By John Walker on August 6th, 2008 at 3:36 pm.
Blizzard have launched a new drive for their rapidly ailing World Of Warcraft player base, in a last-ditch desperate attempt to drum up interest in the game, before it has to switch off its servers. Called Recruit A Friend, they’re hoping that by giving incentives to the smattering of players they currently have, they’ll be able to encourage new blood and rejuvenate the MMO.
Ha de ha. Honestly, there can’t be bank vaults big enough for storing all of Blizzards dosh, but they can’t stop. Recruit A Friend has players email their non-WoW-playing chums (is that possible?) to give them a trial activiation key. The motive? A zebra.
The website explains,
“For each person you refer who upgrades to a retail version of World of Warcraft and purchases two months of game time, you will be able to give a character on the account you sent the invitation from an exclusive in-game zhevra mount. This unique mount can be claimed through the website, is only available to Recruit-A-Friend participants, and can only be applied to a single character.”
If the recruited player only upgrades and pays for one month rather than two, the recruiter will gain 30 days of free play time, which is none too shabby. And if you can convince a bunch of people to sign on, those free months stack up.
There’s also to be some spooky linking between recruiters and their recruitee that lasts for 90 days. This will allow you to summon one another once an hour, and if playing together, gain triple experience. And a third, more confusing thing that I’ll not attempt to paraphrase: “For every two levels the new player earns, the new player can grant one free level-up to a lower-level character played by the veteran player.” Take away the number you first suggested – who is the tallest son?
There are, inevitably, 284 complications and sub-rules about this, all explained here
And hopefully Warcraft will be able to scrape through the 12 million player mark that all MMOs must fight to reach.
06/08/2008 at 15:45 cullnean says:
good idea really not a new one but still a good one
06/08/2008 at 15:49 Max says:
If anyone of my WoW-playing “friends” email me, I’ll beat their heads in.
06/08/2008 at 15:51 The Poisoned Sponge says:
I second Max’s motion to beat in Wow player’s heads. Unconditionally.
06/08/2008 at 15:57 The Shed says:
Jesus CHRIST
06/08/2008 at 16:00 Counterculture passed me right by says:
I don’t play WoW, but ALL my male friends do. I’ve therefore been gradually ignored over the last few years to the point whereby I can’t even consider those guys real friends any more (and I’ve been close to some for decades). So perhaps it’s not possible to play WoW and have friends that don’t, although not from the angle of “All my friends play with me too!”, but rather “All my those who play with are my friends!”. Having lost friends to drug addiction before, I have to say the social parallels are pretty apparent.
06/08/2008 at 16:02 cullnean says:
why the WoW hate?
06/08/2008 at 16:03 John Walker says:
Because indifference is so hard to articulate in a comments thread.
06/08/2008 at 16:07 cullnean says:
nah i would go with “meh”
but the wow hate is annoying its almost like “i havent played the longest journey but my mate says its shit coz he saw some screenshots so it must be rubbish, also if i hate something popular i must be cool yeah?”
WOW is quite a good game imho
06/08/2008 at 16:07 yutt says:
@Counterculture passed me right by
So all of your friends found a hobby they could enjoy together, regardless of physical distance. In response you avoided participating, willfully distancing yourself, and now you blame them for your not maintaining the friendship?
[pointless smugness removed - Ed]
06/08/2008 at 16:10 John Walker says:
Ok – that’s enough. We’re all having a lovely day, and I’m not having any sniping or fighting.
If you want to be mean about anyone, be mean about Kieron.
06/08/2008 at 16:10 Zuffox says:
First one’s free.
06/08/2008 at 16:14 cullnean says:
rubbish post ejected
06/08/2008 at 16:16 cyrenic says:
Kieron will be announcing his “Recruit-A-Beard” program later today. Participants will be able to grow their beards three times faster as long as they are within 100 feet of Kieron.
06/08/2008 at 16:16 Bobsy says:
Incidentally, I don’t buy into the whole 11m player thing. Where exactly do Blizzard get that figure from? Are they counting accounts or unique players (which is to say, how many of those accounts are goldfarmers)? What about banned accounts, and players setting up new accounts after being banned? What about trial accounts? I’ve set up two accounts in my time; are they counting both, or the one I continue to pay for?
