20 Man Mythic: Success or Failure?

[Bookofblade]

...but how can you say that when the number of players doing 25M up to that point was fairly consistent?

I did 25M up to that point because it was the only way to have a challenging PvE experience in this game. 10 Man in ICC was a joke it was what you did on off nights to fill in a loot spot that wouldn't drop for ya the moment I could get away from having to raid with awful human beings that just happened to be good raiders and spend my time with the quality individuals i wanted to play with while still being able to challenge myself I did and I bet there are a lot more in that boat just like myself

[Low Hanging Fruit]

Theres no other conclusion to draw other than people preferred 10 man.

Or do you seriously think the thought process of everybody that switched was "We love 25 mans a lot more but lol path of least resistance!"

If you truly think this you're deluded. It's pretty common knowledge that people interpret data to support their own biases. No place more so than here.

Yeah but remember the stupid reply he will have to it. They only like it because they don't have to spend 10-20 hours recuirting a week or have a rotation of officers recuirting constantly across 20 forums, game chat, and fielding questions. Which sounds like a pretty good fucking reason to preference 10 man. In fact it sounds like a perfect reason. I mean holy shit wanting to play the game instead of lobbying around all day trying to fill rosters. Who the fuck would have thought that was better. Just about anyone that isn't in a situation that doesn't have to. It doesn't matter WHY people like 10 man more. ALL THAT MATTERS is they do. Pretty cut and dry.

[Teebone]

Down to brass tacks: it was a logistical failure, it was predicted to be and always will be. Its not that it isn't nice to have something to aspire to; it's just another damn difficulty level with an excuse to create exclusive content for those few able to dedicate themselves to it.

This isn't 1999-2002 anymore, Blizzard. I get that some of you (namely Afrasabiassaholi) lead and want to be that hardened schlong in the faces of eager-to-suck nerds, but EQ's popularity based on that alone topped at about 150k active subs. Games are not meant to be jobs to most people.

[Bookofblade]

Yeah but remember the stupid reply he will have to it. They only like it because they don't have to spend 10-20 hours recuirting a week or have a rotation of officers recuirting constantly across 20 forums, game chat, and fielding questions. Which sounds like a pretty good fucking reason to preference 10 man. In fact it sounds like a perfect reason. I mean holy shit wanting to play the game instead of lobbying around all day trying to fill rosters. Who the fuck would have thought that was better. Just about anyone that isn't in a situation that doesn't have to. It doesn't matter WHY people like 10 man more. ALL THAT MATTERS is they do. Pretty cut and dry.

Yeah i never understood the argument that needing to manage a roster was some big part of raiding and that not wanting to do that meant you were crap. I'm willing to bet a lot of those people making that claim never had to comb through the recruitment forums to fill their raids they just show up and enjoy the fruits of their officers labors while throwing mud at those unhappy about having to do something they themselves have never done

[Draenox]

I think the mode in itself is a success, but the repercussions of not being able to raid the hardest content with less players ultimately led to the raiding community becoming smaller, which isn't great.

I personally enjoyed 20man mythic while I raided, but I still do miss being able to raid at a top level with less people

[Relapses]

Theres no other conclusion to draw other than people preferred 10 man.

Or do you seriously think the thought process of everybody that switched was "We love 25 mans a lot more but lol path of least resistance!"

If you truly think this you're deluded. It's pretty common knowledge that people interpret data to support their own biases. No place more so than here.

Dude, you and I have had beef about this subject too many times in the past. I don't need to repeat myself but I find it only mildly ironic that you're accusing me of using data to support a bias when that's exactly what you're doing.

The "preference" of 10M raiding is largely subjective. There's absolutely no way anybody on this forum can say whether people largely preferred 10s to 25s and the data I provided was only to support an accusation that there wasn't proof that 10M raiding killed off 25M raiding. I can make the argument that logistics -- the ease of managing players in a small raid -- is one of the largest draws of 10M and I can support that with the data which clearly shows their popularity skyrocket in comparison to 25s in T11 when Blizzard introduced gear parity between the two raid sizes. I can also make the argument that Blizzard developers themselves prefer larger raid sizes, and I can support that with the innumerable Blue posts in which developers mention this. I can also indicate that Blizzard tried unsuccessfully for the entirety of the time 10s and 25s coexisted to incentivize players to use larger raids (more loot/higher chance of WF'd gear).

