I’ve never, until recently, been able to enjoy the delights of the RAF program. I’ve seen nearly everyone else in my guild refer friend after friend after friend, usually leaving the guild to take part in educating and de-noobing whatever fresh and wide-eyed person recently hit 80 and reckoned that they were raiders now, had to be, they’re 80. But with that glorious new mount becoming available only through the RAF system, I knew it was finally my turn.
Prospects were beyond dim. Most of the people I know that I actually like well enough to want to invite into my virtual world are already playing. The rest are bored by WoW, although I don’t see how, given that they’ve never played for more than a few minutes at a time. My co-workers, despite also working in IT, would rather work all hours of the night from their home offices than play a game.
But I just have to have that mount.
In the end, I did what any girl would do and found the single most attractive man I know and told him he could see my boobs if he would get an account. Okay, that’s not entirely truthful. I told At I was referring him.
Yes, I know that’s pretty ridiculous and yes, I know that I just shelled out other actual money for a pretty vampire pony, but dammit, it looks so useful. Take questing about with At for example. Since he’s a paladin and I’m not and the game is still pretty buggy from time to time, we are constantly losing each other while in flight because he’ll be the only one of us benefiting from Crusader Aura. And he’s terrible about paying attention to anything in the game while we’re trying to get from point A to point B and routinely drives me up the wall when I’ve arrived ready to go and he got stuck in some tree branches somewhere and didn’t notice until I said, “Where are you?”
The rocket should also give me the potential to be either very nice or very rude to noobs, and you guys know I like that sort of power.
So, while I could go claim my RAF mount now, I’m waiting for that rocket to be available. Any time now, pocket rocket. Any time.
A beef, I has one with RAF
Posts here rarely feel complete without a rant, or so I hear. And now that I am finally using RAF for the first time, I have a pretty big problem with it. Before, it’s been my problem with it in theory, but I had no solid evidence that my theory was true. Now I can absolutely say that triple XP is too much and it’s too fast. Granted, At and I know what we’re doing. We know how to get from zone to zone and how to best group our quests so that we’re doing a minimum of back and forth. We know how to use all the tools available to us and getting through dungeons is frankly not a problem, aside from dealing with PUGs, so we have some advantage over a leveling pair that is made up of one veteran of the game and one new guy.
In the bits of time we’ve put into our pair, we’ve already hit level 31. It’s been such a whirlwind of killing things and turning quests in (and turning in three or four quests will generate enough XP to rocket us through another level) that I am more than often feeling like a Death Knight in the starting area. Not only does everything fall down dead at the sight of us, I am gaining talent points more quickly than I can remember to spend them. At one time I had six unspent points and, boy wasn’t that odd because I could have sworn I just spent two or three.
No wonder these people are getting to 80 and having no idea of the basics of how to play their class. They moved through their early toolboxes so quickly, they scarcely have any idea what a hammer or a handsaw are for but (and this is especially true for DPS) they sure know how to use the heck out of their wood chippers – they can’t do anything fine-tuned or precise but hot damn can they make some spectacular messes!
In addition to this, the leveling goes so swiftly that unless you have any idea how to make money, you’ll never have enough to learn your basic training spells. I’m sure this could very well be unique to the situation At and I find ourselves in, but we’re not leveling on a server where one or both of us has a main. That server is full up, other than a reserve slot for our future Worgen toons. But since neither of us have thousands of gold just lying about, waiting to be spent, we find we cannot even dream of leveling our crafting professions as all our gathered mats end up on the AH block looking to fetch a fair enough price for us to be able to afford learning how to be more judgmental or hone our protective talents.
In short, the RAF system is absolutely primed to create players who have no notion of what they’re doing, no valuable professions to bring to the table and who expect that their moneybag friends or guild mates should help them at every step of the way so they can acquire flying and epic flying and cold weather flying and the gear that will make their wood chippers able to rape whole forests of resto druids in less than two minutes.
OMG Disclaimers!
Does this mean that I think that everyone who came into the game through RAF is a flaming noob who hits the keyboard with their face to level? No. Many of our guild mates who have brought their friends in have done their best to give their friends a solid grasp on game mechanics and then, when it comes to raiding, there’s just some sanding rough edges off. That’s true of anyone who is new to raiding, so I cannot complain there.
However, with as much as Blizzard has already accelerated leveling, I think they could easily have afforded to perhaps somehow scale XP gain, so that people only got double for the first 20 or so levels and then, as they enter the levels that actually take more than 5 minutes to get through, introduced the triple XP gain from 21-60. Even at that, I think it would be easy to miss some foundational spell or other on the way up, but there might be more of a chance that more players would better understand that there’s a time to use a hammer and a time to use a battering ram.