06/08/2008 at 16:16 Duncan says:
Those Blizzard folk could teach crack dealers a thing or two.
06/08/2008 at 16:23 ape says:
Poor Blizzard with such shallow pockets and minuscule install base no wonder they need to bring in those player.
06/08/2008 at 16:23 Del Boy says:
Do any/all of the RPS staff have WoW accounts?
If so, could you work out how much money you’ve spent on it so far? And was it worth it?
There must be people who’ve spent, what, £400-£500 on it by now. Surely Blizzard could let these people go subscription free or give them a year free etc?!
06/08/2008 at 16:24 The Poisoned Sponge says:
I don’t really think it’s WoW hate, I think it’s more people who used to play WoW, got deathly bored of it, and now can’t understand why on earth people still play it….. at least, that’s how I see it.
06/08/2008 at 16:25 McFool says:
I’ll pass, thanks.
06/08/2008 at 16:27 darkripper says:
Those Blizzard folk could teach crack dealers a thing or two.
In case you haven’t noticed, the whole videogame industry is more similar to the drug industry than to the movie or music ones.
06/08/2008 at 16:29 cullnean says:
lol time for my yearly dabble in eve
06/08/2008 at 16:30 Counterculture passed me right by says:
@yutt
Believe me, I’ve tried to maintain those friendships over the years, but it gets difficult when all they want to do is talk about or play WoW. There was no wilful distancing involved and I still, to this day, try and strike up conversations with them just to see how _they_ are doing, to see if they’ve gotten themselves out of the hole, but all I get is “game progress this, imaginary items that”. They tell me they’ve gone past the point of enjoying the game, and feel trapped because of obligation to their guilds, yet that stuff tumbles from their mouths every time they open them. It makes me sad seeing bright, fun people that I care about become over-weight, black-eyed zombies.
Hobby is not the correct word for the reality of the situation. If you weren’t being facetious I’d be happy you had no understanding of what I’m talking about.
06/08/2008 at 16:30 Jim Rossignol says:
I don’t think any of us still have an active WoW account, but we’ve all played it til exhaustion.
06/08/2008 at 16:31 Dexton says:
Alot of people that hate wow are ex-addicts that put on this lady doth protest too much front of hate to disguise their cravings for more wow crack.
It was a great game and I have plenty of happy memories from the years I spend playing it, along with a bunch of bad ones related to both in game stuff and the real life stuff I neglected for it.
@Bobsy I am guessing Blizzard count 11 million active accounts. That is 11 million accounts that paid money into the Blizzard vaults this month, how many of those accounts were actually played isn’t really as important in gauging the games success.
06/08/2008 at 16:35 The Sombrero Kid says:
@Bobsy
it doesn’t matter if it’s not actually 11 million, it’s 11 times the size of any other moo game cause they all track their stats the same way and it’s more accurate than companies reporting boxed sales or hardware install bases btw.
06/08/2008 at 16:47 cyrenic says:
Here’s how Blizzard defines an active subscriber. I imagine it’s pretty accurate:
06/08/2008 at 16:47 The Hammer says:
All I could say upon hearing news of the benefits you got from this was, “Jesus Christ on a Bike.”
(although I was under the impression the teleport and experience stuff happened as long as you wanted it to)
06/08/2008 at 16:47 Noc says:
You know, years and years back, when Warcraft III was the new thing, I read an article about this “World of Warcraft” thing that Blizzard was doing. It was like, what, Everquest with Warcraft? It looked like a stupid idea, and I was sure it wouldn’t take off.
I mean, who needs that in an RTS?
Seriously, though, I want to note this in reference to what I said about the WoAoR release in the previous article. Superficially this is bribery, but it’s also the removal of a barrier: it looks like it’s engineered so veteran players will start a new character and play along with the new folk. Which removes the element of stepping into a big ‘ole world where everyone knows what’s going on but you, so you lag behind because you don’t have anyone to help you figure out the nuances of the game.
