MMO Gaming

All caps title, how cool am I?

Google alerts are perhaps one of the best things ever. For instance, they found me this article, which I would’ve have ever seen otherwise. The article comes from a guy who knows people who play World of Warcraft. Calling this guy a WoW player would shame the community, but he has, in fact, played the game, so in that most loose definition he is in fact a WoW player.

The point of this article seems to flip between “I don’t get why so many people like WoW” and “What’s wrong with power leveling?” but I’m just going to talk about the latter in this post, because he brings out a couple of interesting points.

He (Mike Musgrove) admits to using a power leveling service to skip those horrible levels 1-20 (because those are the annoying ones) so he could get to the more fun content. Mike gets a quote from the COO of a power leveling company in the article which is pretty interesting. I’ll quote it below.

“The practice is analogous to someone who maintains a beautiful garden but doesn’t always have enough time to perform all the yard work himself, and therefore hires a gardener,” he wrote in an e-mailed response to questions about the company. “Some purists might call hiring a gardener ‘cheating,’ but we believe most people are quite comfortable with it.”

My first thought when I started reading the article was that Mike was the kind of person who didn’t really like the premise behind the MMORPG so it is no wonder he didn’t like WoW. This quote though got me to thinking, is it really so bad to hire someone else to play through the crap for you (especially if you have already done it on one character)? I don’t know.

I’ve always felt that power leveling was sort of the least of evils. Buying gold is, aside from plain silly, going to mess up player-driven prices. Power leveling though…really doesn’t hurt anyone. Oh sure, the player who gets himself power leveled may suck horribly when they begin to play the character for themselves, but plenty of players suck horribly who have played their character the entire time, so that argument seems a bit off. There is the chance that such a company could rip you off, take your account name and password and you would never get it back and all sorts of problems ensue, but finding a “reputable” power leveling service would help to avoid that.

So what’s the big deal really? Is it so bad to skip the drudgery of boring content to get to the “good stuff”?

Personally I would be all for a company sponsored “power leveling” of some sort. Whether that means it cost me X dollars to start a character at X level or some sort of micro payment where you can pay X amount to gain a level. Say tomorrow Blizzard instituted a policy of allowing people pay $1 to gain a level on any character lower than level 60, assuming that account already had at least one other level 60+ character on the server. Would you take advantage of it? I would, I’d love to level some alts up a few levels to skip content I’ve done many times before. Is there a big difference between that and a power leveling service?

power leveling, blizzard, world of warcraft, skipping content