Posts with tag recruit-a-friend

We've got not one but two different screeshot contests that have shown up on the tip line lately. First off, our friend Mep, who runs WoW Screenshots, has gotten his contest all up and running, and you can go over and upload a screenshot or vote for the winners over there right now. His contest runs through September 20th, and the prize is a mousepad with your winning screenshot printed right on it. Pretty groovy custom prize -- we can't wait to see what kinds of screenshots rise to the top.

And Chris also emailed us about a new site he's started up called Epic Screens. It's another screenshot database (a little competition is a good thing, right?), and he's hosting his own best screenshot contest, with two copies of vanilla WoW on the line (perfect, he says, for Recruit-a-friend). He doesn't have a final date (or any other official rules posted), so we're guessing you just head on over there and submit some shots, and if you win, he'll let you know. Sounds like fun -- let the screenshot competitions begin!

I've been pushing forward on my Paladin lately, and so I've entered the wacky world of Heirlooms. I have already picked up the leather Heirloom shoulders (thinking that even though the Pally wears plate, if I ever want to level a Druid or Rogue, I'll have them), and I'm well on my way to grabbing the new Heirloom chestpiece as well -- 20% bonus XP, combined with a healthy amount of rested XP, should make the leveling curve as easy as it gets (RaF is nice too, I guess, but I'd rather not pay for a second account). So I'm in Heirlooms up to my neck (at least until they give us helms), and I was intrigued by this question over on the Rawrcast forums: do you think Blizzard will eventually provide Heirloom items for every slot?

20% is already a significant bonus to killing and questing XP, and rested technically provides a 50% bonus. But with ten Heirlooms in 10 slots (we'll leave out weapons, since those don't have the 10% XP bonus, as well as shirts and tabards, and rings and trinkets for now), you're looking at a 100% XP bonus even without Rest. The current average 80 probably spent about 14 days leveling up, so with an extra 100% bonus, you're looking at seven days /played, or very close to the current record. At that point, Blizzard might as well let us grant levels to each other.

We can't believe it either – Turpster has been let loose on WoW.com to bring you videos from in and around the World of Warcraft! You've heard him on the WoW Insider Show, and now see him on TurpsterVision right here on WoW.com.

Last week we had a look into the benefits of Blizzard's Recruit a Friend scheme and Multiboxing; today we look at how to get started with Multiboxing at home with one PC and several WoW accounts. For me to share these secrets of success with you I must first ask you to join me in the Multiboxer's oath:


For the real tips and hints, check out the video and then join me after the break for the software, addons and macros that you'll need. (WARNING: There are some really big numbers and long words that I don't fully understand but they make lots of characters do similar things at the same time)

We can't believe it either – Turpster has been let loose on WoW.com to bring you videos from in and around the World of Warcraft! You've heard him on the WoW Insider Show, and now see him on TurpsterVision right here on WoW.com.

Multiboxing has long been at the center of a heated debate within the WoW community. Some say that it is cheating; others say that it is just against the spirit of the game, all I know is, I absolutely love it!

I started my journey nearly 90 days ago where I added three new accounts with Blizzard's 'Recruit a Friend' scheme. I set myself the goal of being able to have a level 60(+) of every class in the game. For some of you out there I am sure that you've already achieved this feat during the past 4 and a half years of Warcraft – I know of one person who has gone FAR further than just one of each class. I've always focused all of my attention on my main, gathering achievements, pets, mounts, mats, gold, gear, well you get the picture – and I ended up forgetting the joys of alts. So with too much time on my hands, a few extra copies of WoW and some cool bits of software (more on this below) I jumped into Azeroth with a new mission; to destroy everything!

That hot time of the year, the Midsummer Fire Festival, has now ended. Once again the denizens of Azeroth go about their humdrum lives without any brilliant fires and spirited naked flame-ladies dancing to and fro on the bridges of Ironforge. Life is boring. The Ice Stone Has Melted.

But alas, not for I and my tabard! After a good half day of solid grinding I trekked my Paladin throughout the dunes of Kalimdor and the lush forests of the Eastern Kingdom, extinguishing the flames of the bastard Horde and honoring those of the blessed Alliance. All was done well, so say we all.

It didn't take long though for me to realize that I didn't want to do this on more than my main. However I found myself exerting as much discipline as possible to finish the dailies every day on my dual boxing Recruit a Friend alts, pulling in about 50% of a level each day just from the daily quests alone. It was quite a nice XP bump.

All in all I accomplished with the Fire Festival I wanted to, and it wasn't too bad of a time. Although I can definitely wait a year to extinguish another flame.

