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Blizzard surveying WoW players about selling standalone Level 90 upgrades

Cipherr said:
You are talking about 10 years ago. Today is not Vanilla, lets not act like it is. Back in Vanilla the only raiding was 40 man, which not only required more people, but was the ONLY form of end game raiding. There were fewer healing and worthwhile tanking classes, certain class specs were useless (Molten Core mobs being fire immune) and there was no avenue for casual raiding like LFR, 10 man raids and flex. Consumables worked different so farming mats for raids was a bitch and a whole load of other things.

Its a whooooooooooooooooole different world from Vanilla, you cannot make that comparison today. Having a few alts these days nets you fuck all for an advantage, except maybe growing more stuff on your farm. All it does now is save you time.
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Not talking about Vanilla, dude. You obviously haven't been around when 20 druid raids were used to get world firsts during the Lich King era.

Milennia said:
Wait what? This is till the case.. Why do you think all raiding is casual and doesn't matter?
25m world ranks aren't casual, you need 2 alts minimum as a requirement (i had 4 that i could play at that level).
For years i raided 5-7 days a week during progression, all the way up until march of this year. I know loads of former guild mates that still play, and it is the same deal. Theres just less top guilds now however.
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Blizzard does not make microtransaction features for 1% of its population that fight for world firsts.

The rest just go into scrub whatever LFR mode. This is what this pay feature is aimed at.
 
Millsington said:
Instead of investing in making content people want to play, make it a slog and then charge to skip it.

Modern game design scares me sometimes.
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I don't think that's really fair. Blizzard puts more work into making their content relevant and interesting than most other MMORPGs, I'd say. They are only considering this option because of the demand from really hardcore players, I'm sure. The kind of people who want to be able to play every role in a raid should the need arise and who want to max out all of the trade skills.

I still don't like the idea, but I can see why they would consider implementing it.
 
Friggz said:
I miss vanilla WoW =(.
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I assure you, you don't.

WoW is significantly more playable now that it was in 2004. While I will never argue about how much better pre-Cata Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor were(sorry, I really don't care for the Hot-Topic makeover that every Undead settlement has, or the lame pirate music that now plagues the once serene deserts of Tanaris and Silithus), it's just nostalgia talking when we refer to vanilla being so much better than current WoW. Most classes were broken, some were just useless, others were redundant, and still others were stuck with horrific and nightmarish mods like Whispercast, which always resulted in some Rogue/War spamming my chat box with "kinhs kinsg kinsg Kinsg KINSG". Seriously, fuck that mod, and fuck 5 minute Blessings, and fuck Retribution being 100% useless except for Blessing of Kings.

Back on topic though, I do not support this. Not because the frankly silly pay 2 win concerns, but because part of leveling is learning how to play your class. Sure, some people just don't get it at all, but they usually don't get all that far. If people are able to get 90's right away, there's going to be a new demographic of bads.
 
Shining Sunshine said:
Not talking about Vanilla, dude. You obviously haven't been around when 20 druid raids were used to get world firsts during the Lich King era.



Blizzard does not make microtransaction features for 1% of its population that fight for world firsts.

The rest just go into scrub whatever LFR mode. This is what this pay feature is aimed at.
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Indeed it is, and we did have leveling options open to us that others didn't.
However an instant 90 affects the entire community, whether blizzard aims to or not.
Im positive GMs would pay for alts to fill out the roster, or the entire guild will just have every class at max level. Even if its 40$ a pop.
 
Peachblossom said:
so in addition to buying the battle chest, mists, and warlords AND an additional $15 per month you still have to pay more if you want to be able to play additional characters without doing lots of pointless leveling? It would be like another game either charging you or making you do 30 hours of tutorials before you can play another character.
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quite a racket they've got going. I guess if people see value in it, more power to acit-blizz or whatever the company is called post vivendi reverse buyout.
 
Rex Griswold said:
Back on topic though, I do not support this. Not because the frankly silly pay 2 win concerns, but because part of leveling is learning how to play your class. Sure, some people just don't get it at all, but they usually don't get all that far. If people are able to get 90's right away, there's going to be a new demographic of bads.
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Not calling you out on anything but if this were to happen it'd be after the level cap was raised to 100 in Warlords, so they'd still have a significant amount to go through still. I think a few others glossed over that.
 
