20 Man Mythic: Success or Failure?

[Siar]

My guild went through significant efforts to transition from 10-20 man. We poached players from 10 man guilds that broke apart, we negotiated guild mergers with other 10 man guilds. The result was... not great. For a tightly knit 10 man guild to suddenly double their roster size, well it's not impossible. We did it. But at a cost. Trying to double the roster meant we couldn't be too picky about our recruits. As a result, raid performance dropped, we went from a 10 man guild clearing Mythic (or Heroic as it was in MoP) content to a 20 man guild that maybe cleared 70% of a raid on mythic before the next tier came out. A lot of the people from our original group got fustrated with this and stopped playing. We are a guild of folks who would rather play together than with anyone else. So when faced with the choice between joining another guild or quitting the game, people always chose to quit.

So for me, 20 man Mythic was a failure, i didn't see how having 20 man made things easier to design.

Going into legion, the guild leader ship is considering stepping down from Mythic for a time. Best proposal so far (imo) is to form solid 5 man groups for the new CM Dungeon format with Heroic flex on the side and hopefully developing those groups until we can make a solid mythic team out of them. Gonna take time though!

So in short. We made a HUGE effort to transition to 20 man Mythic, more than most guilds I think. It wasn't a success.

[Bullettime]

Clear success, You had plenty of time to adapt and if your guild died because of that it's because you let her die.

It was a success on higher population servers due to the massively increased recruitment pool but it basically killed the raid scenes on lower population ones and further pushed people to server transfer.

If you were already on a high population server, it was a massive success.

[Jaylock]

Clear success, You had plenty of time to adapt and if your guild died because of that it's because you let her die.

I'd like to agree with this statement.

They gave players AMPLE time to adapt and adjust, and those who didn't got to stick with flex mode norm / heroic, which is not bad, its fine actually, but in order to see the hardest encounters the game has to offer, they were weeded out.

20 man seems to be the perfect compromise to the 10-25 man debate. Guilds who were overstaffed for 25 man and had to downsize, those players could have easily been recruited by the many 10 mans out there, and wala, new 20 man mythic guilds emerge. But something tells me that it really wasnt a logistics issue, but more of a player pride issue of not wanting to adapt.

[Deleted]

Only 1 of the top 10 progression guilds on my connected server during SoO realm is still raiding. I don't call that a success.

Mechanic wise, I think they did hit a sweet spot in terms of mythic. Despite better mechanics I didn't have as much fun. I don't feel close to the whole team anymore. Just a few. In fact I don't recognize half of the people's voices on TS these days.

[cousinit1686]

I really wanted to get into mythic, but it took too long for the x-realm capability. My guild was losing 2 members for every one we gained, and eventually I had to give up my dreams on mythic. Rip dreams. Did it work for others? Sure. Did it work for me, not really.

[Bullettime]

I'd like to agree with this statement.

They gave players AMPLE time to adapt and adjust, and those who didn't got to stick with flex mode norm / heroic, which is not bad, its fine actually, but in order to see the hardest encounters the game has to offer, they were weeded out.

20 man seems to be the perfect compromise to the 10-25 man debate. Guilds who were overstaffed for 25 man and had to downsize, those players could have easily been recruited by the many 10 mans out there, and wala, new 20 man mythic guilds emerge. But something tells me that it really wasnt a logistics issue, but more of a player pride issue of not wanting to adapt.

Or again, the fact that 10m raiding was largely what was keeping the raid scenes alive on lower population servers. Forcing everyone to suddenly merge and upscale to continue just resulted in a lot of server transfers to servers like Mal'ganis, Stormrage, etc.

[Alydael]

I think it was a success overall. The problem is with Normal and Heroic feeling more or less the same.



Wrong metric. Players, not guilds, should be what you're tracking. If raids suddenly go from 10 man to 20 man, it only follows that there will be half as many raiding guilds.

Well, since a guild raiding team tends to be a group of friends playing together and since blizzard has repeatedly stated that they want you to be able to play with your friends..... I think it would be relevant.

Also, guilds are important to the game as a whole- they keep people subbed.

[Fynzie]

The justification about low realm pop is unlikely to be a real one :

Either you were a real progression guild (w'll take large and say < 500 world), you had the power to recruit regardless of servers restrictions just by your image, so finding 10 to 15 more people in 1 year is very likely to happen if you take it seriously (or keeping them for that matter), the push of hype and nostalgia WoD had bring was one more thing to help you during the first weeks of the expansion. Or, you are a "casual" guild and the level requirement you ask of your players is way lower and you can afford to recruit less skilled players on your server.

