The Paid Levelling Market in Forever
Blizzard sells no level boost in Forever, but the demand that a boost product would have absorbed does not disappear with it. It turns into a player-to-player trade: runs, carries, escorts, and the quieter half of that trade priced in real money rather than gold. This is what that market is made of, what the reported dungeon experience changes do to it, and which parts of it we cannot confirm.
Nobody sells levels at a counter, so players sell them to each other
The starting fact is a design statement rather than an economic one. There is no boost on the shop and nothing like a Token, because the no-Token decision treats the road from 1 to 60 as the game itself. What it does not do is remove the group of players who would rather spend coin than evenings. That group still exists on every realm, and in the absence of an official product it goes looking for a person.
What that person actually sells is narrow. A geared character pulling a party through instances is the bulk of it, which is why running a group through a dungeon is the first service most sellers advertise. Around it sit smaller jobs: escorting a low character through an elite quest chain, clearing a camp while somebody tags, and charging gold for a summon, which sells travel time rather than experience but comes out of the same wallet.
The price of all of it is set from the seller's side first. An hour spent pulling for somebody else is an hour not spent on a gathering route, so the floor under a run is whatever that hour would otherwise have returned. The buyer works from the other end and counts hours saved. Where the 2 numbers meet is the rate, and both of them move with how fast levelling goes on the realm that week.
The dungeon experience reports and what they do to the rate
The forum thread that keeps this topic alive is about experience from instances. Testers have reported that dungeon runs return less than earlier beta builds led them to expect, and that questing compares better than it used to. We have not seen a published figure for the change and we are not going to invent one, so treat the direction as reported and the size as unknown.
The direction alone is enough to move the market. A paid run is priced on hours saved, and hours saved come from experience per run. If an instance returns less of it, the same hour of a booster's time buys the customer fewer levels, and the rate the customer is willing to pay falls with it. The seller's floor does not move at the same speed, because gathering income is set elsewhere. When the floor and the ceiling meet, the service simply stops being advertised.
There is a second effect on the seller's side. A booster is also collecting what the instance drops, so the run pays twice, and what a dungeon run returns in coin can carry a rate that experience alone no longer supports. Anything measured on a test client is provisional in any case, which is the point of reading it against how beta builds move item values before treating a number as settled.
Gold on one side of the trade, real money on the other
The same service has 2 prices, and they are not the same market. A run paid in gold moves coin between 2 players and creates none, which makes it a transfer rather than a faucet. A run paid in cash moves nothing inside the game at all: the levels arrive, the gold supply is untouched, and the transaction sits entirely outside the economy the rest of the realm is trading in.
That second half is the one with rules attached. Blizzard publishes what it considers real-money trade and what it does about it, and the detail belongs in the published real-money trade rules rather than in a pricing guide. We list the trade here because it exists and because it competes with the gold-priced version for the same customers, not because we have a view on how anyone should spend an evening.
It is worth noting what is already off the table beside it. An organised gold auction inside a raid is not permitted, and the reasoning behind raids run as gold auctions is the same reasoning that kept the boost off the shop. Levelling services survive because they are a person selling time, which puts them in the same bracket as the rest of services players sell each other.
What we cannot confirm
We do not have numbers for any of it. No experience values before or after the reported change, no rate for a run in gold, no figure for what the cash side asks, and no date on which any of this was adjusted. The forum reports are testers describing what they felt, and that is a different thing from a patch note. Where we have written that something moved, we mean the direction only.
We also do not know whether this market survives contact with a live realm. On the beta the case for paying anybody is weak, because solo levelling is reported to move quickly enough that a run saves less than it costs. Launch populations, layered zones and a crowded early quest route could change that in either direction, and we will update this when there is something firmer than a thread to update it from.
Questions
Is there an official level boost in Forever?
No. Blizzard said there are no plans for anything like a Token or a boost, and the stated reason is that the climb from 1 to 60 is the content rather than an obstacle in front of it. Everything described on this page is one player selling time to another, not a product sold by Blizzard.
Does boosting still pay if dungeon experience is lower?
It depends on which side of the run you are on. The buyer is paying for hours saved, so less experience per run means fewer hours saved and a lower rate. The seller is also collecting drops and vendor trash for the whole run, and on some routes that part alone is worth the hour regardless of what the customer pays.
Can levelling be bought for real money instead of gold?
That trade exists wherever an account can be handed over or played by someone else, and it is covered by Blizzard's published rules on real-money trade rather than by anything in the auction house. We describe it because it competes for the same customers as the gold-priced version, and we point at the policy rather than paraphrasing it.
What sets the price of a paid run in gold?
The seller's alternative. An hour spent pulling for a customer is an hour not spent on a gathering route, so the lowest rate anyone will accept is roughly what that hour would have returned in materials. The highest rate is whatever the buyer thinks the saved hours are worth, and the trade only happens while those 2 numbers overlap.
Sources
- Blizzard's own news channel, where any change to levelling or to the service rules would be published first — World of Warcraft news.
- The beta discussion boards, where the dungeon experience reports described above are being argued out by testers — WoW beta forums.