Title stole from TAGN commenter Asmiroth, because it sums up my feelings on this whole thing.
Congrats, you are paying more to have less content. Or, in the situation where you want to play with all your lvl 90 friends RIGHT NOW, you are paying $60 for RIGHT NOW. /shrug
Hardcore Casual 
With a $60 price tag on the expansion and instant lvl 90 character they are only creating future problems.
The expansion will drop in price.
If they drop the instant leveling price as well all players that previously purchased this option will spew rage tears.
If they don’t they will have an expansion that is cheaper as a single option subset.
I take it you’re quite unfamiliar with Blizzard’s support in recent years. They don’t give a flying fuck. ;)
Shit, if you want to buy Warcraft 3 + The Frozen Throne from the EU store they’re 15 euro each.
You could buy a modern game on release day for that.
Does Blizzard give a shit? No sir.
It’s easy when any title you release auto-sells 5 million copies in the first week.
I don’t believe it’s been confirmed that 60$ is the price tag for the expansion. Currently, if the expansion is say, 40$, like MoP was, then using the free character boost to put a level 90 on your already existing account would cost 20$ battlechest (assuming MoP is folded into the battlechest with WoD release)+ 40$ WoD + 25$ account transfer fee = 85$. Even with WoD dropped to 20$, the total is still more than 65$; although I agree with sleepysam that at some point they’ll remove the free 90 boost from the package.
My guess is they remove the insta 90 from the discounted expansion.
It depends if you think that level is content or playing with friend is content, no ?
But the real question is : even with this offer, is WoW the best game to choose if you do not think that level is content, and playing with friends is content ? ;-)
EuroGamer deleted the part of their post where they said the expansion would be $60 and didn’t bother to note the correction. Because EuroGamer. So now there is potentially a price differential between the expansion and the insta-90, though you get one with the expansion.
So $60 for insta-90 remains. That is clearly a reasonable price point for some… lots of dollars/hours math being thrown about to “prove” it… but I couldn’t say I see it as something I would buy at that price. Silly me, I went and actually played the game.
I don’t have an issue with the expansion price. The more salient point is that the insta-90 is basically an admission that offering “more levels” is not sustainable.
It’s a shame – part of the appeal in MMO is character progression and what is basically being said here is that NOTHING you did previously matters.
The obvious counter is that you aren’t skipping 9 years of content. Leveling accounts for maybe 6 months of that 9 years. They would be skipping the raids/pvp grinds/pvp zones/rep grinds/heroic dungeons/crafting tiers anyway, and that stuff makes up the bulk of that 9 years. For that matter, they’d be skipping something like 50% of the quests on any given character even without dungeons.
Well, you are skipping 9 years of content. The problem themeparks have is that during that 9 years, the majority of the content produced isn’t relevant to today.
If an old raid still gave out worthwhile rewards, it would still be used. But it doesn’t, so no one runs it other than for the novelty.
Realistically, what you’re giving up by paying the 60$, for ‘most people’, is some low X number of hours, or X/3 for the many RAF’ers, grinding in 5 man instances in full heirlooms and skipping ALL of the questing content from 1-90. If you actually try to quest from 1-90 in full looms, you still end up skipping about 80% of it due to the xp curve vs. available questing content. My RL friends sucked me back into raiding with them a few months ago, I self-RAF’d myself and dual-boxed 2 characters at a time, healer-tank, pulling as many mobs as I could conveniently reach and aoe’ing them down nearly instantly. Honestly, I could usually only reach 10-12 mobs and a geared low level tank doesn’t even need healing to solo 10 same-level mobs in WoW these days. The other trick is that a skilled and geared tank can easily outdps all the dps put together in a low level instance group, chain pulling and aoe’ing on the run, due to the broken vengeance/tank aoe changes, so you can RAF a dps and just put him on /follow, and the other 2 dps/healer will usually just ignore the fact that your RAF’d dps does nothing, because you’re basically solo’ing the instance on fast-forward with your tank anyway. This sometimes works with a healer/dps combo as well, but less often. Leveling content in WoW, as it currently exists, is pointless–while, in my opinion, encounter design for the heroic raids are as good as they’ve ever been, and definitely better than the raids in any other MMO out there. 60$ seems like a fair enough price for someone that is in a hurry to have a raid ready 90 asap, but I already RAF’d multiple 90’s so I won’t be using that service.
In summary, those 9 years of raids and 5 mans that you either skip (raids) or have been horribly nerfed (dungeons) are all of the worthwhile content of those 9 years that people aren’t already bored with, and Blizzard has already ruined the relevance of that content through repeated gear resets. From Blizzard’s perspective, if you’ve already thrown the baby out last week, why not throw the bathwater out this week? Especially if someone is willing to buy your used bathwater for 60 dollars a bucket.
*That should be,’ if someone is willing to pay 60$ to have blizzard throw a bucket of nasty dirty used bathwater on their head.’
My friend and I needed a healer for our 3s team so I reactivated Ben`s account from way back and we levelled him a Monk so that he would play with us. No way were we going to convince him to come back AND level a character, after you`ve levelled so many is it really content still?
Leveling in wow is the most boring thing someone can do. After the patch (I think it was during TBC) that removed all elite areas and especially when they introduced heirlooms and lowered the difficult of the mobs, the leveling experienced became boring and dump.
Even worse, in cataclysm they destroyed old azeroth and the new questing experience is extremely linear = even more boring. Two things bothers me the most:
a)Blizzard decided that is best for them to offer a way to skip a big part of their boring game instead of fixing it
b)The charge for that service in a subscription game, counter all the reasons people prefer sub games (equal effort for everything, 100% of content).
