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.

Comments

Multi-boxing

[CogDissident]

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.

Re:Multi-boxing

[bugnuts]

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.

Wishing...

[AioKits]

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.

Re:First hit is free...

[Cornflake917]

No! Friends don't let friends do WoW.

Shameless

[michaeltoe]

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.

Re:I still don't get it

[Phrogman]

Thats the norm for all MMOs it seems. View the actual game content that you are *supposed to be enjoying* as "grind", then get to the "end game" and whine there is nothing to do. I have seen this in many people in pretty much every MMO.

Its a power thing for people I think. They don't want to compete at anything less than a level field (or preferably one that favours them) and they don't want a challenge. Its perhaps a reflection of the instant-gratification nature of our society on one hand, and the competitive nature of our society on the other. I read an article recently that was saying that pretty much every aspect of North American society is viewed as a competition these days. We have somehow concluded that we are losers if we don't compete at everything and don't win at it as well.

At the same time few players are willing to admit they have anything to learn when it comes to playing MMOs as well - so they fail to learn from their experiences and fail to learn from others. As a result the often suck very badly when playing in groups. I am sure it seems even more apparent in WOW given the number of players present.

I enjoy playing the game to play the game - leveling up a character to max means simply that I am likely to stop playing that character. The "End game" content of most games seems to be grinding to engage in PvP - and quite frankly I have no desire to associate with the typical PvP oriented player. The vast majority are complete fuckwit assholes, and they occlude the decent and competitive PvPers I wouldn't mind playing with. People also take PvP competition far far too seriously I think. PvP was fun in its earliest incarnation in DAOC for instance, until they introduced Realm Points and Realm Point Skills and suddenly we weren't fighting the enemy because they were the enemy, we were fighting them so we could personally gain more power and abilities. That ruined RvR in DAOC in the long run.