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Blizzard Beefs up World of Warcraft's Recruit-a-Friend
It appears that Blizzard has beefed up their World of Warcraft recruit-a-friend program rather substantially. There have been rumors that this was coming for a while now, but the details are still a little surprising. Benefits include triple experience, being able to summon your friend from anywhere in the world, free levels, free gametime, and even a free mount if your friend signs up for a two-month subscription. All of these are subject to several quid pro quos, but it looks like Blizzard is really trying to ramp up their player base for the expansion.
You know, honestly, I wanted to multi-box WoW (ie: play as two or more characters at once). And this is just the thing I needed to actually have an incentive to start doing so.
Second one is gonna cost ya.
Come on, all the cool kids are doing it...
I just quit WoW like a month or so back. This almost makes me wish I had friends. Now I play the game of life! It sucks. Leveling is a huge grind, I'm sure there's a lot of people twinking out there, and don't get me started on the lewt and gear... One friggen blue short sleeved button up shirt I can buy at any store in the world, and it dropped off some dude I managed to down in a bar fight. He conned orange, so it was risky, and all I got was a damned blue shirt.
Least the mounts aren't so bad.
"Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted." -Groucho Marx
And I JUST had my brother sign up for WoW last Thursday...Should've waited a week.
I'm sorry, but is this really that big of a piece of news?
A few of the features mentioned in the article, like the free game time, have been there for quite some time already.
...is a butt-load more players. They're hurting. Please help WoW out. Recruit the one friend you know who hasn't played this game yet.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Haven't enough noobs died in this senseless war...Why can't there be peace between the Orcs and Humans? Someone needs to establish a UN in Azeroth. That should help.
This means that the zebra, which is one of the prizes for doing this, will become an anti-status symbol, because it will signal that its rider has levelled using triple-experience.
This also means that WoW is behaving more like real life. In real life, time is money, and so we permit moneyed people to spend their money in order to save time. WoW has so far resisted such an arrangement, because non-moneyed people screech so loud when it happens... but now that is changing.
It's not direct yet; you can't yet spend $x to start out at level y... but this refer-a-friend thing is a giant leap in that direction (ala triple experience).
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
Like in, Blizzard has the rights to your firstborn male, with a side dish of Fava beans?
The grass is always greener on the other side of the light cone.
That's a pretty decent incentive for just $15 a month. I've been playing 2 years and have been trying to get my brothers to play.
this would offer some real benefits to anyone thinking about running multiple accounts. The ninety day xp boost could get even the casual multiboxer to sixty in that time.
@work. Iphone. Anon.
Awesome! Time to fire up MMOGlider again and bot me some well equipped characters even faster!
I would love to see what the active number of players looks like these days. I stopped playing just after the first expansion. Partly because it didn't add enough for me. I won't be buying the new expansion and reactivating my account and I think there are probably a few people in my situation.
The programme sounds exciting but it seems to be just a bit to little too late.
But I still won't buy the expansion. Playing though the last one burned me out. Perhaps if there was more new innovation, and not just the same thing in a new package I might.
I'd want a more in-depth crafting system, and a means to create my own content. And a more persuasive reason to participate in world PvP. The entire culture is based around grinding for the best gear. Why? Because its there, and for no other reason. Hardly a motivating reason after doing it for 3 years.
WoW players have friends that aren't other WoW players? Who woulda thunk it?
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Blizzard has been increasingly adding out-of-game rewards for people who spend more money (WoW TCG being an example) and this is the first time that those rewards have affected gameplay. You can level three times as fast if you can get a friend to sign up, or (and more likely to happen) you decide to multibox. This shows Blizzard has lost their scruples about abusing this business model. It's only a matter of time before they start charging money for in-game content that should otherwise have been covered by the subscription/price of the game.
and a multitude of other CRPGs I simply was trying create that feeling again. Let alone the challenge required. It requires an very in depth knowledge of how the macro language works, addons, and how each class plays.
