Power Leveling Your Characters - Hot or Not?

Power leveling - Loved and hated by many. Passionate believers on both sides advocate for it and curse at it. So what is it?

Once upon a time games game with a variety of cheat codes which would allow a variety of different goodies to be had by one's character. FOr example, Doom: enter a code and you're in God Mode. You'll take no damage. Enter another code and you'll have infinite ammo.

In other game you might enter a code and now your character is much higher level. Of course, since these are single player games no one really cares if you cheat your way to the end. Besides, a little God Mode was great fun from time to time, especially after getting one's butt kicked repeatedly.

Things are a bit different in the modern day MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game.) These games require, usually, a monthly fee, have thousands of people playing at any one time, and what you do can easily have some effect on other players.

There aren't, usually, any cheat codes either. Those that pop up are quickly stomped out by the Developers. So a replacement had to be found and one of the replacements is Power Leveling.

Power leveling is the process of getting your character leveled faster, generally much faster, then the normal game system allows. World of Warcraft, for example, has the 70 (soon to be 80) levels. I think they're great fun to blast through, at least the first few times, but some people have other opinions.

Perhaps they have several high levels characters and are tired of the leveling grind. Perhaps they're fairly new to the game, but all their pals are playing the high levels and they want to join in. And maybe they just have a short attention span, little interest in the game, and they just want to jump to the end game and play there (and will usually quit soon after. )

Can you see a need here? Some people did and so the Power Leveling services were born. Basically the service takes your money, plays your level 1 character, and a couple of weeks (real time) later you get a brand spanking new level 70 (if it's for World of Warcraft) character. If you paid even more money that character might even have some killer gear.

Fnding a power leveling service is easy. Go to Google and enter something like this: "WoW Power Leveling" or "Guild Wars Powerleveling" or... Well, you get the idea. Be prepared to spend at least $100 for WoW power leveling, a lot more if you want all the goodies.

An even faster route is to just buy a character/account off of ebay.com. Just hop over to ebay, find an account you like, pay a few hundred bucks, trust the seller, and you have a new character to play.

There are a couple of issues here. One is that if you're new to the game you will find that despite having a brand spanking new level 70, maybe even with nice gear, that you will get your behind handed to you by every monster in the game. Teams also just can't stand players who have no clue about their characters, so you won't last long in teams before being punted. And don't even think about PvP.

The other issue is that Power Leveling and the buying of accounts are both against the Blizzard terms of service, so they are within their rights to ban you from the game. You don't get you money back, either. The odds of it happening are small, but who cares what the odds are if it happens to you?

So the plusses of the two methods above are that you get a high level character (for whichever game,) in far less time than you could do it yourself, at the cost of a few bucks. The downside is that you'll get pwned by everything until you get your character figured out. Oh yes, plus the risk of a ban.

Another method of power leveling (in World of Warcraft,) that’s far safer for your account, requires either two accounts or a helpful high level player who can clear dungeons rapidly. High and low levels team up, the high level kills everything in the dungeon and the low level cleans up on the XP.

It’s tedious, but you’ll level fast. You won’t have a clue as to how to play your higher level character, but you’ll have the gear from the dungeons. Spend some time learning your character and you’ll be ok, with no chance of a ban.

For the average player, who doesn’t have a helpful guild willing to power level him, and isn’t willing to shell out the dough (and risk a ban) there is a very solid alternative.

Grab a copy of a WoW leveling guide, for example and power level yourself. It's not as fast as the dungeon grind, but it's far superior to figuring out a fast leveling path by yourself. A good guide will show you a step by step path to getting leveled fast at a fraction of the cost of buying a power leveling service or a character off ebay. You’ll also have the benefit of having a much better understanding of your character, having played it through all the levels.

There are several of these guides available. Some are Adobe PDFs, so you’ll switch back and forth from the game to the guide, or grab a clipboard and print the guide. Check off the steps as you go.

Other guides are in-game, even to the point of displaying on your main screen and literally pointing to the next place to go.

Check them out, see what works for you, and get leveled fast!