How to reward 25 man raids for "logistical effort"

[Deleted]

In no way. People who want to do it 25man can do it 25man. It's fine as it is.

[Tepesch]

Separate Realm Firsts for 10 and 25 would be enough motivation. Nobody cares about food, gold, recipes. Different amount of loot pieces will be always unfair for one of the formats. Going back to separate realm firsts steals nothing from the 10mans even is bonus for those 10mans on realms with top 25man guilds.


...


1. If a guild can manage to kill a boss in both formats before yours, than it will do it no matter if there are 1 shared or 2 separate achievements.
2. Like you can't do raid quest twice in 10 & 25 man format, it might be made, to can take realm first achievement only once. So if the guild has a guild achievement for Realm First! Boss XXX on one format it could not take another realm first on the same boss on the other format or even on another realm...

Even introducing maybe different titles again (for the 25-man and 10-man kills) with the restriction of only getting 1 title (so either the 10-man or 25-man).

[Nakkí]

I hope I'll never get pushed back to 25s again. It's quasi-impossible to raid 25s without a few peeps consistently underperforming and dragging down the progress potential of the entire raid. Also, the scheduling issues when 15 extra peeps come into play can be hell if one wishes to have consistent, tight raids 4-5 times a week.

I'm all for offering incentives for 25s as long as they aren't designed in a fashion which makes 25 the only "real" raid format again.

[Deleted]

Loot is already so much worse on 10 man than 25 man that if it isn't enough of an advantage yet for 25s, it's never going to be. On tier token dropping bosses, you get one token, and one piece of loot. In 7 months of farming H-DS in an hour every week, I never once got the mail agi boots off H-Hagara, and I was in for every kill against her.

That dosent really mean that 25man have a bigger advandage lootwise. it drops 5 items in 25man which means that 20% of the people in the raid will get loot if not someone gets 2 items ofc.
Same for 10man it drops 2 things which means 20% of the raid will get loot.
And that you never got your boots off hagara just proves that you were unlucky. I did 25mans during DS and i killed warmaster blackhorn ~30 times and still i never even saw the healingshield drop.

The only loot "advantage" in 25man is that the item you want have a bigger chance to drop and thats about it.. but to me thats really not an advantage since you need compete against a lot more people to win that item.

[ZakAtack]

The more I think about this, the more futile it seems. No matter what you do, if you offer any type of incentive to 25m that cannot be achieved in 10m, you will incur the backlash from the 10m group. Even the only tenuous advantage they have right now, the "more loot per person" factor, has been complained about by people on the official WoW forums.

Slightly off-topic but as another example, I remember seeing a thread a couple of weeks ago there asking Blizzard when they'd be nerfing Challenge Modes so that everyone would be able to get the rewards. Why is there this feeling in PvE that everything needs to be accessible to everyone and everyone feels they need to be doing anything and everything available to them? I don't see this mentality in PvP with everyone demanding the requirements for Glad status be lowered to their level. What's wrong with having some inequality so those that put more time in get more reward?

[Deleted]

Sometimes I think it would amusing to see all the 25 "incentives" ideas being implented. Given that many guilds struggle to fill a 10 man raid, the fallout would be entertaining to say the least.

[Deleted]

My Wrath date excluded 10man kills, it was purely 25man.

LFR doesn't explain the 50% drop off with Cataclysm, that drifted down another ~10% over the expansion.

Stone Guards might be "overtuned" but that's still a HUGE drop off. You can't tell me that 50% of players are struggling to do Stone Guards since at least one week of Stone Guards is a free kill (ie. no Jade Shards, since there's zero raid damage).
No Cobalt Mines is almost as ridiculously easy, maybe more so depending.

Had to drop the link in also since 3 pages later, people might not know what we're referring to.
http://i.imgur.com/Pju1d.png

And remember. Wrath included the data from Tier 9, which had no % debuff or anything.

I can't keep up with the speed this thread is going at so I missed where this came up, but just wanted to say that that graph is astonishing, and a terrible shame.

