WOW Power Leveling - How To Power Level - Is It Too Risky?

Is Powerleveling Too Risky? That basically depends on one question: How do you want to powerlevel your character? Whatever your reason is for wanting to powerlevel your character, 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 the risks involved in the powerleveling options that you have.
How Do You Want to Power Level 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. 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 it 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 specializing 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 and sell 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 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 two guides I suggest are: Brian Kopp''s Alliance Leveling Guide and Joana''s Horde Leveling Guide The moderate price (a one time fee with free updates) is definitely worth it.
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.
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 your account and then give you nothing in return. If you are going to trade, 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 if you have questions or problems there is someone to help. 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 without wasting a lot of time doing it. This is by far the safest and fastest way to level your characters that will not get you banned.