Posts with tag battlechest

EU players will be happy to know that for the seventh anniversary of World of Warcraft in Europe, Blizzard has slashed the price of World of Warcraft yet again, bringing the cost of WoW down even lower for a limited time. Remember, United States and assorted North American nations, these are EU copies and versions of the game.

I've said it before and I'll say it again -- lowering the cost of the barrier to entry to WoW is not a choice but rather a grave necessity. When 90 levels starts looking like a lot of content and too big of an endeavor for a new player, it doesn't matter how good the 85-to-90 content is, because people will never see it. The last thing you want is for price to be an issue when there are so many other factors to consider about the relative uniqueness of the MMO industry.

Here are the EU seventh anniversary sale prices:

• World of Warcraft Battle Chest EUR 7,49 £4.99
• World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King EUR 9,99 £7.49
• World of Warcraft: Cataclysm EUR 14,99 £12.49
• World of Warcraft mount: Celestial Steed mount EUR 10,00 £8.50
• World of Warcraft pet: Lil'K.T. EUR 5,00 £4.50

Hit up the EU Blizzard store to get these deals while they last.

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Brace yourselves for what could be some of most exciting updates to the game recently with patch 4.3. Review the official patch notes, and then dig into what's ahead: new item storage options, cross-realm raiding, cosmetic armor skinning and your chance to battle the mighty Deathwing -- from astride his back!

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GameStop has announced a brand new bundle online that gets you World of Warcraft, The Burning Crusade, and Wrath of the Lich King all for just $19.99. We don't know when the World of Warcraft Battlechest combo bundle is going to expire, but for now, customers who purchase the Battlechest from GameStop will get a copy of Wrath bundled along for free. The deals don't get much better than this, folks.

Many people, myself included, believe that WoW's barrier to entry is perhaps one of its most difficult challenges to overcome. With more deals like this, WoW can get into more hands at a lower price than ever before, hopefully adding on subscribers and new blood in anticipation of Mists of Pandaria.

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Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com's daily Q&A column where the WoW.com team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Mike Sacco be your host today.

Happy fifth anniversary, everyone! In honor of such a prestigious age for our young upstart MMO, this edition of the Queue ... has ... well, basically nothing to do with the anniversary at all. I mean, it's not as if you guys asked any anniversary-related questions. So, we're just setting today's Queue to "normal view" and takin' care of business.

Shall we?

Pemberton asked...

How come we can't fly from Darkshore to the Exodar?

When I got my recruit a friend account it came with two lovely, full-color Bradygames guide books. Each is a 24.99 16.49 value with the Battle Chest purchase. The books have descriptions of all the races and classes. They go into some detail about the zones and many of the monsters in WoW. The guides contain tips on game play and various mechanics. I found them to be completely useless. They're outdated. They guides don't really give any tips on the nuances of the game. At times they are wildly inaccurate.

Granted, they may be helpful to brand new players, though not entirely more useful than small, black and white Game Manual that also comes in the box. As a rookie I never turned toward printed guides. I asked a lot of questions from resources like Thottbot, Petopia, and of course WoW Insider. Most of what I've learned, I've learned on the fly. The beautiful, colorful images must cost a small fortune to print. It all seems very excessive to me.

We kind of already figured this (and who is really jumping into Northrend without first having finished up with Outland anyway?), but Datth has confirmed it on the forums: in order to install Wrath of the Lich King, you'll have to have Burning Crusade installed as well. Not a huge surprise, but just in case you were recruiting someone to come up to level 80 with you, make sure to tell them to buy all three versions of the game when Wrath comes out, because they'll need them.

The bigger question is: when will get a battlechest? It took about seven months for Blizzard to put Burning Crusade and World of Warcraft in the same box, but can we expect them to do it faster with Wrath of the Lich King? Probably not -- while the price may drop a bit on the current Battlechest (if you wanted to jump into the game the day of Wrath's release, it would cost you $70 total, and our guess is that that's about $10 more than Blizzard will end up charging), odds are that anyone getting in now would have to buy that and Wrath to play.

Of course, odds are that you've made up your mind about buying the expansion anyway. Anyone out there still playing with vanilla WoW? As much as Blizzard has been about skipping past all that 1-60 content as fast as possible, I wouldn't be surprised at all if they even tweaked the subscription pricing on that end to try and pull more people into buying the expansions. They already will let you try the game and first expansion for free, and you'd have to think eventually they'll try to convince the last few demographics holding out to join up as well.

Bornakk confirms that, as Robin posted here the other day, players will need Burning Crusade to complete the Battleground daily quests.

Which brings up the question, yet again, of why there would be people out there who still haven't picked up the expansion that released almost one year ago. It's $30 at Amazon right now (which means you could probably find it in a few places online for less than that), and given all of the content now available, not only in Outland, but back in Azeroth, it's really a no brainer.

Now, maybe you just didn't want to make the investment of the Battlechest, and maybe you haven't yet reached 70 and figure you don't need to play BE or Draenei or do these daily quests. Maybe 60 is good enough for you, and jewelcrafting isn't your thing. But especially with the holidays coming up, it's not surprising at all that Blizzard is placing more and more content behind the Dark Portal. If you haven't installed the expansion yet, why not?