The decline of 25 man guilds had nothing to do with preferring 10 mans.

[Notdev]

I prefer 25s. Guild fell apart and went to 10s. Fell apart again and went to SWTOR. Looking for a 25 man guild now.

I wholeheartedly disagree with the title. I was a part of two 25 man raiding guilds this tier, both which fell apart (one started at the end of WoTLK, one was around since vanilla) due to lack of quality recruitment. It really has a LOT to do with people preferring 10 mans. "Why apply to this 25 man guild when I can do 10 mans with the same reward and less hassle?" We had the natural attrition, (which was a lot more then in times past due to the game getting stale) but it was harder and harder to replace those longtime raiders that quit, because the quality AND quantity of applicants was so low. We hit recruitment hard, but still weren't getting enough bites. (This is a guild that raided 3 days a week and finished T11 13/13 H with a world top 500/US top 150 rank, so it wasn't some mediocre guild that couldn't recruit because they were mediocre)

There were a lot of people who predicted, when the fusing of the lockouts change was announced, that it would slowly kill off 25 mans, because the incentives to do 25s weren't enough. (majority of those incentives don't even remain for whatever reason. Remember 25 mans were supposed to get more loot per person, more VP, and more gold?) I myself thought it was a change that wouldn't make it to live because it was so stupid (IMO).

[Deleted]

After raiding both 10 and 25, i have to say i pref the 10 man social side, but pref the 25 man raid activity side, feels a little more epic with that many people flinging spells, but the fact i feel like closer friends in the 10 wins it over for me.

And can agree with the why do 25 when i can get the same from 10.

[Belloc]

I think it's because of 10man and 25man being homogenized bringing forth the idea of "Why do 25man when we can do 10man and get the same content and same loot".

If you're going to bring loot into it, you must also consider that 25-man has a higher chance to drop a wider variety of loot. I don't know about other 10-man groups, but I barely ever see any plate tanking drops (or conqueror tokens, for that matter). In a 25-man raid, this is nowhere near as large a problem.

If a person's primary raiding motivation is loot, they would logically prefer 25-man raids.

[Abandon]

So here is my opinion behind why 25 man raiding guilds declined and it has NOTHING to do with the raiders and EVERYTHING to do with the management of these guilds.

There, now it's accurate. Just because it's your opinion doesn't magically make it a fact, dude.

[Mulungu]

I think it's because of 10man and 25man being homogenized bringing forth the idea of "Why do 25man when we can do 10man and get the same content and same loot".

In my opinion, this post addresses the point almost perfectly. When 10/25 were redesigned to give the same loot and lockout changes prevented you from doing both, the choice of format became very clear for some people/guilds. The reward for putting together 25 man raids for some was undoubtedly the higher quality loot. Why put more effort in for the same rewards?

For everyone who has played with a 25 man guild that has since died from the homogenization expansion, I guess that means we just didn't like each other enough to keep on trying. Many tight knit 25 man guilds do still exist, which is somewhat proof positive of my previous statement.

[klogaroth]

I think the main reason 25 man is avoided on my realm is it's near impossible to recruit anyone and most 10 man guilds aren't interested in the risk of a merger. May as well have a 10 man raid around the same level than recruit for 25s with players who aren't as good. It's just so much easier to find 10 people on the same page.

[Moucalgeon]

Despite being crippled by 1 or 2 baddies, I always loved 25 man raiding. (Heroic blood queen when everyone couldnt find their '1' button :S) I dont think blizzard put enough compensation into running 25s I was in a guild that split in to 2 10s, until they fought over leftovers and the guild split in half. I left the raiding scene since then as I havent been able to find the right guild to do 25s with because there simply isnt the variety of them there used to be. I'll be hanging around, but mostly playing D3 when it comes out, maybe even SWTOR if a trial shows up by the time my annual pass runs out(don't regret getting it one bit either because I will have enough time to run a fair assessment from my own personal prefrence of MoP when its released).

[Deleted]

If you're going to bring loot into it, you must also consider that 25-man has a higher chance to drop a wider variety of loot. I don't know about other 10-man groups, but I barely ever see any plate tanking drops (or conqueror tokens, for that matter). In a 25-man raid, this is nowhere near as large a problem.

If a person's primary raiding motivation is loot, they would logically prefer 25-man raids.

I agree with this. Loot can't really be the reason imo. Just yesterday we disenchanted half the loot, cause the Hunter already has all his tokens and the Retri already has his items as well.

That said, my GM and I talked about going 25 man instead of 10. But we face the same issue as many of you have already described. There are only 3 25 man guilds left on Horde side on my realm, the rest have all downsized to 10 man. No way we would ever be able to go 25 man the way things work now. In order to promote 25 man guilds again, there needs to be some sort of gear difference.