TTOOLL said:
Leveling in WoW is fun the first time, afterwards is a chore I would gladly pay to skip.
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Yeah, the leveling game wasn't really designed with good replayability in mind. The Cataclysm revamp was poorly planned out too. Instead of fixing this, Blizzard just kind of covered their ears and hoped it'd solve itself.

Normally, I hate this kind of stuff. But in this case, I'd be nothing but supportive of new players who wanted to skip the leveling game this way. It really is awful.
 
I might finally play WoW. The amount of content is overwhelming for new players. I was still playing Ragnarok back then
 
I'm kinda proud I was so casual I never hit max level and I played since closed beta in 04.

Running the same dungeon over and over and over and over and over to build up dkp to spend on a loot drop was just not something I will ever be interested in.

The MMO really needs something other than poopsocking the end game. Maybe its just the nature of the genre though.
 
I don't see the problem with this. The catch will probably be that you would have had to leveled at least one character to 90 prior to using this service for alts.
 
Origami Superman said:
Never played WoW, but on average how many hours would it take to level from 0 to 90?
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On average probably a week for most, couldn't say how many hours as it varies with heirlooms and boosts/method.

I usually knocked it out in about 2 days with help, although i usually had my characters leveled for me, only done it twice.
 
Stuff like this sort of reflects poorly on the whole levelling experience and the real focus of the game. As someone who has levelled a few characters to 90, I'm going to say never again. It's okay until about 25 (although you can steamroll that now) but it just goes downhill after that.

They keep trying to add in things that aren't raiding, but they always fall flat. They keep trying to make raiding more accessible, but the problem is that raiding just isn't fun. I remember Greg Street once said "WoW is a game about upgrading your stuff." Yeah, no. I'm done with that treadmill chasing an imaginary carrot.

If they could give me reasons to think about actually living in the world, so to speak, then I'd be all for it. If it's just going to be another 5 levels of hurdles before the dungeon/raid grind, then I'm pretty much out for good.

They should be asking how to make the game fun, not how much are you willing to pay to leapfrog all those years of shitty hurdles they put in.
 
Rex Griswold said:
I assure you, you don't.

WoW is significantly more playable now that it was in 2004. While I will never argue about how much better pre-Cata Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor were(sorry, I really don't care for the Hot-Topic makeover that every Undead settlement has, or the lame pirate music that now plagues the once serene deserts of Tanaris and Silithus), it's just nostalgia talking when we refer to vanilla being so much better than current WoW. Most classes were broken, some were just useless, others were redundant, and still others were stuck with horrific and nightmarish mods like Whispercast, which always resulted in some Rogue/War spamming my chat box with "kinhs kinsg kinsg Kinsg KINSG". Seriously, fuck that mod, and fuck 5 minute Blessings, and fuck Retribution being 100% useless except for Blessing of Kings.

Back on topic though, I do not support this. Not because the frankly silly pay 2 win concerns, but because part of leveling is learning how to play your class. Sure, some people just don't get it at all, but they usually don't get all that far. If people are able to get 90's right away, there's going to be a new demographic of bads.
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Nobody learns shit while leveling anymore. Questing is an absolute joke with not a damn thing that's dangerous and doing dungeons is just a bunch of people in full heirloom gear bulldozing the place, not to mention the xp already comes in insanely fast that you out level half the content Blizz intended people to do at X lvl anyways. I just did LFR last night and saw at least 8 of the dps under 50K dps. You can't have worse players than what already exist. And it's all Blizzard's fault.
 
Can I just say the people that ruined the game (if you feel that way) is the players. They're the ones that mine everything before its ever released, they're the ones that made spreadsheets and ringed every last bit of experimentation out of the game. I hope for their next mmo blizzard put a stop to this stuff somehow.
 
Maybe I'm one of the rare few who actually enjoy leveling up my characters, but I can understand the appeal of just jumping straight ahead to the new expack content.
 
Rex Griswold said:
I assure you, you don't.