At the end of the day, though, there's absolutely no way anybody can say whether any group of players unequivocally preferred one raid size to the other. I'd say the fact that 25M was able to sustain itself before gear parity kind of indicates that there wasn't a fundamental issue with 25s but that's just my spin on it.

The bottom line, however, is that Blizzard continuing with the Mythic model in Legion seems to support my contention of class representation in endgame raiding. When a game has as many classes/specs as WoW does, it's much harder to design encounters that meet the perceived goal of the raiding experience in smaller fixed sizes. We can argue endlessly on that point (and that's largely the content of discussions in this thread) but there's no way for any of us can say which direction is most healthy for the game without injecting some amount of personal bias into our summation.

[Dukenukem]

Still waiting to here a valid argument behind T11 causing the death of 25m guilds that doesn't sum down to 'half our guild preferred 10 man'

99% of people like "Easy, Quick, Rewarding" and only minority like "Slow,Hard, Equally rewarding"?

[Raiju]

The "preference" of 10M raiding is largely subjective. There's absolutely no way anybody on this forum can say whether people largely preferred 10s to 25s and the data I provided was only to support an accusation that there wasn't proof that 10M raiding killed off 25M raiding. I can make the argument that logistics -- the ease of managing players in a small raid -- is one of the largest draws of 10M and I can support that with the data which clearly shows their popularity skyrocket in comparison to 25s in T11 when Blizzard introduced gear parity between the two raid sizes. I can also make the argument that Blizzard developers themselves prefer larger raid sizes, and I can support that with the innumerable Blue posts in which developers mention this. I can also indicate that Blizzard tried unsuccessfully for the entirety of the time 10s and 25s coexisted to incentivize players to use larger raids (more loot/higher chance of WF'd gear).

None of your examples show anything other than people had a preference to 10man. The fact you geared faster and were only realistically likely to see full BiS on 25man became a nonstarter because of that preference.

At the end of the day, though, there's absolutely no way anybody can say whether any group of players unequivocally preferred one raid size to the other. I'd say the fact that 25M was able to sustain itself before gear parity kind of indicates that there wasn't a fundamental issue with 25s but that's just my spin on it.

That doesn't even make logical sense. For that to be logically sound 25m should sustain itself after gear parity, else in a game all about progressing your character it's not surprising everyone does 25man for the gear.

WoW's endgame has always been raiding. Yes, 25man was more successful than 40man - but then it wasn't successful enough to justify the content being made. This is why we got 10man, lfr, flex. That's irrelevant now and it's merely a question of preference at the top end (as the sub drop from people not having the raid size they prefer on the highest difficulty only is negligible either way). Blizzard prefers larger so we have 20man. That says nothing for the playerbase which all evidence points towards preferring 10man as a valid option.

@Dukenukem outside of firelands 10man had no disparity to 25man. It was bugged to hell in T11 with plenty bosses harder, and we continued the trend of certain bosses being easy 10 vs easy 25 until the end of MoP. The only difference was logisitical - handled by a 3-5 people in a 25man.

[Bookofblade]

At the end of the day, though, there's absolutely no way anybody can say whether any group of players unequivocally preferred one raid size to the other. I'd say the fact that 25M was able to sustain itself before gear parity kind of indicates that there wasn't a fundamental issue with 25s but that's just my spin on it.

The bottom line, however, is that Blizzard continuing with the Mythic model in Legion seems to support my contention of class representation in endgame raiding. When a game has as many classes/specs as WoW does, it's much harder to design encounters that meet the perceived goal of the raiding experience in smaller fixed sizes. We can argue endlessly on that point (and that's largely the content of discussions in this thread) but there's no way for any of us can say which direction is most healthy for the game without injecting some amount of personal bias into our summation.

