http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.a...p=1#post9467359

Eyonix:


This is perhaps the best news I have heard yet concerning the expansion.

I know some people won't like it, but for me personally this is about as good as WoW related news gets, period.

The news is just flooring our guild, but most people like the change. It'll be great to have encounters with more individual play in them, although I think Blizzard has done a great job with some of the boss encounters in Naxxramas and the end of AQ40 as far as 40-man raids goes. The big thing, though, is the change that this is going to bring to existing guilds. There will no longer be the need for very massive guilds to raid. 2/3rds of the players = 1/3rd the drama imho. At the same time, what do guilds who do have guilds sizes designed for 40-man content do? Run two 25-mans? Or downsize? Already, our guild is talking about letting the expected attrition at expansion take care of downsizing for us.

I think this'll be a positive change. I think there will be more guilds and more people will be able to find groups they want to be around. However, it's going to take some time for many guilds to adjust to it.

And, of course, there's a *lot* more being revealed. PvP changes, the addition of Bloodlust, and much more.

http://www.1up.com/do/previewPage?cId=3152830

Very good change IMO. The expansion is sounding very good to me right now.

My first thought on how a 50-60 player raid guild would adapt to running 25 man instances rather than 40 is to split into Pacific and Eastern time raids. Having a choice of start time will make regular attendance easier, so it might not need all that much extra recruiting to fill two raids - and you'll want to do that anyway to add the extra classes to your mix.

Yes, but these 25-man dungeons won't be like the relatively easy 20-man dungeons that we've seen already. These are going to be tough dungeons that require skill, gear, perseverence, and time. They likely won't be something where you'd want to split your best players into two raiding parties. I suspect that what's going to happen is that a whole lot of guilds are going to be breaking up, reshuffling, and reforming over the coming months. Guild sizes are going to have some radical adjustments with core players staying in some guilds and other people breaking off to join other guilds just forming. Overall, I think it will be good, as there won't be this trap where you have to be in only the very small handful of gigantic "raid capable" guilds to see high end content. If you don't like some people, you'll have more freedom to quit and join some other guilds whose people's personalities suit you more. I like it, but it's going to take a while to adjust to it.

Best news I've ever heard about this game. Holy crap.

Certainly all current raiding guilds will need to adapt. If a guild has exactly the right people and schedules now to reliably raid with 40 people without anyone feeling pressured into attending or disappointed at being excluded then this is clearly not a good change for them. A sixty player guild with 20 regulars that gets a random five other players showing up some nights and all 40 on others will appreciate the change - especially if the smaller instances on the hard setting are competitive enough that running them doesn't feel like a waste of time to players with access to the 25 man ones.

I don't doubt they will be harder, but go to ZG or AQ20 without any MC, BWL, AQ40 or Naxx gear. Hit ZG with just end game blues (not even dungeon 2 stuff). The current 20 mans are pretty challenging in that setting, but not many people ever experienced them in that light. Even if you only have ZG and AQ20 gear (have mastered those instances) those places are easily as hard as MC and BWL and even some of AQ40. Not quite the challenge of the 40 man stuff but some of the 20 mans are easy is because of overgearing.

From a guild management point of view, this is going to be.... interesting? I think that's the word I'm looking for, but I'm really not sure.

Consider the guild in which I am the Druid officer, Divinus of Thunderhorn. On a 40-man raid night, we'll have anywhere from 35-45 online at startup time. Great number of people to do a 40-man raid. I don't see us growing too much larger, and I also don't see us cutting back. With the new caps, we stand to have anywhere from 10-20 people sitting outside unable to raid at formup time, with more trickling in later.

We could grow a bit and then form two 25-man raids that night, but I don't see any good reason to spread the "talent," so to speak. The goal will be progress, and spreading up the A-Team players doesn't accomplish that. However at the same time, I doubt anyone will want to completely abandon Naxxramas, so we're back to raiding with 40.

Brings up lots of questions, and for some reason I see the self-proclaimed "casual" players lauding it. If the number of AQ20 and ZG runs are any good indication, I don't forsee a lot of pickup BC raids for quite some time.

Lots to digest.


Oh, and by the way, anyone find any screenshots of the Draeni war elephants? I've got 700some stacks of runecloth in waiting...

I basically concur with Mongo on this.

Gameplay wise it is probably a good change. Less people make for less complications, less downtimes, less organization overhead etc. Blizzard has shown in ZG and AQ20 that raiding encounters on a smaller scale can be as challenging as the big ones. Jin'do is imho more difficult than anything you encounter in MC.