Did you accomplish everything you wanted to with the Fire Festival? Are you satisfied?

Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com's daily Q&A column where the WoW.com team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Adam Holisky will be your host today.

I have to admit, o' faithful Queue readers, that I considered pawning off answering questions today to someone else so I could have more time to catch up on other work. Patch days can get quite busy around the WoW.com head quarters.

Last night for example. Alex, Mike Sacco, and I had heard that there was a new raid lockout extension feature in place, so we rushed onto the Patch 3.2 PTR to grab some screenshots. Of course that meant we had to deal with the thing crashing every few minutes. And once we finally did make it into ZG to get a quick boss kill, Sacco disconnected and the server announced a shutdown in 5 minutes. But hey, we got the kill off and the screenshots captured with 15 seconds left until the shutdown. We won!

Aideros asked...

"When are more "hero classes", like the Death Knight, coming out? What are the speculations? Has anything been said about them since WotLK?"

Our old friend Tim Sullivan, who worked at Wowhead way back in the day, just sent along a note that he's working on a brand new web video series all about something in World of Warcraft that's been gaining a lot of ground lately: multiboxing. Thanks to recruit-a-friend and all of the bonuses that come along with sponsoring a second account, quite a few people have shown an interest in running more than one character in the game, and Tim's series, called Multiboxing.tv, shows live feeds from his gameplay (all five screens of it, four Hunters and one Priest) while people can chat and learn live about multiboxing and how it all works. He's also leveling the group up -- they're currently around level 40, and he says he's headed to 80 eventually.

You can check out his front page to see when he'll be streaming next (and someone told us he was streaming for something like fourteen hours the other day -- take care of yourself, Tim!), and if you're interested in how you might get started multiboxing, he and his chat channel are probably more than happy to help you figure out how to do it. He did say he'd be streaming every night this weekend, so if you're around then, you should be able to catch him. Personally (as you probably already know), I'm a big fan of the standard one character gameplay -- I have enough trouble figuring out one toon, much less five. But Turpster, as you've probably heard on our podcast, has dived into this kind of stuff headfirst and loves it, so if you're interested in seeing how it works, tune in to Tim's channel and find out.

Update: Apparently while this was presented to us (and appears to be) just a guy streaming his multiboxing, Tim may have some less generous motives -- he's apparently trying to sell multiboxing software, and you can see the comments below for some other shady moves that have been made. Watch at your own risk, and keep in mind that while the stream appeared legit to us, it may be an advertisement for software you certainly don't need to multibox.

I first heard about this from El Jeppy when I visited him and company on the Rawrcast Show a few weeks ago, but now he's posted a little more about goals and method on his site. He's just beginning something called "Project 62*80," which sounds pretty crazy on the front of it: he's planning to level 62 different characters (which is apparently one of each race and class combination for both Horde and Alliance) to level 80, and he's planning to do it by Christmas of this year. With 224 days until Christmas, that's 22 levels a day -- pretty easy when you're starting from level one, but not so much when you're trying to do 60-80.

He's not just grinding away on it, though -- he's chosen to do some multiboxing, and plans to level three characters at a time up until 60, and then three to five characters per group up to level 80, so if he can move four characters up five levels each a day, he'll be pretty close to his goal rate. And he's using recruit-a-friend, so the triple XP will make things even easier on him. It definitely seems like he can do it if he stays committed, but man, it's not something that would ever appeal to me.

He started off with Paladins (for the free mounts and the survivabiilty), and from there it sounds like he's going with Death Knights next, to raise some quick gold for the rest of the enterprise. You can follow his progress over on the Ten Gnomes blog if you want to see where he's at. It's hard to wish him luck (does anyone really need 62 freakin' 80s?), but we'll do it anyway: good luck, Jeppy.

We've heard about suggestions of vanilla servers before (and Blizzard has flatly stated that they have no plans for them), but here's a new twist: Nomnom on Korgath says that Blizzard should finally, once and for all, abandon the old world. He says that leveling from 1-60 is a pain, even with the changes and recruit-a-friend (and on that, I agree -- my Paladin is level 50 and staying there, because leveling is boring), and that Blizzard should just start all new characters at level 55, especially if you've already got a 70+ character. They already did it with Death Knights, and those have worked their way into the endgame just fine.

That idea's definitely been batted around before, and anyone leveling an alt can definitely see the benefits. But think of what you're giving up with a new rule like that: Deadmines, Wailing Caverns, Scarlet Monastery. All of the epic quests and reputations, all of the great old-world vistas and settings. Plus, new players to the game will find the old world even emptier than it already is -- everyone who has a high level character will already be leveling through Outland or Northrend.

