Pay to not Play (Gaming)

by roland , Tuesday, February 25, 2014, 13:42 (3924 days ago) @ Cody Miller

Oh look:

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2014/02/world-of-warcrafts-60-level-boosts-reflect-important-economic-reality/

You can pay to instantly level up your character to level 90. Why would you do this if the game was fun?

I'm not at all going to try to justify why anyone should pay to boost a character but, to be fair, WoW and other MMORPGs are a little different in that there seem to be two different games contained in one. The main game (leveling, grinding, questing, etc.) and the end game (raids, whatever else happens I don't know because I never got that far). It's always seemed weird to me that you can't really participate in raids without a very high level character (seemingly billions <--exaggeration of hours of work). As a fan and player of WoW I never had the level of commitment required to get a character up to a high enough level to participate in raids, and that sucked for me and for Blizzard because my interest in the game faded. But that doesn't mean I don't want to be a part of the end game stuff, I just wasn't able to.

And no I wouldn't have paid to boost my level, but I can understand if some people wanted to.

It seems like the right thing to do is something like the solution you offered, give people a menu option to play what they want. From a main menu, or otherwise, the player selects what they want to play from a selection of "the main quests", "raids" or, say, "competitive multiplayer" (and none of those options should require payment)?

And isn't that kindof sounding like Destiny?