Half the server/guild takes the boost, half doesn’t. Drama lama
+1 to your first two paragraphs.
“a)Blizzard decided that is best for them to offer a way to skip a big part of their boring game instead of fixing it”
They already tried to fix leveling in Cata, and people hated it( Especially you, re: your comment in paragraph 2 ). Can you really blame them for giving up on that and focusing on what they do well? Think about it.
“b)The charge for that service in a subscription game, counter all the reasons people prefer sub games (equal effort for everything, 100% of content).”
Those aren’t ALL the reasons I prefer sub games.
Cata was a mistake because instead of the talent that made vanilla revamping the game, the post BC interns did it, and the result was not surprising. Blizzard COULD have done Cata right and moved the game away from WotLK and back to vanilla in terms of quest content.
Now they are just saying screw it, here is your 90, go queue up for an instance.
Actually, if you want a taste of the old Vanilla leveling, just go to Silithus. It is exactly the same (minus the elite bugs everywhere), and it sucks so hard it makes you wonder if all the zones were this bad and you just didn’t realize it. De gustibus and all that, but for my money there were very few zones that weren’t improved by the revamp.
Silithus was always, IMO, the worst zone in vanilla by a large margin, even after they revamped it.
Wasn’t Silithus in the vanilla just an empty zone without any quests, NPCs or anything?
Originally originally, yes, I think you could semi-exploit into it and it was empty. Then they kinda half-assed a release (I think), and then later with AQ40 they redid the zone again. It still sucked.
Fair enough, although I hold out hope that the talent that made vanilla WoW is working on something that moves the genre forward instead. I spent a lot of time grinding to level in vanilla WoW; my good memories of vanilla WoW are more about increased difficulty of 5 mans than about quest quality, and the fact that all raids stayed viable through the end of vanilla. Do you know anything about why ‘Titan’ was scrapped? If that team was/is so amazing, where are the tangible results? I.e., perhaps the key people from vanilla WoW left Blizzard altogether, and what we think of as the alpha team is really just the shell of its former self?
I don’t think that Titan scrapped. They just postponed it. Blizzard didn’t except wow to last so long and releasing another game now, while they still have a very successful game would be stupid in my opinion. Why to compete with themselves?
As for the above, I don’t think they tried to fix leveling with cataclysm, they tried to make it even “easier” by making it linear and also reduce the number of quests you have to do each time(1-5). You don’t fix leveling by making linear and easy and in the same time taking away from the world immersive features (Day/night cycle, elite areas, and adding lot of “quality of life” features).
Lastly, equal effort for everything, 100% of content, may not be ALL the reasons people play subs but I think is within the major ones. At least in my anecdotal statistics (guild, friends).
“Why to compete with themselves?”
Starcraft cannibalized WC2 players. WoW cannibalized D2 players. why would Blizzard stop competing with themselves, is my question. WoW’s revenues are in a steep decline, so this would be time to bring out Titan, if indeed that is the reason it was ‘postponed’.
“Lastly, equal effort for everything, 100% of content, may not be ALL the reasons people play subs but I think is within the major ones. ”
Ok, that’s your opinion; if you don’t care enough to make an argument for it, I won’t bother to make one against it, and we’ll leave it at that.
these were single player games :) one time buy. Wow has a subscription model and need people to pay/play. You could buy WC2 once and thats it..same for D2 and SC.
When wow reach a certain point of population, I think Blizz will turn it into a f2p and release titan, so they still have 1 sub game for their fans and one f2p to milk whats left out of wow.
So, where do you think that point is? They’ve shed 5 million players already.
The ‘Titan is on ice’ theory has gained credibility with me since it was announced that Blizzard actually gained about 200k subs last quarter.
Say what you will about Blizzard, but they are pretty sophisticated about following ‘metrics’, i.e. datamined player behaviour/preferences. I would not be surprised if something in their models had shown that people are trying to skip the content as much as possible (a rise in chain-dungeon-levelling, RAF, or whatever) and they simply responded to that.
Honestly, I get this. I don’t play WoW anymore, but if I did, it would be purely for raiding. If I wanted an alternative of a different class, I’d seriously consider this as I’ve already played that leveling game _many_ times and am decidedly uninterested in doing so again. Gaming time for me – as a parent of multiple small children – is extremely precious. It’d take me a long time to level said at, and doing so would preclude raiding.
No… I can definitely see reasons to do this.
Ultimately, WoW has always been three entirely separate games crammed together into one. The standard RPG leveling game, the coop raiding game, and the PvP game. There’s virtually no overlap at all – skills in one rarely really transfer, and as to “learning your class” you’ve got to be pretty damn bad at the game to not be able to learn pretty damn quick with a small amount of reading and practice. Having to spend a number of hours gradually unlocking abilities in an environment not necessarily like how you’ll need to use them is… Well, silly.
Yes, you are paying to not plat the game. But there are three different games – you’re just paying to not play one of them that you’re not interested in (and likely have already played through many tines).
Luckily something as ridiculous as this could never happen with a subscription-based game and that’s why they’re so much better than all free-to-play games which sell you all the levels that you want (and here we list all f2p games that sell you level-cap characters: ).
sells you something =/= free, so no free game can sell you level-cap characters, by definition.
P.S. To be even-handed, not only do I object to the use of the word free to describe games which aren’t free, but I object to the use of the word ‘subscription-based’ to describe WoW, as I believe subscription fees will not form a majority of the gross income related to WoW in 2014.