Zen of Design ;

This is all we were talking about at work today:

Our new Recruit-A-Friend program has added features that reward you even more for bringing your friends into Azeroth™. Recruit-A-Friend and earn:

• An exclusive ZHEVRA in-game mount* when your friend pays for 60 days of subscription time.
• 30 Days of FREE** WoW gametime when your friend pays for 30 days of subscription time.

Also, from the moment your friend creates a character and starts adventuring with you (including the trial period), both of you will receive these additional in-game benefits:

• You and your friend will earn triple the experience when grouped together.
• For every two levels of experience your friend earns, they can grant one level of experience to any one of your characters of lower level.
• You and your friend will have the ability to summon each other from any point in the world.

At one point, I think there were 12 people in my office talking about this.  Responses varied from ‘this is a raw deal that cheapens everything I’ve done so far!’ (1 response), “This is the sign of cheapness, of Blizzard finally getting desperate” (1 response), and “Whoa, I’m totally multiboxing THIS shit” (all the rest of us).  I know of at least two people with lapsed accounts have reactivated them since then.

Of those at work, 3 or 4 also said “I was about done with Conan anyway”.  So there’s that.

There was a lot of discussion about motives, oddly enough, even though I think they’re clear.  The most devoted players of WoW are raiders and battleground players who are having a harder and harder time field battles and raid excursions. AND they have an expansion pack in the near future that, for better or for worse, has almost no content below level 70.  Getting more people in, and to max, makes a lot of sense in that light.

Ever spend a couple hours trying to cancel some sort of service, and say to yourself, “There oughta be a law”? Well, if you’re a politician, you can do something about it.

The Illinois House and Senate have just passed a new bill requiring subscription-based Internet gaming service providers to give customers safe online ways to cancel as well as clear instructions online on how to cancel. Apparently this all came about after one alderman had a tough time canceling his son’s Final Fantasy XI account and took it up with the House. The full text of HB4178 can be read here, but it’s not made clear if virtual worlds are included in “games.” My guess would probably be yes, though.

The Today Show hosts play Rock Band 2.

In other rock band news, I hunger.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I haven’t played Conan since I discovered my female barbarian was nerfed by her own damage animations.  That being said, I find articles like this one a little obfuscating.  Oh noes!  Funcom is down to half its value!  Sky!  Falling!

Looking at the longer view, we see that Funcom is… exactly where they were before they launched Conan. Which is to say, the launch of Conan probably overinflated their value.

Also note that in both graphs, the graph starts at 15, instead of 0.  The net result is that a casual graph reader would think they lost 80% of their value from their peak, when instead they’re down half.

Should Funcom be doing better?  Probably.  But it’s not nearly as gloomy as the original article suggests.

The internet is all abuzz that Brutal Legend has been dropped by Activision.  Given that Brutal Legend combines the brilliance of Tim Schafer and the Jack Blackiness of Jack Black, this makes baby Jesus cry.

Dear people who control the game industry’s money: do something about this.

Last night, my guild finally managed to take down Illidan Stormrage, the end boss of the Black Temple.  It was an enormous amount of work to get there.  I think I joined the guild about this time last year, and back then we were taking babysteps into Serpentshrine Cavern, struggling with Lurker.

According to WoWJutsu, 5.18% of all U.S. raiding guilds have gotten down Illidan, which amounts to roughly 4000 of ‘em.  (That being said, with our fresh kill, we rank in the low 2000s).  Split the difference, and assume that each guild has about 35 raiding members (probably low), and you’d guess that about 100K people have popped Illidan.  A small fraternity, but actually not as small as I expected.

Overall, Black Temple is probably my least favorite of the raids in WoW.  Frankly put, it’s just too damn long.  You’re required to kill 8 bosses even to take swings at Illidan.  The four earliest bosses don’t drop much that’s any good, and yet we’ve killed them all at least a dozen times - we were sharding stuff on Supremus as early as our third kill.  It would be really nice if, in the future, Blizzard adjusted their loot reality to the mentality that early bosses will die five times more often as the later ones.

All this said, my guild seems to have little interest in Sunwell.  By most reports, Sunwell requires farming Illidan at least 6 weeks before you can even make serious attempts on the first boss.  So what’s next?  Who knows.  Stay tuned.

Sorry I haven’t been around lately, we’ve been hard at work to get an internal demo done, and it’s been leaving me just crispy enough to not feel like posting much of anything.

As a reward for your patience, here is a video of Rush failing at Tom Sawyer in Rock Band.

Conan females do less DPS than males do because their special attack animations are longer. Even better, it would take too much artist time to fix anytime soon. Sara is on the case.

What if World of Warcraft had been a free-to-play ad-based game?

Interestingly, Pardo commented on this subject: “When were first going to make World of Warcraft, we wanted to make it free and advertising supported.”

However, the Blizzard exec noted: “We didn’t want to charge a subscription, but as we researched market conditions, we realized that wouldn’t support us.”

In regards to their twice-a-week patch schedules, the Conan team is already slowing things down. A recent disastrous patch may be the reason.