20 Man Mythic: Success or Failure?

[mopkins]

blizzard talks constantly about how their player base has gotten older since the game has been out so long and as a result their player base has less time to dedicate to the game.

that statement combined with killing off 10 man's makes zero sense. People have less time to dedicate towards organization and leadership within a video game yet they forced us to double our rosters? And they wonder why we quit?

[TEHPALLYTANK]

Whatever though, i lost nothing, Blizzard in turn lost almost their whole player base over the course of an expansion. "Huge success though".

I feel quite the opposite, when my guild died I lost what was one of the few stable things in my life. Living my life with most things outside of my control, and having that one place where I could do something that I enjoyed without any unknowns was really quite valuable to me. Since having lost my guild, my anxiety has gotten a good deal worse. I'm now averaging about two panic attacks per month, up from one to two per year. I'm trying to adapt and find some way to replace that stability, but it is really quite difficult for me to do.

So when my guild died it wasn't just an "oh too bad" thing for me, it was an important part of my life that provided me a source of strength and stability in the face of a world that seems insane to me. It was one place where I could be in control and confident in all my actions and decisions.

[Ebalina]

That comment shows how serious you take WoW, pretty sad, in fact i feel sorry for you.

Whatever though, i lost nothing, Blizzard in turn lost almost their whole player base over the course of an expansion. "Huge success though".

So because i chose to run a guild the way i see it i'm now branded as a no-life by some guy who cannot even admit hes own guild has failed him or he failed the guild.

Listen buddy it really doesn't take much to do to keep a guild running.
You refused to do it well you reaped what you sawed.

It is that black and white.
Blizzard didn't lose their player based because of 20man mythic change it shows how much of a knowledge you have about this game, no wonder your guild felt apart.

[brunnor]

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?

1. It isn't that we care at all about their being 10 man content. It is the fact that they can't balance it and 20(25) man at the same time. Trying to balance both, makes neither "good". Some fights in old 25 man were terribly easy and the same for 10 man, just like there were some much harder on 25 and some harder on 10. That is the problem. If Blizzard could balance both correctly and get it done on time, I don't think anyone would have an issue at all with it.

2. Just because you aren't world first doesn't mean you don't care about progression. Or server firsts, or rival guilds or anything else. If it is an issue to world races, it is an issue to everyone else who raids, just not as much of a publicity thing as you move down the ranks.

3. Bringing players is nice of course, but there is always a limit. If the cap is 25, then guilds with 28 people will bitch. If it is 30, then people with 32 will bitch. There is always a guild bigger than the sizes we have, so capping it is a better way to do it rather than flex because there isn't a roof on how many people you have.

4. Blizzard didn't do a great job this expansion of putting in stuff for classes to do. There were some besides the BF mind control stuff, but they were for doubles and triples of classes, not singles. I don't know if this was Blizzard trying to test the waters or if that is all we are going to get, but either way I feel that aspect was a failure.

I agree that Blizzard just got lazy though. I think they could easily do a 10 man raid and a 20 man raid each tier. They've done it before, they can again should they want to.

I did get a different feeling from posts years ago about 10 vs 25 mans. In ICC, there was non-stop complaining about how 10 man got shafted on loot compared to 25, which resulted in the fix to looting being the same in Cata. If the majority of 10 mans were fine with weaker content for weaker rewards, it should have stayed that way, but that wasn't what was being said on the forums at the time. Obviously forums is such a small group of players that it can't be taken too seriously, but it's all we have to work with.

Your final suggestion would be fine as well really. Maybe a touch longer than a month, but I don't see harm in that solution.

[Fynzie]

Are everyone complaining started the game in the early days of Cataclysm ? I wonder how you managed to raid "at a high level of difficulty" prior to this expansion.

[Not A Cat]

Definitely a success in my eyes. It's the only positive thing I can say about this expansion.

[nekobaka]

Keeping one fixed size has been good. I hope Blizzard pushes out more of the things they talked about in terms of raid comps next expansion. Although, personally I would have preferred 15 man. In regards to guilds dying, well many guilds die all the time even when things like raid size doesnt change.

[Spotnick]

20 man mythic was a success, until they did item upgrades and make it silly and where you could solo heal pretty much every encounters in the raid.

What is the point again of making 4 difficulties if you feel you need to nerf them anyways?

