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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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Just a quick moment to talk about pretty things, like the new Naruto PS3 Project that looks absolutely incredible. But, as I mentioned to my best friend, “It’s a Naruto game,” which automatically makes me skeptic.

However, there’s plenty more that has me tense and excited, from the list of already-announced PS3 newcomers (MGS4, LittleBigPlanet, FFXIII, Killzone 2) to a few new possible exclusives such as Prototype, an amazing-looking game by Sierra (yay Sierra) which is literally every daydream fantasy I’ve ever had (minus the sex) in one; Afro Samurai, which makes me squeal with pleasure and anticipation as I watch the trailer (please come out for PS3); and, of course, the glorious new Street Fighter IV screenshots.

We’ll see some glory soon enough. 2008 is promising to be the most expensive year in a while. And I want to play all these games bad.

Oh, and Blizzard sounds like it’s up to something. A new MMO perhaps? God forbid.

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http://gaygamer.net/2007/12/vivendi_and_activision_merge_t.html

Dear lord, Activision Blizzard? Vivendi already owns Sierra, Activision and who knows what else and now they’re going to merge with Blizzard?

Hello, World of Guitarcraft. Hello, Tony Hawk Hero.

We’re all going to die.

This is Sparta.

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