Warlords of Draenor- Scouting Report

[Deleted]

Soon is trademarked, meaning its not really "soon" but its close. Here have a guess that will probably have truth to it.

Beta goes live the first Tuesday of Feburary.

Pre Purchase goes live first Tuesday of April along with the Pre Patch which would almost be required due to the "Death Knight style starting zone"

Early June(First Two Weeks) Warlords of Draenor goes live.



Have fun.

That would be a very, very short beta.

[Moradim]

question: why is it ok to buy a level 90, but not use a bot to get to level 90?

in both cases you are doing it cause levelling isnt fun, correct? so why is one ok but not the other?

[Zorachus]

It's not boosting to max... just to 90.. there are still 10 levels to go when WoD arrives... far too many people are forgetting this

But it sounds like Blizzard will allow the boost to 90 for people that pre-purchase the digital copy of WoD early, months before release. So if the per-purchase goes up for sale in the next few weeks, you'll get that free boost to level 90. So lots of new 90's running around MoP at max level.

I for one can't wait. I am sick to death of leveling up, and I haven't created a fresh level 1, since BC days. I would like to try a Warrior class out, but no way would I waste my time, slogging through 90 levels, which I have zero joy or time to want to do. But I would like to try that class out,a and Raid fairly quickly, after I practiced the class for a few weeks, and first run old Wrath 80 Raids, and 90 Dungeon runs, to get a feel for the character, before I go into LFR SoO.

[DizzyMonk]

I cant wait to buy 6-7 lvl 90s then max out differnet professions on all of them and then corner the market on everything.

[Gray_Matter]

So after years of protecting the game against people exploiting levels and using level services they do this.
Hey kids - pay money to spend less time playing a game you are paying to play.
What does it say about their content if people pay money to skip it?
And people said you will never be able to pay for an in game advantage.

Let me paint you a scenario. I have two young daughters who dabble a bit in the game. They like to run/fly around and just explore. I have the accounts locked down but it's a real pain in the neck that so much of the game is limited to them. I have to level their accounts to get flying, etc. The money I am paying for their accounts and their subs go a small way to making WOW successful. Would I pay for extra 90's for them. Probably not but a free level 90 would go a long way to giving them more to do in the game. It's not going to take anything away from anyone else so I don't see any problems with it. It's not pay to win as I am sure they will get their arses handed to them in PVP by someone 10 levels lower.

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question: why is it ok to buy a level 90, but not use a bot to get to level 90?

in both cases you are doing it cause levelling isnt fun, correct? so why is one ok but not the other?

The problem is not botting to 90 but the damage that bots cause to the economy.

[Deleted]

I think that for ppl to get a lvl 90 they should have at least 1 lvl 90 in their account

[Deleted]

Blizzard... I've always supported everything you have done, but being able to purchase level 90 boosts makes me very angry.

If you look at my account I am about to have 16 level 90 characters... working towards having 22 characters.. 11 from each faction, covering one of each race. This is my goal before WoD. I've been working on leveling all these toons since Vanilla WoW. I've spend hundred and hundreds of dollars with race and faction changes to get my toons on the sames servers and factions. When I get all 11 classes on both Horde and Alliance this will be a great accomplishment that people may find rather impressive for the amount of time that was involved.

However, come the near future as you say... someone with a big pocket book can purchase and achieve what has take me YEARS to accomplish. This to me is a huge sell out, and just another way for the company to make a quick buck. Not to mention a HUGE kick in my private parts. Even if they were $100+ per level 90 character I am still against this feature being added.

Please do not ruin this game.

I hope this is a troll post.

[ejpaints]

I think that for ppl to get a lvl 90 they should have at least 1 lvl 90 in their account

While I understand your sentiment and partially agree they're hoping this encourages ppl who quit long ago or new players to come in. 90 is quick and easy with heirlooms now but the targeted audience for this won't have them. So I can see why they're going this route. We already had something similar happen with the SoR thing awhile back and it wasn't a complete failure so I say let it play out and we'll see how the cards fall.

