WoW's Recruit a Friend Experiment

I was just listening the WoW Insider Podcast and the co-host Turpster, who is freaking hilarious by they way, was going on about using the recruit a friend program to dual box and level characters uber quickly on a quest to have a level 60 of every class.

This got my WoW propeller spinning as I'm a dabbler and a little shady so the idea of using a loop hole to my benefit is very appealing (even if I suspect that loop hole was intentionally made by Blizzard). Therefore, I went and started a trial account for myself and embarked on a quest to use the recruit a friend benefits to my own benefit.

First Pitfall:
My original intent was to take advantage of grant a level to the veteran account characters benefit: where for every 2 levels the recruit account earns they can grant one level to one of the veteran account's toons. My plan was to play a bunch of characters up to 6 and keep granting 3 levels to my Blood Elf Paladin to fast tracking him from 38 to 60. Road Block! Apparently, you can only grant a level to a character who is a lower level. Meaning my little level 6 warrior can't give shit to my 38 paladin. Blizzard you are tricky bastards aren't you :). Okay I can understand that as it was maybe a little to obvious and more of a gaping chasm then a loop hole.

Adjustment to the Plan:
One of the other benefits of the recruit a friend program is triple xp when grouped and within close proximity to each other. Therefore I figured I have a pretty powerful computer with 2 monitors so I can run two instances of Warcraft at a time and dual box. Clicking between the two sessions to control two characters is a pain therefore I toyed with the idea of using Octopus to assign key strokes to both sessions of WoW at the same time. I was pretty much committed to that plan until I looked up the dual box set up instructions. My mind went numb after step 8 and all I could read was "blah blah blah". I'm not saying I'm not going to set this up someday but it will have to wait until my attention span miraculously grows.

So how the hell do I do this without torturing myself with a long setup process? hmmmmm .... Solution! Use a hunter on the one account and a warlock on the other account. Both classes have pets that can be set to "defend" and will automatically attack anything that attacks it's master. Therefore I setup up a group and set the one character to follow the main and then pretty much just play the main. If something attacks the follower his pet reacts to it defending until my main can finish up and turn around to take care of business. I've tested this scenario and it works, not as slick as mapping the key board to control two sessions but it involves my not having to learn how to do something I don't want to bother learning so I'm happy.

Second Pitfall:
Okay Blizzard really limits what you can do with a trial account. No Auction, no trading, and no receiving email with attachments. Meaning no way to make or give the character money which in turn means no way to improve your equipment, buy bags, and pay for training. Quest money and vendor sales doesn't cut the mustard when your earning triple xp and leveling fast. Therefore, to continue the experiment I had to upgrade to a standard account. This is pretty much what Blizzard wanted to force me to do when they designed this loop hole. Still my main account gets a 30 day credit after the recruit account pays for 60 days so it's not a total wash.

Overall I still like the idea of leveling faster with the triple xp but have just started the experiment and only have my warlock and hunter up to level 11. I'll comment on this more later with a final judgement.