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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
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.
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.
WoW has completely broken down the barriers of stereotyping and social class systems. Nerd play it. Preppies play it. Girls play it. Grown-up professionals play it. High-school football players play it. Military service members play it.
I have a number of friends who, though addicted to WoW, somehow manage to keep up with otherwise completely no-stereotypical lives.
The stigma video games as a "nerd" activity is all but dead to my generation.
You mean something like this?
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.
It seems like the number of people online at any given time has shot way up lately... And lots of people have re-activated their accounts to get ready for the expansion.
This program seems like a money grab to divert some of the cash that goes to power-leveling services back to blizzard.
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.
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.