WOW Powerleveling - What Is It? How to Do It and What Are The Risks?

by Katie Slawitschek

Powerleveling is the process of leveling quickly in computer role playing games such as MMORPG (a massively (or massive) multiplayer online role-playing game) It is also known as speedrunning (playing through as quickly as possible).

What are the Risks? The answer basically depends on one question. That question is, how do you want to powerlevel your character? Whether you want to powerlevel your character because you want to start a new character, you’re bored with your old one, you want to catch up to your friends or just get to the fun levels, you need to find out what your options are. The bottom line is you want to get them leveled faster and you want to find out what risks are involved in the powerleveling options that you have.

How Do You Powerlevel Your Character? You basically have 3 options.

1. Pay for a Powerleveling Service

Why use a powerleveling service? One reason is that it is the fastest way for you to get past all the excessive and grueling hours it takes to level your characters so you can get to the fun levels. You are also getting professional gamers to do the leveling for you. Most leveling services assign 2-3 people to your character who know how that specific class is played. Powerleveling is mostly done by grinding and sometimes by simple questing. Cost varies (and can be expensive) depending on how much powerleveling you want done. One of the drawbacks of a service is that when you are not doing the leveling, you miss out on the game experience of leveling your own character.

2. Acquiring Used Accounts by Trading or Buying

Another way to get a character to a certain level would be to acquire accounts by buying or trading accounts. This would mean acquiring an account from another player who no longer wants his/her account. You can buy, sell or trade used accounts through a company that specializes in this or you can use auction sites and forums to trade accounts. Trading accounts is however against WOW's game rules.

Note that the companies that buy, sell and trade accounts can be costly. Also, in regards to Auction sites, the trading market has been restricted by having the biggest sites recently closing user accounts and auctions that have WOW accounts for trade. Ebay, one of the first to start this concept, decided it went against the gaming company’s terms of service. There are still some auction sites out there but beware they may be filled with gold farmers. There is some hope of another company launching an Ebay type secure trading site in the near future that will provide a safe and secure environment to buy, sell and trade accounts.

3. Do it yourself

You can power level the traditional way, by killing monsters (grinding) and doing quests and missions. This can be very time consuming and sometimes frustrating if you don’t know what and where the quests are, what quests to do and which to avoid. So to speed up this process, you can use powerleveling guides which will enable you to streamline the process by doing your own leveling and still have the experience of playing the game. There are a number of guides out there for Horde and Alliance but only a few good ones. The moderate price of the guides I can suggest (a one time fee with free updates) is definitely worth it. The two guides I suggest for this are Joana's Horde Guide and Brian Kopp's Alliance Guide. You can read more about these guides by clicking here World of Warcraft Powerleveling Guides.

What Are The Risks Involved In These Options?

1. Powerleveling Services

Having your WOW account banned by Blizzard is a potential risk. They have banned over 100,000 accounts due to powerleveling services. One way for them to find out about accounts being powerleveled is by tracking the IP address for accounts that are from China. This is where most if not all powerleveling is done. Another risk is having your account compromised. This is due to the fact that you have to give out your login name, password and the server you are on to the powerleveling service in order for them to powerlevel your character.

Suggestions if you are going to use a Powerleveling Service:

Make sure you research the powerleveling service you are interested in by reading the material on their website thoroughly, especially their policies and privacy information. You also want to be leery of services that are announcing anything to do with banned accounts that have used their services. Many services will say they can’t be responsible for what happens to your account after you have used it However you should at least make sure that the service will at least issue refunds if something happens to your account while they are in control of your account and if it is determined that it is their fault.

You want a service that is honest. Those are the ones that aren’t afraid to tell you the things you should know. For example they may state in their website that by using their services you are going against the User Agreement stated by Blizzard or they are willing to say they have offices in the US but most of our employees are located in China. Many companies may want to hide the fact they work out of China. As with many other industries, services are outsourced to different countries because it would cost too much to do it in the US. So beware of powerleveling services that offer cheap prices as this means employees are not getting paid enough and it may affect how they do their work.

2. Trading/Buying accounts

There are many Forums where players go to trade accounts. Having someone take your account in a trade and give you nothing in return is a risk with trading through forums. Generally players post information about the character and account they want to trade and then complete their transactions while communicating through instant messaging. These forums can be filled with scammers who will take the accounts of other players and then give them nothing in return. If you are going to trade it is best to use only US accounts.

3. Do It Yourself

The only risk to this method is spending money on a guide that is worthless. Pick a guide that publishes testimonials on the site. Make sure they have customer support contacts so you have someone to go to if you have questions or problems. Powerleveling with the help of a good powerleveling guide is a very cost effective and safe way to powerlevel. You also get the pleasure of experiencing the game but don’t waste a lot of time doing it. This is by far the safest and fastest way to level your characters and it will not get you banned. The two best guides for this are Joana's Horde Guide and Brian Kopp's Alliance Guide. To read more about these guides you can read blogpost World of Warcraft Powerleveling Guides.