[Nebria]

The only loot "advantage" in 25man is that the item you want have a bigger chance to drop and thats about it.. but to me thats really not an advantage since you need compete against a lot more people to win that item.

but due the higher drop chance you have a higher chance to see it drop again. it might not be a direct personal advantage for you as you may have to "fight" against 3-4 other people where in 10 man against perhaps 1 however don't underestimate the higher drop chance. I can't have a chance to get something in a "fight with somebody else" if it never drops.

[Oxyra]

I can't keep up with the speed this thread is going at so I missed where this came up, but just wanted to say that that graph is astonishing, and a terrible shame.

You know, I missed a note about that graph. In Wrath there was 1.4M people doing 25mans.
In Cata, there was ~100k.
In MoP. There is 50k.

You can't tell me 1.3M people aren't doing 25mans anymore simply because they don't "want" to.
They're forced into not doing them by the ridiculousness that is the new system.

Blizzard should have realised this was going downhill when they started with 40mans with 2-3 pieces of loot, down to 25mans with 2-3 pieces of loot, down to 25mans with 6-9 pieces of loot and 10mans these days getting as much loot as a 40man would back in Vanilla. With less effort.

I know 40mans weren't all as flash as some people make them out to be, but the continuous catering to the QQing community turned them all into a bunch of whingers. HE HAS THIS, WHY DON'T I HAVE THIS, I PAY JUST AS MUCH AS HE DOES. GIVE PLEASE.

http://i.imgur.com/Pju1d.png

There's another link to this amazing graph. Look at it for a few minutes. Take in the depth of those numbers.

Not having split lockouts killed this game. There is simply no way you can argue against that.
And LFR isn't a fix in anyway. There is no sense of a community. The most amount of chat in an LFR I've ever had was me telling the other tank which side to do on Will, and me spamming RWs to get out of the middle on Elegon. Huge sense of companionship in an MMO there. I swear I played an MMO to play with other PEOPLE.

[Deleted]

You can't tell me 1.3M people aren't doing 25mans anymore simply because they don't "want" to.
They're forced into not doing them by the ridiculousness that is the new system.

So 1.3M ppl who dont wanna raid 10man but only 25mans cant find 25man guild coz this new system is retarded? What u are saying makes no sense.

[Raelbo]

I currently raid 10man because there are no competative 25mans left on my server (except 1 polish only guild), many people are in the same boat as me

So let me get this straight: "Many" people on your realm want to raid 25 but can't because there are no 25 mans on your server? That makes no sense. If there were indeed "Many" such people, you could form a 25 man raiding guild and just do it. Or maybe by many you mean only a few (not enough to form a 25 man group). Out of the thousands of people on your server. In other words a very small proportion...

there is a much greater sense of accomplishment defeating a boss as a bigger group and many more logistical problems can arise such as correct formation of ice blocks on sindragosa (randomly picked an example out of the hat)

Your example of Sindragosa refers to a raid in which 25 man was actively designed to be harder than 10 man, so it doesn't count. It is very easy to design an encounter such that it is objectively harder in 10 man than in 25 man. The real trick (and where Blizzard don't always get it perfect) is in balancing the difficulty exactly.

In other words your assertion that 25 man raiding is inherently more difficult than 10 man is flawed. It is design choices which determine how easy/hard an encounter is, regardless of raid size.

I see no problem reverting back to the old system providing these conditions are met-

Ok, so let's analyse your "conditions" shall we?

A: 25man raiding is made harder strategically (it often is anyway due to the nature of organising 25 players), this would be done at design stage.

Why is this important to you? Are you saying that encounter difficulty is more important to you than actual number of players?

B: 25man raiding rewards higher Ilvl loot

Why is this important to you? Are you saying that loot is more important to you than actual number of players?

C: 10man zoning forces a reduction in Ilvl on 25man loot- no facerolling of 10man content for 25s

So you think that by doing this it will keep the 10 man community happy? I don't agree.

D: Separate the Achievements again, especially realm firsts, they are two different forms of competition, don't put them in the same boat

Why is this important to you? Are you saying special recognition is more important to you than actual number of players?


So far I am picking up a trend here: Nothing you have said does anything to convince me that you actually prefer anything about 25 man raiding other than the ability to distinguish yourselves as a superior player to people raiding 10 mans. Very interesting...

