of the experience...everything else in PVP, dailies, raiding, rep farming,etc. I'd pay to instant 90 a character, but not $60.
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I bought 4 character slots with in game gold. I spent so much the time with gw2 I now want to support them with money. Same with good f2p games.
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They are giving a free level 90 away with the expansion, so if they didn't offer it in the store people would still be able to get a free level 90 by buying the battlechest and WoD expansion then transferring the character to their main account. That would have cost $90+. Blizzard is just circumventing that and making it a bit cheaper to purchase, but not pricing it so cheaply that people will abuse it.
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Are you asking this to the shack? or in general? There's people on here, multiple who have spent 100s of dollars on space ships.
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game + sub in the states. In some countries it's just game time/game cards.
But anyway game + sub isn't that expensive. Relative to other entertainment per hour it's pretty cheap unless you compare with a free game you never spend any money but then I guess everything that isn't free or actually paying you is expensive.
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I think if you use the boost on a level 60 character they will boost the trade skills to 600 as well. Though it hasn't been stated explicitly by Blizzard yet so its still rumor (as far as I know). Someone posted a screenshot from the PTR when they had the boost to level 90 active that showed the tradeskills maxed as well. But again its just rumor at this point.
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Maybe Im one of the few that thinks this, but leveling is a big part of RPG/MMO's IMO. I remember how satisfying it was to reach the milestones in good old Everquest. It took patience and dedication to get anywhere. End-game is not all there is. The journey towards it is just as much fun, if the game is designed properly.
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Having leveled up a bunch of times, I am not interested at all in leveling. Ever. Again. I want to the after level experience or forget it.
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And who decides what is proper game design?
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Random Side-Jack
Would it make these games more awesome if the plot culminated in a final battle where your death or victory was permanent?
If you win, you get something super awesome and it is handed down through any character you create in the future.
If you die, well everything is lost and you start over from scratch :)
Of course the final dungeon is optional.-
No, it really wouldn't except for a very small subset of potential players, and would alienate so many as to make them lose money on the proposition.
I think that kind of thing can be very cool, but a game needs to be designed around permanent death/consequences from the very beginning for it to work well, IMO. Alternately, some kind of legacy system, where your characters could die, but you earned some permanent boosts that would become part of a family history or something as you made new characters who are descendants of the older character(s). -
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I would really enjoy a Random Front-Jack.
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$60 is also cheaper than most third party leveling services not to mention your account/credit card info is completely safe.
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It's WoW. If you are still trying to level you deserve to be $ raped.
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Also, this game needs to die. It's just a bunch of dudes sitting on their mounts showing off their phat lewt
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so part of me is totally aghast at this.
but the part of me that had a level 70 fire mage with top raiding gear who stopped playing and whose account got hacked and banned, I dont want to go through the leveling. I dont have the time any more. Going to 90 day one means I might resub. Fact of life, even if it sucks. -
Aren't you better off just buying a good leveling addon like Booster (http://www.mmo-strategy-guides.com/wow-leveling-addon.html instead of paying 60 bucks for one level 90 character? I've used Booster for awhile, it's not that hard to get to level 90 in less than a week , plus what's the fun in just starting at level 90, cmon people don't be so lazy and greedy Blizzard!
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