I myself will likely boost a rogue for lock picking bc I don't like em and never finished one. As far as purchasing additional 90's, this option will actually be kinda nice if you want to go to another server or faction. I'd like to play horde, but my ally guild has an awesome team I don't wanna leave. This allows me to basically make a copy of something I already have on another server if I choose. I don't know if I will, but the option being there is kinda nice vs leveling a 12th 90 somewhere. Sorry but even 2-3 day leveling I'm beyond bored with those quests and dungeons now.

[maulgryve]

I hope this is a troll post.

Almost 100% assuredly it is not.

I, myself, once wished that there would be an achievement if you reached max level with every class. Now I know that will never happen since people can just purchase their toons.

[aerosyne]

Your time investment back, I put a huge value on that, so do others - it's why it's always lucrative and used in F2P games.

If your time was really worth as much as you're implying, you would not be playing games of a genre that has historically encouraged sinking dumb amounts of time for a varied amount of payoff.

It personally wouldn't affect me, but I can understand that some people have different thoughts about it. Furthermore, this is yet another step in 'paying for stuff'. That slippery slope argument people keep using? Blizzard is starting to justify it more and more, imo.

Paying for flavor items, to remove mediocre time sinks and encouraging impulse buys do not 'justify' the slippery slope fallacy. The only way anyone is going to 'justify' this stuff is to crunch the numbers, get some data and make a detailed report with proper projections and forecasts that, because things go on the shop now, more things will in the future and more things related to directly to max level character power will become available for purchase. Doing asinine things like comparing WoW to any one of the multiple free-to-play games mass-produced in Asia when they have never been comparable is just that: asinine and stupid.

When I get all 11 classes on both Horde and Alliance this will be a great accomplishment that people may find rather impressive for the amount of time that was involved.

I really don't know why people feel the absolute need to broadcast their would-be 'achievements', no matter how insignificant to the world instead of simply finding more notches to put on their mental belt. I also don't understand why people simply assume that what they do is 'great' or that it will 'impress' others or that because they're doing it, it's never been done before.

I don't know that this is true. Resources are power.

No, resources are resources. The 'power' being referenced here is Raw Character Power, which means power related to directly affecting your character in a measurable fashion that is otherwise not easily attained. Professions do not fall in this category because they are very easily attained. RCP (Raw Character Power) affects things like gear, permanent stat upgrades, personal buffs that affect your stats and so on.

Buying a level 90 confers you a level 90, which anyone can get. It does not confer a level 90 with the 'SUPER AWESOME' buff, which increases your stats permanently by 20% for having bought the character. It does not give you a free set of gear that scales while you level. It does not give you a button to insta-kill all raid bosses. It does not give you 50% default damage mitigation, regardless of source, in PvP. All these mentioned things affect RCP because they make a purchased character permanently better than a normally leveled character. Buying a 90 just gets you past content that's been outmoded, if linear and easy enough to progress through, and saves you a (at this point) relatively small chunk of time. And as I've already stated above in this reply, if your time is really that valuable, you shouldn't be playing this game.

The problem is not botting to 90 but the damage that bots cause to the economy.

And the fact that bots have, in older attempts, been reverse engineered off of the game's code in order to create specific instances of the client to bypass Warden and allow cheating. While I'm not as confident of how modern bots work, I would suspect they aren't that different and still involve running their own versions of the client to bypass Warden, which is a breach of the EULA and ToS.

But like Talonkaine I've worked my ass off to get those characters to 90 and level their professions (and work their freaking farms every day LOL) and it belittles the personal sense of accomplishment when you suddenly change course and let people drop a few dollars to get the same level.

You know, every second you spend complaining about not being a special snowflake while claiming you aren't is that many seconds not spent completing your goal, and judging by join date and post amount, you've wasted a lot of time.

Also, a 'personal sense of achievement' is just that: relegated to yourself. That means you shouldn't be giving a shit about what others do around you, and that someone else achieving the same thing as you shouldn't be breaking your ego as it clearly is at this present moment.

[Sparky_b]

If your time was really worth as much as you're implying, you would not be playing games of a genre that has historically encouraged sinking dumb amounts of time for a varied amount of payoff.



Paying for flavor items, to remove mediocre time sinks and encouraging impulse buys do not 'justify' the slippery slope fallacy. The only way anyone is going to 'justify' this stuff is to crunch the numbers, get some data and make a detailed report with proper projections and forecasts that, because things go on the shop now, more things will in the future and more things related to directly to max level character power will become available for purchase. Doing asinine things like comparing WoW to any one of the multiple free-to-play games mass-produced in Asia when they have never been comparable is just that: asinine and stupid.