I'm keen on the thought of having a 15 man raid size, it would be a compromise that might turn out to benefit everyone more than the current state of raiding does.

[Forgettable]

My guild was a 25man guild in WotLK. We were by no means great, only ever managing 11/12 Normal ICC in 25s. We raided 3 nights a week for 3 hours/night on 25mans. But we could never find enough people who were skilled enough to progress any farther. We also had a 10man raid at that time, which (due to 10mans being tuned lower than 25mans, and having our best 10 players) went 10/12 Heroic ICC. We raided 2 nights per week, 3 hours/night on 10mans. When Cata hit, my guild jumped at the idea of being able to dump the junk players and still be at the top level of progression and gear. So we did. But we've also taken a more casual approach to raiding, as many people have gotten married / gotten real jobs, don't have as much free time to commit anymore. We aim for 2 nights a week for 3 hours/night, but sometimes that doesn't happen or we're missing some people due to work or whatnot. We're currently 6/8 Normal DS, and I'm really loving being able to raid with my closest WoW friends and still have some semblance of progression. But our goal is fun. I mean, that's why we play this game, right? To have fun? So that's our goal and we were able to hit it when Cata came out.

My point? I disagree with the OP, because at least in my guilds case, we no longer raid 25mans because we prefer 10mans. We have better players, we have less people to manage (Boy was that a nightmare in 25mans), and we're a tight knit group and get along better than we did when 25 people were around.

[Katfish]

For my guild the issue was more so to do with the attendance boss. RL came up on a few ppl at once. Recruiting was a little rough and we could never get filled back up to 25m. We went down to 10m because it is better then doing nothing at all. The lock out system really seemed to hurt my server a lot as well. The server is slowly dying and now there isn't any 25m raiding guilds on either faction. I see a lot of small guilds all over the place but no more big guilds. Personally I don't care either way as long as we are raiding and progressing. But a lot of my guild mates would like to do 25m if we every had a chance to do them again.

[Isotope]

Like others have stated, the single lock out and the fact the loot rewards are the same. There is no reason that people will start up a 25man because of the time and effort it takes to run vs the reward you get. If you just look at across the board more and more casual guilds stopped doing 25's and are doing like 3-10's. On my old server there was something like 15 guilds that killed Lich King (normal mode) and Halion (normal mode) before xpac. It is down to 1-25man.

If you want Blizzard wants (and I don't think they do and eventually want people to just do 10s) to bring back 25mans. They need to make it so 10/25's don't share the same lockout and they drop different gear. By doing this they need to make LFR drop lower ilvl gear than that drops out of 10man normal.

I predict that if Blizzard makes that change subs will go up and so will the amount of 25man raid guilds.

---------- Post added 2012-01-06 at 02:39 PM ----------

For my guild the issue was more so to do with the attendance boss. RL came up on a few ppl at once. Recruiting was a little rough and we could never get filled back up to 25m. We went down to 10m because it is better then doing nothing at all. The lock out system really seemed to hurt my server a lot as well. The server is slowly dying and now there isn't any 25m raiding guilds on either faction. I see a lot of small guilds all over the place but no more big guilds. Personally I don't care either way as long as we are raiding and progressing. But a lot of my guild mates would like to do 25m if we every had a chance to do them again.

The big problem with recruiting new people into 25mans, I found, was that majority of the people would only be a few bosses behind in their 10man guild. Thus they know they are going to get there and get the same gear so it doesn't make it worth their while to join the guild.

[willowwand]

I still prefer 25 man over 10man but you just don't find players that want to commit to a schedule anymore. /sad

[Deleted]

People prefer 10man because it's more challenging, and increases the longevity of any raid tier through increased difficulty.

[Vargur]

That's by choice, you can go drop 25 bucks on a videocard that will eat WoW up and spit it out. If the GPU isn't an issue you probably need a RAM upgrade.

It crawls to 10 FPS, max 15 on graphical intensive moments with lower settings on a GTX560, quad-core, 4 GB RAM... you have no idea what you're talking about.

[willowwand]

It crawls to 10 FPS, max 15 on graphical intensive moments with lower settings on a GTX560, quad-core, 4 GB RAM... you have no idea what you're talking about.

if you dont DC on the whelps on ONY 25 then its all ok...

[user531345]

I have seen a lot of posts with players saying people went 10 man instead of 25 man in cataclysm because it showed most players preferred 10 man raiding.

This is totally false in most cases, sure there is some players that prefer 10 man raiding for various reasons with a major one being players with low end systems can't handle 25 man raiding.

