The new Recruit-A-Friend program seems to be working great. I recruited 'a friend' and decided to test it out. This program rewards both the new recruit and recruiter 3x faster experience when partied together, the recruiter gets an epic Zhevra Mount (as seen in the photo) and the two players gain the ability to summon each other without any assistance for the first 90-days.
The registration was simple, you visit Blizzard's Recruit-A-Friend page and follow some simple directions. The new recruit sets up a trial account and can play for 10 days before needing to buy the game. We learned a lot of things about trial accounts and the recruiting system from our experiences.
Trial Accounts have a lot of limitations. These will drive any existing player insane. Among them include the inability to join a guild, chat in chat channels, trade and receive mail. My recruit, for example, didn't make enough silver while leveling to 10 to train his new skills, which was very frustrating since I couldn't give him any gold through trade or mail. He activated his account the first day and it took over 24 hours for it to take effect.
The experience bonus is carefully controlled. For instance, only the lower of the two levels will receive the 3x experience bonus. If the two characters are close in levels, the lower of the group should catch up rather quickly. Once your characters are the same level the two will level at the same rate. If you use the system, make sure you stay close to each other when turning in quests to reap the benefits.
Summoning is very useful. I've created a lot of characters in my day, and it really sucks when you want to play with someone else and they are a Gnome and you're a Night Elf. My recruit immediately summoned me to Teldrassil and we were flying through levels before we knew it.
Levels go scarey fast. We finished only a few circuits in Teldrassil before hitting 10 and 11 and had tons of extra quests to do. The problem is if new recruits use this system, as Blizzard intends, they will be overwhelmed and not learn the game as intended. They won't have enough silver to train level 10 skills and won't know WTF is going on when talents show up in the first hour.
The only problem I had was claiming my Zhevra Mount it took me awhile to figure out how. Eventually, I found the rewards section is on the bottom of the recruit a friend page, from there it was simple and instant. Overall, we casually leveled to 20 in less about 4 hours, which is half the time of my record (set a year or so ago).
