Work has been kicking my butt the past few weeks, and between that and the stress relief of raiding I've not had much time for writing.
Hopefully this post will get me back on track a bit.
I've been enjoying my time in Classic, and as (I believe) Shintar put it that it's more enjoyable when you're with a group of people --a guild or a cross-guild group-- that you enjoy hanging with. And in true WoW fashion, while the focus is on downing the last boss in AQ40 (Viscidus), raid chat has been filled with what's coming up. Not Naxxramas, mind you, but a bit farther down the road than that: Burning Crusade.
To say that people are excited for BC to drop is probably an understatement. Draenei, Alliance Shamans, Outland, Draenei, flying, Karazhan, and Draenei are just some of the things that people are excited about.
And did I mention Draenei?
Of course, all this excitement for the Burning Crusade left me with an uneasy feeling. Oh, not that I'd be not interested in playing through Outland when it was relevant, or any sort of other petty reasons. In fact, I'd love to see some of my long time blogger friends (Hi, Vidyala and Voss!!*) come back and get a chance to play Burning Crusade again.
Then what's the problem?
In a word: guilds.
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| Yeah, I'm just a ray of effing sunshine. |
What will happen when BC drops and people start raiding? The requirements will plummet from 20 and 40 man raids to 10 and 25 man raids, and dropping the number of people in a raiding team by 50% and 63% (respectively) is going to result in some tension. Remember, we're coming at BC from an entirely different place than Vanilla: from what I've been told by people who were there, raiding was something that few guilds were able to do in Vanilla, so dropping the raid requirements to 10 and 25 people were a godsend. But in Classic, the situation is reversed: a LOT of guilds raid in Classic, so when you take a raiding team and chop it down like that, there's going to be some tension. The larger guilds with multiple raiding teams can probably absorb this adjustment, but the smaller guilds that field only one? That's another kettle of fish.
For example, I'm one of six Mages in our AQ40 team. I'm also quite aware that due to a combination of (lack of) experience, skill, and gear, I'm probably 5/6 or 6/6. So, when the time comes to make up raids for BC, I'm likely to be left off the main team. I'm okay with that, since you want the best people in your raid, but I'm also not a member of the guild either. Being demoted as a guildie, however, is going to have a completely different impact.
Guild leaderships throughout Classic are going to have to navigate this minefield, and I'm not sure a lot of guilds will survive. People will want to get a chance to raid and see the content they never got a chance to see, and to be put on the bench will hurt. Hell, look at sports: just how many sports figures take being pulled from the starting group well? You spend your life competing, you're a proud member of the starting lineup, and then the coach pulls you over and says "Look, we've got this kid here, and while we still value your contribution, we've gotta look to the future. It's a business, you understand."
Sure, some people handle a demotion with grace and think of the overall team as the important part. But there are others, lots of others, who still want to prove that they've still got it. They're upset and angry, and they've got instant motivation to prove their coach/manager wrong. They split for another team that gives them the chance they wanted.
And this is what worries me: the necessary demotion of people from a raid will cause drama, more drama than was experienced in the original BC.
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I suspect that the drama will be closer to what happened to guilds in Wrath, when the requirement to raid was only 10, and suddenly less than half of a guild was needed to put together a raid team. It could get ugly really fast, with a lot of guilds blowing up into chunks, effectively balkanizing the guild environment on Classic servers.
And seeing some of these guilds that I've run with breaking apart is not something I want to have happen.
There are a lot of great people I've gotten to know through raids, instances, BGs, and just goofing in general around Azeroth, and I would really prefer that my nightmare scenario never happen. I play to have fun and socialize, and dealing with drama is not what I signed up for. Sure, I realize that some drama is inevitable --we're talking people here, after all-- but the less drama the better.
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Perhaps my concerns are overblown. Perhaps things will work out and there won't be an excessive amount of drama in Classic.
But if nothing else, the year 2020 has taught me to not be optimistic.
*I'm on Myzrael-US, in case you're wondering. It's West Coast time, so more in line with your own time zone. Just leaving it out there....
I actually think that "the bench" isn't going to be as much of an immediate problem, as there'll be lots of Kara teams, and the 10/25 split means that those teams won't map straight onto the larger raid size either. But there'll certainly be less of an incentive to put up with any rules or people you don't like that much in your guild if you could also go smaller and get things done without them.
ReplyDeleteMaybe, but I do think that the bench will be a bigger problem when the composition of a raid team becomes more important. Slashing the Rogue list, the Mage list, the Hunter list, and also incorporating a Shaman (or Pally depending on faction) into the list will have an impact.
DeleteIt's only natural to have a "am I not good enough?" moment, but how guilds respond to that will be an issue. Create a new raid team? Fine, but will this be considered an "equal" raid team, or will in be a farm for the main raid team? I've seen both, and I've also seen both split guilds in half, and that's just in the current scenario.
Perhaps I am overthinking it, but it is a big motivator for me to stay on the fence and with my current guild and not jump into the guild I raid with.
Also it reads as if you didn't experience the Vanilla/TBC transition, there was a lot of drama. Especially for the Karazhan groups in guilds that were raiding before. I think it could be either worse this time (the best players of the raid blitzing through) or better (oh, it's so easy we can split and run 2-3 Karas per week, no problem).
ReplyDeleteOr maybe I'm the outlier, I found this transition a lot harder than the one to WotLK, but maybe your guild/group at the time plays a big role, but I didn't have the impression that I was alone.
The people I've spoken to from back then didn't raid in Vanilla (save for a few people, such as Shintar) but did raid in BC. For them, the adjustment was a major boon.
DeleteI'd expect the raiding guilds to have a ton of drama, because 40 (or 20) down to 10, but in its own way that was a precursor to Wrath.