Not that WoW’s a prohibitively complex game, but I suspect it’s still a double-handful for people who aren’t familiar with MMOs.
06/08/2008 at 16:50 Ian says:
That whole triple-experience-for-linked-accounts thing is more enticing than the mount. Now if only I knew somebody who might have an interest in playing the game but doesn’t already. :p
06/08/2008 at 16:56 Leelad says:
Bought another account for the mount and remain happy. not to bothered about the XP gains but I have an account to give away should one of my pals wish to partake.
06/08/2008 at 16:58 Kieron Gillen says:
Following on from Jim, my exhaustion was a lot lower than everyone else’s.
KG
06/08/2008 at 16:59 cullnean says:
what to do, what to do?
resub to WoW, eve or give air rivals a shot?
06/08/2008 at 17:04 Wurzel says:
I played WoW for about 2 and a half years, and have been clean for about a year now. I can honestly say that I have no ill feelings at all towards the game – it was fun, engaging and full of interesting things to see and do. I stopped, though, because its affect on me was getting ridiculous – it was so addictive that I stopped seeing friends, socialising and so on and became a recluse. Thankfully I as able to realise this was happening and stop.
Even now I still occasionally get the urge to play it (£9 for a month not being a bad deal) but thankfully resist. One side effect seems to be that I can’t enjoy any other MMOs due to them not living up to WoW, however, which I guess is good for me in the long run :)
06/08/2008 at 17:08 Biscuitry says:
It seems like a sensible enough idea to get new subscriptions, but… isn’t everyone even remotely interested in WoW already playing anyway?
06/08/2008 at 17:26 John Walker says:
Well, every time I hear the subs numbers, they seem to have gone up another million.
I was just about to say what a small fraction of the Earth’s population actually play, but bloody hell, 1 in 545 people on Earth are playing WoW. That’s EXTRAORDINARY.
06/08/2008 at 18:00 wcaypahwat says:
I see people who play WoW, and don’t even have their own computer. They’re effectively paying not only their sub fee’s, but also an hourly fee to play the game. And half the time they just stand around some town.
Then they tell me I should start playing.
Also, im great at pretending to know what they’re talking about :)
06/08/2008 at 18:12 Andthensobecause says:
@Biscuitry
You are forgetting about the children who are tasting the internet and video games for the first time. Think of what WoW must look like to them.
06/08/2008 at 18:40 Subject 706 says:
Kids! Just say NO to the MMO!
06/08/2008 at 19:50 bleeps says:
Correction: *unicorn* zebra
06/08/2008 at 21:35 RiptoR says:
WoW still exists? I thought most of the players would have gotten a life by now… Guess you must never underestimate the power of the ‘internets’ :p
06/08/2008 at 22:25 heliocentric says:
i kinda used to be big into competitive team play muds. Guild drama, grinding, re specing? All familiar to me. Course the mud was more like eve in that it had space ships and you could lose everything. I dont think i’ll ever want to play a game where i am defined by my stats, rather than my actions defining my stats again, not least under a monthly fee. My latest gambit? Getting my mmo playing contacts to play games like hl2 and bf2.
06/08/2008 at 23:21 Verdugo says:
I don’t do MMO’s. Mainly because of the Pay-to-play stuff and it bores me when you just click on enemy and wait and see who wins.
06/08/2008 at 23:35 Dorian Cornelius Jasper says:
Riptor:
You vastly underestimate this thing’s cultural impact. It’s reached the point where D&D now takes inspiration from WoW instead of the other way around. And speaking of “life” and how this mysterious thing could be “gotten” is a bit disingenuous here. On the internet.
07/08/2008 at 00:01 Gorgeras says:
Not playing WoW again until they make it the Alliance VS Horde PvP-fest they were promoting it as from 2003-2005 which never happened. Will be giving Warhammer a go.
Honestly, if the box had advertised grinds, raids, bad AI, communist in-game economics and an undynamic world, I would have told them to cram it in their ass on that fine january afternoon in 2005. It ended up being the complete opposite of Warcraft as I understood it.