So here is the truth behind why 25 man raiding guilds declined and it has NOTHING to do with the raiders and EVERYTHING to do with the management of these guilds. 25 man raiding requires a lot more effort to run outside of raids and in turn more hours spent in game for GMs and officer to make sure things are in place and ready to run.

So when blizzard threw out the preverbial bone to make 10 and 25 mans equal I remember a lot of 25 man guilds on my realm downsizing keeping there best 12-15 players as it required less work for the same rewards and a belief in faster progress. Obv it turned out that some 10 man encounters turned out to be impossible for some guilds in tier 11 and these 10 man guilds broke up as fast as they were formed. The truth is there was more 25 man raiding guilds in WOLTK then there are 10 and 25 man raiding guilds combined today. All that happenhed was the same GM and officers running 25 man raiding guilds just started running 10 man raiding guilds until they quit.

Now with everyone applauding the new LFR system and long before it's breeding a new casual playerbase and for every old school/hardcore GM or officer that is quiting there is hardly anyone to step in and take there place and for every 25 man guild that dies a new 10 man raiding guild takes it's place.
When things get tough for a 25 man guild it's easier to downsize then to recruit, when a 10man raiding guild fails people generally quit.

This is the general trend and will continue to go this way hand in hand with the casualness that wow has become. I am happy my sub ran out on the 24th of december but it really is sad to see what has become of this game that I once loved.

At least I am loving SWTOR at the moment which seemed to be released at the perfect time.

ok so earlier in the article you say that a boss was impossible to kill on 10 man, And then you end with that wow is too casual?? sorry but if upir going to make a post like this i wouldnt suggest making 2 completely oposing statements if your going to one completely biased point of view as you have.
IF anythng has caused decline in guilds its the difficulty being too High
less then 3% of ALL guilds have cleared full heroic t11, only about 1.-1.5% of those were when it was current
and less then 1% have even got to experience heroic ragnaros pre nerf, and as all of those were the statistics subs declined???
yet wow is too casual do you want blizz to make it so only 0.000001% guilds get to experience HM content to be happy?????/

[iceberg265]

Doesn't really bother me as I prefer 10 man anyway, bit of a shame for people who preferred 25 man but clearly there aren't that many of them around who prefer it so much that they'd be prepared to sacrifice a little bit of ease of use for it, and if they're not a majority then it's a bit silly to cater too much to them.

My former guild used to be a 25man guild. We would do 10s on offnights for fun, but our main raids were 25mans. Over the course of Cata, we bled people till we were forced to become a three 10man guild, then quickly a two 10man guild, and before long we were a single 10man group. We tried to recruit, we really pushed it hard and eventually worked our way back up to a 25man guild again. But the quality of players we had to get made it so we could not even down Shannox after two months of raiding. So we bled people again and dropped back down to a 10man guild.

I preferred to raid 25s but there was only one 25man guild left on my server, and they were on the opposite faction. How much exactly should I have to sacrifice to play the way I want?

[ghostprotocol]

This is totally false in most cases, sure there is some players that prefer 10 man raiding for various reasons with a major one being players with low end systems can't handle 25 man raiding.

So here is the truth behind why 25 man raiding guilds declined and it has NOTHING to do with the raiders and EVERYTHING to do with the management of these guilds.

as much as I love absolutes this is false.

Biggest difficulty in running a 25man guild is recruiting. The pool of people to recruit for 25mans shrink every weeks, after all Joe Blow 9 of this friends can simply go form their guild, add LFR, same loot for 10 & 25 man and your recruitment efforts triple with less and less quality applicants. 10man guilds DO have an effect on 25s

[yunito]

i luv 25 man raid feel more EPIC to me. 10 man feels like a phantasy star game u play over xbox live or ps3.
to me when they made 10 man share id with 25 was first stab in the guts for those who love to raid all the time(specially since theirs not much to do at end game).
For me LFR fix that but was stab cause more bleeding to death when they made 10/25 raid same loot and achievement!!!! now most 25 raiding guild has or would bleed to death specially on low/med server... so many ppl left to another mmo to find that massive raid/dungeon epic feeling again.
if i had the money i would transfer to a high/full server cause i would know there be many 25 man riading guild. (which i would but in mid summer)

[Aalyy]

People prefer 10man because it's more challenging, and increases the longevity of any raid tier through increased difficulty.

This was only true in T11. The content in tiers 12 and 13 has been much easier in the 10m format. I love raiding 25. If feels more like a raid to me. Sadly, our 25m guild just called it quits. And another one bites the dust! Blizz has made it so much harder for 25's to compete. 10's are easier, drop the same loot, and they don't deal with the recruiting nightmare that 25's do.

I hate the 10/25 lock out and 10's getting awarded the same loot. That should have never happened. I wish somehow this change could be reverted. I'm not gonna hold my breath, however.