Guild Raiding Participation: WotLK through MoP

[Deleted]

Before we begin, if this topic has exceeded your personal threshold for discussion or you have a low tolerance for long posts/lots of reading, please head out now. I understand that not everyone wants to read threads about how many guilds are currently raiding, were raiding and speculation on what factors are affecting that. I ask you to understand that there are people who find this subject interesting and, assuming that this thread is within the rules of the forums, we are allowed to discuss this topic here.

I went through every fifth (#1, #5, #10, #15, #20 and so on) realm on the current (as of Saturday afternoon) US realm ladder on wowprogress and entered the number of guilds listed under each tier. All data shown in this post is from a one fifth sample of all US realms listed.



As you can see, raiding peaked in ToC with 98% of 25 man and 95% of 10 man registering as having killed a boss in ICC. I find this very interesting as tier 9 was released on August 6th and only lasted as current content for 4 months, with ICC being released on December 8th. ICC was current content for 12 whole months, was heavily nerfed with the stacking buff and both were raided by people in blues (link: http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...-gt-Chronicles). One thing to note was that the armory was offline for ~2 months prior to the release of Cataclysm.

Next, we see the utter decimation of 25 man raiding. 87% of 25 man guilds registered in ICC didn’t kill a single boss in tier 11 as 25 man. They all quit 25 man raiding and went 10 man? Seems not, as tier 11 saw 20% fewer 10 man guilds than ICC. There are a significant number of late WotLK raiders who just vanished, and this point stands as the greatest drop in raid participation between complete tiers in the recorded data.

Moving on, we see that tier 11 took it’s toll on 22% of 10 man guilds who didn’t manage to kill a single boss in Firelands, which was current content for 5 months, and received a significant (~20%) nerf three months into it’s lifespan.

95% of those Firelands guilds managed to kill something in Dragon Soul, which is somewhat surprising as Dragon Soul received the largest nerf seen to a raid, the revamped Scroll of Resurrection and a very comprehensive ‘catch-up’ batch of heroic dungeons. As this was the point that LFR was introduced, it’s not hard to presume that people who wanted to see the raid opted to see it via LFR rather than joining guild raiding. However, it’s fairly clear that, at it had very little effect on the number of guilds participating compared to those who participated in Firelands.

With the release of Mists of Pandaria we see the only tier-to-tier growth of 25 man raiding on record. With 3% more guilds entering into tier 14, it appears that the 12 million MoP subscribers manifested themselves somewhere. That said, tier 14 saw a 15% decrease in participating guilds from Dragon Soul. Is this where we see LFR affecting guild raiding? Without knowing what percentage of those 12 million players made it to level 90, what percentage of those raided tier 14 via LFR, it’s hard to come to a conclusion.

We are now twelve weeks into tier 15 and what we can see is that only 57% of 10 man guilds and 43% of 25 man guilds have dared to venture into Throne of Thunder and knock down Jin'rokh.

What’s also interesting is how the picture changes depending on whether you look at the top 10 realms, or the bottom 200+. For example, the top 10 realms had an average of 28 guilds raiding 25 man per server in tier 14, while the bottom 200 had an average of 7. In fact, looking only at the top 10 realms, raiding guilds have been growing:



As you see here, tier 14 shows the highest number of 10 man guilds in their history, with 14% growth from tier 9. You also see that the 25 man collapse was felt just the same on the high population realms with large raiding communities, and tier 11 still shows fewer 10 man guilds than were recorded in tier 10.

And, finally, here are how the bottom 200 realms look without the top 25 realms propping their numbers up:



It’s fairly clear that the popular opinion that, at least in terms of raiding guilds, if you’re on a low population realm, you have to transfer to a high population realm, or give up on raiding as a guild is correct. While it’s unfair to say that the issue is snowballing, the fact is that the average realm outside of the top 25 has 28 10 man guilds and only 2.4 25 man guilds who have killed a boss in ToT, and every tier there are fewer guilds than the tier before. In comparison, across all realms, there were 157 10 man and 109 25 man guilds per server in ICC.

