Originally Posted by
Gurbz
The main issue with raid lockouts is the loot. It has little to do with invested time, or how much Blizzard thinks you should be playing the game or any of that. Shared lockouts were pretty much required as soon as they made 10s and 25s share a loot table. Otherwise, people would gear up faster than Blizzard wants, because you would get multiple chances (with the coin system up to 4) at a given boss's loot table per week. Any adjustments on the drop rates of loot to compensate for this would increase the perception that running both formats is a requirement instead of an option.
Blizzard does have the tech necessary to make a player only eligible for loot from a boss once a week, like in LFR, but how many people would honestly run a raid a second time in another format knowing that they are getting no loot? I would guess not many.
The most obvious solution would be to go back to 10s dropping inferior loot. This would kill the majority of 10-mans, as players would now feel that it is "required" for them to run 25s, whether they want to or not, just for the sake of character power as happened in Wrath. Kinda like how they think that dailies are required in the same non-literal sense. This would destroy a ton of guilds/raid teams that are established in the 10-man format, which in the US/EU is by far the more popular format. Asia may be different, but I don't have data on that region. If they were going to go that route, it would probably been seen as better to just switch to a 15-man format only. Same painful aftermath, but with more benefits.
So solve all those issues and we could have a perfect multi-format raid system. The current setup is nothing more than Blizzard choosing, in their mind, the lesser of the evils. They really can only end these issues by choosing a single format, regardless of what the final raid size would be, and only developing for that format.