But the consequences for existing guilds can be devastating indeed. Managing a sufficient pool of people for 40 man content is like shepherding cats. We raiders are not exactly known for our humble egos. This very annoucement alone is probably enough to stir guild drama on it's own. People will look at their fellow raiders and make mental lists with whom they would be willing to raid in a smaller raid environment if they had the choice. This could very much accelerate the unraveling of existing guilds, which would be a pity as most of them haven't probably even visited Naxx yet. The looming shadow of guild reorganization and a general feeling that the era of 40 mans will end anyway isn't exactly a motivation for progression in Naxx or AQ40.

In the end: yes, it's probably a good decision for more managable and accessable content, yet the adaption process will hurt. One can only hope that Burning Crusade will be released soon, so that the uncertainty will end.

On another note: I hope that this is not beginning of complete "casualization" of the game. There are already people whining that the current 20 mans are to much to ask for, and some are even not willing to do five content. A WoW where the most casual players set the standards is certainly not something I'm looking for.

This is very true (i.e. if you've only run Maraudon as a 60 because it came out after you'd already capped). Ossirian is probably harder than any boss in MC. And pre-nerfed Rajaxx wasn't easy either.

Also, I hope they do eventually scale existing content to be worthwhile in "hard" mode to level 70s.

Since release:
- 1 new level 60 5-man dungeon + tweaks to existing 5-mans
vs
- 2 20-man instances
- 3 40-man instances

I imagine any whining from "the casuals" is a product of being almost completely ignored for 18 months.

Good news.

Already my guild has difficulties to motivate 40 people for Ahn'Qiraj consistently.

I expect that many will quit WOW after the initial excitement over the expansian has subsided.

As a raider (I guess) currently progressing through BWL, I love this change. I only raid 40-person dungeons because they're the only way to progress my character - I find them boring and tedious, and I really enjoy five-man, ten-man, and twenty-man groups a lot more (tending towards ten-man as an ideal size).

As far as having people excluded from content because a guild was designed to contain 40 people for raiding, I'm not too sympathetic. "Casuals" had to deal with the exact same issues raiders will go through when the player cap on Stratholme, Scholomance, Blackrock Spire, etc. was lowered. Yes, there are guilds of ten to fifteen people who enjoyed making guild runs through those instances. I'm in one of them. When the player cap was lowered, we lost our main guild events, which really allowed us to learn, bond, and work together.


Casualization is something that I predict WoW will tend toward. Everyone knows that casuals are the majority of players - Blizzard (and behind them, Vivendi) would be foolish to cater to the minority of hardcore raiders. It just doesn't make any business sense. Smaller-group content is just more inclusive. Raiders can still clear five, ten, and twenty-five man instances, but the shift towards smaller instances makes that newly-developed content more accessible to casuals as well. They cater to the majority and don't exclude the minority.

Wow ... just wow. I like the change from a game perspective, but it could be very painful getting to that 25.

Personally, I think this is a good thing. The smaller dungeons have always been very fun to me. I look forward to more creative, epic fights on a smaller scale. Things like Jin'do, Hakkar, and Ossirian are tons of fun and I think that if the focus becomes to make those smaller instances fun, I think Blizzard will really throw everything they have into the effort.

As far as putting together the 25-man runs, I think that there will be groundwork that will need to be laid, but I think once it works itself out, then it should be a much better system than what is currently in the game. This even raises the possibility that the big raiding structures necessary to keep 40-man raids going will be largely unnecessary. Organizing a 25 man raid will be quite a bit less of a hassle than organizing a 40 man raid.

One thing that I think is kind of lame, however, is that they plan to put a timer on the 10-man raid instances. I just don't understand the point of that since it means that you will only be able to do 5-man instances without having to worry about raid locks. Hopefully those raid timers will be relaxed shortly after the expansion comes out to be more in line with how the end-game currently works.

I at first thought that, well if they make the instance hard enough that you will need more time to get it done then this is a good thing. But then, when thinking about it even more I realized that for some of the smaller guilds that if you can't finish it in one night anyway you might never reuse the raidlock. That's actually how ZG, AQ20, and MC is happening for us on Terenas (and we are working on Rags now). We have yet to reuse a raidlock. We go as far in a night as we can in the time we have (4 hours is the cut off time, but many people will go 5). Hakkar is down, Ossiran I hope will go down on Monday. It's not like it completely stops progress, you still get the place on farm and it still ends up taking the same time block. Blizzard hasn't designed an instance yet that once you 'get it' takes more than about 4 hours to complete. OK I can't speak for any of the Naxx wings.

So yeah I'm not sure about raidlocks on the smaller stuff. Really anything shorter than 3 days will make it pretty much not usable for a sizable portion of players as far as saving progression and will just mean it's yet another artifical way to slow people down. I guess that isn't horrible, the game isn't really hard, but yeah. Maybe a system where if saving for progression really is the big deal that a boss just drops something that allows you to get back to that point again quickly. Dunno. I've never been a huge fan of raid locks to begin with.

