Originally Posted by
Kaesebrezen
Your assumption is that people do not raid because it's not rewarding enough. There are plenty of other reason not to raid:
- heavy time commitment. You generally are required to be on schedule for two (or more) days for several hours each week. That's a time commitment many people aren't willing to make nowaways. You have a very large pool of fun entertainment to pick from, raid rewards have a hard time to compete against "fun".
- you have to be with a lot of other peoples. Chances are, the more people you have, the more likely you have to spend several hours a week with people you get not along. Yet again, something that competes with the "fun" of other entertainments. People think that 10 man killed 25 man because of the path of least resistance to gear, while part of the truth is that with 25 man you most likely had several people you didn't have fun with.
- there's a lot of stuff in a raid that wastes time: totally boring, yet long, trash, the smoking/coffee/shitting-break people need, the guy that got a call from his mom, the guy that accidentally released, the guy that likes to argue, standing around while the leads discuss stuff and decide how to progress further... (yeah yeah, you can set strict rules for your people, but good "fun" probably doesn't look like that)
I'll bring FFXIV's Baldesion Arsenal up now, because it's imo a rather odd existence: It was a 58 man raid in a 120 people instanced zone. To successfully clear it you had to organzie 58 people, get them in the same public instance, followed by having none of the remaing 62 people take a slot in the instance. The public instanced had bonus abilities you had to prepare for the raid. Then inside you had a strict time limit, dead is dead (ressing was very limited, required farming zone abilities, and also RNG based with a 70% chance for the rezzer to be dead), and moderately hard bosses (you also hit the enrage if people went for surviveability zone abilities instead of DPS - and mechanics could one shot).
That thing was a massive nightmare to organize and prepare, the raid itself was comparatively difficult (for FFXIV standards) - and then you place the rewards against all of the downsides: A mount, and tokens that upgraded your gear earned in the zone with a zone specific stat (i.e you deal more dmg and take less damage in the zone - which generally was a zerg/grindfest). Yet you had people farming this content for months, organizing groups, teaching new peoples, just to help them get the mount...
Now where does that place your "reward" for raiding?