After a Level 90 booster priced at $60 was recently spotted by WoW Insider, Blizzard has revealed some new details about this controversial addition to World of Warcraft.
As you may know, one booster will come with the upcoming expansion Warlords of Draenor, allowing players to instantly bring a single character to level 90. Additional boosters will be available on the WoW store, as Blizzard believes that some players will want to boost more than one character, but without the need to buy a whole new game.
"We realised as soon as we came out with Warlords of Draenor boost to 90, we knew that there was going to be demand for more than 1," WoW lead encounter designer Ion Hazzikostas told Eurogamer.
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It's tremendously awkward to tell someone that you should buy two copies of the expansion just to get a second 90. That's odd. So we knew at that point we were going to have to offer it as a separate service."
While paying $60 for a level booster may seem much, Blizzard believes that a lower price tag would "
devalue the accomplishment of levelling."
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If our goal here was to sell as many boosts as possible, we could halve the price or more than that - make it $10 or something. And then hardly anyone would ever level a character again," said Hazzikostas.
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But levelling is something that takes dozens if not over 100 hours in many cases and people have put serious time and effort into that, and we don't want to diminish that."
While many players are concerned that this booster may greatly reduce leveling and depopulate lower level areas, Hazzikostas says this isn't what the developers are aiming for.
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The intent here isn't to create a world where no-one levels."
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It's just to allow people who want to purchase additional level 90s, maybe they want a second or third alt and they don't have time to level it themselves because they have a family or etc - it's to allow them to do that."