Pick up a WoW Leveling Guide and Enjoy the Game
April 30, 2011
For those of us who have fulltime lives outside of WoW, a popular debate
has been waged between many of us regarding using Power Leveling
services is okay or not. Some will call it blatantly cheating while
others say it's a waste of money. I may have agreed with them before I
began using Dugi's Guide.
Is it really cheating, though? It used to be that a lot of popular games came with built in cheat codes that players either had to unlock or otherwise find. These codes could do anything from giving you unlimited ammunition in a FPS to making you immortal in God Mode. I don't know about you, but I used to spend a ridiculous amount of time finding funny glitches and cheats in my old Pokemon games. It's not like Dugi's Guide gives you a code that gives you millions of gold instantly.
The concept of cheating in those games is a lot easier to define than today as we see it in MMORPGs. When you're playing a game with literally millions of other players, how one person levels or advances in the game can have a huge effect on the players around them. A great example of this can be seen in PvP.
MMORPGs don't come with any form of cheat codes, but all generally suffer from some sort of exploitable bugs or features. Developers eliminate any obvious abusable bugs as soon as they find them (in World of Warcraft, a great example is the elusive GM island which used to be pretty accessible if you were brave).
They can stamp out software bugs as much as they like, but they can't fix the way that players cheat the system. Power Leveling, or the act of using a leveling service to level your toon much faster than WoW allows players to normally, is something that clearly the developers did not intend to happen.
Still, if you've been through the game a few times, you know just how boring questing can get. After four trips to 80+, I just wasn't that into the idea of leveling a new toon.
A lot of players start out this way, too, on their very first trip. Maybe it's because they have higher leveled friends, or even just because they have a ridiculously short attention span—either way, almost all players can agree that the endgame content is a lot of fun but getting there just isn't.
Power Leveling services base their business off of this model—they saw the need, and they fulfill it for any player willing to pay. If you were to go to Google and type in "World of Warcraft Power Leveling", you would get literally thousands of results. If you go with a reputable service, you'd probably be looking at around $300.
Power leveling services work based off of a toon that you need leveled, so you have to wait for as long as a month sometimes for a person to log into your account and level your toon. During this time, you can't play on your account as if Blizzard catches two IPs logging in, you will likely get banned.
Another option that is easier for some players is to hit eBay and browse for an unwanted character that someone is selling. The upside to this is that after you purchase the toon, it's already high leveled and all you have to do is login and play. The downside is that a lot of sellers will try to scam you and the toon is already made so you have no choice regarding class, race, or equipment.
The big downside to both of these methods, of course, is that Blizzard despises both power leveling services and buying accounts. They are remarkably talented at finding traded accounts and will ban you without flinching. Power Leveling services always have a clause that says that if you get banned for using their services, they are not liable and will not return your money.
There are a few ways to level faster ingame without breaking Blizzard's TOS. The first is by doing instance running where a higher level toon takes you through dungeons and kills everything to give you a ton of XP. A lot of times you have to pay gold for these services, but they do work. Unfortunately, this is an extremely tedious way to level! I tried it on one toon, but the boredom eventually drove me to stop.
For those of us who don't have the money to fork over to power leveling and ebay services (and the patience to do dungeon leveling), there is a pretty nice alternative. In my opinion, it is the most rewarding way to level as it is compliant with both Blizzard's TOS and cheap.
If you want to level fast and be able to level quickly on any toons you make in the future, pick up a WoW leveling guide. These leveling guides have the absolute fastest leveling path available as they are created by professional players who get paid to find these routes so you don't have to.
As a bonus, you'll really understand your character as you will actually be playing it the entire time. With Power Leveling and buying toons off eBay, you get a character a lot of times and have no idea how to actually play it properly. Any good leveling guide will take you through a leveling path step-by-step for a tiny percent of the cost that it would take to get only one toon leveled through a power leveling service.
The guides used to be in PDF format, but now they're delivered ingame. They display as a UI addon with a little arrow that points towards your next quest objective—pretty nifty!
