Talbain

I think we're seeing this more because of the following than anything else:
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/new...hp?story=19574
Gotta keep up those numbers after all.

Resident Cynic
My Blog - Genesis
http://genesis.lakuuna.org

 

• songster

The whole "powerlevelling" thing is getting monumentally overblown. The only people who could conceivably benefit from this in an exploitative way are the ones who are:

a) Planning to reroll
b) Already own a second computer (or one computer capable of running two instances of WoW simultaneously and controlling both)
c) Willing to buy a second account
d) Don't mind levelling up a second toon at the same time as the one they actually want to level
e) Have the skills to dual box successfully

Even if (a) to (e) are all present, the maximum possible benefit is saving yourself about 2 days /played on the toon you want to powerlevel, and getting a "free" (but probably unwanted) extra alt. Oh, and a mount.

 

• Calantus

I already have keyclone and I'm missing a shaman, mage, and want to reroll my rogue into human. This is exactly the perfect situation for this. I'm leveling the shaman and mage together via this system, then when they hit 60 I'll level a rogue to 30 with some random throwaway alt and boost him to 60 through the free levels. I'll save about 6-9 days played at the cost of a character transfer doing this method I reckon.

The only problem is you can't trade to trial accounts and it takes a couple days for trial status to drop. Since my mage is the trial AND not the one I'm playing she has almost no money ever because she hardly loots and I can't give her money so she's missing out on a lot of spells and has no bag space. The experience is insane though so I won't complain too hard.

 

ZeroWashu

I wrote up much of the dual boxing knowledge I had a few years back for the folks at wowwiki, it starts at Multiboxing - WoWWiki - Your guide to the World of Warcraft and if you look a the top of each page it provides links to software, hardware, and macros.

The easiest system to dual box on is a mac. I have run five sessions on an iMac which only had 3gb ram and a 7600gt.


I do agree with what another posted in that something similar needs to be done for scroll of resurrections. The fact you ca gift the levels at the time of your choosing makes this much more valuable to those of us with consistent online friends or family members who play the same hours. It obviously is a boon to multiboxers. I wonder if the group bonus experience is tripled as well? If so then triple boxing would be ideal.

the caveat to dual boxing is picking your quests but with triple quest experience that allows you to eliminate all the annoying ones along with the annoying zones.

the teleport does open up the possibility of a druid porting his lower level buddy to moonglade well before that person could get past the timbermaw so don't over look that usage.


Misc: Best Buy has the combined pack with WOW and TBC for $29.99
When I coverted a trial to paid it was done in hours. I literally started the trial, created a character, then entered in my CD keys.

 

Glayde

Yeah I made use of my bestbuy bucks I had sitting around to lower the sale price even more, and my trial account was converted instantly.

 

Vodrin

Out of interest does that give you two months subscription or only one month from WoW and not from TBC.

I had a level 30 I had leveled with a friend that I wanted to finish off, so we both linked a friend account to each other. Planning to level to 60 on my main account (linked to his sub account) and my sub account (linked to his main) both at triple xp and gifting the free levels to our level 30s. That would be 3 (2.5~) level 60s for around 4 days played, and account transfer the one on sub-account if interested in it. Triple-XP on quests is amazing, and summoning abuse is nice also.

The quest from crossroads to deliever to thunder bluff: logged my main, used Shatt'rath portal to Thunder Bluff, summoned his character, logged alt, he summoned me, hand in and hearth back. I'm sure this can be abused in lots of places.

 

• Calantus

I think the delay is online CC pay only, probably to combat abuse from goldsellers and suchlike.

 

Valdamir

Well, I have to say for me this is pretty much exactly what I wanted/needed.

I have 4 characters which I leveled to 70. I have another 4 characters languishing around level 20, simply because I just don't have the will power to level them any longer. With this option, I can get a second account for 90 days and essentially power level the 4 toons to 60. It will cost me a few transfer fees, but that's no big deal to me. The extra bonus for me is three of my four toons needing to be leveled can be healers, a priest, a shaman, and a druid (fourth is a mage). So, I send two of them to the new account and simply setup them up on auto-follow and hot keys for throwing heals on whichever toon I am fighting with. It will be cruise-o-matic.

