WoW Rest Stop

Everyone is up in arms about how the guild feature is going to work in Cataclysm.  I think Blizzard feels that 25 man raids just aren't do-able by the 95% of its playerbase and have decided to encourage everyone to do 10 man raiding instead which can still be tough but easier administratively.  The odd thing is they are doing this at the same time as encouraging bigger guilds through the new guild achievement feature.  I could be totally off base here but I think their ultimate hope is they end pushing everyone to guilds similar to AIE on Earthen Ring.  This guild is a loose confederation of 5000 people that the officers make no attempt to organize.  Their only job is to make sure that guild chat/forums is as free from drama as possible and repeat offenders and dealt with promptly.  I haven't seen the charter (if one exists) but I'm sure there is a general understanding by all that they want a guild that anyone would be OK to let their 10 year old join without fear.  In a sense it is an extended WoW family.  The downside vs a typical guild is it is left to the members when it comes to raiding.  Many people have picked up the torch and there are many raiding teams inside AIE.  Over time the guild has centered their raiding around 10 man raids as organized 25 mans raids haven't been successful.  This has discouraged many players who are hard core and these people typically only stay with the guild a while.  This isn't to say there aren't many great players in AIE ... they just realize that the culture of the guild is that RL > WoW and they have to adapt accordingly.  The nice thing about this structure is when it is time to raid there and only 8 of the people in the "core" team can make it, a call goes out to the guild - lfg channel.  That means many people who aren't on a raiding team can find a raid.  The great thing about this is because everyone in the raid is part of the social network, the conversations are much more polite than you'd find in a normal PuG. 

I was listening to the podcast "World of Warcast" the other day and the main discussion point was Blizzard has switched their focus from being a MMORPG to being more of a social network.  When you combine the recent changes with the fact that Battle.Net is going to link every server with one another it seems this concept quite nicely by encouraging the AIE setup.  This does not mean that every guild needs to be like AIE.  I am pretty confident that mega guilds will pop up that will be focused on raiding with no cap on what can be said in guild chat.  When you think about it the possibilities are endless.  I can see a day when there are mega-guilds of similar minded people be it by georgraphy, politically, or hobbies.  It certainly is possible for those things to happen to day but the changes Blizzard is pushing seems to be encouraging more of it in the future.