WoW Guilds To Get XP Boost, Free Money

Just saw this over at PC Gamer- Blizzard has announced that the 4.1 patch for World of Warcraft will, in addition to updating the Zul’Gurub and Zul’Aman instanced dungeons for level 85 players, be giving players some encouragement to hurry up, put on some big boy pants and join a guild already, because there'll be extra experience points and gold to be had. Details after the jump.

The new feature couldn't be simpler. Through nothing more than guild members emerging victorious from level-appropriate dungeons, raids and battlegrounds on a weekly basis, the entire guild will benefit from an experience point boost (one which doesn't even count towards the daily experience cap) and a neat stack of gold will be deposited into the Guild Vault. In the case of 5 man instances, 3 of the players must be members of the same guild for the adventure to qualify, while challenges requiring 10 or 25 players will need 8 or 20 of the players to be members of the guild, respectively.

It's a move displaying typical Blizzard-level wisdom. Not only will it encourage the formation of new guilds and please older guilds, standard MMORPG design can only keep people playing a game for so long. Ultimately, it's the social glue provided by guilds that turns World of Warcraft from a diversion into a way of life. I'll be very surprised is something similar to this doesn't start popping up in all sorts of other MMORPGs over the next year.

Jeez, I just disappeared down a rabbit hole watching videos of the new bosses that were introduced in Catacylsm. These are some absurdly nuanced fights.