If I look at the least populated and non-connected EU server (Die Aldor), 15 guilds killed at least 1 of the 3 "hard" boss of Siege of Orgrimmar, and only one guild had a decent progress, which mean the servers had enough people to make a solid Mythic guild.

The fact that you don't want to socialize with more than your circle of friends and friends' friends is another problem.

[Deleted]

The justification about low realm pop is unlikely to be a real one :

Either you were a real progression guild (w'll take large and say < 500 world), you had the power to recruit regardless of servers restrictions just by your image, so finding 10 to 15 more people in 1 year is very likely to happen if you take it seriously (or keeping them for that matter), the push of hype and nostalgia WoD had bring was one more thing to help you during the first weeks of the expansion. Or, you are a "casual" guild and the level requirement you ask of your players is way lower and you can afford to recruit less skilled players on your server.

If I look at the least populated and non-connected EU server (Die Aldor), 15 guilds killed at least 1 of the 3 "hard" boss of Siege of Orgrimmar, and only one guild had a decent progress, which mean the servers had enough people to make a solid Mythic guild.

The fact that you don't want to socialize with more than your circle of friends and friends' friends is another problem.

You seem to imply that there aren't groups of 10 raiders that are friends on a low pop server and that are skilled enough to clear things. you don't have to be a "real" progression guild to want to do the hardest content available with your friends. I and many others raided 10 man MoP heroic because it is hard content and because we like tight knit groups. Not that hard to comprehend.

[Wildpantz]

Progress cleard untill blackhand was down. Havent been raiding since yogg. My guild was still around was a top 20 guild in wrath and tbc so maybe my experience is a little unfair easy to jump in and have full team. I enjoyed it raids have to be locked to be able to be tuned like this.

[Zeta333]

I think they should have kept 10man for highest difficulty alongside 20. Both 25 and 10 both were difficult depending on boss. I find 20 man raiding less enjoyable due to the fact that it's a less tight group. As someone that has social anxiety it is hard getting used to talking in a 10 man group but i managed cause you learned to know the people and not that many people were talking at the same time. And now in a 20 man group it is hard to feel more than just a number and join into conversations.

It's not that I dislike 20 man, I just rather had it as 10 man.

having two sizes available for the maximum difficulty is what killed a huge portion of raiding to begin with

[primalmatter]

It was a success but it is more of pain the size changes then anything else.

We need consistency more then anything larger smaller so long as its stable it works.

[bmjclark]

I'd love to have 10 man back

[Bullettime]

having two sizes available for the maximum difficulty is what killed a huge portion of raiding to begin with

It actually didn't kill raiding at all. There was just a lot more 10H guilds due to the ease of logistics involved and Blizzard agreed with the 25 audience that 10 just didn't feel epic enough in scope which is why they tried the 20m as a sort of compromise.

[mopkins]

I tried 20 man mythic and didn't like it so I stopped raiding and so did my 20 man guild.

Here's my questions to those who call it a success:

1) why do you care if there is 10 man or flex mythic? If you prefer 20 man you can stick with it
2) after world firsts are done, who cares if guilds bring 10, 15, 18, 20, or 22 guild members to clear mythic?
3) Wouldn't most guilds rather bring players than bench players especially once server/world firsts are complete?
4) what super awesome mechanics did blizzard introduce in WoD that only could have been done on 20 man mythic? Every mythic fight I did besides blast furnace (because of mind control) could have been done exactly the same with half the people

My opinion as someone who was a dedicated 10 man mythic raider was that blizzard just got lazy. Nobody doing 10 man cared that they weren't "respected" as a true hardcore raiding guild, we wanted a challenge tougher than heroic that we could do with our close knit friends. 20 mans could have mounts titles and hand jobs...we didnt care...that wasnt the point. Apparently that was too much to ask for.

I was always a fan of having mythic 20 man only for say a month and then open up flex mythic for everyone. What exactly is the harm in that?

[Deleted]

I've always been a 25-man Heroic(20-man Mythic) raider, but I think it is pretty obvious that 20-man Mythic is a massive failure. They literally killed the high end 10-man raiding scene, which as a result caused a large number of players to just straight up quit instead of getting back into the 20/25 man scene.

[Detritivores]

Depends on your definition of success. In my opinion, the bad far outweighs the good. The main strength is self evident. It's one size, can be tightly tuned, and eliminates any controversy about which size was "harder."

Top 3 negatives
1. Tryhard wannabe goofballs that only care about the purity of the world first race and like to pontificate on forums about how no one can enjoy the game in a raid size of their choosing because that somehow hurts their egos. Makes no sense.

