Warlords of Draenor is inclusive

World of WarcraftWarlords of Draenor is about as inclusive as WoW expansions get: each copy comes with a magic wand to wave at one of your characters and bring them right up to level 90.

It wasn’t a surprise to learn that Blizzard would be selling an identical boost via WoW’s in-game store, but the price turned heads: $60.

Blizzard have assured players that they’re not running a “profit maximising” scheme – but instead ensuring that WoW’s levelling zones don’t become NPC-only wastelands.

Essential to new players WOW power leveling

Blizzard will price World of Warcraft level 90 boost at $60 to avoid “devaluing” leveling

Why do people want to jump straight to 90? These are most likely people who are raiding who want to play alts but can’t be bothered spending hours and hours going back through all that content again. Someone who isn’t playing end game would presumably want to actually play the game they’ve bought, and on top of that can still level another character to 90 with WoD. So it’s for people who want two or more alts.

We’re talking about the hardcore then. So this is trading time spent playing alts on the zones with time spent raiding. Where are these people going to be most valuable to the game? I would suggest it’s doing public dungeons/raids and making up the lower end organised raid groups, since they’re not essential to new players WOW power leveling and probably wouldn’t be filling the Barrens anyway as they’ll be power-leveling as fast as possible.

I would suggest that it’s in Blizzard’s interest to have hardcore raiders with level 90 alts then. They feed the in-game economy and keep the part of the game which requires other people populated. It’s not like they’re losing the subscription fee by speeding the process (unlike first-time players), because they’ll still be paying it regardless of what their character is doing.

What about the guys who already levelled a bunch of alts? They’re going to be pretty upset that someone else can just pay to emulate all the hard hours they put in. I don’t know if it would be enough to force them to leave, but bad feeling from those guys would probably filter down through the raiding guilds. I’m not sure how much Blizz care about that, but my guess is that’s what they’re talking about when they say they don’t want to devalue leveling.