What Brohg said but to clarify old bonuses were grandfathered for those that earned them during the refer a friend promotional period. I wouldn’t worry too much about it though because anyone you want to invite to EQ can get good early gear by playing trough the Gloomingdeep tutorial and the Hero’s Journey achievements. When I first came back, I was shocked at the stats of the gear those quests rewarded.
I wish they'd bring it back. I have a couple recruit a friend accounts I use, and the experience boost is very welcome.
Honestly, I think they should just add the 300% bonus to people below max level anyway. I have a RAF account and the ability to spin up an alt and (relatively) quickly get it to a point where I can actually evaluate whether or not I like it is awesome. It's still a significant time investment to bring the character to anything respectable after. The 50% bonus down the road is cool I guess if I wasn't capped on my main for 11.5 months of the year, but that 300% catch-up bonus would be really nice, especially if the heroic characters never manage to see an upgrade.
They'd probably have a lot more subs if they brought this back, especially since you have to both be gold to receive the bonus.
it'd be nice if they made some other way to acquire the trophy that is no longer obtainable for recruit-a-friend.
...they would also probably have more subs if when All Access (THERE IS NO MORE GOLD!!!) your /claim filled with endless xp potions and magical unicorn mounts... As others mentioned, it was used far, far more as recruit an alt and did not have the effect the DBG folks wanted...drawing new folks to the game. So it died. The game is littered with attempts at things and only a handful of people benefiting from them. Instead of asking to bring back a failed product, why not come up with new ideas?
Recruit a friend becomes Revive a Friend, have a current subscription and current expansion which allows you to send a 1-2 week gold pass to a friend that hasn't had an active gold subscription in 6 months. Also, comes with temporary experience bonus applied while grouping. Realistically, this just becomes Revive an Alt but that's just the nature of the game. Good luck, getting people into EQ.
Let's be honest. An Alt going All Access is still an account going All Access. I like the Revive-a-Friend idea, or if they were to do something along these lines just let existing but inactive accounts be included. Incentive to come back has to work to some degree, even if temporarily. Any revenue boost is a revenue boost.
People still refer to All Access as Gold due to the fact that on your character select screen every time you log in it says at the top in GOLD - ALL ACCESS Just like it says SILVER in silver for those who are silver. And Free in Green. Some people even use "icebox" for refrigerator and "bless your heart" for "your stupid and go take a leap" Hard to change socio-linguistics
Agreed, I think with this strategy you can encourage expansion sales to the main account and additional account subscriptions, expansion sales, and possibly a heroic character sale with the temporary experience boost.
necro... now that we know account to account transfers are not gonna happen would it be possible to get RAF back? I don't really see a downside, even if it does just become refer-an-alt
I would like to see them sell the old Recruit a Friend Rewards in the Marketplace. The only one that has ever made it to the Marketplace is the Golden Hero Armor.