WoW’s Recruit-A-Friend program is going on hiatus — but what happens to all the rewards?

If you’re not familiar with Recruit-A-Friend in World of Warcraft, it basically is what it sounds like — a means by which you can recruit friends to play WoW and get neat stuff for yourself in the process. I’ve never used it because usually the friends I have in real life already have accounts, sometimes more than one.  If you’re like me and you always meant to get around to finding someone to get into WoW so you could get yourself some cool pets and mounts? You have until June 11, and then it goes away.

The RAF program going on hiatus to get an overhaul, and at present we have no idea what form that will take or what rewards it will have when it returns. This means that the current rewards — the mounts and pets available through Recruit-A-Friend — might not be available again when it returns, and certainly will not be available while it is on hiatus. These include the Heart of the Nightwing, the Emerald Hippogryph, the Cindermane Charger and the X-53 Touring Rocket mounts. This also means that (at least for now) you won’t be able to get the Golden Pig or Silver Pig battle pets, or the Jade and Zipao Tiger battle pets.

This also means that if you want the in-game benefits of Recruit-A-Friend, like Friend to Friend Teleportation, 50% bonus XP while grouped with your recruited friend, and your friend being able to give you a free level for every two levels they get, you’ll need to find someone who doesn’t currently have a WoW account by June 11 and they’ll have to buy the game within 60 days. Again, it’s possible all that stuff is coming back, but Blizzard might entirely redesign the program and those benefits might well not return.

I hope they retain the basic structure of the RAF program, but I suppose it has been around for a while, and change can be good when dealing with venerable promotions like this one. At least keep the mounts and pets, Blizzard. People would go nuts if they lost the ability to gain them permanently.