No, not the Royal Air Force. I am talking about the new Recruit A Friend-campaign that Blizzard have been running for a while now. They've done similar things in the past, but where you only used to get a free month if you got a friend hooked on their virtual crack you now get a whole bunch of nice perks - including triple XP when grouping together with your friend. Yes, triple. And your friend can grant your characters levels, as long as he/she is higher level than you.
There's been some controversy surrounding this campaign, mostly from people who feel cheated and the elitist group that believes that all those new players will rush to level 70 without any clue how to play their class and thus, by just existing, ruin the game for everyone else. I've read forum posts and blog entries about this campaign and a lot of people are probably fed up with the whole discussion. But I haven't written anything about it before, so I frankly don't care. Just press that "back"-button if you don't want to hear about it anymore.
I won't claim that the RAF-campaign is a "game killer" in any way. Seriously, within the close future there won't be such a thing as a "WoW killer". No, not even Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. World of Warcraft got 11 million players, a lot of them have spent so much time with that game that they are not going to abandon it anytime soon - a lot of them have made friends that they won't leave behind either. And there's a big part of them that will try out other MMOs but still keep their WoW-account active despite not playing very often (like me).
But still RAF managed to have a negative influence on me. I've always wanted to level a mage, since they seem like a great class and seriously who doesn't want to be able to teleport and create portals? No one, that's who. But when I was still mucking around in Khaz Modan, killing boars and fireballing yetis, a friend of mine kept sending me messages on Facebook about what level he had reached using RAF together with his girlfriend. He did have more time to play than I did, being between jobs, but before I had reached level 10 he was hitting the high level 50s.
And that did cheapen my gameplay. I lost interest. He wasn't a new player, he had a whole bunch of level 70s already, and he knew exactly what he was doing with the new characters. But I lost all interest in leveling my mage, deleted it and went back to playing my two level 70-characters. Why did I have to toil through the horrible level grind (after three years of World of Warcraft, leveling a new character is nothing but a chore), when he could speed through the content without even breaking a sweat?
Of course, that's just me being grumpy. I got personally annoyed by it. But when I take a step back and think about why the system is in place in the first place, a whole other image starts to appear.
A while back, the leveling speed between levels 20 and 60 recieved a boost which made it a lot easier and faster to reach Outland. I took full advantage of this when leveling my shaman. Now the RAF is applied on top of this leveling speed, which makes it crazy fast (yes, I wrote crazy fast). But do observe the levels affected - level 20 to 60 for the permanent level boost, level 1 - 60 for the RAF-campaign.
I've seen a lot of people say that this is all because Blizzard want new players to join their friends at the end-game. Perhaps, but I think that's just a bonus for Blizzard. I don't think any of those initiatives have anything to do with new players. I think it is just as much, if not more, about keeping old players - players that are fed up with Azeroth and know that by design the whole original vanilla WoW (before Outland and Northrend) is completely pointless. The loot is crap and instantly outdated in Hellfire Peninsula, the reputations on Azeroth are worthless and the environments and quests are not nearly as well-designed as what can be found on the other side of the Black Portal (or is it Dark Portal? The big portal-thingie. You know what I mean.)
In all, I think the designers at Blizzard want to bury Azeroth. The only reason why they keep bringing people back there to train and use to Auction House is for the potential new players to get to see high-level characters and get something to look forward to. They want people to speed through that particular content and never look back, never grow any form of connection to the old world. They know that redesigning Azeroth to reach the standard of Outland or Northrend would be more or less impossible, it would cost too much money and take way too long. Instead they put small things in - the new village in Dustwallow, Karazhan in Deadwind - and hope that people won't notice when they allow people to more or less skip the content.
Here's an idea, Blizz. If this is the way you are going to do it, why not just let the people who have reached level 70 with one character create new characters and choose if they should start at level 55 or level 1? You did it with the upcoming Death Knight, why not just include all classes? All the new players can enjoy the old content, not knowing exactly what awaits them on the other side of the Portal or in the frozen North, and all the old timers can create all the characters they want and never see Azeroth except perhaps during a level or two in the Eastern Plaguelands. We win, you win, the new players win. All is well.
Until then, me and a friend actually pooled together to buy a Warcraft Battlechest and a two month Gamecard in order to use RAF to our advantage. I'll be leveling that mage I always wanted, he'll level a new hunter and then I'll get his level 30 paladin to around 60 with the free levels I can give him. Too bad that old players, that have invested so much money and time in this game already, have to give Blizzard more money to get the same perks as completely new players.
No, I am not old and bitter. I deny all those charges.