Originally Posted by
Krom2040
I'd like to try to take a few paragraphs to make the case for smaller raids. What does this mean exactly? Well, I'd say it would mean dropping Mythic raiding down to ten people, and reducing raid flexing from 10-30 down to, say, 8-15. This is probably an unpopular perspective on a forum dedicated to raiding, but bear with me!
For some context, with the exception of a chunk of Cata and most of MoP, I've played a *lot* of WoW since Classic, logging I'm sure well over ten thousand hours in total (I'm somewhat remorseful to say, and I have no desire to check my /played time on dozens of characters).
With that said, I need to issue this disclaimer: I've never *really* liked raiding, or least the big raiding experience. I understand what the initial appeal was - you have a "massively multiplayer" game, and so it makes sense that you want to show off the universe you've created with epic encounters involving dozens of people. When the game was new, that kind of thing hadn't really been seen before; we'd had huge deathmatch or CTF first person shooter games, but we'd never seen it with so many players coordinating in a PvE environment against a huge variety of AI enemies. So that was very cool!
But even going back past WoW to the relatively early days of online gaming, it was clear that there was a point where more was not necessarily better. Quake was probably the seminal Internet first person shooter, and it originally had a maximum player limit of 16. This initial limit was largely related to technical limitations at the time. But in later iterations of the same game, they upped that to 32 players, and of course that was an exciting thing! More players, more action, of course it was better! Right??
Well, not really. It was kind of an interesting novelty, but for the most part the gameplay itself wasn't appreciably different. If you used existing maps designed for up to 16 players, then it was just too crowded and manic. If you used new maps designed for 32 players, well then, the gameplay ended up being about the same as it was with 16, except... you stopped really recognizing who you were playing with. You were less likely to actually interact with any single other player, so it kind of started to feel like an impersonal zerg, a big mess of nameless targets. It became a little less of a memorable social experience and really more of a mindless grind. It was a very different type of game, but I think that same lesson translated over to the world of MMO's fairly quickly.
As early as Classic, it was obvious that having a huge number of players was not in itself an interesting thing. 40 players was clearly way too many for anybody who had actually had the misfortune of trying to organize such a group, and it was too much to really design interesting encounters. Blizzard (smartly) took the step of reducing it down to 25 players, and even then people bitched and moaned that it would be "less epic" and how they'd have to cut "15 of their closest friends" and all that kind of nonsense that nobody remembers anymore. In fact, I clearly remember how many posts their were on the Blizzard forums by people predicting that the first WoW expansion would actually just ratchet things up into overdrive with 100 player raids (which is... clearly ridiculous to anybody who's actually thought about the logistics of designing interesting encounters for it). I strongly feel that players want larger raids just because they feel it's somehow natural for hard content to have more players, not because there's any particular design philosophy promoting it. From a gameplay perspective, there's certainly nothing implicitly harder about having more players; some of the hardest games in existence are single player games, and the most sophisticated competitive multiplayer games out right now only involve small teams (League, DOTA, Heroes, etc.). Obviously if I have 20 players play through the exact same level of Mario Brothers, it's more likely that at least one of them will fail on any given attempt than if I have 10 or 5 of them of them do so, but it doesn't make the level any harder, it just means there's a higher chance of failure. I can achieve the same overall result by tuning the difficulty up a little bit for the smaller player group. And to take that metaphor a bit further, you can hopefully agree that it would be very frustrating to be one player in a group of 20 who completes the Mario level every time and still always fails due to somebody else's screw-up.
I've done my time in raiding, and I've been moderately successful at times based on which guild I happened to be in, but it's always been something I felt I was being encouraged to suffer through rather than something I really enjoyed. I've never been in a large guild where I felt everybody was somehow connected with every other player; I've been in a bunch where there were multiple little cliques, and plenty where there was an officer core that basically knew each other and regarded everybody else as warm bodies they needed to appease to continue being successful. The best times I've had raiding have been in small guilds, and my favorite raid of all time was Karazhan (a sentiment that I've seen expressed on numerous occasions).
Particularly as DPS, I've never particularly enjoyed the dynamic. When you're one in a large crowd of DPS attacking something for 5 to 10 minutes, it's hard to feel like you have any real contribution to the outcome. And realistically, it's pretty true to say that you don't; when you have that many people, your only *real* obligation for most encounters is to not sit in fire so much that you die. Most mechanics are such that other people can pick up the slack if you just sit there and tunnel like a doofus, and there are usually only a small number of mechanics that require a dedicated DPS to do something very specific so that the entire raid can succeed (i.e. a hunter pulling infernals out of the infernal pack on Archimonde, or a DK doing a mass grip at exactly the right time, etc.).
People who participate competitively in large raids are *extremely* vocal that they deserve the development effort that's invested into them, and to some extent, one really has no choice but to agree. After all, it's a logistical nightmare to get a couple dozen people together on a consistent basis, usually involving the people management chore of perpetually having at least a couple of people in a state of burnout. But are the best players really doing large raid content because they enjoy it, or are they doing it because they're obligated to if they want to be on the cutting edge of player power? Is there really a premium on player skill involved in having more active participants in a raid, or is it really just harder to manage from the perspective of the guild leader? I think at this point it's almost impossible to separate these considerations. But that said, I think we can probably all agree that it's not an ideal situation that people management and scheduling occupies such an important role in the success of most top tier guilds.
It's my opinion that 10-man raids should be the rough maximum size of group content (minus some accomodation for flex raids). It's at that point where you can really have a few people from each of the trinity roles (tank healer DPS) and have all of them feel like they're contributing as individuals, rather than as a big zerg where a few skilled and knowledgeable people pick up the important mechanics for everybody else. In fact, I can easily envision a scenario where I would be very happy with tightly-tuned 5-man content, much like challenge modes except, you know, something that actually got on-going developer effort rather than being plopped in practically as an afterthought. I'm very hopeful about the prospective Legion implementation but I'm still not sold on the reward structure or that it'll feel fresh a year down the road.
WoW at this point is an institution, and expectations are such that they probably won't try anything *drastically* new like that. The people who have suffered through raiding for a very long time already have a strongly-ingrained Stockholm Syndrome about the whole ordeal, and nostalgia is powerful and impossible to take away from somebody. But I do think that large group raiding is a thing whose time has started to pass. New gamers are accustomed to highly polished, highly tuned multiplayer gameplay, and I think those gamers are recognizing that, in a lot of ways, designing content for large groups really kind of has to suffer in some important ways in order to stay consistently achievable. I think it's time to scale back.
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