Non-hardcore raiders got:
- 1 Three wing level 60 5-man dungeon.
- 3 Battlegrounds
- An entire zone (Silithus) and revamped two others (Hinterlands and Searing Gorde)
- Darkmoon Faire
- Lots of holiday events
- World events -- elemental invasions, the AQ Gate openning event, and the Scourge Invasion (wish the last one lasted longer)
- Tier 0.5 quests along with revamps of three existing level 60 dungeons
- Grindable quests and rewards in Silithus, EPL, and Furbolg country.
- New Bloodsail Buccaneer quests! Yarrr!
- The STV Fishing Extravaganza
- Two semi-casual 20-man instances.

Hard-core raiders got:
- 3 40-man instances

The reason why it feels like raiders have gotten all the new content is because it takes months to work one's way through the 40-man dungeons, so it feels like "Omg! The big raiding guilds always have new content each week!" Well, yeah, on average, they get one whole new boss to defeat each week. Otherwise, they're slogging through the same content they were doing before. On the other hand, the casual content that has been released tends to be completed very quickly (or for the grinding quests involves doing the same thing repeatedly). It took, what, a week for most people to have seen all that Dire Maul had to offer when it came out. ZG was fun, and yes, I went through it and the whole learning curve with a group all in low quality blues with an alt on Twisting Nether. But even with this group, it only took a couple weeks to learn and finish ZG. It doesn't compare to the months-long learning curves of AQ40 or Naxxramas. I'm looking forward to having new content in the expansion that takes small groups a long time and a lot of effort to learn and finish, too.

The comparison isn't really the same. First of all, all of those dungeons were already designed for 5-man (strat, scholo, and lbrs) and 10-man (ubrs) parties already. People who were running them with 10-man and 15-man parties were already zerging them as it was, so there was little "learning" or "working together." Pretty much it was all just kill the monsters with little planning and get the loot. And, oh, if you want the quests, make sure you drop group before the fight. Lowering the raid caps merely returned the dungeons to their intended level of difficulty, although it took so long to do it that it was like closing the barn door after the animals have all run out.

In your case, however, that shouldn't have mattered. After all, if you were able to organize 15-man teams, then it's not a stretch that you could get five more people to run ZG with you. By the time the raid caps were lowered on the 5- and 10-player dungeons, you should've been ready for new challenges anyway.

I don't see this as a positive change at all. The top end guilds just got the shaft. There is no way any of the "elite" guilds will split up their raid force to run 2 25 man raids. Nobody wants to be in the "B" team. My guild has 7 bosses down in Naxx and will have 2 more down shortly. I am not looking forward to saying goodbye to 20+ people when TBC comes out. That is the reality for top end guilds. The trend of Blizzard has always been to dumb down raiding and i see this change as being that. The intricacies of the fights in Naxx requires every raid member to be awake and thinking. Usually one death unravels the boss attempt. Whatever guild i have been in we have taken Hakkar down on our first try and Ossirian down on our first try. Lots of people consider those fights HARD and some have never defeated those 20 man bosses. I considered them TRIVIAL and EASY. And yes i have done them with characters in blues and greens. It seems the casuals have won the day and the dollar speaks mightily to Blizzard. I guess its a great business move on their part.

I don't want easier content. I will be very surprised if they can make 25 content as difficult as 40. I do wish they had spread the hurt out a bit and made 25 cap dungeouns before the expansion. This is a harsh change and i am interested in how many hard core raiders will stay around for this game.

Yeah, I'm nervous about it, too. I guess the key question is whether the 25-man dungeons will be hard or not. If they really and truly are hard and take months to progress through them like current 40-mans, then that would be cool. But if they're kind of watered down instances designed for semi-casual players that can be completed in a couple weeks, then that'll be lame. Everything I've heard, though, sounds positive. I think they really are going to make some encounters really hard in the expansion. If that's the case, then that means that we get hard encounters without the overhead headaches of managing massive guilds. If that's the case, then this is a positive development.

Uh, you moved the bullet points around, but most don't make any sense where you put them. You can't run ZG/AQ20 in PuGs. One of the wings of DM isn't for level 60s. The battlegrounds are just as much for hardcore as not (PvP is orthogonal to casual/hardcore in my opinion). The AQ gate opening event which you so love was not an event for the casuals.

The STV fishing event is 40 minutes of entertainment (I won it on my first try with no help). The holiday events are more of "something to do" than "advance your casual character" events. The 2 revamped zones really don't impact level 60s much.