But for the record, I do believe they should do 10 man mythic instance.. and by that I mean a complete standalone instance.

if there is one thing that made this expansion very boring is that we lost our off-raid night alt run, because we outgeared heroic very quickly and since we could bring mains to help us in those, it made it very boring real fast and people stopped showing up.

20 man alt runs are not quite easy to do let's say.

So there is room for challenging 10 man content in this game. It doesn't need to be the same content as 20, Karazhan and Zul'aman were 10 man raids, what was wrong with that? That would also open the door for 8-12 flexible content probably.

[Ickabob]

It was a success if the plan was to kill guilds.

[Spotnick]

It was a success if the plan was to kill guilds.

It was kind of obvious it was going to kill 50% of the guilds. Everybody knew that, it's why they gave a 1 year warning in advance.

[Goondicker]

Whether your intention, that doesn't solve anything for the people that want flex or those that want top difficulty small group content. It adds almost nothing and that system was even worse because 10 man was mostly irrelevant in the eyes of non-pug raiders but maybe that's the solution, who knows.

Right, I think Flex raiding and top difficulty small group content is bad for the overall health of the game. I don't think it could be taken away now, but you know... hindsight.

[Thereaperszone]

Blizzard didn't lose their player based because of 20man mythic change it shows how much of a knowledge you have about this game, no wonder your guild felt apart.

It was a big factor for a ton of people and it does take a bit to run a guild well. You are also forgetting smaller servers who have a every hard time getting 20 good players, 20 man was a dumb idea they should have went with 15 or stayed 10.

[ComputerNerd]

Big failure, for two main reasons:

1) Less guilds raiding mythic and the switch to a strict 20 man mythic broke guilds up.

2) None of the great mechanics Blizz claimed they were going to be able to incorporate based on the set 20 man limited ever appeared. The raid bosses were good, but they weren't anything really better than mythic bosses when it was flex (and still called heroic). At least I didn't notice a big difference.

If the change to set 20 man mattered, you would have noticed the improvement.

It is successful at what it is trying to do.
The problem is old baggage from a horrible system it is quite rightly moving away from.
The "pinnacle" of wow raiding can never be two formats.
It has to be consistent, or its meaning is gone.

You have to break some eggs to make an omelette.
Moving to what is a better format for mythic going forward is not without issues, but it is better for the future of it.

Stop blaming the new format for the problems the old one had.

You don't want to see the improvements, rather than them not being there.

[Cebel]

success. The "hard core" race section was more competitive than it has been in a long time ( outside of method crushing as usual obviously ).

Most mythic fights were well tuned overall.

The real problem with raiding is the inflation in gear and stats that 4 raid difficulties creates, as well as the fact that it makes the previous tiers obsolete ( normal/heroic gear giving better gear than mythic gear from the tier before for example, so instead of doing something different on your alts you literally ONLY raid the new raid. )

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My guild died because of it, i know that much.

The amount of blizzard lapdogs is this site is off the charts. Countless guilds died because of 20 man mythic, hundreds of thousands arguably quit the game because of it, "huge success though"...

shit guilds died because they were too lazy to go recruit or merge with a like minded equally skilled guild.

Its called natural selection. The weak died off and the strong thrived.

Dont blame the system for showing you a weakness in your guild and your guild not taking the steps to mend that weakness.

[Deleted]

Less than 1600 guilds or 32k players have killed the final boss of mythic 10 months in.

I've said it before and I'll repeat it here - it's an abject failure that brought nothing new to the table in terms of quality or mechanics. It also took a lot away from people that like smaller groups.

Tough and fun encounters should be the obstacles designers throw at players, not roster management.

3.195 guilds killed Garrosh in SoO (that number includes the nerfed verion and kills that happened during WoD). Remember that the game had at least twice the players it had now and the majority of these guilds were 10-man. Considering that, 1.600 kills right now are actually better than the MoP numbers with fewer the overall players we have now. And we haven't even reached the end of this expansion.

This means that less (mythic/heroic) raiders have quit than the average population and/or the raid design, including the size, actually worked for the people that want to raid and do raid. I mean, it is simple math that about 50% of the guilds/raids had to fail or merge. And the ones that had to were, in most cases, the worse ones. That is the harsh truth of it.

