Should WoW have a customer loyalty program?
Every time this pops up on the forums, I mull it over - should World of Warcraft have a customer loyalty program, and if it did, what should it entail? Part of my difficulty with the concept is, I would probably benefit from it - I've been playing WoW pretty much non-stop for its entire existence. Even when I stopped playing I didn't unsub (probably should have, but hindsight is gloriously incapable of altering the past) and so, if a customer loyalty reward of some kind was implemented myself and my wife would probably get something out of it.
This has me wondering if it would in fact deter new players - the last thing you want is a system that makes people just picking up the game envious or feeling as if a reward is forever out of their reach. After all, you can't go back in time and start playing in 2004, If there was (say) a special mount or pet or transmog item that people who'd been playing five or more years got, then it would by definition exclude players who hadn't been playing that long. And a lot of people tell me they started playing in Cataclysm nowadays - that's a significant number of people who would have to wait at least another year or two before they could get that hypothetical reward.
I'm not opposed to the idea, mind you - like I said, I have been playing forever, so if it got implemented, I'd probably get something cool, and I'm sure you could work it so that it didn't feel like something so far out of new player reach that they felt like it wasn't even worth trying to get. I'm frankly more curious about what you think, friends - is a customer loyalty feature a good idea, or more trouble than it is worth? How should it be implemented? What should it do?