Watch them. Or, at least, watch them crumble to dust, then emerge a couple weeks later, phoenix-like, into 25 man raid guilds.

The entire thing that defines an elite raiding guild is that they are the ones willing to do what it takes to be the best. Are all of these people just going to stop playing WoW, into which they have already invested thousands of hours, just because they need to reorganize?

I think it´s not very likely. People will complain, adjust, then get back to what they really want, which is being the best. If some people can´t adjust, their spots will be taken by one of the great legion clamouring to be part of the best guilds, Darwin-style.

-Jester

Casual != pug's. Let's put it this way. When AQ20 came out, our guild blew through it in two evenings without ever doing any prep-work for it and d/e'd 90% of the loot (except for skill books, of course, and only a few of those books were real upgrades). From the outset, AQ20 was used by our guild to equip up alts and get alternative gear for players -- like pew pew gear for priests that they would not be able to get in the 40-man raids. AQ20 was not designed for raiders who had been running BWL for months. It was designed for players coming in with blues and a few small epics who wanted to do a little more than the standard 5- and 10- man dungeons but who didn't have the time or energy for the massive 40-man dungeons.

And, yes, you most certainly can get in ZG and AQ20 semi-casual groups. There are groups going on on Tich all the time that are small groups of friends who band together to run ZG or AQ20 once or twice a week and sometimes invite pugs to fill out their raids. If you want to experience them, then get to know good people in various level 60 dungeons runs and let them know that you'd like to run ZG or AQ20 with them sometimes. Make a few friends and you'll get in those groups. Telling people, sure, I can run ZG or AQ20 with you on Wednesdays and Sundays does not suddenly make you a slavering hardcore raider.



Sure, one nice thing for raiders is that they can experience the stuff that casual players get to do, too. However, casual players can play and enjoy battlegrounds quite well, so ignoring this massive bit of content while trying to claim that Blizzard has ignored casual players for 18 months is silly. You don't need a massive 100 person guild to PvP, and for that matter, you can compete very well with just a few friends, and despite how some people like to paint it, the epic rewards for PvP (both honor and reputation) are excellent. Heck, Blizzard even disabled the AV join-as-group function to prevent massive guilds from dominating smaller groups there.



You must play on a PvE server. The fishing extravaganza is a blast on Tichondrius. There's lots of replayability there, even if you don't like to fish.

Your list has two problems. The first is that if it isn't a 40-man raid instance, you lump it into something specifically for 'non hardcore raiders'. Where are the world raid bosses? Where's the raid questline from the AQ opening? Why are things like the darkmoon faire and the bloodsail quests for 'non-hardcore raiders' only?

The second problem is that it assumes all content is equally enjoyable or progressive. Killing a bazillion furbolgs for a trinket doesn't even halfway compare to the Benediction questline.

However, before this dives back down into the endless (and often semantic) debate of raiding vs. casual, I'd like to ask a better question: What do you really want from the endgame? Because from my perspective as a former raider, this change resolves many issues:
1. The barrier to entry has been lowered; you now depend on 3/8s fewer people to *begin* raid content.
2. Neither 25 nor 10 easily divides by 9; Roles will now be cross-class, giving everyone more responsibility.
3. Blizzard can make roles more complex (and interesting) because they're adding 2 more tiers of talents.
4. Smaller raid size means more raiding guilds and more raid lockouts per week per server; this creates greater gear opportunity and flattens the gear curve in PvP.

My subscription is currently running out and I wasn't planning to play in TBC, but this change indicates that maybe Blizzard has more in store to convince me.

Edit: Revised point #2, changed to 'issues' from 'problems'.

I like how everyone forgets the Dire Maul being 3 wings (2 instances), or the sheer EXISTENCE of Mauradon. Not to mention the Faire and other additions listed above to give the non-raidnig community their crack at shiny purple stuff.

I think you may end up being right in your analysis but there is one fear of mine. The whole end game is predicated on challenge and difficulty and if that is taken away with the 25 man raid cap you will see droves of elite players leave this game. I read Fires of Heaven and Elitist Jerks (two top end WoW guilds) daily and on both boards there is a lot of good discussion on whether this is the end of elite raiding. Yes the this move by Blizzard will probably equal out the gear difference a litte bit better than the old system as well as give more access to more content to a greater pool of players. This is a $$$ move and it looks to be a good one. Tigole, one of the chief devs, estimated 25% of the playerbase has taken down Ragnaros and 15% have taken down Nefarion. That estimation is probably too high. So that means 80%+ of the playerbase feels ignored and left out. They got their Christmas gift early with with the 25 person raid cap.

Personally i am very disappointed. I loved the challenge of 40 person raiding and have absolutely loved the encounters in Naxxramas. They are by far and away the best in the game apart from C'Thun. Now i can't wait until Beta and see what the actual changes will be and how that will affect the long term raid future of this game.