This would achieve 3 things -

Provide a greater challenge strategically for 25man raiders (the part of 25man raiding I used to relish).

I don't see how any of the changes you have recommended make 25 man raiding more challenging than it currently is. Rather, it sounds like you want to dumb down 10 man raiding in order to make 25 man raiding stand out as something special. You don't actually care about how many people are in your raid group, you simply want to distinguish yourself from the masses.

Provide no incentive to drop to 10man from 25 (lower ilvl rewards wont help you that much in 25man and maintaining the combined lockout it would give 25man no real reason to raid 10 except cheese progression and hinder it later on in the tier)

I disagree. What you are proposing is not about removing incentives to drop to 10 man. It's about adding incentives to do 25 man, incentives which have nothing to do with the number of players in the raid group, but appeal to a bunch of other things that would have people running 25 man in spite of the fact that they would rather be running 10 man.

No punishment for 10man guilds, they wont need the extra Ilvl to raid 25man and will still face a comparable challenge to 25man

There is a contradiction here. In point A above, you require that "25man raiding is made harder strategically". So therefore the 10 man challenge won't be comparable to the 25 man challenge.

So overall, 10 man raiders will have to accept that they are second rate citizens, completing less challenging content, and have to accept getting inferior gear, achievements, titles and mounts.

And they would feel that way because that is the way you want them to feel, because you can't be raiding a superior format without the other being inferior, which in and of itself is not necessarily a bad thing (I don't have any problem with heroic raiders distinguishing themselves from normal mode raiders).

The problem with this is, however, that you are forcing people into the second rate citizen category based not on skill, or commitment, or effort, but instead because of the fact that, for whatever reason, they prefer raiding in a smaller group.

Feel free to flame my idea, but I think it's fairly fool-proof and accommodates all types of raider

I hope post hasn't come across as a flaming, but rather as a well constructed counter argument that demonstrates the shortcomings of your idea. Sorry, but I really don't think your idea is at all fool-proof, and it pretty much accommodates only a very small minority of raiders.

---------- Post added 2012-11-20 at 04:09 PM ----------

What's so bad at a 15man raid? It would put everybody on the same level. It was like the BC model, which I really liked.

The problem is people are not all the same.

[Deleted]

Ehm since when is 25 man raiding a superior form of raiding?! Because all the so called "PRO Guilds" are raiding 25 man? Well if they all jump down a bridge and eat little children you do that too?

If I don't get a proof statement form a blue, both of them are equal! (Yes, I know there where encounters that were harder/easier in 25 and there are encouters that were harder/easier in 10 man enviroment)

They only thing I can think of why people think it is easier could be the fact that you dumped all the noobs from the 25 man raiding group and raid with the 10-13 decent people in a 10 man raid... Sure it feels easier in 10 man... you don't carrie them anymore.

[Deleted]

My Wrath date excluded 10man kills, it was purely 25man.

LFR doesn't explain the 50% drop off with Cataclysm, that drifted down another ~10% over the expansion.

If you truly read my post you'd know thats not what I was saying, I actually acknowledged this.

Stone Guards might be "overtuned" but that's still a HUGE drop off. You can't tell me that 50% of players are struggling to do Stone Guards since at least one week of Stone Guards is a free kill (ie. no Jade Shards, since there's zero raid damage).
No Cobalt Mines is almost as ridiculously easy, maybe more so depending.

I agree the drop off is big, but this is where my LFR point took place, rather than trying. A lot of people are just running LFR now. it was the same for DS, the only difference with DS and this tier so far, is DS was out for 9 more months, and had 35% nerf by the time it ended. This hasn't started yet so until this tier ends t14 is irrelevant to your graph. AT THIS TIME. <-- just to clarify.

Had to drop the link in also since 3 pages later, people might not know what we're referring to.
http://i.imgur.com/Pju1d.png

And remember. Wrath included the data from Tier 9, which had no % debuff or anything.

Tier 9 had 4 lockouts for a time, thats a lot of loot gain and loot itself is an artificial nerf to content the longer it goes on. ICC was also easy, like, a shit ton easier than cata content, and also under went 30% buff/nerf and was around for 12 months.

