|
Issue Date: January 8, 2006
Games
Is it cheating?
Casual gamers pay to advance to higher levels.
In "World of Warcraft," your character climbs levels to face monsters like the vicious dragon Nefarian, above, within Blackwing Lair on level 60.
|
Say you want to play "World of Warcraft," an online game that lets you compete in real-time combat with thousands of others in a medieval kingdom inhabited by dragons, mages, orcs and demons. Problem is, you're stuck doing the lame missions your newbie character is assigned. You want to see the sort of action accorded to players who have advanced a few dozen levels, but that takes time, which mere mortals often don't have.
You're not alone. Luckily, there's Power Gamers Matrix (PGMx.com), a service that specializes in "power leveling" for online gamers. Here, you can turn over your character to professional players who will return it to you after advancing it in the game and endowing it with the type of honed skills that red-blooded gamers kill for.
Climbing to higher levels in which you can take part in dungeon raids can be extremely laborious. Typically, an online role-playing game like "Warcraft" has 60 levels; reaching endgame can take 18 days of non-stop play. Casual players think they're only cheating themselves if they shell out hard-earned cash on a game they'll never get to finish.
But such transformations don't come cheap. Rob Bartlett, who runs PGMx, says to "power level" a single character can cost anywhere from $30 to more than $1,000. "We cater to people who have more money than time," says Bartlett, who began offering services in 2001. The 29-year-old former RadioShack store clerk says he racked up about $1 million in sales last year from PGMx.
The site, which attracts as many as 1,000 clients per month (including a few celebrities Bartlett won't name), provides power-leveling services for popular subscription-based online games like "City of Villains," "Star Wars Galaxies," "Lineage II" and "Dark Age of Camelot."
The only way to reach the top level is simply to play the game. Bartlett, who lives north of the border, says he can't afford to pay Canadians $10 an hour to punch keyboards, so he outsources the work to Romania, China and the Philippines. Gamers who work for Bartlett play a single character for an entire shift, then pass it on to the next worker, and so on. Jumping the first 10 levels takes a day, but the top levels require more time.
"It's not rocket science," Bartlett says, "just a matter of knowing the tricks and putting in the time."
-- Paul Bond
|