I really don't know why people feel the absolute need to broadcast their would-be 'achievements', no matter how insignificant to the world instead of simply finding more notches to put on their mental belt. I also don't understand why people simply assume that what they do is 'great' or that it will 'impress' others or that because they're doing it, it's never been done before.



No, resources are resources. The 'power' being referenced here is Raw Character Power, which means power related to directly affecting your character in a measurable fashion that is otherwise not easily attained. Professions do not fall in this category because they are very easily attained. RCP (Raw Character Power) affects things like gear, permanent stat upgrades, personal buffs that affect your stats and so on.

Buying a level 90 confers you a level 90, which anyone can get. It does not confer a level 90 with the 'SUPER AWESOME' buff, which increases your stats permanently by 20% for having bought the character. It does not give you a free set of gear that scales while you level. It does not give you a button to insta-kill all raid bosses. It does not give you 50% default damage mitigation, regardless of source, in PvP. All these mentioned things affect RCP because they make a purchased character permanently better than a normally leveled character. Buying a 90 just gets you past content that's been outmoded, if linear and easy enough to progress through, and saves you a (at this point) relatively small chunk of time. And as I've already stated above in this reply, if your time is really that valuable, you shouldn't be playing this game.



And the fact that bots have, in older attempts, been reverse engineered off of the game's code in order to create specific instances of the client to bypass Warden and allow cheating. While I'm not as confident of how modern bots work, I would suspect they aren't that different and still involve running their own versions of the client to bypass Warden, which is a breach of the EULA and ToS.



You know, every second you spend complaining about not being a special snowflake while claiming you aren't is that many seconds not spent completing your goal, and judging by join date and post amount, you've wasted a lot of time.

Also, a 'personal sense of achievement' is just that: relegated to yourself. That means you shouldn't be giving a shit about what others do around you, and that someone else achieving the same thing as you shouldn't be breaking your ego as it clearly is at this present moment.

All of this is hyperbole, opinion and subjective. And if you think buying levels is not buying power, you are wrong.
Levels are more powerful than gear.

[Cirque]

Let me paint you a scenario. I have two young daughters who dabble a bit in the game. They like to run/fly around and just explore. I have the accounts locked down but it's a real pain in the neck that so much of the game is limited to them. I have to level their accounts to get flying, etc. The money I am paying for their accounts and their subs go a small way to making WOW successful. Would I pay for extra 90's for them. Probably not but a free level 90 would go a long way to giving them more to do in the game. It's not going to take anything away from anyone else so I don't see any problems with it. It's not pay to win as I am sure they will get their arses handed to them in PVP by someone 10 levels lower.

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The problem is not botting to 90 but the damage that bots cause to the economy.

First off, if your daughters are so young you should probably realize that this game is not intended for anyone younger than 12.

Secondly, if they're as young as you claim, I sincerely doubt they care that much about endgame. Are you sure you're not projecting your own vision on this game on them? I know my friends and I would have been perfectly happy to be exploring azeroth as a kid.

Thirdly, not wanting to intrude on your sense of parenting, but why are you playing THEIR game, do you really think that this is any kind of good development for your children that their dad fixes all their things including playing their game for them? I loved it when my mother finished Tetris on the hardest mode, and I loved watching the pixel firework, but I always felt envious I couldn't do that myself (..and to this day I actually can't win the hardest tetris mode). But, I worked really hard to be an amazing player in any other game, especially Mario, and my mother often had to ask me for help on levels. THAT felt good. I was appreciated for my skills and I felt accomplished at something. If my mother had to play my Mario levels I'd have been so depressed. If my mother had to pay money to get me to the last world, in which I would probably be as miserably bad as in the first world, I'd not only have been depressed but undervalued and what's more, I'd have had no fun whatsoever playing just this last world without having been allowed my own time in the other worlds. TLDR: give your kids their own time to explore and play their game and don't make them feel like they suck accidentally by not letting them get their own flying, or at least, get it together with them.

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That would be a very, very short beta.

Two months closed beta, two months open beta... Short, but workable. If they had proper internal testing, at least. No new classes and stuff to balance either, so.. I don't know. June is optimistic, but even if they make it, it's still just way too long (IMO).

