Alex said:
All the account info has to match. When I sold my alts off my account (just moved my Warlock to another), it went fairly smoothly and it worked out for the guy well, but you will not be able to buy one and transfer any of it an existing one.
That's what I said. So my friend who has a mage wants a shaman -- doesn't this essentially mean that if he wants to buy a shaman, he needs to buy an account that features both a mage and a shaman? You'd end up paying more because it's an account with at least 2 level 60 characters, but I guess that's offset by the fact that you can sell your old account to make up the difference. Or you can just alternate (play mage 1 month, play shaman the next month).
Still wouldn't pay one red cent for anything virtual like that or gold, though myself, that's the damn fun of the game.
Buying gold makes sense at a lower levels, IMO. It takes an insane amount of time for someone at 35-40 to grind out the money for a mount -- you're way better off just coughing up 20 bucks for 100g. At the endgame, gold purchasing is just retarded, though. "100g for $20" won't get you anywhere when you want an Epic Mount or a Rep-based epic like The Unstoppable Force. At that point, you're paying $40 for a weapon, $150-200 for a mount, etc.
At 60 gold-buying used to make some sense when it was dirt-cheap, but for some reason prices have gone through the roof. I can't really understand it, either. By all accounts, farmers have only gotten more efficient (now using bots instead of paying people to play)....their costs have gone down, yet their prices are 2-3 times what they used to be. It will be interesting to see what BC's inflation factor does to prices.
Buying a blue/green-equipped Level 60 character ($150-$200) still makes a good deal of sense, except for the fact that you won't have a clue how to play them if it's not a class that you're used to. Whenever I rolled premade on test servers I was usually overwhelmed, particularly by caster classes that had like 30 different spells. The 1-60 grind teaches you to play, but there's a lot of redundancy too of course. I still feel like they should go the route of previous MMO's where you can skip the first 20-30 levels if you already have a maximum level character......that's essentially what people try to do by buying a LVL 60, but they are just skipping way too much.
If you could go straight to Level 40, or even level 1-39 with a rested double XP bonus, I bet it'd cut down a lot on eBay selling. I can't stand playing any of my alts unless they're Rested.