07/08/2008 at 00:08 Alex says:
I’ve never played WoW. I don’t really like multiplayer games. Nothing I’ve seen or read on the game has made it seem particularly appealing. So I tend to paraphrase Monty Python:
“On second thought, let’s not go to Azeroth.. it is a silly place.”
07/08/2008 at 03:44 Konky Dong IV: Heartbreak on Moonbeam Mountain says:
I actually do think WoW is on the downturn.
Myself and just about everyone has grown fairly tired of WoW’s formula. I (and a few of my friends) got into the WotLK beta and even that has done little to rekindle our interest. WoW has been a truly great experience and it won’t die anytime soon, but I think a lot of people are hungry for something new and fresh. WoW is such a good game that I binged on it for the past four years. The “quest/grind to level and then raid for loot, rinse and repeat” style MMO really holds no interest for me any more.
I’ll tell you what I really want. In my ultimate dream scenario, the new Star Wars MMO comes out and it has FPS combat, a complex, intricate crafting system (that goes far beyond just being another menu on your toolbar), and a heavy emphasis on exploration. Also space battles, free-for-all pvp, and the ability to customize and create my own ship. And bronze bikinis. Yup. That’s the game that would get me to quit my job.
07/08/2008 at 06:43 wowgolds987 says:
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07/08/2008 at 10:05 Dan says:
Gold spam outside of Orgrimmar? Get back to the bank there, you level 1 Troll hunter, you.
I’m getting bored of WoW now. I still do 2 raids per week with my guild, since I don’t want to abandon the friendships I’ve made there, but other than that I don’t touch it. I’ve got a WotLK beta key and tried it out, but got bored very quickly. It’s all very pretty, but still just the same old “Kill 10 boars/Kobolds/giant vikings” grind.
07/08/2008 at 14:02 E-we says:
Just felt the need to echo @Counterculture
07/08/2008 at 14:45 Paul Moloney says:
“I’ve never played WoW. I don’t really like multiplayer games.”
I think 99% of my time in Azeroth has been single-player, though not always by choice. The last time I played WoW (I tend to play for 6 months, then take a break) it was hard to form casual groups to take on particular quests – bearing in mind I was still playing a late 50s level character. And I’ve no interest in hard-core guild nonsense. I bought “Burning Crusade” just before my last break, and haven’t actually installed it.
P.
07/08/2008 at 17:02 James says:
This will be really great for multiboxing.
07/08/2008 at 18:51 EyeMessiah says:
I got banned for botting, but not in a bad way.
I think wow’s death-throes will last so long that it will put HL1 CS to shame. I’m hoping that as WoW dies Blizz will gradually eliminate barriers to play in ever more desperate attempts to bring in new players (e.g. above, the quest XP buff & the pvp tourney – except these are just the start!) and hold on to old ones, and that the ‘opening-up’ of WoW will have some sort of effect on the development of new MMPORGS. Hopefully this effect will involve altering player expectations so that the next generation of MMPORG designers will be incentivised to make their games less like jobs and more like, uh, games.
EDIT: current ad banner is wowcursors.com.
07/08/2008 at 23:30 malkav11 says:
Actually, most of my friends did play and have now quit, same as me. (Though my exit from the game is definitively permanent due to poor customer service that lost me my $80 collector’s edition account.) The frustrating thing about WoW is that there are so many servers and so little inter-server functionality. When I was playing, so were all my friends (pretty much), both online and offline. All of them were playing on other servers. None of them on the same server as any other, so there was no easy way to migrate where a big clump of friends were playing. I myself was reluctant to go to even one other friend, because I had the support of a good guild composed primarily of acquaintances from the MUD I’d been on for ~8 years at that point. The sole actual friend from that guild left to play on a different server.
Very few people were willing to continue to log on to the other internet realms or IM programs I contacted them on, so I lost quite a few friends to WoW even while I was playing the exact same game.
08/08/2008 at 11:20 mechazawa says:
I’m a bit late, but here’s how good that program is. If you know the game, you can hit level 58 in less than 14 hours /played.
