OrtizGames

World of Warcraft released an exciting promotion this week called “Recruit-A-Friend” that completely breaks their game. Read up on it here.

Now, there’s a big principle of game design that is “make your players feel like what they’re doing is meaningful”. You want to have a balance to difficulty and skill and make sure that the stretch to the end of the game is a challenging but rewarding one.

With this new promotion, a newly recruited player playing grouped with a friend earn triple experience on all quests and monsters, allowing them level up almost insanely fast, ensuring that well within the 90 days of the promotion they will have hit at least level 60. And their bluebar is unaffected, simply pushed back constantly as they gain more group XP. Also, for every two levels they gain, they can grant one level to any grouped character one level below them, which pushes their XP bar all the way to the same spot on the next level. Yes. It’s unbelievable.

After having started several WoW characters I can safely say the climb to 70 is a long, ardous one that takes several months of hard work–but as a friend and I started up another account to see how this promotion worked, we realized that in the span of three days of casual play (under ten hours total) we were already close to hitting level 25. That’s unheard of. That’s practically a World of Warcraft record. Our quests would gray out before we even turned some of them in.

Safe to say, I will finally get a character to level 70 now.

I understand Blizzard wants to push people out of levels 1-60 and into the Outlands and the Burning Crusade Expansion (not to mention Wrath of the Lich King levels 70-80 which comes out later this year) but seriously, breaking well over half the game for the sake of encouraging people to level up? I can see the near distant future filled with level 60s, all running around the fields of Azeroth and massacring new enemy characters trying to level a character to 70.

It’s retarded. And insane.

My friends and I have agreed that this has to be a temporary promotion. 90 days of triple the experience on Iquests and monsters is ungodly. The game is almost not fun anymore, it’s so easy. The only reason we’re relishing it so much is because we’ve gone through these initial quests multiple times, and now being able to breeze through them is relieving. However, I’m sure any new WoW players will not find this experience as comforting; rather, disconcerting.

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Unfortunately, Activision Blizzard have right off announced a very EA-like move that’s left me with a bad taste in my mouth.

If this is going to be the trend in games, I think Greg Costikyan was right. I don’t want to see the same recycled garbage every year. I didn’t like COD4 because it was almost an exact carbon duplicate of COD2 dressed up in the future. We need to move away from that kind of repetitive gameplay, or else we’re going to have a Beautiful Katamari every time.

I think I’m going to stick with Rock Band now… as pained as it makes me.

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