Saturday, November 15, 2008

LL MM NN OO PP Queue Queue

After reading up on Hatch's adventures in Recruit-a-Friend leveling madness, I was eager to give it a go myself for grinding up some alts for Wrath. I sent the emails, made the trial account, and sat down on Saturday afternoon, rip roaring to go! Then I hit the queues, and came screeching to a halt. Call me crazy, but I thought the point of waiting in line was that you eventually reach the front? Not only did the number not go down, it actually went UP. I hovered around 1000 all day long, never making progress. Oh, it gets better... hit the "continue" link for the solution to today's big Scooby-Doo mystery.



After crying LOUDLY in trade chat around the 2.5 hour mark, someone finally felt like it might be a good idea to tell me that TRIALS GET PUSHED BACK IN THE QUEUE, AND WILL NEVER REACH THE FRONT.

OH GEE THANK YOU BLIZZARD FOR YOUR WONDERFUL "RECRUIT A NEW BLIZZARD HATER" PROGRAM. IT WORKED, AND NOW I HATE YOU THAT MUCH MORE. WHAT BETTER WAY TO SHOW OFF YOUR FANCY NEW GAME THAN BY HAVING SOMEONE INTERESTED IN TRYING IT OUT WAIT IN A LINE THAT NEVER ENDS? GEE, MAYBE THAT WILL SET THE FUTURE EXPECTED LEVEL OF ENJOYMENT FOR THEM. WE WOULDN'T WANT THEM THINKING THERE'S ANY FUN TO BE HAD IN YOUR GRAND CREATION, WOULD WE? PERHAPS I'M BITTER, BUT AT LEAST I'M NOT LIVING IN A FANTASY WORLD WHERE THIS IS IDEAL? GG BLIZZ, YOU REALLY KNOW HOW TO SHOW A NEW RECRUIT A GOOD TIME. MAYBE YOU COULD OH-I-DON'T-KNOW PUT A FREAKING
NOTE ON THE LOGIN SCREEN THAT'S LIKE "HEY, IS THIS NUMBER NOT GETTING ANY SMALLER? YOU AREN'T A TRIAL ARE YOU? OH YEAH, THOSE DON'T WORK, DON'T WASTE YOUR AFTERNOON".

You'd think there could be some detection scheme in place where they're like HMMM HE'S A RECRUITED FRIEND TRIAL, AND HIS FRIEND THAT RECRUITED HIM HAS BEEN SITTING IN THUNDER BLUFF ON A LEVEL 1 DRUID WAITING FOR .... SOMETHING.... ALL AFTERNOON. MUST JUST BE A COINCIDENCE!

Sure enough, this all goes down on my 'free afternoon' while I can play the game guilt free while the wife and kid are at her mother's doing grandma-grandson bonding. I finally figured it out, and got back at the end of line (after activating a retail CD key that I HAD THE WHOLE TIME SITTING ON MY DESK) right as she came waltzing back in the door asking "if I had fun playing my little game this afternoon".

Christ, I wanted to scream. THIS is a perfect example of why I hate MMOs. This kind of crap is just expected, and God help you if you're some noob choosing today for your big foray into our little slice of Hell.

*UPDATE* I finally got in the game after waiting for about 4 hours total to get both toons in together, and I find that I can't create a toon on that server, since during queue times, character creation is locked. While the 'just play on another server' argument is sure to come up, it defeats the point of 'recruiting a friend to play with you', and nullifies the 'grant a level back to an alt of the guy recruiting you' thing.

G G (-_-;)

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Destroyed.

:<

Tom Phoenix said...

That is just terrible. It is really stupid that someone is prevented from playing the game due to technicalities.

I hope your problems will be over soon.

Anonymous said...

This is punishment for playing warhammer ! With any luck the queues should die down with time, things are crazy with the expansion now.

Dont get discouraged by the madness though, RAF really is crazy, I used it to top off a load of old alts i had between 30-40 as well. I leveled a mage and druid with the itention of making the mage my main. It took like 2 days to get to 60, with some faffing around. I then insta dinged a priest i had from 30 to 60.

Some tips include: avoid doing item drop quests when your dual boxing, they are massive time sink and you just dont have to do them, with 3x xp on quests you have to do 1/3 of usual questing, so go for kill 10 of x and deliver this quest.

Dont bother with the trial account, you cant recieve gold or items, it`ll really slow you trying to level with gray items and 2 6 slot bags.

Gold will be a problem if you dont have an existing source on the server

If you insta ding something, spend 30 minutes in sm afterwards, if you go to outlands you`ll get two shotted because you have 100 defense. Likewise for melee you`ll miss everything.

Some noteworthy quests that give masses of xp with raf include the azshara delivery one for horde, and the intial rep cloth handins for each of your faction citys. The alterac valley quests may be worth doing if your faction dominates that bracket, they award heaps.

The usual dualboxing tips apply too, melee/melee setups are a pain, hunters are a royal pain the hole. The best setups are melee as main, caster slave, or caster/caster.

Also, they way RAF is worded makes me think they`ll add 3x gains to TBC content at some point, probably in a few months when the wotlk deathknight rush dies out a bit.

Anonymous said...

have you been on zul'jin lately??? I haven't seen you online much

Anonymous said...

Who would have guessed. Just on 4 years down the track and we still have...

http://wowqueuedance.ytmnd.com/