WoW: Tanks and healers ride free

Much discussion has raged on the blogosphere over Blizzard's announcement of their intention to introduce a premium service allowing players to form cross server dungeon groups with their RealID friends.

Here's how I see it working out:

- it will be very popular, like the Sparkle Pony.

- a small amount of people will use it for the obvious purpose - to connect to genuine friends whether from real life or early times in WoW or other games to play together. These players won't have much effect on anyone except themselves, they're a tiny demographic and will have roughly the same split between tanks healers and dps as the rest of the populace.

- a large number of players will game this. Tanks and healers won't need to as they don't have significant barriers to getting groups nor, despite what some people say, does the quality of dps deposited in their groups under the random dungeon finder matter that much. However dps players will adopt this by the thousands - their own private tank and healer pool allowing for instant dungeon groups.

What this will mean is that a statistically significant number of tanks healers and dps are removed from the LFD system. When you remove tanks (shortage class) healers (secondary shortage class) and dps (a glut class) from the pool you reduce the proportion of tanks and healers relative to the number of dps. This should significantly increase dps queues.

This is a problem for which there is a solution: subscribe to the premium service and collect your own network of RealID tanks and healers after a few LFD pugs.

So this leads me to the following prediction:

LFD Premium - high sales
DPS Premium - no more queue issues
DPS Economy - sucks to be you
Tanks and healers - ride free.