Good for us? certainly a goldmine for Blizzard

I was sitting in the maintenance shop this morning, waiting for something to break. As I was waiting I was thinking, mostly because it beats staring at the wall counting the number of cinderblocks they built the place out of.

I thought about a lot of things, but one thought that struck me really hit hard. As in, hard enough to get me to kick the dust off this blog again and do some writing.

Instead of wandering thru the thread of how my mind came to be asking me this question, I’m simply going to put forth the potential goldmine Blizzard is not tapping and see what you folks think.

In the game World of Tanks there are three kinds of XP to be had. Locked, Free, and Convertible.

Locked XP is exactly what it sounds like. It’s XP earned by a given tank that must be spent on that tank.

Free XP is a bit different. 5% of all XP earned is automagicly granted as Free XP, which goes into a pool that is available to be spent on any tank you wish. It doesn’t sound like much, but it adds up after a while.

Convertible XP is any XP earned by a tank that is already maxed out on leveling. It goes into a separate pool that can be converted into Free XP, if you desire, for real world cash.

Now imagine that Blizzard adopted a similar plan for WoW.

Locked XP earned by anyone leveling.

Free XP earned as a 5% bonus on top of any XP earned on any toon.

Convertible XP earned on any toon with it’s leveling locked. At max level players would get the choice of the extra gold per quest or earning convertible XP.

People that want to level the normal way would not be effected at all.

People that have more money than time could convert XP earned on their main to quickly level an alt to play with friends. 

People that are on their 38th alt and simply can’t make themselves level thru Wrath again could “Free XP” past it and move on to Cata.

Say for instance that the only thing you play for is high end PvP, or end game raiding… say that you despise leveling and just suffer thru it to get to play the actually content you want. Well, this would let you spend this expansion banking convertible XP that you could use to bypass the questing next time out. (For a price of course)

Thats only one example, I’m sure others can think of lots more.

As to the argument that it would have characters showing up at max level without a clue how to play their class, it’s not a good argument for many reasons. Here are two: 1) leveling thru questing is primarily a solo Dps exercise. It doesn’t teach group tactics, healing skills, or tanking ones for that matter. 2) You can already grab pet battling at level 5 and (in theory at least) level to max using nothing but that.

This is not to say that people won’t get to max and not know how to play, it’s simply stating that it already happens.

All in all it would give Blizzard another knob to tweak on the leveling process to adjust the speed while at the same time giving them what could be a very solid revenue stream once WoW finally does go free to play.

Just a thought, but seriously, why hasn’t this happened yet?