Do we really want to abandon the old world for good? Blizzard doesn't think so -- Palehoof unofficially suggests that Blizzard is happy with the subscription fees for the two weeks it takes you to level your character, and Bornakk officially says that Blizzard is happy with the way things work now, and if they see a problem, they'll fix it. You have to think that they'll eventually allow this kind of "powerleveling" in some way -- as we move closer to level 100, it'll just be silly bothering with the lower levels considering how far ahead the new content is. But for now, you'll have to stick to leveling the old-fashioned way, because vanilla WoW isn't going anywhere.

Welcome back to an extreme late night edition of The Queue. What's so extreme about it? Read on after the break. Why is it coming out so late at night? Well, I've been busy today. I've finished up leveling my last two characters while two of my accounts are linked via the recruit-a-friend program. Now my Paladin and Warlock are level 60, and my set is complete. WTB account wide achievements now, please. "K. Thx. Bai," as the kids like to say.

Dan Asked...

"Does anyone know who the three characters in all the BlizzCon announcement graphics are (see posting earlier this week)? One looks just like Thrall, but the other two seem pretty vague... a paladin and some sort of demonic rogue looking thing (maybe an Orc)?"

Welcome back to The Queue, WoW Insider's daily Q&A column where the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Adam Holisky will be your host today.

Salutations and fond wishes everyone. Today in the queue we'll spend a moment looking at shoulders you can get for your alts. Shoulder padding, if you will... Remember shoulder pads? I hear they were popular in the '80s. Along with Ghostbusters. And Ghostcrawler is popular now. So therefore Ghostcrawler is only two steps removed from the fads of the '80s.

Bet ya' didn't see that one coming.

Be sure to submit your questions about patch 3.1 in the comments. We'll try to answer as many as possible in the next few days.

Jared Daniels asks...

"Would you recommend getting the inherited plate shoulder pads solely for the purpose of leveling my Death Knight and Warrior from 70-80? My main is a Mage and I am coming close to being able to buy the ones from using Stone Keeper Shards. If no, then what would you recommend I do with the shards?"

Welcome back to The Queue, WoW Insider's daily Q&A column where the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Adam Holisky will be your host today.

As Alex mentioned yesterday, he and I will be taking turns with the queue. So don't fret, Alex will be back in your loving graces tomorrow. As this is my first post for the queue, I feel like I'm boldly going where no man (Alex is a superman) has gone before. And who better to welcome me than John de Lancie's iconic Q character? With Picard oddly facepalming himself... huh. I hope this isn't a sign of things to come. Anyways, I digress. On with the Q!

037 asked...

"Is it possible to solo Zul'Durub to farm the mounts? If it makes a difference, I am a 10 Man Naxx geared Enhancement Shaman."

Say what you want about Fatal1ty and his endless selling out (we know you will), but the guy is a recognizable face, something that's a little hard to find in the world of professional gaming. Allakazham caught up with him at CES last week, and in between talking about how awesome he and his products were (sigh), they did get some good Warcraft talk out of him.

He's been taking advantage of Recruit a Friend, so he's got a Warrior, Rogue, and a Death Knight all to level 60 (unfortunately, I didn't hear him say which faction he plays). His Death Knight's "get over here" "grappling hook" have captured his imagination -- hopefully he'll stick with playing with his brother and get up to level 80 so he can see some of the endgame PvP. Unfortunately, he says he's not into PvE at all, which explains why he's going slow, but if he can push the last 20 levels, there's some fun stuff to be found..

And then it's back to the selling -- he says he's looking forward to sponsoring some players under his brand later this year (though he has no plans to play WoW professionally), and he pimps some equipment, too. It's not exactly a hard-hitting interview, but it is interesting to hear one of professional gaming's biggest names talk about his time in Azeroth.

It seems Blizzard has been listening to the complaints and concerns of players. I've been taken aback by the implementation of paid name changes, PvE to PvP transfers and gender changes. For years, I've read clamoring for race, faction and class changes.

Zarhym weighed in Wolfbite of Chromaggus' thread in the general forums requesting class changes. Name and appearance changes are purely cosmetic, while allowing class changes would affect the overall dynamics of the game. Later in the thread Zarhym stated that this is partially to avoid creating a "flavor of the month" class, and would prefer to address player concerns. Rerolling was the most common prescription amongst posters to solve the original poster's issue.