Everyone wanting to emulate WoW's success has absolutely destroyed PC gaming. Watered down content and gameplay that is engineered to be inordinately time consuming? No thanks.
Don't you mean WoW brought a new level of quality to PC gaming? There's so many garbage games out there released early, buggy, completely broken, etc with patches coming months later. WoW decimated those shitty companies by opening our eyes to a game that worked.
Paying your way into accomplishing some of the in-game goals without putting any effort into it sounds like pay to win to me. There is no rule that says you have to win the UltimateGoalOfTheGame (tm) to qualify.
Leveling to max level isn't an accomplishment. You can level any character while watching Gilligan's Island reruns the whole time. Players who believe it's an accomplishment are those who wasted hours of their lives leveling multiple characters before this service was announced.
I played World of Warcraft on and off for a few years. I was a pretty hardcore player from the launch of Burning Crusade through to near the end of Lich King and came back casual for a while for late Cataclysm and early Pandaria. I know the game pretty well and have friends who still play it.
So I can say with confidence that you would be absolutely mad to pay for a boost up to level 90 with prices like that (and if you are a new player, mad to pay at all).
There are two types of people now who might be starting out at level 1; new (or returning-after-a-gap-of-years) players starting their first characters, or veterans levelling an "alt" (a secondary - or indeed tertiary or beyond - character).
If you are a new player, then going through the level-up process is important and you should not skip it. First of all, this is where you learn how to play your character. Most end-game content involves group-play and if you have a brand new player at the level cap staring at a hotbar full of unfamiliar abilities, it will be a long time before you are actually competent enough to play alongside others. The level-up process, during which you are introduced to abilities one or two at a time, takes you at least part of the way along that learning curve for your character. It also exposes you to a lot of the game's lore, if that's your bag (I always found WoW's lore a bit boring and juvenile, but some people like it).
And if you're a veteran player, then there are lots and lots of things you can do to accelerate the level-up process for an alt without handing over real-money. I levelled up three alts while never taking them out of "rested" state (meaning they were getting double xp from kills). Heirlooms allow you to boost the rate of xp gain even faster, to the point where 1-80, by the launch of Pandaria, was just stupidly fast. I doubt even a brand new character takes over 100 hours of game time (or indeed, anything like it). Alts certainly take much less.
So yeah, I can't imagine Blizzard would have too many takers for this. Or at least, I hope they won't.
You learn very little in the leveling up process in today's game. People who say otherwise are stubborn and believe you should suffer the slow process like they did in 2004. Once you hit max level everything changes. There's guides, macros, priority lists, addons, etc that allow you to learn your class quickly and efficiently. Yet WoW still has tons of bad players. So forcing someone to spend extra "wasted" time leveling isn't going to fix them.
flip side: never played WoW, and I have no interest in trying because so many people have been doing it for so long that I'm pretty sure I would flounder about for a year getting killed all the time and called nooby nooby noob noob. This new way I could pay $60 and at least get my foot in the door. Much more tempting.
Your first time through would probably be better suited without using the boost. This will give you a feel for the game itself. The character on the other hand changes completely at max level so learning to play from 1-90 doesn't have much benefit.
This is like if baseball has responded to the 1919 Black Sox Scandal (players paid to throw the World Series) by simply selling the World Series trophy to the highest bidder each year. (Yankees jokes aside.) Does that fix the corruption, sure. Does it save the sport, no. "Pay To Win" is the opposite of a game, it is just normal life.
Pay to win would indicate that you are given an advantage over other players. You have no advantage at 90. You're still responsible for learning how to play and acquiring gear. There's not a single thing in WoW you can purchase for real money that will give you a competitive advantage over another player.
play the game and achieve all those things glaringly pointless.
There is no "achievement" in WoW. If you want a game that involves skill rather than "pay to win", learn to play Chess or Go or any of a number of other things. You cannot pay $60 and suddenly become a master level, because it requires learned skill.
Play the game because you enjoy playing the game. If people are willing to pay $60 to not play the game, it's not a very good sign of the game being any fun. But someone ELSE paying $60 to not play the game, does not remove YOUR ability to play the game if you actually do enjoy it.
