Originally Posted by
FpicEail
Never mind that this argument is ludicrous due to the correlation v.s. causation fallacy, particularly due to the simple fact that people can continue to play the game despite certain changes they don't like, but it doesn't even work from a correlation standpoint. That expansion you keep using as a model of success? It lost all of those new subscribers and then even more within a year of release. By quarter 3 2015 that sub count had nearly halved and reached levels not seen since classic WoW. It was so bad that they permanently stopped announcing sub counts. As for raid participation: the figures were similarly bleak. I remember having this discussion at the time. You were looking at something like 50% less guilds doing the highest difficulty.
As for the 10 man model: there's not much else to say other than the very peak subscriber count of WoW was reached in a time where 10 man raiding was an option.
I suspect you know all of this full well, however, and this is why you carefully word your way around it by referring only to how expansions did on launch and not how they did over time.
You also seem to subscribe to the opinion that 10 man was the easy, casual mode, which demonstrates your cluelessness. 10 man was often the harder of the two. There was no room for carries and individual mistakes and carries mattered a lot more. It also limited your choice in composition. Garrosh, the last boss to ever be available on the highest difficulty on 10 man, was drastically harder on that setting compared to 25 man. It did depend on the raid and boss, but there were plenty of instances throughout the expansions where 10 man was absolutely the more challenging choice.