[Moradim]

why dont we sell actual gear? or raid consumables? I have money and I should get what I want!

this is the logic so many people are using, and it's silly. think as a consumer, not a corporation.

[taheen74]

http://us.battle.net/wow/en-us/forum.../11307390649#1

My opinion on this whole thing.

Personally, I think there should be some strict limitations- that way I can't just buy a class I've never played before to 90 (especially if it's a tank/healing role) and ruin people's day.

[Soulfròst]

Blizzard... I've always supported everything you have done, but being able to purchase level 90 boosts makes me very angry.

If you look at my account I am about to have 16 level 90 characters... working towards having 22 characters.. 11 from each faction, covering one of each race. This is my goal before WoD. I've been working on leveling all these toons since Vanilla WoW. I've spend hundred and hundreds of dollars with race and faction changes to get my toons on the sames servers and factions. When I get all 11 classes on both Horde and Alliance this will be a great accomplishment that people may find rather impressive for the amount of time that was involved.

However, come the near future as you say... someone with a big pocket book can purchase and achieve what has take me YEARS to accomplish. This to me is a huge sell out, and just another way for the company to make a quick buck. Not to mention a HUGE kick in my private parts. Even if they were $100+ per level 90 character I am still against this feature being added.

Please do not ruin this game.

STOP WHINING. You are NOT a special snowflake. Anybody can do what you're doing if they're dumb enough to throw that much time at a useless goal. Anybody, let me say again, ANYBODY who plays the game, can do this. It takes zero skill, just a ridiculous amount of time.

The amount of people complaining here about this is ridiculous. So they make some more money out of it by giving players a noticeable convenience. THEY'RE A BUSINESS, BUSINESSES EXIST TO MAKE MONEY. Get over it. Their goal here is to hopefully gain back the players who have since quit the game, and also to bring new players to an already aged game.

Please stop the I R SPESHUL SNOWFLAK complaints.

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http://us.battle.net/wow/en-us/forum.../11307390649#1

My opinion on this whole thing.

Personally, I think there should be some strict limitations- that way I can't just buy a class I've never played before to 90 (especially if it's a tank/healing role) and ruin people's day.

Please tell me how you buying and playing a level 90 class that you don't know how to play, in an expansion where the level cap is 100, would ruin anyone's day but your own? If you group in a dungeon and suck at it, people will either A) try and teach you what to do, or B) kick you and move on. It's that simple.

Play the class/role more, practice it more, and you'll figure it out.

[Azrile]

ya i know what your saying i have 12 90s myself but it is going increase the number of bad players

This is just false. For almost every class, you learn nothing about your class leveling from 1-85. If I started a new rogue ( probably my least familiar class), I would either level by questing 1-85 with 2 heirloom daggers and killing every mob in 2 seconds with mutilate. Or i would drag along an heirloomed tank and run through dungeons spamming fan of knives. What have I learned about playing a rogue?

[Crovyn]

So it will be release June or July hmmm

[Soulfròst]

Jeez, at this point, I'm thrilled just to have news, forget what it actually says.

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I really dislike the buying 90s thing. Not enough to cry over it necessarily, but I still dislike it. The one free one for everybody was fine, but I'd no longer be impressed (for lack of a better word) with people that have a full account or one of each class, since I won't know whether they worked their ass off for it or just dropped a couple hundred bucks. I know you'd still be able to do it anyway by purchasing multiple licenses and paying for multiple character transfers, but ... meh. I just don't like it.

There is nothing impressive about this. Because literally anybody can level each class to 90. Sure it takes time but having too much time on your hands has never been anything remotely close to "impressive".

[Deleted]

STOP WHINING. You are NOT a special snowflake. Anybody can do what you're doing if they're dumb enough to throw that much time at a useless goal. Anybody, let me say again, ANYBODY who plays the game, can do this. It takes zero skill, just a ridiculous amount of time.

The amount of people complaining here about this is ridiculous. So they make some more money out of it by giving players a noticeable convenience. THEY'RE A BUSINESS, BUSINESSES EXIST TO MAKE MONEY. Get over it. Their goal here is to hopefully gain back the players who have since quit the game, and also to bring new players to an already aged game.

