
How much time and effort are you willing to invest in another player? If that person is in your guild, the answer is probably a fair bit more than you’re willing to invest in someone you meet in a PUG.
For obvious reasons, we’re willing to invest in the long-term performance of people we expect to be playing with in the future. We’ll accept lower gear levels, the need to explain strategies, and perhaps some out-of-raid consultation on rotations, gear, spec and enchants – all in the name of producing a better player some weeks or months down the road. We may not consider it to be an investment in the same way you think of mutual funds, but it is – you’re investing time that you would otherwise spend running heroics or gathering materials. What you hope to get back is a smoother experience in the future.
This willingness to invest is almost exclusively contained within our guilds. Advice to people we run PUGs with is more perfunctory:
You should use Seal of Vengeance instead of Seal of Light to tank
or
Move when you see the “Ticking Time Bomb” debuff
These snippets are designed to make our immediate experience better. Even loot advice (“that mace is better for a shaman than what you’re using because Shaman get no in-combat regen from spirit”) isn’t really an investment in future performance. It comes from that “how can you not understand the core stats that are important for your class” place, at least for me.
There are exceptions, to be sure. Sometimes when I’ve left a run I’ll get into a chat with someone about class mechanics or things that have a long-term benefit, but there’s never any follow up. It’s just friendly advice, and whether it results in improvement I never know.
The introduction of cross-server dungeons in patch 3.3 is only going to reinforce this lack of investment in PUGs, as the chance of running into the same person twice will go up by a factor of 20 or so, depending on the size of your battlegroup.







