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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.
What makes multi-boxing fun?
Characters were designed to solo reasonably well, even healing classes. But in a group, you can often gain xp slightly more than twice as fast. With the group bonus, that means it'll be break-even at a minimum, so that encourages grouping.
However, when all the characters in the group are your own, you get ALL the xp. And with triple xp, plus the ability to actually PROMOTE your buddy an entire level, it's just a race to 70... it might be faster to multi-box outside of a party just to promote that last level or two.
The record to 60 was around 22 hours, and 26(?) hours from 60 to 70 (using an exploit where people would leave an instance to grant the remaing people full xp for mobs that were almost dead). I easily see people hitting 70 (with two characters at a time) in under 24 hours.
The 1-60 game is essentially dead already, barring arena twinks. They've already amplified the amount of XP you get from 20-60, and drastically increased the amount of faction points you get per kill/turn in/blowjob for pre-BC factions so that people can get their trinkets and crap before rushing off to the Dark Portal. Even Death Knights are starting off at some ridiculously high level.
You mean something like this?
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.
They already have with The Burning Crusade and are about to do it again with Wrath of the Lich King
FOXTROT UNIFORM CHARLIE KILO
Three fire mages, all heavy-specced into fire. Pyroblast kills any enemy, the moment they're pulled. Take 4 and a priest, and just macro all 4 of the mages to a few keys, with the priest being directly controlled, and you've got a hard to beat army.
Also, 5 shaman with all their totems out can kill anyone if they work together. It won't win high-end tournaments (because you're not "quite" as good as 5 highly skilled people) but having 5 characters that work perfectly in sync, and are built to complement eachother, are hard to beat.
Just FYI, they ARE boosting leveling speed from 60-70 when the expansion comes out.
Am I still counted in Blizzards official subscriber count, despite not having played in over a year?
If you're still paying your subscription, yes.
If not, no.
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