WoW is significantly more playable now that it was in 2004. While I will never argue about how much better pre-Cata Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor were(sorry, I really don't care for the Hot-Topic makeover that every Undead settlement has, or the lame pirate music that now plagues the once serene deserts of Tanaris and Silithus), it's just nostalgia talking when we refer to vanilla being so much better than current WoW. Most classes were broken, some were just useless, others were redundant, and still others were stuck with horrific and nightmarish mods like Whispercast, which always resulted in some Rogue/War spamming my chat box with "kinhs kinsg kinsg Kinsg KINSG". Seriously, fuck that mod, and fuck 5 minute Blessings, and fuck Retribution being 100% useless except for Blessing of Kings.

Back on topic though, I do not support this. Not because the frankly silly pay 2 win concerns, but because part of leveling is learning how to play your class. Sure, some people just don't get it at all, but they usually don't get all that far. If people are able to get 90's right away, there's going to be a new demographic of bads.
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So fucking this... Sure the community was tighter, outside of guilds compared to now, but outside of that vanilla was so obnoxious. 40 man raids ment doing your damnedest to make sure everyone was there and that you had a strong enough core that you could carry 10+ people, because chances were incredibly high you would be carrying atleast 10. Oh and waking up to an alarm clock if you wanted to rank out in PvP was a fucking blast. -_-
 
It seems that leveling in WoW at this point is easier than breathing. I guess it'll be a nice option for them as the game gets closer to being F2P.
unbias said:
So fucking this... Sure the community was tighter, outside of guilds compared to now, but outside of that vanilla was so obnoxious. 40 man raids ment doing your damnedest to make sure everyone was there and that you had a strong enough core that you could carry 10+ people, because chances were incredibly high you would be carrying atleast 10. Oh and waking up to an alarm clock if you wanted to rank out in PvP was a fucking blast. -_-
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A time when men were men, and jacked off while raiding with one hand if they had obtuse raid duties.
 
So many arguments here are broken because this game isn't primarily about getting to max level (which this offer wouldn't even do - it'd just get you caught up to where current players are, 90, on the way to 100). It's really about what you can see, do and experience AT max level - ideally with other players. That's the core magic of the game, really. For those who place the most value on the levelling process, that isn't going anywhere by the sound of it.

This purchase wouldn't allow you to 'win'. It'd get you onto a semi-level playing field with current players and allow you to experience the game with thousands/millions of other players, as intended - the real draw and allure of an MMO, imo.

As a player since 2005 with a bunch of 90's, I'm totally fine with this.
 
Millsington said:
Instead of investing in making content people want to play, make it a slog and then charge to skip it.

Modern game design scares me sometimes.
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They did make content that people wanted to play. The problem was that it's not content that people want to play for the fifth time. They could stick more content at those lower levels, sure, but that's a drain of resources from making content for the 90-100 run, which will be directly relevant to everybody.
 
I have absolutely no problem with this whatsoever. If people want to pay to skip the 1-90 leveling then that's all fine with me.

The leveling process never taught you how to play your class which is why LFR is the way it is these days.
 
Shining Sunshine said:
Not talking about Vanilla, dude. You obviously haven't been around when 20 druid raids were used to get world firsts during the Lich King era.
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No such thing as a time I wasnt around:
YzDxjcW.png
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My point isn't that though. Its that its ridiculous to point to that as a reason that having alts is some massive advantage today. You are talking about a few isolated scenarios from years ago, or a scenario of world firsts tier guilds which represents less than a 10th of a percent of the player base.

That's ridiculous. In no way does having alts 10 levels off of the level cap represent an advantage to 99.9% of the player base today.


unbias said:
So fucking this... Sure the community was tighter, outside of guilds compared to now, but outside of that vanilla was so obnoxious. 40 man raids ment doing your damnedest to make sure everyone was there and that you had a strong enough core that you could carry 10+ people, because chances were incredibly high you would be carrying atleast 10. Oh and waking up to an alarm clock if you wanted to rank out in PvP was a fucking blast. -_-
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So refreshing to see some sane folks. The rose tinted nonsense about Vanilla is just insane. It was great in comparison to other MMO's at the time, but the game is better today by a country mile than it was then.
 