The thing I agreed with about your graph, is the fact it does show, from T10 - T12 that yes the lockout change had a dramatic effect.
However, the lockout change only really stopped pugging, and the ilvl change, the need to pug. This caused an artificial lack of content in cata, and was a part of the subscriber loss.
I wouldn't mind it is the lockout changed again. Pugging would thrive again. However it would have to be implemented with realm firsts in mind, like I mentioned in my post around page 7 of this thread.
This wouldn't give a particular 'incentive' for 25 mans, but it also wouldn't demean either raid size, being able to pug however, would create an incentive to run 25 man. because you can do both raid sizes, one serious, one fun...
The only issue with this is 3 raid sizes if u remove lockout, players will burn out really quick. Not to mention the potential pool of players for a pug is limited quite a lot by server population.
I honestly think this still wouldn't save 25 man, cause a lot of ppl still couldn't be arsed.
Which is the inherent problem to begin with... Lazy, unreliable players.

[Deleted]

So let me get this straight: "Many" people on your realm want to raid 25 but can't because there are no 25 mans on your server? That makes no sense. If there were indeed "Many" such people, you could form a 25 man raiding guild and just do it.

It makes perfect sense, and it's what most realm populations went through in Cata. My realm started Cata with something like ten proper 25 man guilds and finished Cata with zero. 25 man guilds just died one after another even though the realm as a whole had easily enough players that wanted to do 25 man raiding for at least a couple of good 25 man guilds.

The thing you're missing here is that these players are people, not some numbers you can just add up and combine into guilds whatever way you wish. When a 25 man guild dies, some people will quit the game because they know joining a new guild will not give them the same experience they got raiding with a guild they've played with for years. Some people will move to 10 man raiding, not because they prefer playing with 10 rather than 25 people, but because it's the best risk/reward. Some people will transfer to high population servers to join a 25 man guild because they realize the same forces that killed their old guild will inevitably kill the other guilds on the realm as well. Some people will not find a suitable 25 man guild because they don't raid the right amount, they don't have the right skill level, they don't have good enough leadership etc. etc. Some people will join one of the remaining 25 man guilds on the realm, which gets a temporary boost, but which will in a few weeks die from the same problems.

The tragedy of Cata is that it put into the game a system that killed off the foundation of old, well managed guilds. That's damage that Blizzard won't be able to fix. The guilds are dead, the foundation of the game is dead. The only thing Blizzard can do is to go further and further into turning WoW into a FarmVille style casual garbage and hope enough people remain to milk some profits out of.

[Deleted]

It makes perfect sense, and it's what most realm populations went through in Cata. My realm started Cata with something like ten proper 25 man guilds and finished Cata with zero. 25 man guilds just died one after another even though the realm as a whole had easily enough players that wanted to do 25 man raiding for at least a couple of good 25 man guilds.

The thing you're missing here is that these players are people, not some numbers you can just add up and combine into guilds whatever way you wish. When a 25 man guild dies, some people will quit the game because they know joining a new guild will not give them the same experience they got raiding with a guild they've played with for years. Some people will move to 10 man raiding, not because they prefer playing with 10 rather than 25 people, but because it's the best risk/reward. Some people will transfer to high population servers to join a 25 man guild because they realize the same forces that killed their old guild will inevitably kill the other guilds on the realm as well. Some people will not find a suitable 25 man guild because they don't raid the right amount, they don't have the right skill level, they don't have good enough leadership etc. etc. Some people will join one of the remaining 25 man guilds on the realm, which gets a temporary boost, but which will in a few weeks die from the same problems.

The tragedy of Cata is that it put into the game a system that killed off the foundation of old, well managed guilds. That's damage that Blizzard won't be able to fix. The guilds are dead, the foundation of the game is dead. The only thing Blizzard can do is to go further and further into turning WoW into a FarmVille style casual garbage and hope enough people remain to milk some profits out of.

So THE issue isnt 25man raiding, the issue is players playing 25mans. Problem solved, 25man doesnt need anymore carrots.

[Deleted]

So THE issue isnt 25man raiding, the issue is players playing 25mans. Problem solved, 25man doesnt need anymore carrots.