A few disclaimers;

1) This data was collected entirely from wowprogress. I make no claim that it is wholly accurate, nor do I know what criteria wowprogress use/used to classify a guild as 25 man or 10 man.
2) No attempt has been made to ensure that guilds listed are distinct. If a guild is listed under 10 man and 25 man for the same tier on wowprogress, they are also represented here under both categories. Adding the number of 10 man and 25 man guilds together does not equal the total number of guilds raiding.
3) This data was (foolishly) collected by hand. It’s entirely possible, maybe even probable that human error (typos, etc) resulted in some tiers having an incorrect entry. I will link to the spreadsheet at the end of the post, please feel free to verify anything you feel is incorrect and point it out in the thread, or via PM if mistakes were made. I am, however, confident that the ‘big picture’ provided here is correct according to the data.
4) For tier 8, wowprogress appears to only list 25 man guilds, and only ranked those which obtained an achievement. There are additional guilds listed on every server for tier 8 that wowprogress shows no achievement for, nor does it give those guilds a numerical rank. I only counted the guilds with a rank, participation was clearly higher, but I chose to only include those given a rank. I also chose to exclude Ruby Sanctum, as it wasn’t an actual tier and I don’t feel that every guild thought of RS as something to care about. In retrospect, I probably should have included RS as it may help to fill in part of the picture.
5) I replaced Nemesis with Galakrond as Nemesis is a new realm and wasn’t online for the duration of the sample (at the time I was collecting data, Nemesis was rank 90 and Galakrond 91). I also excluded Warsong as it was one of the realms that people abandoned when Nemesis was created, their decline is explained by other factors.
Spreadsheet (current top 10 guilds is found on the second page): https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/...kE&usp=sharing

[Keoren]

To explain some of the anomalies, the T14 kills are still being updated and that probably results in the numbers compared to the T15 ones being somewhat skewed. The other expansions also saw a lot of variance with the freezing of the rankings. The T11 rankings for one were frozen several months into T12.

The numbers also suffer a bit from the tiers not being current content for the same amount of time. You already pointed the varying durations out.

That said, filtering all this for the individual realms would be more pain than it is really worth. This is the better representation that I've seen here. Even if the individual tiers have their issues, the numbers can still be used to get a rough idea of how raiding worked out over each expansionin the US.

2) No attempt has been made to ensure that guilds listed are distinct. If a guild is listed under 10 man and 25 man for the same tier on wowprogress, they are also represented here under both categories. Adding the number of 10 man and 25 man guilds together does not equal the total number of guilds raiding.

I think that this could be addressed by taking the 10+25 overall and adding it as another pillar. It does not generally have doubles outside of the recent transfers and could show the overall changes.


EDIT: Ebonheart below does point out few things that I had left out.

[slime]

Even though you point out that 10 man raiding dropped in T11 as well, I can't help but blame the merged raid locks causing the incredible drastic drop in 25 man raiding. Guess I should be thankful to still be in a guild that has a 25 man raid.. they are IMO the most fun.

[kamuimac]

U put so much thought in this while not puting emphasis on the simpel fact of shared lockouts -_- there were ton of 10 man raiders who then pugged few bosses in 25 man format thats one of most important factors there was in those tiers.

[Ebonheart]

There are just so many factors contributing that its kinda hard to actually pin point a specific fun.

The merged raid lock outs I feel probably killed 25 mans. Most guilds simply ran 25M during WTLK cause of the higher ilevel drops even though they could be running 10M.
Also the difficulty levels between 10M and 25M were quit a bit. So most family/friendly guilds stuck with 10M and the more casual-semi hardcore pushed 25M.

The 2nd reason, which isn't mentioned as often I would have liked was the guild level up system in Catacylsm. This is what I believe killed guilds completely. Pre Cata, you had a lot of small guilds. You had a lot of guilds made of specifically raid groups and their alts.

Then with Cata we had the whole guild level crap where level 25 guilds simply benefited a lot more and there were numerous perks which were quite OP. So you had a lot of folks that wanted to guild hop to level 25 guilds and a lot of guilds also merged due to this. This is when guilds started rapidly taking anyone and everyone to help level their guilds up faster.

For example - Lets call this guild "Ebonheart". Now Ebonheart had a single raid group that ran both 10/25M during WTLK. So all the progress and achievements and boss kills and records were based on a single group in the guild However, with a merging of another guild and with the addition of newer members, Ebonheart can now put together multiple guild groups other than the "core" group. So lets say Ebonheart has 4 other alt/guild groups which may not be pushing progression as fast as the core group. However, wowprogress still only factors in progress of the core group or the group that gets the first kill.

Lastly, LFR didn't really help. Most guilds that did probably casually raid don't really have to put in the effort weekly to see content or to farm better gear. LFR solves that.

Then you have other factors, such as drop in subs, people transferring off servers, etc.

[Deleted]

I'll be honest, Ebonheart, I didn't see that situation happen myself, but it's very possible that multiple guilds merged to gain access to perks while maintaining multiple, separate raid groups. I do remember many guilds attempting to get anyone and anything that could get their guild XP into their guild, but, what I saw, mostly manifested in what you still experience today, 15-20 guild invites within 5 mins of creating a new character/logging into a character without a guild.

[gcg]

Wow this is uh....

Infracted; Post constructively. (Sonnillon)