In adjacent news
I was right. Being a holy paladin is pretty darn boring so far, except for when the whole party is taking massive AoE damage and I can’t do much to help that. Then it just gets frantic.Will bacon make this better?
I agree with the triple xp thing. It was great for leveling, but the new person doesn't learn much about the toon they are playing.
I agree wholeheartedly with the RAF criticisms. We bought a second account just for the mount and to level alts as well, and it was ridiculous. By the time I'd finish half a zone I'd look at my quest log and go "…so all the quests are green now. Awesome." It was a strangely disjointed and jarring experience.
As for the Holy pally, gasp! Honestly I was excited to get Bacon but then ended up using it less in practice – at least at first, I just didn't have the mana pool to support it. The most engaging thing for me as a holy paladin is using all my other tools in conjunction with the healing ones – Hand of Salv, Protection, Judgments, etc. Even Hammer of Justice (I think that's my stun hammer?) to interrupt mobs, trying to time a Holy Light so that the most people will benefit from the glyph splash, etc. Or maybe I'm just weird. It does get more interesting as you level though IMO, now at level 76 I'm having a blast.
I do look forward to it getting more interesting! Fortunately, At will be able to give me further pointers about being a healadin as I go. I'm sure I'll need it – it's been so fast I think I'm still missing shoes while I'm halfway down the road!
Reversion and I leveled up our druids with RAF back before Wrath came out. If I hadn't had a solid year of WoW under my belt I'd have been lost, and as it was I didn't get competent as a healer until BS levels, when the RAF craziness wore off.
I wonder how many girlfriends of gamers are being entirely turned off of Wow? "Honey, here, try this with me, it's so easy, you get levels so fast!" and before they've even learned how to get their camera angles to work, they're in Scarlet Monastery and the warlock is pulling the boss.
Bonus points for a hysterical visual! I can just see the confusion of the situation – personal experience?
Fortunately my hubby is wiser than that – he let me learn WoW at my own pace (and then got me to really like it by cleverly making me play EVE for a while. WOW was… let's just say… sooo much better than that). I *did* have camera angle problems at first. But I learned WoW well before RAF, thank goodness.
*raises hand*
I was that noob, I'm afraid. I had never played ANYTHING AT ALL before my buddy got me into WoW, and if you had looked up "noob" in the dictionary, there would have been my face.
However, most of that has worn off by now, thank heavens. At least, I hope so. After almost two years, one would think that I would have learned SOMETHING, right?
Wonder if this comment will work?
Anyway. In the interim, I've written a whole blog post inspired by this (yay lunchbreak) but a direct answer to "how do they learn" might be that we're *supposed* to teach them. With great power comes great responsibility etc ;)
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I agree wholeheartedly with the RAF being actually the WORST way to usher in a new player. I used it with my completely new-to-WoW friend and by the time we were in Outlands he still had no idea how to play his character, since we just blazed through Azeroth with the triple XP. Fortunately after taking a year off he has returned, on a new server, and is re-learning the game properly this time. Perhaps even better than normal, since the one thing he did learn was how to work the AH and make decent gold, so he's well financed at least!
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I do look forward to it getting more interesting! Fortunately, At will be able to give me further pointers about being a healadin as I go. I'm sure I'll need it – it's been so fast I think I'm still missing shoes while I'm halfway down the road!
We're certainly all noobs when we start, even the people who think they know something about gaming. The fact is, WoW is such a big place that yes, even two or three or four years later, we're all learning new things, I think. I do think the RAF system is putting some newer players at higher risk to be noobs for longer – or at least at higher levels. Hopefully everyone gets at least one person or a good guild to help them sort things out!
Excellent point. Unfortunately, I have seen some friends abandoned (I have a student worker who spent most of his time peppering *me* with questions when I wasn't the one to refer him) and others paired up with people who are just bad teachers. Those are times when the system puts an unfair strain on the guild the new person happens to be in. As you mentioned in your post, though, usually those who are willing to learn will get educated somehow or another and much faster than those who don't care.
I find that many people make a better go of their second characters when they've tried the RAF thing. Seems like most get one character up to 80 and then go back and level something else at a slower pace and without everything in the whole game being brand new to them. Unfortunately, most of these second characters are DK's. :P
I do think players have a better chance to absorb more about their class when they're not also trying to figure out where and what the hell everything is. Trying to figure everything out for the first time at warp speed isn't going to help anyone.
Can't help but agree with this. Having just levelled my second character to 80, I *know* the process of learning was much smoother and I'm reasonably certain that after a week at 80 I'm much more effective with her than I was with my main at the equivalent time. Knowing the basic mechanics of encounter design and class roles already meant that, even in dungeons I hadn't seen before, I was able to spare some brainpower to think about my utility abilities etc. That's a fair improvement from "what's he doing? er, what button now? Help, why are they hitting me? What's that over there? Arghsplat"