Haves and Have-nots

A player named Schwick keeps a very exhaustive FAQ on everything there is to know about the Burning Crusade on the European World of Warcraft forums. One thing that is particularly interesting is what will happen to the players who do not buy the expansion. Priced the same as the full game at just under $40, it is conceivable that not everybody is going to buy the expansion. And that will create two distinctive populations of haves and have-nots.

Now the expansion does two things: It changes rules, and it adds content. So at first I had assumed that the rule changes applied to everybody, expansion or not, while the added content would be available only to the people who paid up. Unfortunately it isn't quite that simple. Some rule changes have to be applied to everybody. For example the PvP honor system is going to change, with the old relative ranking system going out the window, and a new cummulative system being installed instead. It is simply not possible to keep a part of the population on the old system, thus everybody will benefit from this change. Also changes to the user interface, like a rumored new LFG system, are going to be available to everybody.

But the major rule change of lifting the level cap is *not* going to apply to everybody. If you don't pay, you will be stuck at level 60. And it is unclear whether you will be able to use the new talents (which costing only up to 41 talent points you would be able to afford even at level 60) if you didn't buy the expansion. Somebody without the expansion will be able to use socketed items and gems from jewelcrafting, but he won't be able to become a jewelcrafter himself, and obviously the best socketed items are bind on pickup items found in the Outland zones, which the have-nots can't even enter. Without the expansion you will be able to *see* fellow players running around as Blood Elf or Draenei, but you won't be able to create one yourself. You won't even be able to enter the new starting zones for these races, although I'm not quite sure how that is going to work, as WoW normally doesn't have "zoning" between zones on the same continent.

In summary, if you don't buy the expansion, World of Warcraft technically remains pretty much as it is. Unfortunately as a have-not you will be in a minority. So if you are level 60, you have a big problem. Most other players will have leveled on, and finding enough level 60 players to go to places like Molten Core will be really difficult. You could theoretically try to organize a guild where all players don't have the expansion, but such a guild wouldn't be very stable, with many people buying the expansion sooner or later and moving on. The whole environment is set up in a way that you will be strongly encouraged to give Blizzard your $40.

Of course all this is only true if you are not Chinese. The biggest group of have-nots is the millions of players on the Chinese servers, which won't be seeing the Burning Crusade expansion before 2007, if ever. Blizzard is currently earning very little for each of the millions of Chinese players, much less than they earn from the rest of the world, and so they are negotiating for a bigger share of the pie with the Chinese distributor, holding the expansion as hostage. But even without the Chinese, Blizzard will probably sell about 2 million copies of the expansion before christmas, at $40 each, which makes a nice little stash of money.