However I did find out quickly that balanced groups are far less efficient than optimized groups. One of the best sites dedicated to dual boxing is http://www.dual-boxing.com/forums/index.php?page=Portal You can also choose read articles about it on WOWWIKI starting with http://www.wowwiki.com/Dual_box // disclaimer is that I wrote the bulk of those wowwiki articles.
The primary use I have for dual boxing now is that it makes annoying classes bearable when you always have backup. Just tow a high level healer out of group for timely heals and even warriors (no healing ability and very few if any escape possibilities) become simple to do.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I hear the players are planning a recruit a server program. If blizzard buys more servers then as a reward, players will actually log in during peak hours and keep playing. I think that one would be a lot more successful.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
Tag it 'free mount'.
That way we can have a 'free fsck' next year.
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
Actually I agree with fast 20-60.
After playing one faction then the other, if you want to raise another class at least you'll waste less time on content already know!
And now my son and I can team up to rock WSG!
But I'm logging out when he starts singing songs in trade chat, no matter how many incentives you give me.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Personally, I'm waiting until they create fraternity and sorority linked servers with Pink Unicorn mounts and School Symbol Reward tabards.
Go Alpha Betta Gamma Huskies!
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Seriously, all this does is tick me off. Iâ(TM)ve played WoW for a while, and Iâ(TM)ve invited friends into the game who have enjoyed it a lot. Now people get all this free crap for doing exactly what I did before? And now people are even getting free levels for someone else playing, and I had to work for the same thing? As someone who has played the game for a long time, I find this more than annoying. Itâ(TM)s downright offensive. Itâ(TM)s heaping special treatment on new players, and ignoring those of us who already invited our friends to come play.
Maybe it's just me, but I still don't get the "race to level 70" mentality.
1. Essentially the levels 1 to 69 are the actual game content. (Well, ok, plus a couple of things you do at level 70.) That's the actual quests, story, exploration, etc, to be done.
After that, the game is over and you're essentially stuck into an endless tarpit of an endgame grind. There's nothing more to do that repeat the same few things over and over and over again, just to keep you busy until the next expansion pack is released. Not even particularly smart or diverse things. Some classes can get through months of it without pressing more than one button, or maybe two.
And whatever you get from it, is fully useless in the rest of the game, since everything else was designed to be done (and any non-instance stuff: soloed) by someone with green gear. So any "OMG, EPIC STUFF!" you get in a grind instance, isn't needed for anything except more grinding.
But at any rate, that's what happens after you played and finished the actual game. And it's not even much fun. And it makes a whole lot of people depressed and unhappy, who were perfectly content before getting stuck in it. (Just listen the drama in any raiding guild, and then you tell me if that sounds happy.)
Yet some people are apparently in a hurry to skip the actual game levels, only to get stuck in that endgame grind? And some are even willing to pay for it or risk banishment? (By buing Glider, multiple accounts, buying power-levelling from some Chinese guy, etc.) WTH? It's on par with paying someone to watch a movie for you, just so you can come back and watch the last battle in a loop, for a year. As I was saying: WTH?
So, yay, now they can compress the actual game to 24 hours. Heh.
2. The game is already fast to level, even when soloing and not being particularly good at it. You can (and God knows enough people do) get to level 70 without having every had to function in a group, or do your job in an instance. You see "healers" who never fully understood that they aren't mages. You see warriors who still think that their e-penis size depends on attacking a different mob from the rest of the group, to show how tough they are. You see hunters who still think that when the going gets tough, they're supposed to set the fucking pet on aggressive, I quote, "so it can protect the other members of the group too." Etc.
More importantly, you see people who haven't yet figured out how the game really works, and are still operating on wild mis-understandings or basing decisions on strategies on their own "what kind of things would make sense" fantasies, instead of how the game actually works. You see people who haven't yet figured out what all those icons do, and how to combine them.
I swear to god, one hunter still thought that he can walk backwards to keep a mob at a range and use his ranged attack, like with the ultra-slow mobs at levels 1 to 9. _There_ it works to take a step backwards and shoot the mob again before he reaches you. At level 70, it doesn't work. So the retard would run backwards through two extra groups, and actually be proud of his "footwork". The idea of disengaging, feigning death and letting the tank do his job (or not ending up needing that in the first place) never occured to him.
