On the PTR, I copied over Searsi, my Draenei mage. And got offered the chance to faction change her to a Blood Elf. When some of my Alliance guildies wanted to play Horde, I took the chance to make her for real.

Interestingly enough, things like taking the portals out of Dalaran hasn’t really affected her yet. Such is the life of a mage.

She has been racing through the levels. I haven’t seriously quested in a zone since the Ghostlands. I am sure the Dungeon Quest XP Nerf will have an effect, but I am not sure how much. Especially if you have access to the new heirlooms that are coming. Of course, your own mileage may vary.

The oddest things has been the difference in spells. I leveled Searsia Frost and new other people who chose Fire. Now all three specs are completely viable and I am loving going Arcane. Getting all the signature spells so early makes a huge difference along with the reduction in mana cost for casters. Oh, and getting Mirror Image at 50 instead of 80 definitely make more for a change as I found out in Stratholme last night.

I realize that nothing I say will make you like this change. I realize that quick instant travel has become something that players rely upon. I realize that even with dozens of travel improvements including new boat and zeppelin paths, flight path improvements, and shortening of hearthstones to 30min cooldowns that portals forever changed people’s idea of travel. I realize that you’ve gone through three or four different reasons about why it’s a bad change, jumping to the next as I refute the last, and that by continuing a conversation along these lines I’m simply driving myself closer to madness. I realize all these things, but what I want to say is – Everything is going to be ok. – Bashiok

In other words, this is our world, and you are just playing in it. I started 3 new characters last night: a Tauren Paladin, a Blood Elf Warrior, and a Gnome Warlock. But I am still thinking that the only class that really interests me at Endgame is Mage just because I can ignore all of Blizzard’s shenanigans.

Last week, I lamented the Death of the Dungeon Finder, or at least the ability for DPS players to get a group without extraordinary long wait times, I hadn’t seen this quote.

They are hard enough that the random dungeon finder may end up being something you want to avoid in favor of creating your own group so that you can work together and get the proper balance of crowd control and skill. – Daniel Whitcomb

What I hadn’t realized is how invested some people were in killing it.

It’s true that if tanking and healing have more going on, then we might lose some bad tanks and healers that were only capable of doing their job when things were super easy. I don’t think we can be held hostage by those players though. We want tanking and healing to be fun for people who like to tank and heal — not so easy that victory is assured for anyone. – Ghostcrawler

It isn’t interesting, though, that he isn’t excited about how players that started post-Vanilla or post-BC are going to have interesting challenges and learn to be better. Instead, that quote seems to be quite happy that people are going to be angry and frustrated. Certainly an odd position for an employee of a publicly-held position to hold toward customers.

The guilds that fall above the 1000 member mark are less than one-thousandth of one percent of all guilds. – Bashiok

But here’s the thing:

The final piece to building your ideal bank alt is going to be a controversial choice for many of you: what to name your guild. Many fashionable bank alts choose to wear a vanity guild plate. That is another way of saying “a guild without members, which will keep you from getting random guild invites, and will also provide you additional bank space.” – Michael Gray

I’ve got a personal guild, which I’ve also heard labeled as a “Vanity” guild. That is, it’s a guild that isn’t a real “guild” as you’d think about it normally on the game – I’m the only member of my guild, or if there’s someone else in it for a time, they’re only there to help me accomplish something, like inviting my alts into the guild. This guild I have isn’t used for regular guildly things, either.  - WowGrrl

Then:

The long-awaited Dungeon Finder is finally out on the servers, and people have had a few days with it now, so let’s jump in and gauge some early reactions. Overall, it seems to be a big hit — tanks and healers are jumping into groups right away, and while we’ve heard of longer waits for DPS, it doesn’t seem bad at all. – Mike Schramm

Soon:

DPS players, get ready to wait in the LFD tool. Get ready to wait a really long time. Expect to see queues go way, way up as a result of tanking and healing becoming more demanding. Many people who are tanking now are not going to have the patience to mark every pull and explain every fight. Many people who are healing now will not be able to adjust to the new triage system. You are going to see extended wait times; learn to cope with them. – Matthew Rossi

A couple of things…

Like everyone else, I have been watching a lot of Total Biscuit’s videos. Frankly, I don’t care that they are harder. But I do care that they are longer. I actually like being able to run a Heroic in something between 15-45 minutes. In the last couple of nights, I have done at-level  mostly clears of Blackrock Depths and Sunken Temple. Going back to spending hours in a 5-man is not an improvement from my point of view.