You are correct none of us can speak for more than just ourselves but I for one left 25 man raiding because I wanted to play with the smaller group recruitment issues were not even a thought but I will admit a wonderful perk.

but to say 25s were doing great then were killed by 10 mans is to say they were killed by providing choice. They couldn't even incentivise people back into the larger sizes with better and more loot, they had to force them back and that is sad.

[Lilija]

All this shows me is people were forced from 10 mans to try to save something that was obviously dying, maybe it should of been left to die as all great things eventually do

You do realize that all those doing ONLY 10mans before Cata weren't doing top end content? Because 10mans were not top end content. Current model offers exactly that plus more (flex).

Now you need to realize one important thing from that graph - raiding started to decline rapidly in Cata in general. It isn't only because of 10man reign but it was the 2nd factor. And it hit 25 more because it was the less convinient option. People who are die hard 10man/25man fans are in the minority. The majority will raid whatever gives them easier way to obtain what they want.

And while for consumers it would be better to have a choise, they can't avoid some choises being an easier path and that leads to quite obvious results as we have seen. Bigger raid size also means more space for growing amount of classes/specs in game. So from a game design reasons bigger raid was a more obvious choise for a compromise. Also bigger raid means we can have more complex mechanics and we have more people to assign to certain duties. With smaller raid size you have dumb down things a lot comparing to what potentia bigger raids have.

[Relapses]

Perhaps I should reframe what I'm saying:

It's not so much the preference itself, it's that there is no way for any of us to know how many players were doing 10M because of logistical ease vs. how many of them were doing it because they preferred smaller raid sizes. I'd say by and large players dislike logistics being a part of the raiding experience so 10M being more popular because of this isn't surprising. But I don't think players by and large prefer smaller raid sizes just because they are more intimate. If logistics weren't in the equation, we'd probably still be doing 40M raids.

And again, this is my personal opinion but I felt the two expansions Blizzard designed encounters to appease two subsections of the same endgame raiding playerbase resulted in encounters which were largely much less interesting than the ones we've seen with WoD's model. That's why I consider it to be a success. I don't think there's any way for Blizzard to fix the issue of logistics in Mythic's fixed size unless they went back to a model which once again separates players into two camps or they simply drop the fixed size of Mythic raiding (which goes against my previous contention of class representation/the developers perception of the endgame raiding experience). Mythic 20M isn't the best compromise but it's better than the alternative model we had in Cata/MoP.

[Deleted]

Now that flex is a thing, i really can't understand why mythic is restricted to 20 people. You have 18 people online? 18 people who made time and pay to play cannot raid that night. You have 25 people online? 5 people who made time and pay to play cannot raid. This is a huge problem to raid environments i've been a part of and it snowballs, when people are not guaranteed fun happy times when they reserve time for it they are more inclined to skip the next time they have something conflicting with the time they've reserved for raiding.

For the balance issues, easiest way would be to open flex after the world 1st race is over. I wouldnt mind either if mythic became considerably harder with 19 or less, or 21 or more people as long as it was playable and possible to get kills. In hellfire citadel there are already many good examples on how to make a fight doable but considerably harder with less or more people.

The reason i havent been playing for a while have been that the hardest part about raiding was logistics after clearing heroic. Now that flex is possible for first few difficulties the contrast to mythic is huge. It's just not fun going from "everyone gets to play whenever they log in to raid" to "20 or nothing". I don't really personally care if it is considerably harder in anything but 20 man, still beats not being in a raid.

[Osmeric]

Theres no other conclusion to draw other than people preferred 10 man.

Or do you seriously think the thought process of everybody that switched was "We love 25 mans a lot more but lol path of least resistance!"

If you truly think this you're deluded. It's pretty common knowledge that people interpret data to support their own biases. No place more so than here.

It could be that (1) people were reluctant to switch guilds (remember how guild rep worked then) and (2) the bump up in difficulty meant they had to shed some raiders for whom the new difficulty was unsuitable. So 10 man would've been it.