I have no idea what you're trying to say. Blizzard did irreparable damage to the raiding scene in WoW with the new model. Doesn't really matter what they do with 10/25 from now on, might as well get rid of 25 mans and go to 5 man raiding or whatever.

[schwank05]

Give 25's either separate lockouts or better loot or IMO go back to wrath and have it be both. Some of the most fun I have ever had was doing GDKP runs in ICC in wrath, so much fun and a great way to make gold. But there will be the people that will whine about this again for some stupid reason.

[Oxyra]

If you truly read my post you'd know thats not what I was saying, I actually acknowledged this.



I agree the drop off is big, but this is where my LFR point took place, rather than trying. A lot of people are just running LFR now. it was the same for DS, the only difference with DS and this tier so far, is DS was out for 9 more months, and had 35% nerf by the time it ended. This hasn't started yet so until this tier ends t14 is irrelevant to your graph. AT THIS TIME. <-- just to clarify.



Tier 9 had 4 lockouts for a time, thats a lot of loot gain and loot itself is an artificial nerf to content the longer it goes on. ICC was also easy, like, a shit ton easier than cata content, and also under went 30% buff/nerf and was around for 12 months.

The thing I agreed with about your graph, is the fact it does show, from T10 - T12 that yes the lockout change had a dramatic effect.
However, the lockout change only really stopped pugging, and the ilvl change, the need to pug. This caused an artificial lack of content in cata, and was a part of the subscriber loss.
I wouldn't mind it is the lockout changed again. Pugging would thrive again. However it would have to be implemented with realm firsts in mind, like I mentioned in my post around page 7 of this thread.
This wouldn't give a particular 'incentive' for 25 mans, but it also wouldn't demean either raid size, being able to pug however, would create an incentive to run 25 man. because you can do both raid sizes, one serious, one fun...
The only issue with this is 3 raid sizes if u remove lockout, players will burn out really quick. Not to mention the potential pool of players for a pug is limited quite a lot by server population.
I honestly think this still wouldn't save 25 man, cause a lot of ppl still couldn't be arsed.
Which is the inherent problem to begin with... Lazy, unreliable players.

I've got a fair bit of info about ideas on the US forums but they're down at the moment.

imo cross realm raiding with split lockouts is the way to fix all issues, you'd need appropriate limitations though, realm first dealios being 100% server groups only obviously, minor limitations like not being able to use a bonus roll, maybe other things, whilst in a cross realm group or if you're not from the same server as the leader, things like that, this would fix a lot of the issues of realms with low populations or people on realms who play at odd times when most of their realm is offline etc.

Oh and the data my stats are from is the first boss, so 4 lockouts a week didn't really change that much in ToC. As it was only the very first boss on normal mode. ie. no matter how bad a player was, if they downed the first boss, it showed up.

And the inherent problems with 25man, stem from no one wanting to waste a week's lockout, a full 7 days, trying to do a 25man when they can just go do a 10man with little to no effort, even if they want to do 25man, they can't get a group for it, because no pugs do 25mans anymore. Why would they, trying to pug 25man when there's certainly no benefit to pugging 25man anymore.

25mans were fun to pug in Wrath because the community was that much stronger, I've mentioned this a bit, but I play on Blackrock US, a very large server, it used to be the world's largest server. And in Wrath, I could safely say that I knew the majority of the server, and the majority knew me, I was a very prominent raid leader back then, as were other players, we led 10s/25s of all the content, HMs and normals and it was a very community based experience, everyone recommended people that they knew, people were friendlier back then. There was a bit of elitism when GearScore came out, but everywhere had that. People just enjoyed playing with friendly people. Your reputation on the server mattered.
Now you just join a guild and forget about the other 4000 people on the server because you'll never see them in a raid, at best, you'll see them at Sha once a week, where you roll your face to win, Sha takes less co-ordination than bosses in VoA did, and bosses in VoA were renowned for being derpmode easy.

It makes perfect sense, and it's what most realm populations went through in Cata. My realm started Cata with something like ten proper 25 man guilds and finished Cata with zero. 25 man guilds just died one after another even though the realm as a whole had easily enough players that wanted to do 25 man raiding for at least a couple of good 25 man guilds.