To me, the key portion is the tripling of the quest experience. I could already get all the rest exp. I wanted, but that wasn't enough for me to put out the effort. But tripling the quest experince... that will make things fly.

 

Tyrian

I see this as the first step to a future "Each max lvl character your account has may grant one low-level character on the same account double/triple exp permenantly, until they reach lvl 58". Alts and rerolls are an important part of the game. Players get bored and want to reroll and try new things, but want to get their alts to the max level quicly where the most exciting content is. As the lvl cap increases, the amount of work to achieve this is getting much higher (almost unreasonable for many players soon) and sooner or later a change like this is bound to happen.

 

Karoo

So now we know there isn't a 1 store limit for the amount of levels you can bank to gift.

The next question is this:

If that Hunter you gifted was higher than the level 9 shaman you used to give the level would it have worked?

Can you only give levels to people lower than you? Can you only give levels to people lower than the level at which you gained the specific gift level?

In other words, you gifted 2 levels to a level 1 character, that's the lowest a character can possibly be so naturally it would always work regardless of level limitations.

However, if the hunter was level 5, would you have only been able to give him the three free gift levels you earned when the shaman hit levels 5, 7 and 9 but not the gift level you earned when the shaman hit level 3 since the hunter is higher than level 3?

That's a very big question for people who plan on gifting a level 30 from 30 to 60.

 

Pyros

You have to be higher level at the moment of the gift, at which point you can gift everything you have until the gifted char is the same level as the "gifter". You do need to lvl your newb to 60 before you can gift another from 30 to 60. You can't for example, level 2 30s then give all their levels to someone to get him from 30 to 60.

 

Sariaa

Here is a question I didnt see answered. Maybe someone knows the answer or can test it in game.

I have 2 accounts already. My main account with the majority of my toons on it, and my second account that has my latest alts. My GF waas thinking about getting another account and linking it to my second account. When I level toons on my second account I PL them through instances with my shaman or pally depending on the instance. So if there is a character from the new trial account, and a character from the linked account in a group, and then there is a 70 from a totally separate account, would the 2 low levels get triple exp in instance even though they are grouped with a 70?

Hope that makes sense. I'm inclined to think that they would get triple exp, which would make it even easier to level.

 

Original Look

Has anybody got any more concrete evidence/facts about transferring characters to and from different accounts with different surnames?

I also don't quite understand how much free play time you receive on the 'friend' account. I will probably end up paying for an extra month or two anyhow, but I seem to be reading 90 days some places and 10 days in others. Its only an issue because I would like to start messing about with it, but I don't have a lot of time to play over the weekend at all so if I am limited to 10 days free time I would rather wait. Which brings me to another issue, does this offer expire at any point?

 

Phillyt

You can' transfer between accounts with different last names. It's been like this since the paid transfer program rolled out. What do you mean by free time? The way it works is you have two accounts: a main account and a friend account. The main account refers his friend and the friend account gets a special key and signs up. The friend account is on a 10 day free trial at which any point you can upgrade to vanilla WoW for $20. After the upgrade, you get a free month and then you have to pay for two months to get a Zhevra for your main account and at which point the leveling bonus stops. There has been no word on when it expires.

I recommend upgrading now since you don't have much time to play because there is a 1-3 day period where Blizzard needs to authenticate your credit card information. During this time you don't have access to mail and trade and it's very frustrating. If you upgrade now, when you are ready to play, you'll have full access to these things.

 

Original Look

Great, thanks - You just answered all my questions. By free time I was referring to how much time the friend account had before it had to upgrade to a standard account, I seemed to remember reading 90 days somewhere, but I guess not.

As for character transfers between accounts though, I thought that it was only possible between accounts with the same surname as well. However, someone earlier on in the thread mentioned that their Guild Master had swapped characters with other memebers of the guild multiple times with different surnames. I guess it would be the case of Blizzard just getting the $20 rather than perform proper checks, but I was just wondering if anybody else had any experience/information about it.