If the encounters are going to be easier it will mean more access to everyone but you will lose the people who like challenges and difficulty. My guess is the encounters will be easier and that will be terribly disappointing. So who knows.....

That a dungeon is split into three wings doesn't change it's size, it's difficulty or that it doesn't provide progression. Mauradon doesn't provide much progression for 60's either. "WTB Thorium Widgets" is not epic content no matter how good the (single) reward is.

I'm all for the best rewards coming from difficult content. Difficulty does not mean group size. I don't consider MC difficult - an administrative hassle yes, but not difficult. My Warrior's guild just cleared to Golemagg on their second run (without me; I've more than had my fill of that place on my old characters). It's reward to risk ratio is seriously out of whack - it's one of the easiest instances in the game once you know it. I can't watch TV and still do my job well when running the deadmines.

In the end this is a game that I play for entertainment. If I'm feeling forced into something I don't enjoy then I'm not getting value for my entertainment dollar. Which is why I've abandoned two 60's and am about to do so for a third.

I know the 20-mans weren't designed for guilds already *past* BWL. They are however an excellent stepping stone while still not past BWL, maybe even longer if for certain classes/specs. This however does not make them "casual". You will need organization to get a balanced 20, and you will need a looting system (unless you have 20 extremely chill people willing to live with /random and bad streaks).


Someone has to keep the list of 20+ people, someone has to keep track of the people to be waitlisted, someone has to decide who gets priority, someone has to keep track of loot priority. None of these are things that a casual player does. Sure you could do it with one "hardcore" organizer and 19 "casuals" you found in 60-man dungeons. I seriously doubt that makes up the majority of 20-man runs. Yes, the 20-mans are a lot closer to "casualable" than the 40-mans, but anything past 10-15 is catering to the hardcore (they just may not be geared out yet).


To excel in PvP you need to devote "hardcore" amounts of time (ie rank 9-10+). Or you can grind the rep. But, like I said, the PvP game is orthogonal to the PvE game -- it either appeals to you on PvP merits or not, and not casual vs hardcore or not. Additionally, they haven't really done a good job making PvP fair to casuals -- so if you are casually PvPing, you're likely losing to epic'd out players or organized PvP honor farm teams.


PvP server. 60 warrior (270 fishing at the time), got ganked once by 2-3 high 40s and still managed to win. Maybe I got lucky.

I didn't forget Mauradon. I was level 60 when it came out. It's value to me was zero (OK, maybe some NR res). Sure, I played it a few times on alts, but certainly far fewer times than the other 55+ dungeons.

One of the wings isn't level 60, and the tribute wing is runnable in 30 minutes.

Giving people treadmills with a shiny carrot is hardly laudable.

Nit: Only Horde got a revamped Hinterlands, there was no change from the alliance perspective.

I take this as indication that the loot on 10-man instances will be on par of that with the 25-man instances (at least on the harder difficulties). If MC/BWL could be run back-to-back like a 45m Strat or Tribute run, then that would happen and you'd have no reason to run them after 3 weeks. There's obviously room for them to do this wrong, so I hope they get it right.

Whether you think so or not, pulling entire streets in Baron-side Stratholme with seven people certainly helped me and my guild members learn how to play better. It was something like the 45-minute Baron clears of today.

As for my guild, you know why we weren't able to put together a ZG raid? It's a casual guild. We have players that don't get on with any regularity, and it was nice to be able to pull together a group from the seven or eight people on and go zerg Strath. It was fun to be able to go to Strath. Now we can't do that. If we go do a five-man, we have 2-3 extra people who end up just logging off because they have nothing to do, and if we try UBRS we have a few people missing, so the run takes longer and people end up having to log off because of real life constraints.

We never scheduled raids with any regularity - we just went if we had enough people online. As a guild, we don't have enough people who can set aside a long block of time to run ZG.




If my guild should have been able to recruit five people, then the 40-man guilds can feel free to recruit 10 more people and run two raids. Voila! No more problem.

I expect that the changes they make will be more of bringing the content inline with 25 people vs. 40 people. You will probably see all raid content lose about 3/8 of their health and you will probably see a little bit of diminishing damage done by the raid content (probably not the 3/8 less) and you will probably see fights like Patchwerk target 1 less target to allow for the removal of 15 people. Overall, I think they'll just scale the encounters for 25 people from 40, but make them no less difficult for 25 people to conqueor than 40 people.

Yeah. I think a number of fights can easily be scaled down. I.e. only 6 adds for Domo, 2 fewer sons of Rag, 30 spawns for Razorgore, Vael's BA every 20 seconds, etc. The number 40 is nothing magic.