I used to even think that such people must have been power-levelled, but in the meantime I know a couple who got to level 70 fair and square, without learning anything.
Do we really need more of those, and worse at that? Someone getting to level 70 in 24 hours, probably hasn't even had the time to assimilate what all those icons do, or wth is happening around them. Assimilate it all for 2-3 character? Heh.
So ok, let's even believe that they're eager to get into the group action at the end. (Yeah, right. Most people who were swearing that grinding MC is the meat of the game, went back to soloing instantly after BC got launched.) Ok, let's believe that. What do they hope to bring to a group at that level? How do they expect t
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I play in the Shadowburn battle group. Occasionally there's this redundant array of shaman that show up in the AV games (from a different server - I forget which). They always appear in the same 5-man group and have the same initial letters in their names. I've seen them wreck havok. Immediate heals on each other, concentrated firepower, occasional res on a fallen component. Totems times five adds to the effect. All component shaman are decked out in near identical PvP gear.
I've been able to tell which component shaman has the player behind it by two ways. First, when addressed, the player will occasionally give simple responces in BG chat. Secondly, when moving, the player-controlled character will be out front followed by a group of 4 that move on top of each other.
I would imagine setting up a 5-box group like this would be kind of interesting from a technical angle. However, after watching this redundant array of shaman in action, I'm convinced the reward is being a considerable force on the battlefield.
What ends up happening is you chain your accounts together through the refer a "friend" program, so when you pay up your bot accounts each one in turn gets free time.
I had stopped playing WoW for quite awhile...Glider actually made the game fun and got me started playing it again. I never got banned.
Looks like with this new system Blizzard is trying to reinforce their "real" player base.
Obligatory blog plug: http://www.caseybanner.ca/
I'm going to go out on a limb here and disagree with you. Shocking, I know, but hear me out:
I see the whole shebang as something similar to when I played Basketball in High School. (Another shocker - yes, yes I know.)
The first 20-30 levels are like Basketball Camp. You're learning the fundamentals, mostly through solo drills and small scrimmages.
Levels 30-60 (and questing through 70) are like Basketball practice.
The sub-Heroic content is like intramural or pre-season play.
Karazhan and beyond are the regular season, and whatever the peak dungeon of the day is relates to the playoffs/championships/whatever.
This isn't about penis size, personal ego, or anything related to individual gain for me. I see it as a team effort, and my character-building time is spent towards providing something that can help the team achieve that 'cup'.
You have it a little backwards. Good gear (epic loot) is a requirement to run the end game content. Getting the gear is a way to see the content. End game raids are another part of the road.
There is a gear progression required in order to be able to do the end game raids. I know some people like to wave their epeen about and look down on non-raiders but I believe those are in the minority. You may notice them because they are vocal.
I don't run end game raids for loot - if I get a nice item it's gear that will allow me to move to the later stage raids. I enjoy the end game raid battles because they are a lot of fun.
I enjoyed the leveling game as well and pvp for that matter. I have one level 70 and two level 62s. I can certainly understand why someone may want to rush to 70. The complete class talent builds and the gear that make them viable aren't available until you hit max level.
People enjoy different things about the game. Some prefer the questing and leveling game, some prefer pvp and some prefer instances and end game raiding.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
Well, I suppose I'm not going to tell you what you like in a game. If that's how you play it, fair enough.
It still doesn't really answer my main question: why would anyone want to skip those training stages, then?
Using your analogy (not that I see it that way, but ok, I can work with that) it's like wanting to be directly in the championship, without first doing those fundamentals training. If the goal is helping the team achieve that "cup", it makes no sense. Add one complete newbie to a basketball team, and they'll lose the cup. Guaranteed.
It makes some sense if it's about personal glory, as I was saying. You know, for that "I was in the basketball finals" or "I have a level 70 in epic gear!" bragging rights. But for team work and helping the team? I'm just as unconvinced as before. See my examples in the original message, about how well some of those people actually perform in a team.