[Dukenukem]

Now that flex is a thing, i really can't understand why mythic is restricted to 20 people. You have 18 people online? 18 people who made time and pay to play cannot raid that night. You have 25 people online? 5 people who made time and pay to play cannot raid. This is a huge problem to raid environments i've been a part of and it snowballs, when people are not guaranteed fun happy times when they reserve time for it they are more inclined to skip the next time they have something conflicting with the time they've reserved for raiding.

For the balance issues, easiest way would be to open flex after the world 1st race is over. I wouldnt mind either if mythic became considerably harder with 19 or less, or 21 or more people as long as it was playable and possible to get kills. In hellfire citadel there are already many good examples on how to make a fight doable but considerably harder with less or more people.

The reason i havent been playing for a while have been that the hardest part about raiding was logistics after clearing heroic. Now that flex is possible for first few difficulties the contrast to mythic is huge. It's just not fun going from "everyone gets to play whenever they log in to raid" to "20 or nothing". I don't really personally care if it is considerably harder in anything but 20 man, still beats not being in a raid.

If you can "carry" you are doing Mythic in 19-18 ppl already. it is possible, just not for progression

[Relapses]

Now that flex is a thing, i really can't understand why mythic is restricted to 20 people. You have 18 people online? 18 people who made time and pay to play cannot raid that night. You have 25 people online? 5 people who made time and pay to play cannot raid. This is a huge problem to raid environments i've been a part of and it snowballs, when people are not guaranteed fun happy times when they reserve time for it they are more inclined to skip the next time they have something conflicting with the time they've reserved for raiding.

For the balance issues, easiest way would be to open flex after the world 1st race is over. I wouldnt mind either if mythic became considerably harder with 19 or less, or 21 or more people as long as it was playable and possible to get kills. In hellfire citadel there are already many good examples on how to make a fight doable but considerably harder with less or more people.

Two major problems with the idea of flex Mythic being balanced after the World 1st race is over:

1.) The encounters would have to be designed with the idea of flexible mechanics from the beginning, meaning even if the first iteration is done at 20M, the mechanics would still have to be designed in a way that at some point players are going to complete it with different raid sizes.

2.) Even after the World First 1st race is over, there's still competition between guilds on the realms they play. If it becomes easier to progress on bosses with odd raid sizes, you better believe players are going to use whichever size is perceived easiest for progression.

It's a good idea but it solves one issue and brings about more problems than the ones it solves.

[Raiju]

1.) The encounters would have to be designed with the idea of flexible mechanics from the beginning, meaning even if the first iteration is done at 20M, the mechanics would still have to be designed in a way that at some point players are going to complete it with different raid sizes.

For all but a tiny fraction of mechanics this is already done for lower difficulties, it's just a % number difference at that point.

2.) Even after the World First 1st race is over, there's still competition between guilds on the realms they play. If it becomes easier to progress on bosses with odd raid sizes, you better believe players are going to use whichever size is perceived easiest for progression.

It's a good idea but it solves one issue and brings about more problems than the ones it solves.

This is already brought by RNG legendaries causing massively different experiences of combat between guilds, which are due to be available sometime after hte raid is over in mythic.

[markos82]

20 men mythic IS a success - if you couldnt make it your not mythic material.

Another clueless little kid

[Relapses]

This is already brought by RNG legendaries causing massively different experiences of combat between guilds, which are due to be available sometime after hte raid is over in mythic.

That's a problem with the design of the legendary ring, not the encounters though. I just don't think a system where a guild starting progress late in the tier may feel compelled to bench half their roster on certain fights because it's perceived to be easier.

[Raiju]

That's a problem with the design of the legendary ring, not the encounters though. I just don't think a system where a guild starting progress late in the tier may feel compelled to bench half their roster on certain fights because it's perceived to be easier.

Actually it's a problem of the legion legendaries in this case, which they are holding by as a core implementation

[Gorgodeus]

It killed my guild. It killed multiple guilds that my friends were in.

It was a failure.

It only killed guilds that were incapable of expanding or refused to merge with others. The issue is too many guilds thought they were special and were unwilling to disband and join with another guild. Common sense that there should have been fewer guilds when the hardest content went to strictly 20 man format.