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Today, as many guilds continue to progress through Sunwell Plateau, the final raid instance of The Burning Crusade, it seems to me that most guilds are sticking together in an attempt to overcome the current game's toughest challenges together rather than breaking apart as many did near the end of "classic" World of Warcraft. For comparison's sake, Bosskillers.com documents 179 registered kills of Kil'Jaeden already, but only 36 of Kel'Thuzad. While I have no way of knowing how accurate those numbers are, I believe the discrepancy does attest to the fact that more guilds today are sticking together to achieve their goals, and I believe that it is a direct result of the tighter-knit social communities that the Burning Crusade raiding atmosphere has created.
Worldofwarcraft.com lists 9 "classic" raid areas, and 10 more in the Burning Crusade. After 3+ years raiding, it's almost surprising how many different raids there have been, especially since many of them have been so very different. But when looking back over all of the time spent in the pursuit of another new boss kill, what is it that stands out the most? It would be easy to write volumes about the myriad different boss encounters, abilities, fight mechanics, quirks, and so on of these current 19 raid zones; raiding is so integral a part of the game and its evolution that the discussion of what has changed could go on almost endlessly. Instead, though, it seems to me more appropriate to consider what about raiding has, for the most part, remained the same: the goal of close social interaction through the game.
Raiding has generally continued to provide a reason for players to join and participate in guilds, thereby bolstering the framework for the game's social community. It binds players, particularly guild-mates, together in the same way that members of a sports team or business venture are bound together through hours spent collectively striving for the same goal. In many cases, raiding is the only reason that some continue to play the game, long after the "soloable" content has become boring. For others, World of Warcraft remains fun solely because of the friends they have made in their guild and the social connections they have created.
It seems clear that the creation of a network of social communities has always been part of Blizzard's goal for endgame raiding, but the path to that goal hasn't been completely smooth. With the release of Molten Core, 40 player raids felt, at the time, extremely grand purely because of the scale. Unfortunately, however, the huge amount of players necessary often meant that fights were sometimes almost impossibly difficult up front, and then quickly out-geared, breaking the social bond formed when people are forced to face a challenge together; no challenge, no bond.
The massive number of participants also meant that some players could fly under the radar, as it were, and manage to continually raid through Molten Core and Blackwing Lair without really needing to interact too much with their guild-mates. This original raid design set the foundation for the social community, but in some ways prohibited its growth as well. When a guild needed 40 people to raid, it was forced to recruit 50, 60, 70, even up to 100 or more people just to maintain the numbers required.
Close social connection was lost, guilds became very "clique-y" and it was mostly due to the fact that in a raid setting some raid members didn't really need to depend on one another. Take for metaphor a football team. A quarterback, over time, often develops a close social bond with his receivers, because they are forced to work together so often in order to achieve success. They demand each other's hard work and in fact require each other's performance to achieve their own success. Conversely, that same quarterback has little investment in the success of the third-string kicker. He has little reason to form a close social bond, because he has little reason to really interact with the kicker.* It was the same with guilds.[If you have a hurry using of cheap gold wow, you may come to http://www.inwowgold.com . We can delivery your gold wow on the order in a short while.]