I guess I'm not seeing what everyone else is seeing, because I frankly cannot find much upside in this change. I can see that a lot of people are enthusiastic about it. I imagine responses like these are what prompted them to make it in the first place.

I think enthusiasm is good. I think interest is good. What I'm not so sure of is that changing the raid size to 25 man actually alleviates any of the problems that cause people to not raid.

Firstly, I think it's important to emphasize the damage this is going to inflict on raiding guilds as currently structured. The structure of the game will always affect how people socially organize within it. As the max raid size was 40, most end-game raid guilds have built themselves around a 50-60 member core running a single raid. In more of these guilds than most people think, all of the people within them like each other and enjoy gaming with each other. I'm sure that "I play this game for the people" is a phrase not uncommonly heard. It's a good thing. MMO designers rely on a social element to sustain their game. Social elements make content re-runnable without being boringly repetitive.

With the advent of a 25-man max cap, these guilds (and there are many) will have to change. One choice is running two 25-man raid IDs. Poking around various forums will provide many thoughtful critiques of the concept. Two IDs results in drama, from the start: Avarice members on Stormrage can back me up when I assert that trying to do two groups is one of the most drama-intensive things you can do with a group of people. It results in a Team A/Team B mentality, which develops and intensifies animosity between people who had fun playing together. If the teams are fixed, then they're virtually not part of the same guild any more: if they're fluid, progression will be seriously hampered through lack of cohesion. And what happens when Team A's tanks are away, but Team B's healers are away? You have around 35 motivated, skilled raiders who can't go anywhere because everyone's locked to a different raid instance.

I have here only provided a light overview of the difficulties involved in switching to a two-lock system. The problems are significantly greater, but I do not wish to overburden my post with a discussion of it. Suffice it to say that it is a poor solution.

What's the other choice? Cutting and reshaping the typical raid guild into a 35 man unit that looks to have 25 people on for max-level raids. This means that the typical raid guild has to boot around half its members. How do you make such a decision? How do you make it without hurting people's feelings, without harming people you consider friends? This is not a solution either.

Irrespective of the potential benefits of the change, the result will be, however unintentionally, monstrously cruel to those who have been the most loyal players of the game over the last two years. I expect that instead of choosing, many raid guilds will simply choose to not play, and pack their bags for a game where they can play with all their friends. Blizzard has set it up such that one must either wreck your previous social framework (which Blizzard themselves created) or not progress in the game. A great deal of misery is going to result. Blizzard cares little for the misery of people, however. What they should pay attention to is the sentiment on high-level raid guild boards: just how many people are talking about quitting. From a purely financial standpoint, they're making a change that is certain to drive away exactly the kinds of people they could count on to be long-term, reliable subscribers.

So we've established that there are going to be huge and highly unpleasant consequences to this change. Doing something that is going to cause this much unhappiness and cost this much money had better have some clear and unambiguous upsides. But oddly enough...there aren't.

If we accept that the purpose of this change is to increase access to raid content, we need to look at what currently serve as barriers to raiding. It's important to ask "Why don't people raid?".

To answer this, I go back to a post I made a few months ago about different types of hardcore players. I listed six types of players, five of which don't raid. True Casuals don't raid because they're actually casual about the game: they don't want to raid. They solo a lot, quest a lot, and generally quit characters once they cap. Hardcore Non-Raiders hate the feel of anything bigger than a 5-man, be it 20, 25, or 40. Hardcore PvPers, especially with the new PvP system in the expansion, don't raid anything other than battlegrounds. The player limit never had anything to do with why these players didn't raid, and so lowering it isn't going to make them raid more.

It likewise doesn't solve the time accessibility issue which is the main reason why people don't raid. A lot of people don't raid because they cannot clear even one-hour blocks of time in which to play. They do a little here, a little there - not because they want to, but because they have to. For such players, it wouldn't matter if the maximum raid size was one - because they don't have the time to play. Solving that problem is outside the scope of WoW.

The argument has been put to me that less players required leads to less drama. My reply is that it certainly can lead to less drama. On the other hand, this is not a scientific law, nor a predictable relationship. It might lead to no change at all. It might lead to more drama. For every player who quit end-game raiding due to drama, you will find another who left a small family guild for a large raiding guild to get away from drama. I don't accept this as a clear, unambiguous benefit.

It's also said that 25, by virtue of being a smaller number, is a number that's easier to get together. This post provides a good outline of why that's not necessarily the case.

So I've shown all the kinds of players and conditions that lowering the cap simply does not improve. But it surely has to help somebody, right? And it does. The prime beneficiaries are small hardcore guilds that are limited by numbers - like groups of RL friends. I emphasize small hardcore guilds because they must want to progress, and be willing to spend hours wiping, farming repair money, farming consumables. They must be all those things and yet be unable to add people in any way.

