It's been awhile, so my memory might be failing me, but I don't remember Betrayal at Krondor having levels, and that was one of the best RPG's I've ever played.

IIRC you "studied" certain skills, which you could pick, and they would improve faster, and the more you used a skill the faster it improved (ala Elder Scrolls like). But I don't think there were levels, but I'm just not sure. My memory sucks these days and I may just be forgetting it.

But BaK still sits as one of my top 3 games of all genres of all time. (Fallout 3 being in that list too, while the 3rd one on the list is a toss up between 2 or 3 others)

I finally quite WoW in October 2013, having played all but a half year from February 2005. I never leveled an alt for any reason other than playing through the game. I had more than a single server would allow, and never played all the quest and content.

So no, I wouldn't pay to level a character to 90. For me, leveling was the most fun, though the end-game stuff I did with people I knew was fun enough. End-game was never the point, however.

Yup, Betrayal at Krondor only had skills. Yup, Betrayal at Krondor was pretty damn awesome - and that's from me who has played it about 4 years ago for the first time.

It really is, its stunning how this is so savvy and so exploitative at the same time.

I think you might find Dungeon Siege fitted that description in a way.
You do not really "level up", your skills just increase as you use them more and more. You can train your character to be a soldier, mage, archer or even level up a more balanced character.
It really is a beautiful system in a fantastic game.

I wonder how much it will cost to have people clear up my backlog of GoG games for me? What a concept pay money not to play games, like that makes sense.

To play defense a bit, its not really "to not play games" its to skip parts of a game to get to end game content. Having played WoW for years I can tell you many people viewed leveling as a grind to get to the joy of raiding and the super shiny stuff. More power to 'em I suppose. There is certainly scads of that available in WoW now. Personally, my raiding days began and ended with Onyixia runs and occasionally fighting the Molten Giants at the start of Molten Core. Ahh the good old days.

I was mostly being snarky. I played WoW for awhile, did some raiding, heck even took over the production of a Rogue DPS spreadsheet until yet another expansion and complete overhaul of the combat system made revamping it too time-consuming. I had also burned out on the game, improving the spreadsheet was actually more interesting for a time than actually playing the game. By that time, leveling had become trivial. Blizzard changed the xp gains to the point you could max level in under a week. I doubt its too different now.

This is for HC raiders and high-end PVPers that want to jump straight into HC progression and end-game PVPing by skipping the 95% of the game, because those 95% for them are not part of their experience.

People have been asking for this option for years, and remember, you pay what something is worth to you. I've had so much fun over the years, experiencing and exporing every meter of Azeroth and its beauty. I have completed over 10,000 quests on my only character. Yes, you read that right, over 10,000. Even if they offer the option to level up for free, I still will not do this.

That being said, I am looking forward to WoD and to the many epic adventures that have yet to come.

I've always been a huge fan of Blizzard's games overall but World of Warcraft is one that I've never played because the business model doesn't really match up with my gaming needs and expectations for me personally, however from a financial business perspective it was rather brilliant and over time it has been proven to be very successful for them. Having said that, every person playing a given game has to decide for themselves what they personally are getting out of it for entertainment value and what they like or dislike, what amount of money they are willing to spend on a game outright and/or in an ongoing basis, etc. and there is not really any right or wrong to any of it IMHO. Just about any business model a game company uses for a given game, whatever they offer is just what it is. Some people will like it and some people wont, and at the end of the day what ultimately matters is if the company can interest enough people in their product to produce a sustainable business model as long as possible from it. In that regard, WoW has been an amazing success even though someone like me isn't interested.