The thing you're missing here is that these players are people, not some numbers you can just add up and combine into guilds whatever way you wish. When a 25 man guild dies, some people will quit the game because they know joining a new guild will not give them the same experience they got raiding with a guild they've played with for years. Some people will move to 10 man raiding, not because they prefer playing with 10 rather than 25 people, but because it's the best risk/reward. Some people will transfer to high population servers to join a 25 man guild because they realize the same forces that killed their old guild will inevitably kill the other guilds on the realm as well. Some people will not find a suitable 25 man guild because they don't raid the right amount, they don't have the right skill level, they don't have good enough leadership etc. etc. Some people will join one of the remaining 25 man guilds on the realm, which gets a temporary boost, but which will in a few weeks die from the same problems.

The tragedy of Cata is that it put into the game a system that killed off the foundation of old, well managed guilds. That's damage that Blizzard won't be able to fix. The guilds are dead, the foundation of the game is dead. The only thing Blizzard can do is to go further and further into turning WoW into a FarmVille style casual garbage and hope enough people remain to milk some profits out of.

What this guy said is true on so many levels about what happens when a 25man guild dies, people just stop playing. It only takes 2-3 people to kill a 25man these days because they're so fragile.

And so many guilds have died, long standing guilds. Guilds that have been around since Day One died with Cata because of Blizzard's flawed idea that catering to the new players was better than catering to the players that had been playing their game for 5 years, those new players came in, played for a few months, left again, and Blizzard lost their old players as well, trying to please everyone, but really they pleased no one.
You can please some of the people, some of the time, but you can't please all of the people, all of the time.
Blizzard tried to do the latter. And failed. Miserably.
Now we're left with this pathetic raiding model that causes players to hate each other and other guilds.

---------- Post added 2012-11-20 at 10:52 PM ----------

I have no idea what you're trying to say. Blizzard did irreparable damage to the raiding scene in WoW with the new model. Doesn't really matter what they do with 10/25 from now on, might as well get rid of 25 mans and go to 5 man raiding or whatever.

Back in Wrath and earlier, as well as up til the first tier of Cata even, when some guilds were still sticking around, World first and/or realm first competitions weren't between 4 guilds for World First.
Or 1 guild for Realm First.
There was COUNTLESS guilds that were going for World Firsts, and they were all fighting for it.
All these guilds that people looked up to, watched the videos of and said, some day I want to be as good as that person, I want to be able to kill those heroic bosses, I wish I was that good.
Those guilds died because of Blizzards error.

And anyone who says they never looked up to people who wore all the amazing gear, had Invincible/Mim's head and rode around on it, Ashes in BC even, you looked up to those people with a level of awe, those were the reasons you got hooked on this game, you wanted to be like that person.
The problem is, when Blizzard let everyone be THAT guy.
No one wanted to be THAT guy anymore, because everyone else was just as artificially "good" as you.
Everyone else got the same mount as you.

Look at FL mount and Madness mount. No one even cares about them, because EVERYONE got them. They were thrown out like candy, on top of the bug that occurred that gave normal mode Rag 100% drop rate.
Heroic Rag was nerfed to shit in the 5.0 patch and still dropped the mount.
And he was nerfed to shit in 4.3 when they removed the CORE mechanic of final phase.

It's nerfs, lack of split lockouts, and lack of guilds to admire that kill off raiding.

Look at any major sport. People look up to their famous soccer players.
Their famous cricketers. Pitchers. Batters. Quarterbacks. Golfers.
People look up to the pros.
They admire them.
They want to be like them.
They want to watch them.
They play those sports and wish they could be that good.
They act like they're as good as them, but they aren't.
It's the human mentality to want to be the best, but when you're given the best and so is everyone else, just handed to you. It loses its' lustre.

Look at the movie Bruce Almighty.
Everyone prays to win the grand prize Lotto.
So he answers yes to all the prayers.
They all win, and only get like $7.
Now no one wants it and they go rioting because everyone got it.
There was nothing to aim for anymore.

---------- Post added 2012-11-20 at 10:53 PM ----------

Give 25's either separate lockouts or better loot or IMO go back to wrath and have it be both. Some of the most fun I have ever had was doing GDKP runs in ICC in wrath, so much fun and a great way to make gold. But there will be the people that will whine about this again for some stupid reason.