My favorite guide is definitely Dugis Guide, which is a great leveling addon for both Alliance and Horde. It basically automates al l the tedious parts of leveling and shows you exactly where to go and what to do. I've even watched movies while I leveled with this!
Is it really cheating, though? It used to be that a lot of popular games came with built in cheat codes that players either had to unlock or otherwise find. These codes could do anything from giving you unlimited ammunition in a FPS to making you immortal in God Mode. I don't know about you, but I used to spend a ridiculous amount of time finding funny glitches and cheats in my old Pokemon games. It's not like Dugi's Guide gives you a code that gives you millions of gold instantly.
The concept of cheating in those games is a lot easier to define than today as we see it in MMORPGs. When you're playing a game with literally millions of other players, how one person levels or advances in the game can have a huge effect on the players around them. A great example of this can be seen in PvP.
MMORPGs don't come with any form of cheat codes, but all generally suffer from some sort of exploitable bugs or features. Developers eliminate any obvious abusable bugs as soon as they find them (in World of Warcraft, a great example is the elusive GM island which used to be pretty accessible if you were brave).
They can stamp out software bugs as much as they like, but they can't fix the way that players cheat the system. Power Leveling, or the act of using a leveling service to level your toon much faster than WoW allows players to normally, is something that clearly the developers did not intend to happen.
Still, if you've been through the game a few times, you know just how boring questing can get. After four trips to 80+, I just wasn't that into the idea of leveling a new toon.
A lot of players start out this way, too, on their very first trip. Maybe it's because they have higher leveled friends, or even just because they have a ridiculously short attention span—either way, almost all players can agree that the endgame content is a lot of fun but getting there just isn't.
Power Leveling services base their business off of this model—they saw the need, and they fulfill it for any player willing to pay. If you were to go to Google and type in "World of Warcraft Power Leveling", you would get literally thousands of results. If you go with a reputable service, you'd probably be looking at around $300.
Power leveling services work based off of a toon that you need leveled, so you have to wait for as long as a month sometimes for a person to log into your account and level your toon. During this time, you can't play on your account as if Blizzard catches two IPs logging in, you will likely get banned.
Another option that is easier for some players is to hit eBay and browse for an unwanted character that someone is selling. The upside to this is that after you purchase the toon, it's already high leveled and all you have to do is login and play. The downside is that a lot of sellers will try to scam you and the toon is already made so you have no choice regarding class, race, or equipment.
The big downside to both of these methods, of course, is that Blizzard despises both power leveling services and buying accounts. They are remarkably talented at finding traded accounts and will ban you without flinching. Power Leveling services always have a clause that says that if you get banned for using their services, they are not liable and will not return your money.
There are a few ways to level faster ingame without breaking Blizzard's TOS. The first is by doing instance running where a higher level toon takes you through dungeons and kills everything to give you a ton of XP. A lot of times you have to pay gold for these services, but they do work. Unfortunately, this is an extremely tedious way to level! I tried it on one toon, but the boredom eventually drove me to stop.
For those of us who don't have the money to fork over to power leveling and ebay services (and the patience to do dungeon leveling), there is a pretty nice alternative. In my opinion, it is the most rewarding way to level as it is compliant with both Blizzard's TOS and cheap.
If you want to level fast and be able to level quickly on any toons you make in the future, pick up a WoW leveling guide. These leveling guides have the absolute fastest leveling path available as they are created by professional players who get paid to find these routes so you don't have to.
As a bonus, you'll really understand your character as you will actually be playing it the entire time. With Power Leveling and buying toons off eBay, you get a character a lot of times and have no idea how to actually play it properly. Any good leveling guide will take you through a leveling path step-by-step for a tiny percent of the cost that it would take to get only one toon leveled through a power leveling service.
The guides used to be in PDF format, but now they're delivered ingame. They display as a UI addon with a little arrow that points towards your next quest objective—pretty nifty!
My favorite guide is definitely Dugis Guide, which is a great leveling addon for both Alliance and Horde. It basically automates al l the tedious parts of leveling and shows you exactly where to go and what to do. I've even watched movies while I leveled with this!
Posted by Gretel Haiboek. Posted In : wow leveling guide
