WoW Recruit a Friend program

Today's top headline on the World of Warcraft main page is their updated "Recruit a Friend" program. Previously, if you referred a friend, they started playing World of Warcraft and paid their first month's subscription fee, you would get 30 days free game time. The new program awards you with:

• As it was previously, 30 days of free play time if your friend pays for 30 days game time.
  
• An exclusive zhevra in-game mount when your friend pays for 60 days of game time.
• If you and your friend are grouped together, you'll both earn triple experience.
• For every two levels your friend earns, he can grant one of your characters that's lower level than your friend's character, an extra level.
• You and your friend can summon each other once every hour.

Wow, a lot of interesting additions and already a lot of people are talking about it, especially about the increased experience and free levels. I personally think it's an excellent idea by Blizzard. Ultimately, one of the main reasons people keep playing, is because they have a lot of friends in the game. Typically though, when one of your friends starts playing, you already have a maxed out character and you have limited time to spend on keeping them company while they level up. And for your friend, it may get boring playing alone.

This new scheme limits the time you have to play apart from each other, and you can easily level up an alt in the process. If your friend gets ahead of your new alt, because you were raiding or whatever, he can easily allow you to catch up by awarding your character extra levels. Your friend will be level 70 in no time, at which point you can truely start playing together with your "mains". In the past, I've had a couple of friends who gave WoW a try. But the game was already mature at that point, I was max level and my friends got bored having to play alone most of the time and gave up. This is an excellent counter to that.

And of course the free zhevra mount will motivate existing players to actively start recruiting friends. As a matter of fact, it wouldn't surprise me if a substantial number of these "friends who start playing" will be secondary accounts of existing players who are only after the exclusive mount. If people are willing to spend more than $200 on an in-game social pet, they won't think twice about shelling out for an extra account for two months so they can get their hands on a new mount.