Bzzt. After you've leveled your 4th, 5th, 6th, etc character the content you experience while leveling is old. It's awesome the first and second time but it becomes dull after that because it's nothing new. Thus the boost, the heirlooms for extra experience and recruit a friend. There's also the returning player. You come back after 4 years because your friends have talked you into the playing again. Oh no, you're stuck at level 30. Now you have to spend 2 weeks leveling before being able to play with your friends. Most people will be like screw this and quit or decide not to come back at all. A boost to 90 gives an incentive to return. Keep in mind you still have 10 levels to go once this service is enabled because 100 will be the new cap.
One way is to spend some thought and create content that can be played on numerous levels and with group OR solo play.
Absolutely true! Mentoring and Sidekicks aren't the only option. Some games have also created "mercenaries" that allow you to play dungeon content with NPCs that act as your party. Though, the problem with that is that you are still playing a massively multi-player game solo, which kind of seems pointless (given there are better single player games).
I'm still a fan of mentoring though. They could have created a "Legacy Dungeon" mode (with some incentive) for higher level characters that would mix them (artificially de-leveled temporarily) with lower level players (friends or random) that are still leveling up. Give both something to do.
Well there are many possible ways to deal with it, but they seemed to have taken the monetize it solution.
At the end of the day you still need to level your character for max level content. Most mentoring systems didn't grant you spells or abilities that the max level character had. Only the stats. So you would be completely broken when it comes to doing true endgame content in a system like this. Thus the reason for buying a boost.
The second amendment if the Gov't becomes so far out of touch that it uses drones and energy weapons against it's own citizens without just cause. Pretty easy decision considering how effective guerrilla tactics are against our military.
Proof or get out.
Seen the Snowden character assassination even here on Slashdot. "Look at that traitor with the dodgy face, not the highly unconstitutional government surveillance program which basically takes a huge dump over your privacy rights!"
Not that it would do much good here, but God bless 'em for tryin'!
How exactly is it unconstitutional? Because you believe it is? Laws written 100+ years ago do not cover new technology and monitoring. New laws need to be created and currently the NSA, FBI and CIA have been given permission to conduct surveillance. It's been going on for 50 years... You give up most of your privacy by connecting online. You are leaving your house electronically. Want privacy? Encrypt.
The Red Paint was, likely, what the navy calls Red Lead. It's a lead-based primer used on ship to protect against corrosion. Perfect for stopping alpha and beta particles. The white paint is also, likely, lead-based but suitable as a base for regular paint.
I just wish they would use lead-based paint when painting the lines on roads...the new, non-lead stuff wears off too quickly. But, the eco-folks would probably have a bear (not literally).
We have to protect the children who crawl onto highways and eat the paint off the roads.
While there is non human fluctuation in CO2, currently humans put out for 32 Gigatonnes of CO2 per year. Far exceeding the amount can go through the carbon cycle in a year. CO2 traps IR. Clearly, the current rising trend is due to humans. Without the excess CO2 we have been emiting, we would not be experiencing the current temperature rise.
This is why we need to napalm China and India. We'll enter an Ice Age nearly overnight.
Yeah, fine her $100 and call it a day. I mean, after all, she already watched Monster-in-Law. Hasn't she suffered enough?
Most of those videos cost in the range of $10 - $25,000 dollars. Blu rays for Netflix can cost their company $100k each. Because the lifetime of the media can be re-used the initial overhead is fairly big.
If people let enough methane escape to change the climate, it would be a short term disaster and teaching opportunity. It seems better than releasing enough CO2 to get the same change in temperature, because with CO2 the the effect would last so much longer.
If we limited reproduction of humans or wiped a 3rd world country off the planet we'd also significantly reduce CO2 being released as well. We're creating the problem by just living which is far worse than oil companies do. Also temperature change? Have you looked at the weather lately? Global Warming is in full effect here in Minnesota.
My wife worked at the Toronto general for a few years. During her stay she did care on dozens of girls between the ages of 15 - 18 that all had brain tumours. Of all of these girls most were heavy cell phone users. This at the time had prompted these observations to be submitted to a university (don't remember which one). Now, this could have been a complete coincidence since girls of that age usually do spend lots of time on their phones.
And that's what the research is telling us. It is a coincidence. I can't think of a single teenager not having a cell phone in the last 5 years unless their parents are either overly strict or they lost their privileges.
Any given program will expand to fill available memory.