How many of such people are there? Let's assume if they can get 25 they can get 20, and since they're hardcore folk, they will be, at present, raiding ZG and AQ20. Stormrage is what I know, so I'll use numbers from it: there are well over thirty guilds (two thousand or more people) with multiple kills in Molten Core. How many guilds are raiding ZG and AQ20 but not anything 40-man? To my knowledge, there are two. Neither of those guilds can reach 40 people, so the most optimistic estimate gives them a combined 78, which is less than one percent of the total server population (in comparison, roughly 17% is 40-manning right now).

To increase raid availability by less than one percent, Blizzard has instituted a change that is certain to be hugely negative to existing raid guilds. Yes, 40 man raiders are a minority of active players. But screwing them to improve the lot of an even smaller minority is poor judgment.

I can see these types of changes also benefitting the processing loads on the servers and the loads on most players clients since there would be less of the N! problem to deal with.

I know one thing that was killing a lot of players in BWL was that the first rooms were right under the suppression room (with a 'low' ceiling). Since the game engine (server and client versions) does not do much to differentiate the z-axis from the x- and y-axis when doing distance checks for things like the AoEs or graphical drawing, this would lead to some heavy loads on the server or client as they keep trying to do camparisons to all the whelps up there even if they will not actually be interacted with at the time of the first two encounters. The clients failing can be helped a lot by turning down the distance at which deals with objects at a distance so at least it can effectively ignore trying to track a lot of whelps for drawing purposes (before it gets to the check that there is a floor/ceiling blocking the view).

I had wondered how they were going to handle things in Medivh's Tower. I had been in it during the closed beta and had seen that it was many levels stacked together as close as or closer than the ceiling hight to the suppression room in BWL. Now I know that they have changed the tower since beta (its noticably smaller now) but that does not mean that there is overall less to the tower. Most likely there are as many levels as there had been before but now with less running from floor to floor. This most likely tighter packing of the levels would have potentionally lead to even more lag inducing effects in that tower if any of the rooms ended up being populated even similar to how the suppression room is populated in BWL.

Now consider for those not as math knowledgeable what the reduction like fractaled might end up impling. A reduction from 40! to 30! (this is in some ways less than what is really the load being looked at by the way) is not 3/4 of the load, it is 30!/40! which works out to be about 3.25x10^-16. Basically it will amount to a fairly small fraction of the load that is at times required for the way they set up some of the current 40 man content. Yes there will likely be more of these instances being run than there are right now, but it is not likely that there will be enough being run at one single time to be able to make up that difference. This is because to make up the difference between say 25! to 30! would require 26x27x28x29x30 additional concurent runs to match a similar load problems.

I can assure you that this is simply not the case. A guild with 50 people is just too large, that each one is enjoying playing with each one another. 40-man raids are just too big for individual social interaction. Getting 40 people together is a necessity. And if 35 people are fairly good equipped even that one is gone.

There are cliques and groups of people in a typical raiding guild. And I agree that the size of that type of guild is largely due to the 40-man raid instances. I doubt that the typical size of a guild would be as large if there were no 40-man instances. Even now I can observe on my server that there are strategic alliances formed just for raiding a 40-man instance.

Also let's not forget, that the four big instances won't just disappear once the expansion is released.

To be honest, I'm quite bewildered that people hark this 25-limit as the end of the good times for elite(sic!) raiding guilds. If these raiding guilds cannot adapt then what are they good for?

Yes, but when people are level 70, those instances will no longer be 40-man instances in any practical sense, unless you want to zerg them. One will probably be able to complete Naxxramas with 25 people by that point.

I grant that it is not true for everyone. I said as much. But I am in one of these guilds, and surely you don't intend to dictate to me what I do or do not feel? It is true for some of these guilds, and, as I originally stated, it is true for more of them than most people think.

I play for the people not the game anymore. The high end guilds are tight knit groups of people. Spending 4+hours a raid night with the same people develops close bonds between people. Those that think otherwise or experiencing different must be in really anti-social guilds. I am not looking forward to the X-pac now because we will be forced to say goodbye to 15+ people. It is not practical or worthwhile to make 2 teams of 25. The headaches that derive from that are NOT WORTH IT. I will admit though that getting 25 dedicated people is simply going to be easier than 40. But i truly wish Blizzard had implemented this a lot earlier than the X pac so guilds could have done things differently. My guild plans to raid Naxx right up to the X-pac. That leaves a month probably of levelling then the gross task of cutting people.

