Will WoW 3.3 Change Guild Dynamics for the Worst?

Blizzard is starting to give us some specific information about what we can expect with WoW Patch 3.3.  With that, they have rolled out the new Looking For Group (LFG) mechanism.  There are some exciting features that should ease a lot of the pain for people wanting to do dungeons or raids at many different levels in the game.  Specifically, there is the ability to do cross-server dungeons and raids, and there is the ability to do “random” dungeons and raids for slightly better rewards.  As a matter of fact, this is something I wanted to explore in a little more detail.

According to Blizzard and WoW.com;

LFG as we know it is gone
LFG Channel is back for manual gathering a party
LFG tool is going live, allowing you to choose any of the following when queuing up for a dungeon run:
Party Position (Tank, Healer, Melee DPS, Ranged DPS)
If you would like to be a leader
You can queue as a individual or as a group, so you and I can party up and join together
Parties are filled with people from ANY Server
The more random people you run with, the higher the rewards are (Not sure I like this part yet, but it looks like if you run with 4 other random folks, the gold is just higher)
Rewards are roughly 60 Gold per person when you finish the dungeon
Added “Need, Greed, or DE” option to rolling, if no one needs, and you win the Greed/DE roll, and you chose DE, it will be auto DE’d and put in your bags
You can queue up once every 15 minutes
You now have a Dungeon or RAID option to vote on removing people from the group
Emblems of Frost are provided as rewards, which allow you to buy ANY type of Emblem, including Triupmh Emblems with them

That’s fantastic!  Right?  I’m sure this is going to bring a lot of people back to the game.  It looks like this will enable a lot of skilled and well-geared players to participate in end-game content that is currently gated because of the size, skill, or time-restraints of their guild.  Which is cool

I’m a big fan of examining the “Law of Unintended Consequences.”  Basically that law says that for whatever proactive action you take, you will spawn a result or consequence of equal weight.  An unintended consequence, beyond what your expectations may be.  One story that illustrates this well is the story about GreenPeace activists in the arctic who were trying to prevent the clubbing of baby seals for their fur.  To counteract this, they decided to spray food-grade dye on their fur, presumable ruining it for the furriers.  Unfortunately for the baby seals, the local polar bear population could now easily see the seals against the white background of the arctic and the feeding was on.  This was clearly unintended.  Once again I have digressed.

Here is the (probably) unintended consequence of the new LFG system; Almost every guild in the game will be trivialized as far as their value in group raiding and dungeon crawling.  Why?  Because you won’t really need the guild as much any more.  If your guild isn’t Ulduar 25 capable, you can just join a cross-server raid.  Now there is definitely a risk-reward component to this, and I’m not factoring in the emotional or loyalty factor.  Those definitely have an impact.  Blizzard has addressed the Risk/Reward issue with additional rewards that will grow based on the number of “random” or “pugged” members in the group.  They are giving Emblems and coin to people who join the group and successfully complete them.  So now, not only can I find a group that may be stronger than my guild group, it’s going to pay me more too?  I can see a lot of people going for that.

I hope that I am wrong about the change in guild dynamics.  Blizzard has shown in the past that as an expansion approaches, they aren’t afraid to blow up the current paradigm and insert a new one.  For illustration, just look around for 40-man raids now.  Many a guild imploded over that change.  Most of them, if you believe the empirical evidence.  It’s going to be interesting to see how this change impacts the current guild dynamic, and to see if Blizzard has something up their sleeve to counteract the consequences to this.  Maybe this is what guild leveling is all about?

Watch here for more as we learn more about the patch.

- Genda