Feldon If you have been abusing milking enjoying the Refer-a-Friend 300% XP bonus for its high speed leveling (and thus AA earning) goodness, especially by parking a level 1 trial account character at the zone-in, well, I’m afraid that has finally come to an end.
From Rich Waters 0n the EQ2 forums:
The Recruit-a-friend program is a great way for you to bring your friends into EverQuest II and help them level up a bit faster by playing together. When you group with a character you’ve recruited, you both gain a hefty 200% experience bonus. Unfortunately, many people were recruiting themselves and using it as a way to power-level their main character, rather than actually playing with a friend.
We’ve added a couple of limitations to the recruit-a-friend bonus to prevent it from being a solo leveling tool. In order to get the recruit-a-friend experience bonus:
- You and your recruited friend must be relatively close in adventure levels. If you normally wouldn’t be able to group effectively because of your level difference, you probably won’t get the recruit-a-friend bonus.
- If you are too high level to group with your friend, you can still get the bonus by mentoring down to an appropriate level and playing together.
- If you’re not in an instance, you and your recruited friend must be in the same area. You won’t get the recruit-a-friend bonus if you are not close enough to be playing together.
These changes bring the bonus in line with its goals – encouraging an established player to help out a friend who is new to the game, and rewarding this with a nice experience boost.
Commentary
While it was pretty obvious that Refer-a-Friend was never intended for this purpose, there were reasons why players would feel the need to level this quickly:
- The AA earn rate, especially on a new character trying to reach level 90 with 300 AAs, is exceptionally slow (by modern standards). I have to admit: These days, if I’m not getting an AA every 30 minutes, I feel my time is being squandered. If it took 30 minutes to earn an AA from 200->300 AAs, that’s 50 hours of play there.
- If you are grouping difficult heroic content, or especially raiding, it is almost required to have 185+ AAs and some of those endline AA abilities.
- Specific raid encounters require certain abilities. A raid force might lose a certain class to another guild (or quitting the game), so an established player may need to roll an alt Dirge, Enchanter, Shaman, etc. and level them quickly to 90/300 just to fill in a raid slot. While recruiting is an ongoing task, sometimes a reliable, consistent raider rolling an alt is favorable to inheriting a hotshot who doesn’t mesh with the existing guild dynamic.
For someone who is playing the game solo or in small groups, or at levels below 85, or just playing at their own leisure, in no hurry to reach the “end game”, these may all seem pretty absurd reasons. But once you get into grouping and raiding at level 90, the novelty of doing thousands of solo errand quests wears off.
The last 2 expansions didn’t just contain solo quests. They also contain some 20 dungeons and ~8 raid zones, many of which require end line abilities and using every trick in the book that each player is capable of. It’s not reasonable to expect someone to group at level 85+ with just 150 AAs and slowly inch up towards 300 over a span of months.
The only way to properly appreciate content is when you have to earn it. Anything but working for your AA is going to make the game less intruiging than it already is.
Do you really think anyone in your guild, or your pick-up group, is going to care that you don’t have a certain buff, a certain ability, your DPS sucks, you can’t take the hits, you can’t heal fast enough, etc. because you haven’t “appreciated the content”?
You’re welcome to take as much time as you want doing quests (especially bland solo runaround timesink errand quests which have nothing to do with the overall story). But people want to group and raid on day one — not a month after the expac comes out.
Well Refer a friend had problems and had to end. The disassociation between how casual players sees the game and how “the game is supposed to be played” is still horrible. Face it the current EQ2 offer to casual players is “do boring soloquests for MONTHS and then you will be 90 and have AP the gear so you can get groups, maybe” is just not good enough. Hopefully DoV will change that and hopefully Eq2 will have something to offer substantial to casual players again.
And as a casual player I never realized that RaF was the way to level up, oh yes I am not “into the game enough”.
I love EQ2 and I hope they can fix it somehow and make it fun for all types of players.
