Originally Posted by
Atoj
I am not going to repeat everything I've already said in the thread simply because you didn't read it the first time. Instead I will draw another comparison.
Your argument is 8-man is no different than 16-man because each raid is balanced for each size. 8-man raids have very difficult content for 8 people to pull off and 16-man raids have very difficult raids for 16 people to pull off. In that respect you are correct, 8-mans don't deserve the "easy-mode" stigma they possess and a lot of that is propagated through WoW's (imo) "flawed" design to make 10-mans simple and drop lower quality gear. HOWEVER, imagine this scenario. Bioware has 3 sized raids, 16-man, 8-man, and Solo. Solo is balanced for 1 player to solo the raid content because after all, "Why should MMO's require you to work together anymore, amirite?" (/sarcasm) In this hypothetical world your argument supports that the person who works by himself to down content on the single-man version of the riad should receive just as much accolades as the 8 and 16 man versions of the raids and if they get server first boss kills they earned them because the content was balanced for 1-person to do it and it really is still very difficult. My answer to this would be "no f'ing way". 1 Person working by themselves to down content is simply not equal to 8 people downing content. The direct conclusion from that admission is that 8 people downing content is not equal to 16 people downing content. It's a completely different experience all together. The epic scale of 16 people working together when compared to 8 justly deserves the recognition it gets, and 8-man raids will be pushed aside as only "semi-serious" because they have elected on their own volition to exclude themselves from the epic-scaled version of the raid.
Does this mean the hypothetical solo person isn't a good player? No.
Does this mean the hypothetical solo person couldn't do well on an 8 or 16 man scale? No.
But that solo person has no right to bitch about how he isn't taken quite as seriously as the groups who raid on a bigger scale.