So we got a surprise today (well, at least I did, I’ve been kind of busy lately and haven’t been paying much attention to what’s been going on in World of Warcraft) in the form of pre-orders and character boosts.

A lot of people claim the $60 price tag for the level 90 character boost is too much, but is it really? Levelling takes a long time, especially if you don’t enjoy the process, and it could be well worth your time to make the purchase.

Lets do the math.

Effect June 1, 2014, the minimum wage in Ontario is going to be $11/hr. CAD, or ~$9.90/hr. US (I miss the days when the CAD was worth more than the USD). This means that if I were to take a minimum wage job, I’d need to work a mere six hours and four minutes to pay for the character boost. Lets call it 7 hours.

Now, I know there are a lot of speedy levellers out there, but I doubt anyone can do 1-90 in under 7 hours. So considering how much time you’d have to spend levelling a character, it’s probably not a bad deal.

Not to say that you’d be using the time you’d otherwise be spending levelling to work at minimum wage, but it’s a good baseline. Any increase in how you value your time, and any increase in how many play hours it takes you to level, will dramatically improve the paid character boost.

Lets look at this another way. Everyone has some instinctual idea of what their time is worth, and that changes depending on your needs. Some weeks doing absolutely nothing on a Saturday except talk to friends on Skype and watch TV is well worth the time even though you have a Finite Elements Method assignment due Tuesday, or you could be using that time to work. Or blog. Or clean your room.

I digress.

Lets use another example: gas. A lot of people (e.g. my dad) will go out of their way to get a good deal. According to some internet research, the Jeep my dad drives gets about 16 miles per gallon city, and 23 miles per gallon highway. Or about 14.7 L/100km city and 10.2 L/100km highway. My dad will sometimes drive 17 km (round trip) out of his way to get a “good deal” on gas.

According to the internet gas was about 130.9 cents per litre today. That 17 km round trip brings him to a gas station that is 1-1.5 cents per litre cheaper than normal. If he fills up 90 litres of gas, he saves about $1.35 on gas. Assuming an average driving speed of 80 km/h, he values his time at $4.61/hour if he gets highway mileage (given the route it’s pretty close to it).

Now he doesn’t do this when he has better things to be doing, but I figured it made for a good analogy. Plus, I’ve always wanted to do that math.

Now I’m not saying we should all just skip the levelling process entirely, and realistically we’re not going to spend all our new found free time working, but it does provide us with a baseline to say “yah, this could be worth it.”