Blizzard has explained why its allowing some users to spend $60 to level up their character in World of Warcraft to level 90: the high price tag was chosen to keep the value of levelling intact.

World of Warcraft lead encounter designer Ion Hazzikostas revealed that there were a variety of factors that lead to Blizzard offering players the chance to jump to level 90. 

"In terms of the pricing, honestly a big part of that is not wanting to devalue the accomplishment of levelling," Hazzikostas told Eurogamer. "If our goal here was to sell as many boosts as possible, we could halve the price or more than that - make it $10 or something. And then hardly anyone would ever level a character again."

"But levelling is something that takes dozens if not over 100 hours in many cases and people have put serious time and effort into that, and we don't want to diminish that."

Those who buy the upcoming Warlords of Draenor for $60 will automatically get the chance to create a character that starts at level 90, but Hazzikostas stated that expected demand for the ability to automatically level up to level 90 also caused the developer to decide to offer the ability separately.

"We realised as soon as we came out with Warlords of Draenor boost to 90, we knew that there was going to be demand for more than 1...It's tremendously awkward to tell someone that you should buy two copies of the expansion just to get a second 90. That's odd. So we knew at that point we were going to have to offer it as a separate service," said Hazzikostas.

Hazzikostas added that it is not Blizzard's intention to get rid of low-level characters and that the boost is meant as more of a timesaver for players who do not have the time to manually level up multiple characters to such a high level.

"It's just to allow people who want to purchase additional level 90s, maybe they want a second or third alt and they don't have time to level it themselves because they have a family or etc - it's to allow them to do that."

It is unclear when this new shortcut will be offered by Blizzard for World of Warcraft.