^ This.
All of this.

Oh and just tacking on.
Anyone who goes on that raiding isn't the core of this game yada yada, there's other content etc.

Raiding is the foundation of WoW. It was the major component of the game. In fact, besides World PvP, it was the only end game content on release, dungeons/raiding. BGs weren't released til like 1.1/1.2/1.3 (I can't remember).

Oh and if someone could find the blue post for me about 10s/25s.
Wasn't there a blue post, or a Ghostcrawler post somewhere that straight up admitted that they believe 25mans to be the harder difficulty? I remember reading it on MMO-C one day.

[Fenixdown]

No, its not. Not so long as those 270k+ actually want to do 10s. There is no magical law that states there should be some fixed ratio.



So, for you to have fun, we need to drag 10 players from a format they enjoy?

EJL

Who says they necessarily enjoy 10-man raiding? Most people just enjoy raiding, period. The reason there has ended up being so many 10-man guilds and so few 25-man guilds is because it's far easier to guarantee a smoother progression path through 10-man than it is through 25-man. However, that said, if 25's had higher incentive to include the people who are doing 10-man for that single purpose, it would make 25-man raiding just as easy of a smooth progression path because people would be equally inclined to participate in it for higher rewards.

Most people that I know that raid don't care about raid size nearly as much as they care about one of three things. A. having fun, b. progression, or c. reward. In most cases, a. and b. are intertwined together. Right now, c. no longer exists because reward is pretty much equal (though the statistical probability of getting a particular item is higher in 25's, that's still not incentive enough to make it equally or more viable of a format option). As of right now, from personal experience of doing both formats in this tier of content, I can tell you that 25-man has stricter number crunches while 10-man requires stricter execution of mechanics. Mechanics are always easier to execute than numbers, therefore by default, 10-mans in some cases are easier. People will take the path of least resistance if reward is equal.

However, if reward is greater, they will take the path of greater reward as long as a. and b. are still connected to c. In other words, if 25-man gives more reward incentive, and people can have fun and progress as easily as they can in 10-man, then people will be more inclined to choose 25-man. Provided the loot is identically styled (in other words, not like the failure of ToC and ICC loot styles that really DID require you to do 25's if you wanted to min/max), then people won't be "forced" to do 25-man because you won't need that gear to progress through 10-man formats. People that want to do 10-man will do 10-man and have gear that isn't at an extreme disadvantage over people who would choose 25-man. Six or so item level is not going to make a difference in any fight in 10-man provided the stats are still identically styled.

As of right now, format is not being selected on what people enjoy. It's being selected on what has a greater effort to reward ratio. Right now, 10-man has a greater effort to reward ratio because the reward is identical and the effort for numbers is a bit lower. To compensate, 25-man should have a higher reward ratio to help balance the scales. That way, people are picking the format they want to play and not the format that has less resistance. I'm not even factoring in the application process that most people just can't be bothered to mess with to join a 25-man guild (which has no relation to the in-game problems of the two formats, but does affect the format differential just as much).

My guild is on the verge of total collapse. I'm sorry, but if Blizzard gave us a helping hand, I would not be incredibly sad to see the online place that I call home crumbling around me. And, for those of you curious, yes. I AM an officer in my guild. I do raid lead in 25's (and I even raid lead in our 10's...we still separate our roles accordingly there, and nobody in the guild knows healing better than I do). I speak from firsthand experience on the issue. If the system gave someone from a 10-man guild just looking to raid a reason to come with us instead of sticking to 10-man, then everything would be solved. Both formats could flourish equally. I think some people seem to suspect that most 25-man raiders want 10-man to be inferior. While some posters here may reflect that type of attitude, those of us with intelligence don't want that. We just want both to be equal options. Right now, 25-man is an inferior option. It needs a boost.

[Talen]

Did you even look at the graph since they removed the double lockout?

Does it matter? His solutions are still old news, his solutions have been suggested before, his solutions do not address the issues with the LK model.

Your graph is interesting. Misleading in certain aspects, but interesting.

EJL