My personal view? Sure, there were some problems, but mainly for guilds and raids that were not prepared or a bit delusional about what it takes to run mythic mode. The raids have all been great, the encounters well tuned, with very little bugs etc. I call it a success.

[Bisso]

The step from flexible heroic to mythic killed my guild too. Though I wouldn't necessarily blame 20 man alone for it. First, guild leader hated 20 man, so when you guild leader (and raid leader) start with such a negative attitude, it's hard to adapt. We were successful, clearing heroic quite quickly, still having trouble some nights to get enough players, even in flexible. But overall, we progressed fast in heroics, 3 weeks in and we were ready for mythic. But for each raids, we struggled right when we needed to get 20 people in. We simply couldn't make the 5-6 extra people stick to the core group. Either they would suck, or they would simply seem uninterested. So every patch, we simply went back and forth between farming boring heroic content and tackling a few attempts at mythic when we had the chance to be 18-20, pug included. Most mythic raid nights ended up Mythic wait in front of boss for 3 hours, trying to find players, then calling it. People got tired of it and each time we would recruit a new guy, another left. We decided to stop subbing altogether and wait for next expansion, see if things would get better with fresh content.

[Kaykay]

Major failure, our guild was casual but still cleared mythic before next tiers release in MoP and Cata, but with failed mergers and lack of good recruits, we couldn't make a steady mythic team all the way through highmaul and brf, we finally ended up throwing in the towel after beating archimonde HC 2 weeks after hfc release, but still short on players for mythic progress.

This day none of us raid, and only 4 of us are even considering raiding in legion. I laugh at the people who say "only weak guilds broke in this expansion", you're the kind of person who contributes so little to your raid that you dont see the massive amount of work that is put in by officers when not raiding. I'm sure you haven't had to "take shifts" recruiting everyday of the week in trade. Or had to seek out and negotiate mergers with other frustrated 10 man guilds. Then having to deal with pissed off players that progress is happening too slow, because the 50% increase in roster came with social challenges aswell as cultural challenges.

This is a game, it shouldn't take so much management just to get into the challenging content. It's enough of a barrier that you have to commit to raiding x hours a week.

[Bullettime]

success. The "hard core" race section was more competitive than it has been in a long time ( outside of method crushing as usual obviously ).

Most mythic fights were well tuned overall.

The real problem with raiding is the inflation in gear and stats that 4 raid difficulties creates, as well as the fact that it makes the previous tiers obsolete ( normal/heroic gear giving better gear than mythic gear from the tier before for example, so instead of doing something different on your alts you literally ONLY raid the new raid. )

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shit guilds died because they were too lazy to go recruit or merge with a like minded equally skilled guild.

Its called natural selection. The weak died off and the strong thrived.

Dont blame the system for showing you a weakness in your guild and your guild not taking the steps to mend that weakness.

I would argue that while that may have been the case for some guilds, especially the ones that did die on higher pop servers, there was a disproportionately harsh punishment to players that were still on the servers towards the lower end of the spectrum. Players had already began to migrate to higher population servers after the 10/25 split in Cata in search of 25 recruitment, stabilized a bit in MoP, but put the ax to a solid amount of the guilds that remained on those servers. This expansion seemingly sparked a pretty extreme amount of server transfers of people hunting for mythic raid groups that were extremely hard to recruit for or find on lower pops, and only became worse as the content drought sucked away more people.

Mythic created a huge boom of activity and united the raid community into a more solid and competitive state than it's been in for years for those that could be on the servers already, or transferred to, to benefit. It was a huge plus there. But let's not act like there wasn't any downsides.

[Einsz]

Failure. BRF and HFC are by far the worst raids the game has ever seen and the whole idea of 20man was to bring some awesome mechanics without having to worry about 10/25 balance and yet most of the bosses had the same AOE adds IN 3SEC or WIPE or kill X add within Y seconds or you wipe or someone dies

[Deleted]

Definately a failure.

The raids were good don't get me wrong but as a whole and what it put forth to many of the smaller communities, it was a tombstone.

It baffles me that they thought it was a good idea but hell, at least they sticked to their guns I suppose. They do have more classes than players now for a 10-man raid, so it's a good excuse to use but in general I still think that going for a bulky 20 was not the best idea. Hell maybe 15 would've actually worked out better.

I know for one thing that my old guild would probably be together still if that were the case when WoD shenanigans started.