Dresden said:
People who never paladined in vanilla/most of TBC will never understand.
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BC Prot paladin was far and away considered the easy mode of tanking.

I don't really feel a lot of pity for people who play the class that can do two of the most useful things in the game and choose the spec that everyone else can do.
 
mclem said:
They did make content that people wanted to play. The problem was that it's not content that people want to play for the fifth time. They could stick more content at those lower levels, sure, but that's a drain of resources from making content for the 90-100 run, which will be directly relevant to everybody.
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This. A lot of game design theory has to be re-thunk when dealing with MMOs.

Dresden said:
People who never paladined in vanilla/most of TBC will never understand.
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*raises hand*

Fucking 5 minute blessings…

Worse still, I didn't seem to realize at that time how wrong it all was. I did it gladly, just out of gratitude for being brought to the raids.
 
In the Lord of the Rings Online, Turbine was selling a thing that would level your character up to level 50 (which is only about halfway to the cap, which is 95) for 4995 Turbine points, or around $40-50.

Presumably they picked 50 because then they want to sell the person all the expansion packs....
 
Ether_Snake said:
The most fun I had playing PC games was playing WoW's Warsong Gulch, Arathi Basin, and that other one in the winter, and Battlefield 2. That was a lot more fun and less of a hassle than doing quests/instances/etc. It was nice that the whole game wasn't only that, so you could still enjoy a break from this here and then, but I really liked that part of the game.
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The most fun I had was when Honor System was introduced. Tarren Mill vs Southshore was GLORIOUS. When the pvp rank system was launched, a friend and myself spent countless hours hunting other players on Burning Steppes for honor points.

That was incredibly fun. But yeah, Warsong Gulch is also nice, at least before getting mounts.
 
I would rather them just let people skip 60-90 content. Because that shit is a chore.

What I would prefer is a cool class specific quest chain. One that starts at 60 and over the course of the questline power levels you to 90. The quest would be specifically designed to teach players how to play their class. Each quest would reward new skills, and highlight useful ones, and teach people how they work. It would also have NPC companions to teach people how to work in a group situation.

Of course with 11 different classes, this would probably be a lot of work, and it wouldn't get them any money.

I don't really mind a pay for a 90 though. Wouldn't do it myself on principal, but I understand why others would.

Fuck outlands.
 
$10 to avoid the grind is pretty reasonable. WoW is almost a decade old and is fast approaching its twilight years, the mindless leveling to crank out another maxed level character is more of a barrier at this point. Newcomers opting to do this would deny themselves of the whole experience and lose out on learning the fundamentals, but returning players gets to dive right into the endgame content ie. the only thing that holds their interest at this point - it all evens out the way I see it.

Of all the things Activision Blizzard has done, this would be probably one of more reasonable things.
 
Dragonzord said:
BC Prot paladin was far and away considered the easy mode of tanking.

I don't really feel a lot of pity for people who play the class that can do two of the most useful things in the game and choose the spec that everyone else can do.
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Some of us did our time and did it well. Near the end of Wrath, after months of getting plate DPS gear kicked my way in lieu of sharding it, when my raid leader keyed up on that magical night and said "Ed, we're overstocked on healers tonight, would you mind if I asked you to DPS instead?", I was just sitting there like..
35423578.jpg
.

I haven't looked back since. I'll start tanking or maybe healing again come WoD, for some reason I never found the idea of holding aggro on a poorly voiced purple dragon or random panda/panda-feeling to be very epic.
 
Dragonzord said:
BC Prot paladin was far and away considered the easy mode of tanking.

I don't really feel a lot of pity for people who play the class that can do two of the most useful things in the game and choose the spec that everyone else can do.
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Then you don't really have any valid opinions on this topic. If you have a spec that isn't viable, the game is broken. You can't be biased, as you just admitted you are.
 
Rex Griswold said:
I haven't looked back since. I'll start tanking or maybe healing again come WoD, for some reason I never found the idea of holding aggro on a poorly voiced purple dragon or random panda/panda-feeling to be very epic.
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The active mitigation model does away with the concept of aggro entirely, really. It's more about knowing your limits and pushing them against an unrelenting onslaught of attacks moreso than it is maintaining a threat rotation just so the mages don't get squished.