You seem to be conflating "less people" and "less difficult". While there might be an overall reduction of difficulty (I certainly hope not), that would be an entirely different issue.

The way I see it, they could just as easily make the encounters harder, with more onus on each individual to do his or her job right, something which they have to go easy on at least a little bit with 40 man encounters.

I would be quite disappointed if the game got overall easier, and I've never beated Ragnaros, let alone Nefarian or C'thun. (Been to rags, though. Go go Lurkers/Keepers on Terenas!)

But I think blizzard has been doing a good job of introducing harder and more interesting endgame content so far, and I doubt they're going to stop just because they're dealing with smaller groups.

Or, at least, I think we can safely hope.

-Jester

Yeah I remember when people thought Ony and MC were hard or impossible. (Even MJ, go read some of his write ups). Now those places are jokes. ZG and AQ20 are both harder than anything in MC, the enounters are more complex and require people to play better than anything in MC does. Heck if you are in ZG and AQ20 level gear I think both of them take more skill than most everything in BWL for that matter.

So yeah, small can be hard, if not harder. 45 minute Baron run in appropriate gear (i.e. no ZG or AQ20 gear even) is hard and a lot of fun and take more skill than most anything in MC as well. So I agree wholeheartedly that just because it says 40 man doesn't mean it's harder.

My main is guild is one that progressed over time from the "casual" to the "raid" content. Because we are less demanding on attendance than more "focused" raid guilds, the pool of players we draw from is fairly large: we have a core of players who go to almost every raid they can, but also a large group who's attendance is limited by real life or interest.

From a management point of view, smaller raids are definitely a step in the right direction. Coordinating a group of 40 people is a lot of work; coordinating a guild large enough to field 40 people for every run is also a lot of work.

However most raiding guilds (from the most casual to the most intense) have shaped their numbers around what they need to field those 40 players. After the expansion I expect many guilds will shrink in size - instead of 60 or 70 people on the playing roster, they may have 40.

This adjustment might be sudden (guild splits) or gradual (not replacing members lost through attrition). It will probably depend on the guild.

However once that adjustment is complete I think you will see significantly more guilds on the hardest end-game encounters than now, because its a lot easier to find 10 or 25 people for a run than 40. Some people dislike the large raids because they find themselves "lost in the crowd" so to speak where their individual contribution is hard to identify. When there are only 2 or 3 of each class in a raid, your contribution becomes more important.

I assume Blizzard has pretty detailed statistics on who goes to what instances, and they probably know exactly how busy ZG and AQ20 are relative to the 40 person raids.

I predict some short-term upheavals, but in the long run I think people will appreciate the smaller raids.

Chris

Raiding is a team sport. What you do in raids, you do for the 'team' you are with. There are no "heros" in endgame raiding, but there are a ton of team accomplishements...

Whenever I think that a 40-man raid is a team sport, I try to compare it to a real-world sport -- and I fail. Basketball, hockey, football, and baseball have at most 11 people (per team) on the field at once (and they often have dedicated *teams* of coaches/managers). Maybe it can be compared to a symphony -- where it's hard to pinpoint indivual players, but the success of the whole is identifiable.

Well, it's surely not for me --- as a relatively anti-social, non-WoW player --- to interject here, and I apologize in advance for it.

I don't knock anyone who does enjoy playing WoW --- it's undeniably done really well --- but for myself, I'm just thankful not to play anymore a game where there can be a discussion about whether or not 25 people (or 10 people, for that matter) is too small a number for the end-game content, nevermind what you have to go through to get to that point.

I think you missed my point. There are people playing World of Warcraft who prefer small group runs (eg 5-10 people) to 40 person raids. One of the members of our guild stopped playing for essentially that reason (we're hoping he returns for the expansion).

In a small group, you carry far more responsibility for the success or failure of a run than in a 40 person army where you have 39 other people to pick up the slack if you're having a bad day. Lets face it: its easy enough to get by in MC by following instructions, and mashing the right 2 or 3 buttons at the right times. The dungeons have got progressively more complex since then, but it's only probably only the last half of AQ40 and Naxx which require the entire raid without exception to be on top of their games. (The Four Horseman fight for instance appears as if it requires 4 teams of 10 to work pretty much autonomously from one another).

I personally enjoy the large raids. I think the highlight of the game so far was when our guild beat Ragnaros for the first time (back when Rag was a big deal, and not merely a stepping stone to more complicate encounters). But as someone who devoted huge chunks of time developing partnerships with other guilds when we didn't have the numbers, and building up our guild when we decided we did - 40 man raids are a heavy workload to organize.

Chris

I know this isn't really your point, but there's few people that have an issue with 25 as being too small. It's that it came too late, because everyone built themselves around 40.

Fixed.


-A