recruit-a-friend
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Pets Scaling in Wrath: Hit percentage is in, resilience and xp bonuses are out
A while back, class designer Koraa told Warlocks that their pets would be getting their master's hit percentage. Today, he confirmed the same for Hunter pets. This should definitely be a godsend for raid level DPSers of both classes. Conventional wisdom is that reaching your personal hit cap is pretty much the single best way to increase your personal DPS total, and being able to do the same for pets should only provide a noticable increase to DPS, as well as keep any special buffs or debuffs said pets apply coming in with a minimum of interruption. Unfortunately, something else Koraa said on the same post is a little less exciting -- resilience is nowhere on the table for being shared. They believe that they currently have the right amount of survivability for pets. In a group situation, you or your group should be healing the pet, and in Arena play, any time spent killing the pet provides a benefit in the form "crowd control" while the DPS is focus firing your pet. Unfortunately, as the player of a level 70 Hunter and Warlock who have both seen extensive 2v2 Arena play, I'm not sure it's that simple.
Blizzard unveils changes to WoW recruit-a-friend program
We first talked about this allll the way back in April, but it looks like the folks at WoW Insider had it right: Blizzard is making substantial changes to the World of Warcraft recruit-a-friend program. How substantial? Well, how about some hyper-fast leveling and a unique mount substantial? The brand new updated Blizzard Support FAQ offers the nitty gritty, but here are the highlights: Recruited players are now 'linked' to the player account the invitation was sent from. Grouping with a linked player allows both of you to level very quickly. As long as your character and the recruit character are relatively even level, you'll both recieve 3x the normal experience. Recruiting players can summon their friends to them once an hour, via a spell, up to level 60. For every two levels a recruited player earns, he can grant one level to a character played by the veteran. This character must be lower level than the recruit player's character. If the recruit upgrades to a full account from the 10-day trial, these benefits last a full 90 days. If the recruit buys a two month subscription as well as upgrading, the recruiting player is granted a unique Zhevra mount. If these sound like fun, and you've been meaning to get a buddy into the game, you can jump into using the new program via the recruit-a-friend splash page. One of Azeroth's millions of citizens? Check out our ongoing coverage of the World of Warcraft, and be sure to touch base with our sister site WoW Insider for all your Lich King needs!
Blizzard shows off Recruit-a-Friend benefits: Zhevra mount, summoning, triple experience
There's a new splash screen on the WoW homepage, but instead of hinting at a new game, it is instead showing off Blizzard's new Recruit-a-Friend benefits. Looks like they found a place for that Zhevra mount we heard about a while back -- whenever you recruit a friend into the game (by convincing them to create an account with your name as a reference and having them pay for at least two months of game time), you can choose one of your characters to nab a Zhevra mount. Additionally, you can summon referred friends to your character, and when questing together, you can pick up triple experience until level 60, for both quests and monsters that you kill together.More details on Blizzard's support page. Just yesterday, we heard Mike Morhaime saying Blizzard was aiming to bring tons of people into the game this holiday season, and it looks like the recruiting drive has started.
Recruit friends, give them levels
File this firmly under "contained in the game files but may not be activated until Wrath if ever," but MMO-Champion has found something very interesting in some error messages contained in the 2.4.2 patch. Currently, the recruit-a-friend functionality (offered from the account management page) is fairly bare-bones. You get a free month if your friend signs up and ends up paying, and they get a free ten-day trial to give them some time to get into the game, but that's about it.According to these data-mined error messages, that may be set for a change. See for yourself: ERR_REFER_A_FRIEND_DIFFERENT_FACTION = "You cannot grant levels to a character of the opposite faction."; ERR_REFER_A_FRIEND_INSUFFICIENT_GRANTABLE_LEVELS = "You have not earned enough levels to grant any more levels."; ERR_REFER_A_FRIEND_SUMMON_COOLDOWN = "You can only summon your friend once per hour."; FACTION_STANDING_INCREASED_BONUS = "Reputation with %s increased by %d. (+%.1f Refer-A-Friend bonus)"; This is just a sampling of the errors, but it raises some highly unexpected possibilities. If whatever functionality this is referring to goes live, it seems like we'd be able to award levels to friends we recruit and summon them to us, in addition to getting a bonus to reputation gains with (specific?) factions. My guess would be that this is to combat the problem of wanting a friend to play with you, but not wanting to wait for him to grind seventy levels so they can get to the "real" game. Obviously it's far too early to analyze this in detail, and again, we may well never see this in game, but it's eyebrow-raising nonetheless.
Tabula Rasa seeks more rookies
Tabula Rasa has wasted no time in joining the list of MMOs with "refer a friend" schemes. After all, if Earth had just been invaded by aliens -- and assuming Will Smith wasn't available -- the first thing you'd do would be to get your buddies to join the military and flee into ancient wormholes. Right?It's a pretty tempting offer with the game having been released so recently, though. If anyone you know happens to pick up a copy of TR, they get three extra days playtime and you get an additional month -- not a bad deal. Of course if Tabula Rasa really wants to sell some more copies, it could do with more than a handful of reviews on the internet. Perhaps General British is storming offices?
Bring an old guildmate back to life
Blizzard is now offering a new twist on the Recruit-A-Friend program. They want you to send out invitations to your friends who used to play WoW, but have canceled more than 90 days ago. The offer is for a 10 day free trial of the Burning Crusade. If they accept and become a paid subscriber, you get a free month of Warcraft.You can have up to 5 invitations out at once and each person has up to a month to reply before the invitation expires and that slot opens up to you to send out another.This is pretty smart, IMHO. We've all known guildmates who have disappeared since the summer began. If they've been thinking of coming back, at least you can get a month free subscription out of it. Check out the FAQ for full details.
