What’s So Special About The Recruit A Friend Program?

I heard about the new Recruit-A-Friend program from one of my guildies but he didn’t really know much about it. A lot of people seem to be upset about this but what makes the RAF program so special?

Ever since the new Recruit-A-Friend program was announced by Blizzard on August 5th, a lot of people have been really upset about it. Here are the program specifics and bonuses you receive whenever you qualify for the program.

• Free month of game time
• Exclusive in-game Zhevra mount
• Triple experience when grouped with your RAF friend
• Can summon each other all over the world (1 hr cooldown not shared with Hearthstone)
• Ability for the new friend to grant levels to you (can grant one level for every 2 levels gained up to 29 levels)

That’s enough right there to say “Wow! I can’t believe they are doing this!”. What makes this extremely powerful is the ability to recruit yourself and for 90 days you will get access to all these benefits. The benefits only last for 90 days (except for the mount) or until the characters hit level 60, whichever happens first.

To simplify it a bit, here is an example:

Bob recruits his friend Tim.
Bob and Tim both create new characters to play together.
As long as Bob and Tim are grouped together and close to the same level they receive triple experience for killing mobs and turning in quests.
Bob can summon Tim to his location and Tim can summon Bob to his location as well.
If Tim out levels Bob then Tim can grant Bob free levels.
At level 60 Bob can ride his new epic Zhevra mount.
Bob also receives a free month of game time.

I have actually took the time to get the full benefit out of this promotion. I have setup 4 new accounts.

Account1 recruited Account2
Account2 recruited Account3
Account3 recruited Account4

I then took my lvl 70 pally and did instance runs while being grouped with all 4 accounts. They are currently level 40 and it only took me about 8 hours to hit that (and that is kinda of a slow time). Once I get all those characters to level 59 I am going to start 3 different characters and do the same thing until level 30 and grant them 29 levels so they will be at level 59 in a matter of minutes.

The only thing is Account4 will not be able to have levels given to it b/c it hasn’t recruited anyone but still 3 more lvl 59 characters for a few hours work is very nice. That pretty much is the real power of the new Recruit-A-Friend program and you can probably see why this is such a big deal to a lot of people. What do you think about it? Is it something that is great or is Blizzard no better than account sellers since they are in essence pratically giving you a lvl 59 character?