Training the player isn't even remotely the same thing as training his/her character. A guy that skipped through the game at triple speed, or in some cases was outright power-leveled, is still essentially a newbie in a veteran costume. You can take a guy off the street and put him into a <insert famous basketball team< outfit, and that doesn't really make him fit to play with them.
Ah, but maybe he has experience with another class, which he had played to level 70? Fair enough, but that's like skipping to the football/soccer cup, just because you were once in the winning basketball team. It's barely a notch above the newbie in the previous paragraph.
Plus, even a real pro sports team doesn't play only in the finals. If someone doesn't like playing the pre-season plays too, and training in between plays too, why are they in that sport in the first place?
So on the whole, I'm still quite as unenlightened as before when it comes to the race to skip levels.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Lotro is sometimes unfairly said to have no endgame content. It does, plenty. Levelling up is pretty fast but by that time there will be plenty of content left lying around, quests you never done, entire books you yet got to see and raids to complete. What was missing for sometime was direct incentive to do so but this has changed as well.
Still, people indeed RUSH to the endgame without ever actually learning to play the game. SOLO SOLO SOLO! MUST SOLO THIS MUST SOLO THAT! If there is group content then it MUST have a guardian, a minstrel and a hunter (tank, healer, dps) and they won't move without it. They never learn to play without a minstrel, they never find out just how a champion (melee dps class) can tank.
A good captain (buff class) can keep a single melee class on his feet. Two captains can keep a fellowship alive. IF they use all their skills. But do they? Captains are worsed played class in the game. In some areas the biggest debuff is fear and the captain can cure fear for the entire group every thirty seconds. So why must I constantly point this out? Why do hunters never cure poison unless you force them at gunpoint? Why do so few captains use shield-brother and even fewer guardians use protect?
They are all essential group skills that really make a difference. Protect gives a massive buff to evade/parry/block, two guardians who protect each other become unstoppable killing machines as most of their skills open up when they evade/parry/block. Shied-brother by a captain allows him to heal that person with one of his few melee attacks, increase their damage and improve their healing. Considering how few melee attacks the captain has NOT using it means he will be spending more time on auto-attack.
Or what of all the players specced for DPS, not power? A lot of classes are real power drains. So they do max damage for 30 seconds, great when soloing, but when in a long group battle that last 2 minutes they end up useless. Sure, lore-masters can restore power but not for an entire group. BUT I NEED MY DPS. Yes you do and the way to get DPS in a two-minute battle is NOT to be on auto-attack for 3/4 of it.
You can easily spot the ex-WoW/EQ players in Lotro. They are 4/6 and then spend an hour looking for a guardian and a minstel for book 1. That is a very low level instance. Granted it is the first even remote hard one but it can still be easily completed by ANY combination of classes. Provided you work as a team ANY combo of classes, of a level that can obtain the quest can complete it.
One of the prime examples of this low-dependence on optimal group layout is for instance drakes. Do you need a minstrel or a guardian in one area filled with purely with big dragons? Hell no. 6 hunters. The poor drakes die so fast there is no time for them to do any serious damage, the ranged attack is often evaded by agile hunters, it does only single target damage as opposed to the dragons AoE melee attacks and decent hunters can 'ping-pong' the dragons between them by shifting stances to dictate who is going to do the most agro. All on 'strength' stance. Then the person who gets hit shifts to 'endurance', looses agro, uses natural regen to regain health and switch back to 'strength' when ready.
The above tactic really works, it allowed you to get a crafting item by the bucket load and getting such a group together is worse then trying to get a PUG 3 raid PvMP event. It is almost impossible to get people to accept that such a strategy can work and that having a guardian or minstrel with you will only make it harder (less dps, more damage being taken). 5 hunters already do so much damage that the guardian barely has time to reach the enemy, with 6 you can land kills with a bit of luck before the enemy has even turned around.
