The Recruit-a-Friend system, Blizzard’s relatively popular method of attempting to increase the size of World of Warcraft’s player base, will return “soon” according to a recent news update on Blizzard’s official site. This upcoming revival of the dormant program brings with it new rewards which are meant to entice veteran players to bring their friends to Azeroth.

For the benefit of our readers who are unfamiliar with this system and may wish to take advantage of it when it becomes available once again; I shall do my best to explain approximately how the process works. Afterwards, I’ll discuss the new and returning rewards and features included alongside this incarnation of the Recruit-a-Friend program.

Blizzard states in the post announcing the reworking of the program that it will include a new in-game interface through which players can generate unique recruitment links to send to their friends. These links will serve to connect the player’s account to those of any friends they wish to recruit.

I suspect that this interface will work quite similarly to, or perhaps even improve upon, previous versions of the recruiting process. In the past, players would log into WoW and complete a certain process in order to generate and send recruitment links to their friends via email.

After your friends follow the recruitment links you’ve sent them and complete any necessary steps on their part, your account will become linked to theirs. Once linked, the new in-game recruit-a-friend interface will purportedly allow you to see when your recruited friends purchase any amount of game time and, by extension, when you can expect a reward as a result of their game time purchase.

Veteran players will be able to link their account to a maximum of ten of their recruited friends’ accounts. Current players can only recruit friends who are either entirely new to World of Warcraft, or former players who haven’t purchased any game time on their account for a period of at least two years.

Blizzard states that veteran players will receive rewards based on how much game time is purchased by their recruited friends. Blizzard also explains that one recruited player who purchases multiple months’ worth of game time at once will earn rewards for both themselves and their recruiter at the same rate as multiple friends each buying a single month of game time.

Having said all of that, I suspect you might have a question on your mind at this point, dear reader. Once your recruited friends have created and linked their World of Warcraft accounts to yours and you can finally play together, what exactly are these rewards and perks Blizzard is promising? Well, the majority of the answer to that depends on whether you’re the recruiter or the recruited, although there are also significant in-game benefits which both of you can take advantage of.

I’ll begin by discussing the rewards granted to any players who recruit their friends as opposed to those that can be enjoyed by both players at once. As mentioned previously, as a recruiter, you can receive several rewards based on how many months’ worth of game time your recruits purchase while your accounts are linked.

For simplicity’s sake, from this point forward, I’ll proceed under the hypothetical assumption that you’ve successfully recruited one eligible friend who immediately purchased twelve months of game time in total. If I have correctly understood Blizzard’s explanation of the process, that assumption theoretically ensures that you’ll eventually receive every available Recruit-a-Friend reward as those twelve months pass.

Your first reward comes in the form of a monkey called Rikki, who serves as a themed companion. Given the circumstances, I suspect Rikki can’t be used in pet battles, but I could be mistaken about that. Secondly, according to the timetable Blizzard provided, you’ll receive a free month of game time as your reward for the second, fifth, eighth, and eleventh months of game time your recruited friend purchased.

Thirdly, you’ll receive a (presumably Epic-rarity) ground mount known as the Explorer’s Dunetrekker. This mount notably has two available seats, meaning that your friend can right-click on you while you’re riding this mount in order to hop aboard and ride with you.

As your next reward after the Explorer’s Dunetrekker mount, you’ll both get a simple cosmetic character title which exclaims that your character is a “Renowned Explorer.” The sixth month of game time will net you another cosmetic reward, namely a weapon enchantment effect called “Stinging Sands.” Your next reward is yet another entirely cosmetic one, known as the “Renowned Explorer’s Tabard.”

I have a strong suspicion that the nine-month reward will prove to be the most enticing reward of the entire lot for quite a few players, myself included. I say that mainly because it’s a two-seat flying mount known as the “Explorer’s Jungle Hopper.” In my experience, cosmetically-appealing flying mounts that can carry an extra passenger are particularly scarce within WoW; as such, I certainly wouldn’t mind adding this one to my collection.

The final two rewards serve to complete the whole “renowned explorer” theme. Namely, these items are the Renowned Explorer’s Rucksack and Renowned Explorer’s Attire; these are earned at the ten-month and twelve-month points within your friend’s purchased game time, respectively.

