This is not them driving off new players. New players wouldn't have access to heirlooms. I'm guessing it's probably them stopping veteran players, who are the ones with heirlooms, from exploiting the system.
For people saying RAF'ing your own second account is an exploit, blues have responded to that many, many times saying it's perfectly OK. After all, they sell a second copy of the game and several months of gametime every time a player does it! They're happy to allow it. Not an exploit at all.
I for one am glad they did this. My best friend wants to join the game (I bought him a key for christmas, but he hasn't activated it yet because of our current exam schedule), and I thought I'd take advantage of this to get an RAF mount. But then I realized "Oh, but that means we're gonna be 100 in just a few days of playing, he won't have time to learn his class or understand the story ... Whelp, nevermind."Now I can get him in the program without troubling his discovery experience. That's great news :)
Playing with a friend is the point of recruit a friend don't you think?
People will 100% be upset about this, but to be fair this will help the feature to be used as intended from a design stand point.
I don't like all that XP nerf to be honest. I've been playing since Vanilla. I'm currently working on my 7th toon (and I know people that have a LOT more). I've SEEN this content multiple times already.The trick with heirloom is to get past content you've seen a thousand times so you can get to the real fun, which is the new content you barely saw. Same goes with RAF. You have to get to the actual content a first time before going far quicker the next times. Nerfing the XP gain makes it a whole bunch of pain. I did RAF two times with friends. I did it because I wanted to play with them. It was fun for us. I could play with them, and they could get a character to a higher level to keep playing with me and try out the game. Once RAF expired for them, they created another character and explored the old content throughly. Some of them used to play back in Vanilla, so going back to the old places like that was refreshing for them.Heirlooms cost an arm and a leg to get, but also to upgrade. I don't feel like they are worth it anymore after the nerf. And I definitely won't be RAF ever again. It's not an exploit to try having fun. The game already cost a lot of money (Buying base game + latest xpac + game time). People that can afford it work and can't make it the most out of their playtime. People that can make the most out of their playtime don't have the money because they don't work. And not everyone can actually get 100k gold or more during their month. I barely manage to keep myself over 20k gold. I don't do auction house because I want to play and not kill myself watching everything's price and investing and all. It's really sad. If you want to go back to a Vanilla feeling, just go to the vanilla servers once they come out. But don't revert back to the vanilla style. There are so many good games out there that understood that a 2nd and 3rd character shouldn't take as long to level as the previous ones. So many games that boost the XP gain for them so they can catch up to the latest content (since you already did it). Why is Blizzard reverting back? The game was enjoyable to level before those nerf. I don't mind them not stacking the heirloom and RAF xp, because we outleveled our friend pretty quickly. But going from 200 to 50 is far too much. It's not even worth it anymore. I'm currently struggling to level my new character and seriously, I don't enjoy my playtime with that one. Even if it's my favourite class. I already saw that content a thousand of times, I don't want to go through all of it again. It's just a pain. I love WoW, I always loved it and I really don't get all the crybabies that keep saying Vanilla was better. It was good, but so was all the content after that (yes, even Cataclysm, which I found very refreshing). Pandaria was so much fun to go through too. I was never disappointed by the game, always loved what they did to it. But this, this I don't like. I feel like they're spitting in the face of those players that actually went through the game over and over again.
Maybe its just me, but it aint that bad. You still get an exp bonus, you still get to grant level, having perks while leveling and you dont blaze through content as you recruit a friend to the game that maybe never played the game before, giving them time to learn along the way instead of suddenly having many new abilities out of nowhere. Its not a service to level your own alts as you exploit the system to get alts up, there is level boosts for that and alternatives. But thats just my thoughts
RAF leveling your own characters was not an exploit, as covered literally one page above your post.
Yet they still sell level boosts. Which is worse, faster leveling or instant leveling? ....
Blizzard wants to give people the chance to learn and enjoy the old content, so they substantially reduced XP gains to force people into it. I am fine with that, but if that is their goal, why did they lift flying restrictions in old content? People should have to earn that privilege after slogging through the BS one finds in each xpac, for we all know the xpacs consist of about 5% story and 95% BS content to fill the xp void!They should have changed the old content by adding a singular chain of quests, exempt of BS, that slowly reveal the story of each xpac as the player travels through the content, and then they can move on to the next story in that manner until they reach current content. Otherwise, the only true “experience” will be the endless grind of getting quests that require the player to kill a hundred monsters in order to get 6 toe nails. Real fun...
Another bad decision. Keep going down...
I've always felt the recruit-a-friend program rushed the friend through the game so they didn't get to properly understand what they were doing and why. If you're going to create a new WoW player, it's important they are guided through it and given enough time to understand their abilities. Otherwise they might see it as a complicated mess. It sounds like a big nerf but 50% extra XP is still a large enough amount to get the new player into the game smartish, and it complements the new zone scaling.
Here I sit still waiting for them to add more rewards so I can use the one credit I have had saved up for two years.
I don't think this is bad on its own given that RAF is primarily on new player experience and the "boost" function has been made easier and streamlined (for a single character). However, this combined with the nerf to exp gain items and heirlooms just seems like a poor decision, if only in optics.I'm not sure what the goal can be to remove the option for high level players to skip a repeat experience unless it's to sell boosts.