I see this as a good change too, because with it people were just zooming through 1-90 to get to the end content, and most of the time doing so in a solo fashion.
Now if they address the other side of the equation, that is making it more profitable for someone to group up with more people then solo and I think this will be a big plus for the health of the leveling game (ie the route to 90).
For example I know friends who are leveling classes that I also see other people trying to recruit in game chat to run a dungeon somewhere. They don’t join in most of the time though simply because there isn’t anything in it for them as its often a net loss to spend the time running a dungeon somewhere.
Put an incentive in to group up for the lower levels and we will see groups form quicker, and more of these veteran players actively forming groups up as they level alts which can only be a good thing for the game.
I was surprised when they reworked the old names and added Chronomages that they didn’t make the AA points really zoom when doing that stuff. Also, I would have nerfed mastercrafted gear and made those names drop set gear for your level. There should be 42 set gear, 52 set gear, etc. from dungeons.
Yeah, the gear is a total mess below RoK, in some ways it is kind of fun since nothing is worked out for you, but especially with this change it would be good to see the whole gear system get a revamp.
I believe its in the works too, something that puts mastercrafted, legendary and fabled in the right order below 70 would help the games grouping.
I also have a suspicion that when they do it they’ll do it to a formulae, allowing them to alter the gear / level of content easier in future. Which is going to be needed when perhaps otherwise we’ll fly through levels so fast areas do not make sense with a level cap of 140 or so…
The downside though is going to be seeing so much of the gear uniform… it’ll definitely lose something for what it gains if they do what I guess they will…
to break it again? then once its all fixed. To add in items scores?… /shrug
–go Rift!
@darkcircle
Every time the stat system in a game changes it often breaks (or more accurately makes much invalid) the gear designed before, after many changes much of the lower level gear in EQ2 is quite random (just as WoW’s used to be). EQ2 has needed stat system changes due to the short sighted decision taken years ago to put in percentage stats that cap in a MMO.
Ironically in this case the game you are enthusiastically advertising is run by the same person responsible for the percentage stats…
>> But people want to group and raid on day one — not a month after the expac comes out.
Then work for it. Any game that hands out stuff for free has a short life expectancy.
So let’s just make everyone level 90, give them the best gear, and max AAs on day one so they can focus on raiding and grouping…
Yes, that was sarcastic. While all those reasons listed in the article seem like good reasons, the fact is doing any of those things is still abusing the system. No matter how good the reasoning sounds, you are using something in a manner for which it was not intended. End result? A few people screw it up for the rest of us.
It’s too bad that in order “to prevent it from being a solo leveling tool,” everybody has to pay the price, including players that were using the system in an honest and the intended manner.
I’ve been in raiding guilds for years in other games. Losing key players is always a challenge, but it always happens and somehow guilds always manage to survive it, and no other game I’ve played has ever had this Recruit-A-Friend program. So using an argument on how it will hurt a raid guild carries little weight in my opinion. But, that’s just my opinion.
Arcturys,
What would be great is if I could level from 1-90, play through all the dungeons and heritage quests and SOME of the quests, and end up at level 90 with ~220-230 AAs. Instead, I get to level 90 with maybe 100 AAs.
Level 20-70 right now emphasizes solo quests and the mastercrafted armor beats everything including the top raid gear of those zones. Why do anything but solo quest?
Your definition of “working for it” is solo questing. /wrists
But those are totally separate complaints. SOE needs to revamp some of this crap, but there really isn’t much of a valid link between raid guilds and Recruit-A-Friend that I can see.
getting AA’s does not imply solo questing. My Dirge has over 250 AA’s (retired since Sentinel’s Fate) and has done VERY FEW quests compared to most toons of that playtime / level. You just need to actively seek out nameds in all the dungeons, and that means going to a lot of dungeons, and not focussing on powerlevelling to 90.
WOW is all about powerlevelling to max and then playing “the endgame”. In EQ2 you can’t really experience the endgame without AA’s.