Blizzard has a recruitment promotion for World of Warcraft (WoW) that gives the recruiter and a new member triple experience while questing together. I'm interested in working in MMO development, so I thought this might be a good way to get to the endgame in WoW. While it seemed like a good idea at first, I soon found that this type of unbalanced leveling led to a host of problems.

I began as a blood elf hunter and my friend chose a blood elf warlock. The first few levels felt easy, which is typical and helps to get players hooked. There were some nice areas, such as Farstrider Square, that had a lot of quests and were well-designed.

The problems started occurring after the first few levels. I actually got to a point where I had absolutely no quests, perhaps because I had missed a breadcrumb quest or leveled too quickly for the area. There were too few quests to start, and then there were too many. My friend and I began abandoning more fun but time-consuming quests for the kill quests, as they would provide more experience points for our time. The quest flow was completely thrown off by the triple experience. We were abandoning quests that would unlock other quests, and leveling became a dull grind.

There were other problems caused by the unusually fast leveling. We had too little money, as items we would normally gather and sell in the completion of quests were no longer acquired. This led us to be too poor to buy some skills unlocked as we leveled beyond our financial means.

I may have enjoyed WoW more at a normal pace, but the triple experience seems to turn leveling into a grind. I would hope that a lot of the fun in an MMO could come from the journey, not the destination (or endgame). If I'm going to spending hundreds of hours in that virtual world, I want to enjoy as much of it as I can.