Life Begins at 90 – World of Warcraft Character Boosts

Life Begins at 90 – World of Warcraft Character Boosts

WoW-Boss-Compilation-Wallpaper

by David Cooke

 

So, last week, Blizzard finally released character boosts for relentless beast that is World of Warcraft. Announced a while ago alongside details of the upcoming expansion Warlords of Draenor, the idea behind it was to help new and returning players get into the new content sooner and to try and avoid the issue of ‘expansion fatigue’. As the infrastructure was in place to allow for the character boosts, Blizzard also decided to allow it as a purchasable service in the same vein as their server and faction transfers. However this decision has provoked a degree of negative reaction, most people either objecting to the price or the fact that such a service is being offered in the first place.

Not that one of the biggest and most successful video game companies in the world need it, but I want to come to the defense of Blizzard on this. There seems to be a lot of misunderstanding about the motivation, purpose and intended customer demographic surrounding the introduction of character boost. So, here, I’m going to address a few points here to hopefully clear things up for some people.

The most common criticism of the service I have seen so far has been people asking the question ‘Why would you want to pay money to not play a game?’ On the surface this seems like a fair point, we buy games to play them through, not dump a load of cash and skip to the closing cutscene, right? It’s this objection that most irks me, as it shows a fundamental lack of understanding of World of Warcraft. Anyone that has put a reasonable amount of time into WoW can tell you that the game is not over when you reach max level, far from it. I’ve heard it said that ‘WoW begins at 60/70/80/85/90.’ Now unlike the claims that ‘Life begins at 40/50/howeveroldyouhappentobeandarejustryingtodenytherelenlessandravagingpassageoftime’ this is arguably true. Whereas WoW has a good progression to max level; it’s relatively even, there’s lots do and these days it doesn’t take anywhere near as long as it used to; the really engaging content tends to sit at the level cap. Heroic Dungeons, Raids and the majority of World PvP are all designed for max level characters and these are the areas Blizzard tends to devote most of its time towards when developing new content, especially as an expansion goes on. To suggest that boosting a character to max level is akin to ‘skipping’ the game is quite frankly ridiculous as quite a lot of players will spend far more time at the level cap than they will getting there.

For Malfurion it's more a case of 'Life Begins at 15,000'

For Malfurion it’s more a case of ‘Life Begins at 15,000’

Another reason people have been objecting to the ability to shoot your character straight up the heady heights of level 90 is that they’re concerned about an influx of inexperienced players ruining the game. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’ve wanted to forcefully place my keyboard in the centre of my monitor many times because of players not knowing what they’re doing, so I understand the concern and potential frustration. However an influx of players is still going to have a net benefit to the game no matter which way you look at it. An MMO is nothing without a decent sized player base as many have found out to their peril, and though WoW still boasts a comparatively healthy one compared to many out there it can’t be denied that the game has been losing players far more than it would like over the past few years. Making it easier for new players to dive straight into the game or removing the need for returning players to spend time leveling their old character to get back into the good stuff will encourage more players. Yes, some of these players, maybe even most, may be very bad at the game but I’ll take a lot of bad players over a tiny community of elitist pros. Inexperienced players can get better after all, and anything beats two hour dungeon or raid queues because there’s simply not enough people around. Plus Blizzard are aware of this being an issue and although the talk of boosted characters having to go through a Deathknight-style intro quest have not materialised yet (though I believe this will come in Warlords of Draenor) there are still the Proving Grounds to help newer players get used to their classes and roles. There’s even the possibility of the player base being understanding and patient with new players and helping them develop… Nah I didn’t believe it either, but it was a nice thought.

Finally a point on the price and who the service is meant for. While the free character boost provided with Warlords of Draenor exists to try and encourage people to try out the game or came back from a lengthy absence, Blizzard have decided to allow boosts to be purchased for any character. Many people baulked at this when they saw the price, at £40/€50/$60 these boost don’t come cheap. Whilst this is a fair point, and seen by many as blind money grabbing from Blizzard I feel as though there’s more to the high price point than just their bottom line. Taking the other objections to the boosts I have already mentioned in mind, Blizzard didn’t want this to be a common or casual purchase. If they had set the price point lower, they would have cheapened the entire process of levelling. Imagine if the price was £5-10. Blizzard would sell a hell of a lot of boosts, and though I’m not sure of the numbers probably make a similar amount of money, if not more. This would also be bad for the game, not in the ways I’ve already covered necessarily but because the lower level areas would become utterly barren. Anyone who has levelled up a character in recent expansions I’m sure knows the lonely experience that is levelling from 60-70. With Outland almost completely dead as it is would you ever see anyone else there if people could be paying a nominal fee to skip past it all and get to the fun stuff like killing whatever ‘big bad’ was in all the marketing for the current expansion at the time? Blizzard don’t want everyone purchasing these boosts for every character they roll and so they set the price point at one most people feel is too high. This way only certain people will be prepared to pay this. Most of these will be people who take the game very seriously, and I can see this being a god-send for those hardcore raiding guilds out there. When trying to flesh out a roster of fully geared up raiders, being able to skip straight 90 cuts out a significant period of time.

An utterly 'Barren' area indeed.

An utterly ‘Barren’ area indeed.

I must say though, I’m very tempted myself by these character boosts. Though I’m not playing WoW actively at the moment I’m positive I will play again someday, at the very least when Warlords of Draenor comes out, which I’m quite excited for to be honest. I’ve done the levelling thing many times over now, so the idea of being able to skip that to get to play with the last two or three classes I don’t have at max level, or at least within reasonable reaching distance thereof, is appealing. Though to be honest I’ll probably just stick with the free one.

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