My intuition tells me that these items are purely cosmetic and exclusively used for transmogrification purposes, akin to the heritage armor that’s currently available to all allied races and a handful of core playable races. If that’s not the case and these items actually have in-game effects, however, I can’t help but wonder what purpose they might serve. Time will tell, I suppose.

As I mentioned earlier, the revamped Recruit-a-Friend system will also include certain benefits that both you and your recruited friend can enjoy in-game so long as you’re playing together. Firstly, while your characters are in a party together, you and your recruited friend will be able to summon one another to each other’s location once every thirty minutes regardless of any distance between your characters.

In my experience with past iterations of the Recruit-a-Friend system, this summoning ability is quite convenient if, for example, you and your friend have chosen character races whose starting zones are too far from each other to facilitate conventional travel.

Additionally, you’ll both receive 50% bonus experience from all sources while in a party with each other. As it happens, I actually have something of a strong opinion on this bonus which I’d like to share with you, but I’ll come back to that shortly.

The final announced in-game bonus to which you’ll have access is an entirely new concept which I find quite interesting. To elaborate, Blizzard is introducing what it refers to as a “Party Sync” feature. This mechanic’s main purpose seems to be allowing you, as a recruiter, to play with your recruited friend on a high-level character you already have without interfering with your friend’s leveling experience.

Party Sync goes about that by firstly making it so that, whenever the mechanic is activated, every player in your party is on “the same quest state and phase,” to quote Blizzard directly. Another aspect of Party Sync is its apparent ability to allow higher-level players to replay quests with their lower-level recruited friends “for rewards that are appropriate to their current level, regardless of the quest’s original level.”

Additionally, recruiters who are playing on a higher-level character with their recruited friends will also be able to use the Party Sync feature to scale down their level in order to queue alongside their friends for lower-level instanced content, such as battlegrounds and dungeons.

Blizzard made it especially clear that there exists a significant, noteworthy caveat in doing so, however. When you elect to scale down your character’s level for this purpose, you’ll lose access to any class abilities, talents, and Azerite traits which require your character to be a specific level. Blizzard notes that this implementation of a scaled-down player level is different from the existing Timewalking mechanic due to this factor.

To somewhat briefly return to the aforementioned 50% experience boost for both the recruiter and the recruited, the reason I harbor such a relatively strong opinion on the matter is the fact that I fondly remember what the Recruit-a-Friend system used to be like before it was overhauled in Patch 7.3.5.

I’m completely certain there are WoW veterans among us who remember, as I do, when the mutual experience bonus while playing with a recruited friend was a comparatively astronomical two hundred percent. I know that concept might be difficult to envision for many of you; it’s certainly always been difficult for me to wrap my head around, at least.

All I know with certainty is that under this previous version of the system, my recruited friends and I would create our characters, travel to our faction’s capital city upon reaching level 15 to ensure our characters could rest when we logged off, and proceed to “dungeon spam” with the expectation that we would typically gain anywhere between four and seven levels per completed dungeon run. As I recall, that was thanks in large part to the additional stacking experience bonus from full sets of heirloom gear.

Don’t get me wrong. I can easily see why Blizzard felt it was necessary to overhaul the Recruit-a-Friend system by significantly reducing the experience bonus, and I agree with their decision despite my nostalgia. After all, if characters were gaining that much experience as quickly as my friends and I once did, Blizzard knew we would practically reach max level within three days at most.

That didn’t allow us the ability to actually enjoy any of the game’s content, considering all we did was essentially speedrun through whichever dungeons the Dungeon Finder felt like throwing us into. Of course, there was also the technically-permitted prevalence of so-called “multi-boxers” gaming the system to a certain degree by making multiple accounts so as to “recruit” themselves and simultaneously control both their characters.

I’d like to leave today’s final word to you, dear reader. Are you looking forward to the new features in this version of the Recruit-a-Friend system, whenever it ends up becoming available? Do you plan to use the new version of the system as a reason to convince your friends to try the game? I’d love to hear your opinions on anything related to what I’ve discussed today; feel free to sound off in the comments below!

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