Even the boss can be killed quickly, 6 heart-seekers == 12k+ damage for an opening move.
I fear part of the problem is the craze for "solo" content. In both Lotro and WoW and Age of Conan, you can essentially solo your way through most of the gam
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
You have to give up a substantial portion of your life to play the damn things and enjoy it.
The organization required to do high end things requires time. The grind to the high end requires time. It's like a hamster wheel. Sure the Hamster enjoys running on his wheel but everyone knows he's not going anywhere or accomplishing anything.
Thanks to eating disorders most chicks are reasonably good looking these days.
is my wife signed up two weeks ago. I'm going to contact Bliz and see if they'll retroactively count her as it's obvious we're logging in from the same IP address when we run.
But that being said, I go to bed and she's up all night, running both our laptops. Sort of hot boxing.
When you sympathize with stupidity, you start thinking like an idiot.
I got lucky.
My guild goes with the flow. There's no DKP or "special" loot system, just /rolls.
At one point they were 2 into hyjal and bt, we lost a few members over the summer, and have rebuilt and are very quickly moving back to that point.
There was no drama through any of this though. We go for the experience and socialization first, loot second. I have yet to see any "moping", and "guild politics" is a foreign concept.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Pretty much all the game has turned into 'things to do at the level cap'. And there is a lot of stuff to do.
A new player joining a server is going to be pretty much ignored until they reach 70, no one does the old content anymore. And there's no harm in giving an old player a speed-leveling alt.
This is the typical "arse-backwards" solution blizzard further breaks their game with every patch, forcing them to backpedal even harder the patch after.
For example: In early bc, people were still using thunderfury because it was better for tanking than what bc had to offer. Instead of fixing the BC tanking weapons, they nerfed thunderfury. Half a year later, they buff prot warrior base threat because of that lacking gear.
In this case, rather than offer properly balanced loot tables and tweak instances to allow continuous runs and compelling upgrades for every class at every level from 20 to 70 to actually make alts interesting to "play" rather than "power level", theyre introducing this limited band-aid.
This will not solve the greater problem of spending 2 days looking for a group for a pre-70 instance, and being lucky if you meet one person who knows how to play in a group every two weeks. The only way to do that is to make level 1 to 70 as equally compelling as the endgame raiding.
I've been everywhere, from deadmines to hyjal, and what i really miss, is mara.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Oh my god... so wow addicts will need real life friends to get a new mount? That sounds like a problem
testing
testing testing
Is not to provide the rewards. They are fairly desperate. Despite the growing number of subscriptions (or at least accounts that at some point subscribed and probably stopped paying a while ago), the game is dying. Running a census on most US servers will show you that 55% of the characters online are level 70. Which means that most (albeit, not all) others are "alts". The problem is that Blizzard has blurred the line between many classes. When it did that and allowed a number of classes to assume roles of other classes in group play, it decreased the need to have heterogeneous groups. The only time there is a reason to have specialist classes is that generalist classes cannot achieve the extreme performance needs necessary for end-game instances. But when so many are generalists, no specialists get developed, so very little cooperation exists. By doing this, they broke down the conditions which forced people to cooperate. Now all these 70s just wonder around grinding sim-city style. Most of them never see the end-game content (post T4). Sooner or later, people leave. Certainly, many are discouraged and would not recommend the game to a friend.
All these promotions are misguided. They hope that they will compensate for what broken cooperation destroyed. But they can't. They also can't really fix the cooperation issue. The smartest of the players (who understood how to best take advantage of filling proper roles with proper classes and those classes specialties) already reached the end-game and got through it. So Blizzard had to try to retain the less intelligent players by making the end-game content more reachable for the less bright players. So they buffed up the classes that are multi-purpose allowing them to push a little further (now most can get through T5 content). But this broke the necessary cohesion so much that T6 content will never be reached.
What could they have done differently? Nothing, probably. The game has outlived its era. It was developed to work on certain hardware and it will always be limited by that. On the plus side, all the people addicted to it, can get frustrated and leave. And yes, that is a plus side.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.