2. Small guilds and small realms basically eliminated from pve endgame. This is self explanatory and been the reason for 99% of the people I know who unsubbed in WoD. Granted, I'm primarily a raider, and active in the raiding community on a smallish realm, so I'm not trying to say it's the reason for all 5 million who left, but in my corner of the world (of warcraft) it's the overwhelming #1 reason anyone I know stopped playing.

3. Quality of encounters was meh. This is perhaps the most damning. We were promised an improvement in encounter design and class specific mechanics and all kinds of cool shit. The WoD raids were decent, but I would argue strenuously that they are not even better than MoP raids overall, especially ToT, on any difficulty size, and I cleared most of MoP in both size formats. We can split hairs arguing about whether the encounters have actually improved, but the fact that it's even up for debate to me shows that encounter quality is firmly in the failure column.

To me, it's been way more failure than success. There are strengths sure, but not to the extent that they outweigh the negatives, especially the destruction of guilds and entire raid communities on smaller realms.

[Zeta333]

It actually didn't kill raiding at all. There was just a lot more 10H guilds due to the ease of logistics involved and Blizzard agreed with the 25 audience that 10 just didn't feel epic enough in scope.

it 100% had a negative effect on raiding and server community. I was there through all of it and watched it happen. Medium pop servers had 5-8 25man competiing guilds before the merger of loot. Once that happened it went to 1-2 25man guilds and a hoste of 10mans. Which after several months mostly died off and resulted in about 1 25man guild and around 3 10man guilds and then you lost some of those guilds to xfering servers due to lack of raiding community. I watched it happen to 3 different servers i was on durring the transition time. So dont try and tell me it didnt have a negative effect at all. The argument that "it let everyone raid 10man cus thats what they wanted" lasted about 2-3 weeks and then people got bored of the 10mans and they died out or moved on to different guilds. The merger of loot at the end of wrath was prob the single biggest blow to server and raiding population that iv seen since i started playing. 20man was the right direction but 2 expansions to late.

[Detritivores]

I tried 20 man mythic and didn't like it so I stopped raiding and so did my 20 man guild.

Here's my questions to those who call it a success:

1) why do you care if there is 10 man or flex mythic? If you prefer 20 man you can stick with it
2) after world firsts are done, who cares if guilds bring 10, 15, 18, 20, or 22 guild members to clear mythic?
3) Wouldn't most guilds rather bring players than bench players especially once server/world firsts are complete?
4) what super awesome mechanics did blizzard introduce in WoD that only could have been done on 20 man mythic? Every mythic fight I did besides blast furnace (because of mind control) could have been done exactly the same with half the people

My opinion as someone who was a dedicated 10 man mythic raider was that blizzard just got lazy. Nobody doing 10 man cared that they weren't "respected" as a true hardcore raiding guild, we wanted a challenge tougher than heroic that we could do with our close knit friends. 20 mans could have mounts titles and hand jobs...we didnt care...that wasnt the point. Apparently that was too much to ask for.

I was always a fan of having mythic 20 man only for say a month and then open up flex mythic for everyone. What exactly is the harm in that?

I agree with you completely and have never seen 20 man proponents answer these questions adequately. No one seems to get that the overwhelming majority of the 10 man heroic community just wanted hard content to do with the small group of people they actually liked. I've never understood why eliminating that would be healthy for the game. It certainly wasn't healthy for all but the biggest servers...

[Bullettime]

it 100% had a negative effect on raiding and server community. I was there through all of it and watched it happen. Medium pop servers had 5-8 25man competiing guilds before the merger of loot. Once that happened it went to 1-2 25man guilds and a hoste of 10mans. Which after several months mostly died off and resulted in about 1 25man guild and around 3 10man guilds and then you lost some of those guilds to xfering servers due to lack of raiding community. I watched it happen to 3 different servers i was on durring the transition time. So dont try and tell me it didnt have a negative effect at all. The argument that "it let everyone raid 10man cus thats what they wanted" lasted about 2-3 weeks and then people got bored of the 10mans and they died out or moved on to different guilds. The merger of loot at the end of wrath was prob the single biggest blow to server and raiding population that iv seen since i started playing. 20man was the right direction but 2 expansions to late.

Which was primarily because people were leaving to high pop servers to continue in 25m. It caused a schism in the raid community yes, but the completion rates and participation rates as a whole stayed largely the same throughout Cataclysm with the major source of dropoff being Cata ramped up the difficulty considerably and alienated the lower skilled raiders who were able to progress through ICC with the buff.

Mythic just exacerbated this as suddenly those 10m guilds had to reintegrate or recruit/merge to participate in 20m, which over time has become ridiculously difficult on low-med pop, so more kept transferring.