Please stop the I R SPESHUL SNOWFLAK complaints.

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Please tell me how you buying and playing a level 90 class that you don't know how to play, in an expansion where the level cap is 100, would ruin anyone's day but your own? If you group in a dungeon and suck at it, people will either A) try and teach you what to do, or B) kick you and move on. It's that simple.

Play the class/role more, practice it more, and you'll figure it out.

I love you

[CalamityHeart]

"This is pay-to-win!" - I guess it depends on how the biased mind looks at it, but there are several reasons why no one who uses the free boost or purchases the paid one will "win". The boost offers no advantage to someone who uses it over someone who doesn't, other than they opted to bypass gate of tedium that is five tiers of content. No one "wins" by trudging their way through five tiers of broken and cut-up nerfed content. When you can move on to the next tier without completing even half of the xpac you're currently leveling through, where is the "win"? Where's that sense of achievement that you would have gotten had you been there at the time that it was relevant? People's comparisons are tantamount to saying that it's like allowing a person to start at the last leg of a race. That's not totally accurate. It's grace. It's allowing people who got there late the option to pay a fee to start at the stage of the race where everyone else who got there on time has rested up and is waiting to start again. The part of the race that everyone is actually watching. Anything before is useless and irrelevant. It might be a pretty sight, sure, but it's useless and irrelevant. There's no "win" in doing it, or skipping it.

It's not a boost to 100, either. No one is being allowed to skip anything that's relevant. Someone who boosts to 90 will have just as hard a time as someone who didn't when they finally get there, and they'll be at a disadvantage to the people who got there first (i.e. the people who raided at least a little bit in MoP). The gear a freshly made 90 will be in will likely be 384, no higher than 425. Gear for the leveling 90, not the raiding 90. It will be harder for the boosted 90 to survive in Draenor than you, if you did anything endgame in MoP. How is that pay-to-win by any definition? It's pay-to-compete, and just barely that.

"This lets people skip too much of the game!" - I've seen stupid numbers trying to portray the percentage of "content" that is old-world stuff, as high as 95%. That's just not true, regularly. I don't have a solid number, but I doubt anything before WoD when it comes out will be even 50% of the game. You don't have to do half of BC before you can move on to Northrend, even if you only do most of the dungeons once. You don't have to do a third of Northrend on a one-dungeon basis. To my knowledge, Cata is the only expansion content whose leveling wasn't nerfed, and even then, you don't have to finish a zone before being able to move on to the next. (You can move on from VJ and Deepholm at the halfway points.) Depending on whether or not you were in Krasarang, you can hit 90 today at early-to-mid Kun-Lai, when in the beginning you would cap mid-Townlong or mid-Dread Wastes, again, doing every dungeon only once.

Unless you go through the immense trouble of actively and carefully freezing your experience, there is no possible way that someone who buys WoD is going to get the maximum value from old content, if any value. It's not 90% of the game, especially if you have multiple characters, and the prices of old expansions today reflect that.

"People won't learn their class! I'll be surrounded by (more) noobs!" - This has always been the fault of players, not Blizzard. If people don't learn the basics of playing their class and role after Blizzard and others goes through the process of supplying them with ways of teaching them (Proving Grounds, core spells tab, WoD intro questline, Icy-Veins, Noxxic, etc), then Blizzard is not responsible for their badness. It is a sad truth, though, that there will be people who will still suck at this game even if it does do everything it can to teach them. Can't blame that on this feature, though. Blame it on dummies who can't learn, like we do today, and will continue to do in WoD, with or without the boost.

People need to wake up and realize that this is not gamebreaking. It's not pay-to-win. It's not affecting you if you're not going to use it. By level 100, you won't be able to tell the difference between people who started at level 1, or who started at level 90. That, I think, is a key component of a pay-to-win feature: identifiable advantages. There are none with this feature.

This feature is a godsend for people with multiple 90s that don't feel like having to fuck around in the old world to level a different class. With this, they can start right at the start of where it matters, with a full set of abilities and talents they can learn to get the hang of from 90-100. It's a godsend for anyone who buys WoD, for the same reason.

I might use it once, after I've spent the free one. It'll be interesting learning how to use a paladin and a rogue at 90, and I'm looking forward to it.