 

• KinetiK

I was hoping my priest would be riding a Zhevra today but as a result of Blizzard online CC purchase policies I have to wait 40 days before I can get it. I did everything online starting with submitting my email for a trial for which I received 10 days credit and then an additional 30 days playtime as a result of upgrading to a full version of WoW. I then used a credit card to subscribe for a further 3 months of playtime. I giggled and checked my email for the code and 'nothing'. After talking to Blizzard's rep on the phone I found out that I'd screwed myself by using a credit card as they put delays of 72 hr on all purchases via online CC. In addition, they apply the free 40 days first before any additional CC subscription all of which means I will be waiting a while before my hawrse is a stripey one. If I had upgraded a trial using a retail code I would have the Zhevra in 10 days as apparently you still have to wait until your trial account's 10 free days are up.

Argh. I just want the Zhevra, honestly that's what I was willing to pay to get the damn mount.

Things are more like they are now than they ever were before. - Dwight Eisenhower

 

ZeroWashu

They get their ten days free from the recruit a friend invite. They get thirty days from the basic WOW install. I don't remember TBC upgrade coming with any free time.

 

• KinetiK

I upgraded 2 hr ago and didn't receive free time from the TBC upgrade portion.

Things are more like they are now than they ever were before. - Dwight Eisenhower

 

Pyros

I believe someone had pointed out you needed to use a gametime card to get the mount instantly earlier in this thread. Maybe it was on another forum though. You could cancel the creditcard thingie and get a gametimecard and pay one month with it right now though I think?

 

◊ Cowbell

Pretty much every question in this thread so far has been answered by Blizzard. I was hoping to see more tips/tricks or discussion on how to best utilize the RAF accounts, or possibly great places to skip or quests/chains you shouldn't miss with triple xp.

 

Daenerys

I've been power-leveling two accounts with a 3rd that I have a high level Mage on it and so far, so good. The lowbies got 3x experience in Deadmines and it's been great so far. Very fast leveling with this setup, as it takes away the penalty for having a high-level toon run the lowbies through.

I have noticed some quests not working properly, however. I haven't been able to nail down the reason, but randomly I'll turn in a quest and only get normal (1x) experience for it. One theory I had was that when the high-level toon is still grouped with the lowbies and they turn in quests, they do not get the 3x experience. I haven't confirmed that yet because I hadn't really been paying attention to when I had the high-level toon grouped, but it's one theory I had. The other is that Blizzard simply messed up somehow and certain quests aren't giving 3x experience for no particular reason.

As for tips/tricks, do your best to do all the (Dungeon) quests. They give insane XP...I did Stockades and each of the 6 quests gave me ~10,000 XP. In the early 20s, that's about 2 level's worth of XP.

 

Jaete

This and many other questions were answered in that blue link I posted earlier. When grouping, the normal group xp will be determined first, and then that will tripled. So because of the level 70 the xp will be a lot smaller than normal, as intended, and this smaller xp will then be tripled with the linked account thing.

I "recruited" myself a third account just for the hell of it and fooled around some more. Starting again from zero, all xp is tripled for all three chars as advertised. Haven't found anything to complain about this yet. When you're playing more than one account though, the usual multi-boxing woes apply, namely that accepting and turning in quests isn't very fun, and quests where you need to collect 20 bear asses are just downright horrible. From the dual-boxing.com forums it seems that it isn't easy to make the bear ass looting automatic, as that requires you to click a corpse or some other object, which requires you to somehow move the mouse cursor to the right place; and you probably can't do that reliably without having to automate it too much (bots are bad).

Fortunately, you can just skip all the collecting quests and still get more xp than, say, TourGuide says you should; this is what I just did in the orc/troll starting area and I'll be 13 or 14 when I finish. The first 10-20 levels of course involve a lot of running around, some class quests etc, so most of it you can't speed up anyway, but it should get much better at higher levels. Also grinding will probably be quite good xp by itself it you ever run out of easy quests.

It shouldn't be that hard to figure out good uses for the summons either if you have a clear idea of which zones you'll do when. Just send two chars in opposite directions and summon them back in turns. For example, after Durotar you can send one char to Silvermoon and another to Crossroads, summon the other one to Silvermoon so both get the initial flight path there, then after you're done with Ghostlands go to Org, have the one with the flight path fly to Crossroads and summon the other one there. But yeah, a more accurately thought out guide would be great.