14. Hours.
08/08/2008 at 13:41 EyeMessiah says:
Still too long for me!
08/08/2008 at 14:42 KindredPhantom says:
“And hopefully Warcraft will be able to scrape through the 12 million player mark that all MMOs must fight to reach.”
Haha.
09/08/2008 at 04:23 po says:
I’ve been playing for about a month and a half, and I’m very into it, but I can see why Blizzard needs to encourage new players, when people are leaving in droves for newer games.
It would help hugely if they actually listened to their players and improved the game. At the moment it’s full of gold sellers and gold farming bots, that are never removed, and things like the battlegrounds are screwed up because those who want to play it seriously have to put up with low level gank fodder being on the team, that’re only there to lose quick and farm honor for gear.
It could be a truly awesome game if blizzard weren’t such a money-grubbing bunch of pricks, like all the other big game publishers, and I bet a huge number of those 11 million are accounts that they banned in one of their big showy “Look! We got rid of bots” things they do every once in a while, between letting the bots run riot for months on end.
Needs private servers with the full content, and not just an instant L70 and all the epics you want.
10/08/2008 at 21:19 Shane says:
…Hello everybody, I am an Addict.
Now that I have admitted I have a problem, we can continue.
I’ve been an avid WoW player for about three years, and I still consider the game, though ends up wasting alot of time, fun.. it is still an over all good game. That may be do to the constant changes and patches that blizzard continues to put out to make it interesting, but for me it’s simply about the player versus player environment, though there is alot of fun to be had doing the quests as well (That is if you actually take the time to read what they are and say, there’s a lot to appreciate in the witty comments and such the random NPCs make.
My biggest backing on WOW is that it’s also a very, what I will loosely say “Social” game, where you kind of feel like you’re in a giant chat box with dragons swords and killing… I often find myself logging on for a good amount of time running around in circles in game, while talking to various people.
This is no different then sitting on AIM or Myspace for hours talking to your friends, in fact it seems more entertaining that way for me :) So I shall continue to support the game mostly…
(If you play it already, however I will not encourage ANYBODY to join it now, the game is a curse and will suck you in and waste away.. it’s like meth, and yes your teeth will fall out. :) For me it’s going down hill with the new expansion and soon i will simply be paying 15$ a month to have a fun instant messenger… screw you blizzard)
Blizzard also does not spend the money they earn from its however million customers, in the best ways, considering the in game and out of game support is pretty crumy (grant it the out of game is much better then some others I’ve tried to deal with.) I’m sure there are other flaws that I don’t feel like calling out do to the lack of motivation.
Lastly! I still manage to keep a real social life as well, and have friends that don’t play WOW. <3
08/09/2008 at 23:35 Gameraddict says:
Nice article; you’ve generated a lot of interest.
As a former 3+ year player of WoW (clean 4 months) I have to admit I’m feeling the nicotine-like pangs to reactivate.
I had a love/hate relationship with WoW: I love the people I met and developed friendships with ingame – some of which I have kept. I had a blast when we were all able to play together. I was a guild officer and built and ran our guild website, too. That was a great learning experience.
WoW has increasingly become a grind and the customer service more deaf. The more time you spend at the level cap, the clearer it becomes. I hated that…and a push began to make an eSport out of this (previously deep) MMO.
This game is so broken from a PvP standpoint, it’s ridiculous. These days you can expect to get a character to level cap before the 30 hour mark. Expect to be playing roughly as long to make your equipment competitive in PvP…if you’re able to keep a group long enough *and* play well enough.
I acknowledge my needs as a player changed in this time: I went from a hardcore raider to a semi-casual raider/PvPer. I’ll acknowledge Blizzard put “welfare epics” in the game so less avid players could buy the necessary gear (unlike previous systems which essentially meant you had 3 people playing one account in a battleground 24/7). What was not addressed was class balance…this is actually very, very important if they want to be a viable long-term eSport competitor.
Which brings me to my PvP gripe: You spend so much time leveling/equipping your character that if you make a wrong character choice along the way, you might as well start over if you’re not the flavor of the month overpowered spec and class.
That’s disappointing.