Here's a little background first. I started WoW late in vanilla. I've been in the same guild, pretty much, since I first started playing. Some guildies are real life friends, some are friends I've met purely through the game. I'm not really someone who pugs content, though I did do a little in Wrath for Wintergrasp and alt character dungeon runs. I enjoy the five man dungeons and I like running them with guildies.
When I first reached the level cap in Cata, I avoided the dungeon finder like the plague. I mean surem once I had a guild group formed we used the finder to get the additional point rewards, but we weren't using it to fill in random people. Trouble was, not everyone was doing the same thing. The guild was pretty much split 50/50 on who would queue solo in the finder and who wouldn't. Over time, this lead to some people having all the gear they really needed from the dungeons, capping out on points early in the week, and for some even burning out on dungeons completely, while the rest of us still needed to run them both for gear/points and for the joy of doing new (to us) content. Worse still, with the tank queues are short as they were, it was one of our tanks who was able to burnout quickly and was pretty much done with dungeons.
This had not happened in BC and had not happened in Wrath and has everything to do with the dungeon finder. It used to be that being in a guild was, in part, a way to get groups faster for dungeons, raids, group quests, etc. With the tool, your only limit was your time. You could now grind out whatever you wanted on your own schedule.
Eventually I started queuing with whoever I could find and just crossing my fingers for a good group. I quickly decided healing was too stressful in that environment, so switched to dps, even though what I really liked to do was heal. All this in order to gear up for raiding. Along the way, how I ran dungeons changed. While I used to try to arrange times per week for people to be on at the same time in order to more easily form a group, now, I just got on whenever I felt like and queued solo. My transformation was complete. While I still in theory wanted to play with people I know, the convenience of the tool won out.
Things only got worse when they added a bonus for being in a group of strangers. At the time I understood the theory, things are harder with people you don't know so we'll give you a small buff. Well, once people figured out how to do the content efficiently, and as it turns out the buff was not so small, it became much easier/faster/efficient to do the dungeons with strangers.
With the current state of the tool, I feel it forces a conflict in how you want to run dungeons. Since the rewards are the same no matter how you do them, the decision is to do them slower and harder with a group of people you know, or do them quicker and easier with a group of strangers. Overall, I believe that model is not good for guilds. It sure wasn't good for mine.
Open questions: Can anything be done to fix this? How did it affect other guilds?