On the surface, as far as gameplay goes it is the exact type of game I'd enjoy and I have no doubt that if I were to play it I'd find it quite fun and addictive as it seems most people who have played it. But it's a rare occurrence when anyone puts out any game whatsoever these days that I am willing to spend $40-60 or more for and must have it badly, in fact it almost never happens to be honest. I go through phases where I play games for a few days/weeks/etc. and then don't play any at all for days/weeks/months, and so a game like WoW and the financial commitment a player of the game has to make don't really match up with the habits of someone like me. If they had a pay by the hour option available it would match my style better (not that I'd consider paying by the hour mind you, I wouldn't), but I wouldn't pay for something by the month and then not use it, so it never made sense to me to buy that game as I'd ultimately have played it for so many hours/days and then had it sitting idle for days/weeks and be funnelling money to Blizzard just to keep the account active or whatever. A buddy of mine figured out he has given Blizzard around $1900 since the game came out and I could never do that. I don't think all the games I've ever bought in my life add up to $1900!

But I don't need to either. The price to play the game just doesn't work for me upfront or ongoing but that's just me. It works for loads of others and that's why it's so successful and brilliant IMHO. So this new option is just yet another option people have I guess. Some people will find value in paying $60 to have the easy button to a high level character and find it is more worth it to them in value than it is to spend weeks/months of their time to work a character up to that point and so they'll fork out the money to get that benefit likely. In the end if people are willing to pay that kind of money for such a thing then it is worth it to them and they perceive the value in it to actually do it, and Blizzard's business strategy works once again. If it doesn't sell, it's not really a loss to Blizzard much and they could abandon the idea. So there's no real harm there I don't believe.

Sadly, despite loving Blizzard's previous games though I probably wont buy any more of them from them due to the current DRM, online requirements, cloud storage etc. nature of the evolution of their approach to gaming. I don't fault them for it, but it just doesn't work for me personally. At the same time, it's no surprise to me that people continue to enjoy their games and they continue to be successful overall.

I'd personally like to see a return to putting out games that appeal to a wider audience including single player strong stuff, DRM-free distributed beyond the borders of Battle.net but that seems just so incredibly unlikely to happen that despite fond memories of games past, I probably wont ever buy any newer titles they release in the future. Huge backlog of both DRM-free games and Steam et al games already.

However, if I were interested in WoW though and ok with spending the money on it monthly etc. - I'd want to play from the start and experience the whole game through all levels, so the easy-button level 90 thing wouldn't appeal to me personally. Not even for $1 TBH.

I completly agree with your opinion. I have played wow for some 3-4 months and i really think WoW is something special that happened to me in my gaming life. BUT i really dislike the model where monthly sub counts even when you are not playing the game. For example i pay 15$ and then happens to have a lot of work and i can`t log in to play the game for three weeks...but gametime expires and that makes me feel like just wasting 15$ per month for not playing the game. I enjoyed the game like no other mmorpg, but i`ll wait for a better model in a distant future. And yeah, if i want to play the game i would start from level 1 to feel the story...so i don`t like insta 90 at all, not to mention it`s 60$ lol.

This was meant to be a reply @ skeletonbow , but something went wrong :)

The 10k in quests isnt nearly as impressive as the "my only character" in my book. Seriously? I must have had about 30-40 characters on multiple servers. Certainly spent 95% of my time on one server but still had a good 8-10 characters going at once. One character.... you have the patience of a saint or my latent ADHD has yet to be properly diagnosed!

Out of curiosity, what class/race combo?

I play on and off every once in a while (LFR certainly made that easier) and I'm perfectly ok with Blizzard charging that much money for insta 90. I believe that would be a service only the most hardcore of players would use and that also means that earlier zones won't be completely desolate. Not to mention if you really want to level fast, heirlooms are still completely viable option.

I don't play any more, but jesus, imagine a raid full of lv 90 noobs that don't know how to play their character, all looking at their skill bars saying stuff like...."wonder what this button does?"

LLLLEEERRROOOYYYYYYYYYYYY!!111111111!!1!!11!1ELEVEN!!1!1!1

http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/character/sylvanas/Elenarie/advanced

Aiming to get the Challenge Mode gold achievements in the next few months, though it is a bit hard to find people that don't require 9/9 experience or actually care to do a proper run.
LFR is already in the game, and most folks that don't want a challenge do that difficulty. Afterwards you have Flex which is exactly like Normal but easier in terms of difficulty, then Normal, and finally Heroic.