It's more or less the best change MoP made to the game, even if it took them forever to figure out how to do it right (and bears and warriors still feel iffy).
 
Valnen said:
Then you don't really have any valid opinions on this topic. If you have a spec that isn't viable, the game is broken. You can't be biased, as you just admitted you are.
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How? Some things do things better than others. You can't expect to be able to do everything. Ret Paladins were so broken during WOTLK. Now everyone wants to be Sephiroth and swing their 2 handers, heal themselves, wear plate, and have an invincible bubble. I play an Arms warrior and know that I shouldn't be able to beat an equally geared fury one in raw dps because I know I have a lot more survivability in other instances.

And I have a ret paladin as well, before you even ask, but I know that he's more useful as a healer or tank, so I switch him to holy because gear's not hard to get.
 
Khezu said:
I would rather them just let people skip 60-90 content. Because that shit is a chore.

What I would prefer is a cool class specific quest chain. One that starts at 60 and over the course of the questline power levels you to 90. The quest would be specifically designed to teach players how to play their class. Each quest would reward new skills, and highlight useful ones, and teach people how they work. It would also have NPC companions to teach people how to work in a group situation.

Of course with 11 different classes, this would probably be a lot of work, and it wouldn't get them any money.

I don't really mind a pay for a 90 though. Wouldn't do it myself on principal, but I understand why others would.

Fuck outlands.
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that would be a good way to do it
 
For those who see this as "paying to not play the game," let me give you an analogy:

Imagine if every Mass Effect game came with every previous one packed in, but every time you wanted to start a new character, you had to start with Mass Effect 1 and play through every game in order.

Now when there's only one or two Mass Effect games this might not be a big deal, but imagine if this carried through to a fifth or sixth Mass Effect game. At that point they've maybe added ways to make your subsequent plays of the older games quicker if you've cleared everything once, but still, you'd probably eventually want the option to just skip straight to the most recent game, wouldn't you?

That's basically what Blizzard's doing here- they're giving you the option to skip games 1-5 so you can start at game 6.
 
There is no way they will do level 90 bumps for $10 when they are charging $10 for worthless pets and $25 to $30 for things like server and race/faction changes. I'd expect it to be way more of a ripoff in accordance with all their other prices.

I'm interested in their new expansion but their shop pricing is absolutely insane for a game that is still charging $15 a month.
 
Suzushiiro said:
For those who see this as "paying to not play the game," let me give you an analogy:

Imagine if every Mass Effect game came with every previous one packed in, but every time you wanted to start a new character, you had to start with Mass Effect 1 and play through every game in order.

Now when there's only one or two Mass Effect games this might not be a big deal, but imagine if this carried through to a fifth or sixth Mass Effect game. At that point they've maybe added ways to make your subsequent plays of the older games quicker if you've cleared everything once, but still, you'd probably eventually want the option to just skip straight to the most recent game, wouldn't you?

That's basically what Blizzard's doing here- they're giving you the option to skip games 1-5 so you can start at game 6.
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It's still true. It's also why I paced myself leveling alts when I played to 5-9 months after my last one to keep from burnout, and why constant RAIDINGRAIDINGRAIDINGRAIDING week in week out in T6-T8 did its part running me off from the game. I can't imagine it now how the game is.
 
Dragonzord said:
How? Some things do things better than others. You can't expect to be able to do everything. Ret Paladins were so broken during WOTLK. Now everyone wants to be Sephiroth and swing their 2 handers, heal themselves, wear plate, and have an invincible bubble. I play an Arms warrior and know that I shouldn't be able to beat an equally geared fury one in raw dps because I know I have a lot more survivability in other instances.

And I have a ret paladin as well, before you even ask, but I know that he's more useful as a healer or tank, so I switch him to holy because gear's not hard to get.
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If you have a DPS spec that can't be competitive, the game is broken. Period. There is never any valid reason for making it so one spec can never ever beat another when they're both DPS specs.
 
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