TB is quite adamant that he hates the Dungeon Finder. “Everything should be done in a  guild.” That is great when your guild is large enough to support that sort of thing. But of the 171 characters in my guild, I was the only one on earlier this evening. Running Heroics in a guild run is always more fun. But it isn’t always possible. It is kind of a shame if we lose what made the Finder so much fun this last year.

A few months, one of my character had hit level 70 and I had this idea that I would run all the BC dungeons while you still could. So I ended up in Mechanar with a group that had never been there before. We couldn’t get past the first trash pull. After a couple of minutes, the tank left and the group broke up. I would say that never happens but it does. See: Halls of Reflection. Aacr has never turned in the quest from Pit of Saron just because I really don’t want to try to heal that, no matter how much gear I have. I think I will finally turn it in sometime in Level 83 so she can run HoR and get the achievement.

What Matt doesn’t point out: With Dual Spec, I never have to tank and I never have to heal. I can just go Retribution or Balance and try to stay out of the fire. It means I will have longer wait times to get instances. And it means other people will have longer wait times because if everyone is doing dps, there will be an even greater dearth of healers and tanks.

That won’t affect Total Biscuit much. Mages only ever do dps. And large guilds (aka 600 characters or less) may have more people available to do Heroics at more times. But not everyone is in that situation.

And now for some math…

We have pulled a large number of statistics to get to the 600 member cap for guilds and we are happy to say that this value covers more than 99.9% of all the active guilds in World of Warcraft. – Mumper

Hmmm…. I wonder if that includes all the single-person guilds? You know, the ones that only have one character in them so they can serve as storage or bankers or whatever?

Today we announced that World of Warcraft has passed another major milestone and now hosts more than 12 million current subscribers around the globe. – Vaneras

Assuming just for a moment that everyone were limited to a single character and every character was in a 600-member guild,  anyone person could be in a guild with only 0.003 percent of the total player population at a time. Of course, it doesn’t work quite like that. If you had 50 characters across 50 realms, you could actually be in a guild with 0.15 percent of the total.

Interesting.

—

Instead of aie, I was looking at the total membership of another guild I am in. Libraries and Librarians current has 171 members levels 10 or above. For the record, six of those are my characters. I actually thought at one time about trying to join some other guilds but decided that I would rather stick with this core group.

I am wondering how many more members we can get. And if we will ever run up against the 600-character limit. After all, we are a third of the way there now and we are nowhere near as active as some guilds I know.

I wonder if Blizzard thinks the number of players has peaked. Because while they may be “happy to say that this value covers” some percentage now, if the numbers of player continues to grow, this is going to be an increasing problem, not a lessening one.

I have never been the most active member of Alea Iacta Est, but I have been quite happy to be a member. I have two characters there, one 80, and a nice collection of heirlooms that I did a paid character transfer in order to send over there. Needless to say, I wasn’t pleased to read:

We will be introducing a new, hard cap of 600 members in a single guild for Cataclysm. – Mumper

Neither are my fellow AIE members:

We would like to convey to you our very strong dislike to your announcement of limiting guilds to a 600 member hard cap. – Alea Iacta Est

I do get it: AIE breaks the whole guild leveling thing. But the thing is, that is your problem, not ours. I don’t really care about inter-guild competitions, anyway. That isn’t a part of the game that interests me. Just like last week, this is an attempt to re-shape the game, but instead of doing it in a nuanced and positive way, this is a “we are going to break functionality and you can’t do anything about it” method. Even if I weren’t a member of a guild that is being affected, I would oppose this move as totally self-serving on Blizzard’s part.

Two Complains in Two Weeks! I sure hope this doesn’t keep up.