WoW’s LFG tool

(NB: Pardon if this is slightly rambling and off pace – I wrote it over the course of 3 days)

It’s been two weeks since the new LFG tool went live in WoW. Last week we got tons of reactions: Spinks is a fan; Tipa’s in favor of it, if not as enthusiastic as Spinks; Tobold looks at it through his usual pragmatic lens and finds it to be an improvement; Ravious at KTR doesn’t necessarily take a position on it, but does make some interesting observations; and Syncaine wonders why crushing one’s own genitals in a vice isn’t a popular pastime around these parts any more.

Personally, I’ve been PuGing random Heroics since the tool went live, and I’m really pleased with the new LFG system. Typically, I can play for 1 – 2 hours a couple of days a week, sometimes a bit longer on weekends, but nowhere near as often or regularly as the guilds required to raid would need me to be. Therefore, my only chance to enjoy group content is via PuGing it, which means I’m usually running Heroics. Anything that makes the process of putting a group together is a good thing in my book.

As for the potential long-term impact, remember that games have had this for a long time, and if the results there are any indication, the application of the LFG tool to MMO PVE content is probably going to be a huge success. This isn’t a feature that started with WoW – it didn’t even start with MMOs. I’d go so far as to compare this to Xbox Live-style matchmaking – in particular the system that Bungie built for Halo 2. Seeing how well that was received (it’s all over the place today), it will probably be something we see a lot more of, to the point where I’d imagine it will become a standard element of MMOs in the future. After all, if grouping and group content are at the core of a game, be it Halo or WoW, getting people together to play that content can’t be an afterthought – it’s something that should be built into the game itself.

Thinking about it, given that this solution has been so ubiquitous in other genres – even existing inside the MMO genre in the form of PVP matchmaking – I’m a bit surprised that the LFG tool has taken so long to finally make it into MMO PVE. If I had to guess why, it’s because MMO developers have always left it to the players to organize themselves to tackle group content, using a tool that has existed since the earliest MUDs: the guild. As both Syncaine and Spinks note, the LFG tool decouples the game content from the social content, which is what I think has made this such a shock to some individuals. But game-changing updates tend to be shocking, and I think in a very short time the LFG tool will come to be regarded as one of the most significant non-content content upgrades in a long time.

Here’s the deal. The end-game content of WoW breaks down into two categories: solo, and group. Up until 3.3, raiding – and to a lesser extent, Heroics – pretty much required you to be in a guild. Indeed, unless it was content you were vastly out-geared for, you pretty much needed a guild to raid or run Heroics*.

Why is that? For raids, mostly organizational constraints. Organizing MMO players is typically compared to herding cats. That’s because, despite what the naysayers believe, the requirement to actually get 10 people online to do the same content at the same time isn’t the entire extent of raiding. You need 10 people to perform half a dozen very different, very specific roles (MT, OT, MH, OH, RH, DPS, CC, etc) who know their roles as they relate to the other 9 people’s roles, who know the content even if they’ve never played it, who have all the right mods and access to the same Vent server and …

The problem is that the attitudes about raiding have spilled over to raiding. Players adopted a belief that every dungeon, quest, and effort involving more than two people needs to be approached like a progression raid. Perhaps not to the point of having Ventrilo servers and mod coordination, but there’s still an expectation that if you’re not perfectly (overly) geared and expertly trained for the content (ie, it’s on farm), you’re not cut out to run it at all.

While Syncaine laments that players can now “rid themselves of the annoyance of a guild” in order to access group content, I’m more inclined to believe it’s going to improve the nature of guilds in the first place. Two reasons for that.

First – and this one is somewhat obvious – by removing the tedium of finding groups, players can focus on playing the game, which accomplishes two things: one, it encourages more players to play the content, increasing role skill (via practicing said role – ie, healers healing, tanks tanking, DPS not standing in the fire, etc); two, it brings the average level of gear up across the board, as players are playing more, which means they’re earning more badges and downing more bosses and looting more gear, which means they’re getting more upgrades and generally improving their kits. This means the average gear level of an average guild increases (as average guilds are composed of average players), which means more guilds can tackle top-tier content.

Second, by decoupling pre-raid gear progression from guilds, players are more free to use guilds to organize themselves socially. As average gear level and skill levels increase, it becomes more likely that a given guild will have the necessary gear and skill to complete advanced content, which means that players will be less likely to remain shackled to an incompatible social group in order to maintain access to their level of content. An increased focus on using social tools for social organization leads to a better social environment, which leads to more harmonious relations within a guild (I still think cross-guild raiding alliances and content partnerships  would lead to a better raid organization environment, but that’s another topic for another day).

That’s not to say this is a silver bullet – far from it – and certainly the most hardcore of players and guilds will continue to exist exactly as they always have, but among the masses – among the >95% of players who never completed a dungeon beyond Karazhan during the Buring Crusade era – I think the LFG tool is a massive game changer. In a sense, for many (most?) players Blizzard has with 3.3 “released” more content in a single patch than ever before, because they just blew open access to a huge chunk of the game for that large group of people.

We’ll save the topics of the long-term impact of cross-battlegroup instances (how long until we start merging servers altogether, and usher in the era of the standard 15,000+ player server?) and the LFG tool (and its future as a raid organizing tool, just for starters) for another day. I’m already 1200 words deep, and I’ve spent too much time writing this.

*if you’re going to argue that guilds weren’t required to run heroics, remember, I’m not talking about stuff you vastly outgear – I’m talking about the perspective of a fresh level 80 in dungeon and quest blues. If you were lucky, you’d see “LF2M Heroic XXX PST for gear check and invite” so you knew to skip it. If you’re unlucky, you’ll show up at the dungeon entrance only to be kicked out of the party with a quick “sry ur undergeared.” Unless you were gearing up with a guild in order to fill a raid spot for them or you lucked out and found equally gear-deficient party-mates, you’d be hard pressed to find a group.