Justified

Last week I talked a lot about what would make a real change to 25m raiding to bring it back into prominence and since then there's been a few blue posts about it. Seems some other people either have the same ideas or were being really nice and posting these ideas on the forums. From the blue feedback it appears that they disagree with what I think on a much more fundamental level. That is to say they think it should be about making 25m more appealing to players instead of making it just as easy to be a part of, or run for that matter, either raid size. I'm not convinced this is the case, but they have a lot more experience and numbers than I do. Either way we'll see how the thunderforged pans out. I think it'll be a great way to see which direction people are leaning.

So now that I've outlined what I think are good solutions to the problem, another question comes up. Why is it so important that 25m raiding sticks around?

I'm going to try and break things up a bit more because this question really is a multi-parter.

1 - Narrative.

This game tries to deliver a certain narrative of the game world. There are grand struggles that you, as an adventurer and hero to Azeroth get to experience. This is where the old-school players would bring up 40m raids feeling truly epic. 40 people is a lot of people. Bosses that need 40 of you to take down feel a *lot* more epic than bosses that require 10. This is probably one of the stronger arguments to me for why 25m raiding is a more central or important part of the warcraft raiding game than 10m. Bigger groups feel grander. At a certain point other factors start to dominate the feeling of epic but delivering on this story of enormous scale really requires more than 10 people. Part of this might be because I'm so used to 25m that being in a 10m raid just feels empty, like there's not enough going on, but I think it's more than that.

2 - Population dynamics

25m raiding sets up an interesting population dynamic, lets break it down a bit.

Main specs (not including switches for os tanks and the like).

8% Tanks (2/25)
20-30% Healers (5-7/25, in some cases 8)
62-72% DPS(The rest of them, which is 15-17 usually)

Swingers.

10% of your dps will likely have a tank OS. (2 or 3)
20% of your dps will likely have a healing OS.(usually 3 or 4)
30-40% of your healers will have a dps OS.(2-4 depending on the raid group, I find it varies a lot).

Interesting setup there I think, now lets take a look at 10m.

Main specs.

20% Tanks (2/10)
20-30% Healers (2-3)
50-60% DPS (whatever's left).

Swingers.

10-30% of your dps will have tank OS (that's only 1-2 of your dps)
10% of your dps will likely have a healer OS (usually only 1, on rare occasions 2)
33-66% of your healers will have a dps OS (again only 1 or 2 depending on the raid group).

That's a huge difference between the two models. I think the first setup (25m) feels more natural where the 2nd setup (10m) feels a bit more normalized. In an average population of fantasy characters you're not going to get that RPG mix of tank/healer/caster/melee. I've played DnD campaigns with ranger/cleric/rogue/warlock. No tank there. I've played other campaigns with knight/duskblade/paladin/druid. That's just about as strange in comp. These aren't even that a-typical for these sorts of games.

3 - Design space.

I know people don't like encounters with mind control but it's a mechanic that's not so easy to duplicate without actually taking control of players. Think about this mechanic for a bit, in a 10m raid it's really easy to suddenly take all the healers out. If you MC too many people you're making it incredibly difficult. Not enough and it's barely even a mechanic. In 25m that window is a lot larger. Lets say the right number is 2 or 3 people in 10m. They happen to be healers and you have no healers while you break them out. None are healers and you may not have enough dps to break them out. In a 25m raid that's not even a concern until you get it up to 5+ players and has a much smaller chance of happening. Vizier showed us exactly this problem where in 25m the way you can split your raid made a fairly big difference.

Other mechanics like meteor effects. Blade lord unseen strike is a good example of this. In 10m if it landed on a spriest they could just dispersion it and take the whole swipe. On 25m even stacking cooldowns up on them wouldn't work for it, it's just too much damage. As a designer you have to consider these types of things. This is the sort of thing I call design space, the room you have to where things are in the sweet spot is a lot larger and allows for not only a larger variance in difficulty but also a smoother difficulty curve and a larger pool of mechanics that are still engaging. Also I'm going to predict that dark animus has a similar problem based on my very rudimentary understanding of the fight.

4 - Community.

A lot of people confuse what drives the game decisions by what brings home the top dollar. This isn't always so obvious or in some cases not even the right way to look at things. How does blizzard get new customers to play warcraft? I'd hazard a guess at 2 primary ways of getting new players.

1. Recruit a friend type things (not neccessarily the one in-game but just people bringing friends into the game).
2. People who see the community online.

The first one is pretty simple, make a good game and people will want to play it with friends. The goal here is to make it easy for friends to play together. Not much complexity here.

The second one is where it gets a bit complicated. It's really easy to say that they wouldn't do something to see a drop in subscribers but sometimes that's what you have to do for the long-term health of the game. It's hard to give specific examples because even though in some cases they say "We know this isn't popular but it's going to make a better game," it's a bit more veiled than that.

Creating a world where people can get together and really develop a community, an out-of-game culture that comes from the game and develops around the game is something that can really really drive sales. How many times have you seen tv shows or something that had some secret society and thought "Oh man I'd love to be a part of one of those." It's somewhat similar, though obviously not the same, to say that you want to be a part of a large community that is based around this game. Again there's more to it than that but to put it simply this does sell a lot of subs and gets people to play the game. It wouldn't work if the game wasn't that great but there are *tons* of people out there who play the game because they get to be a part of some large social group or even just to play with their friends. A bad community would really ruin that, not saying it's the greatest right now but look at all the fan art and fan websites. Look at things like the entire curse network of websites or wowhead or shows like convert to raid or PST.

Well it seems I've gone and done a big wall of text again. I'm going to try and work on that a bit in the future but for now you'll have to suffer through the walls. Also 5.2 is expeced in 2 weeks. (26th of Feb). I'll try and continue to keep things rolling.

Thunder forged (The big 25m problem)

I've been missing lately, and there's a good couple reasons I promise. First I was in the market for a new guild since my raid times basically took away what little sleep I had, second I've been trying to figure out a way to handle this next topic properly and since thunder-forged gear got announced I really couldn't think of a better time. So without further adieu, this is it:

In the interest of full disclosure I do play 25m.

The problem:

So the problem right now, or at least the one that everyone is seeing is that the 25m raid scene is slowly coming to an end. Not to sound dramatic but it's been in decline every since wrath came out with both of the difficulties. It didn't start nose-diving until cata but this is essentially the problem. There are more 25m raid teams that are going extinct or turning into 10m raid teams. Take a look at Dream Paragon, or Exodus/Vodka to give a more recent example, than there are new 25m raiding guilds forming. This is fairly simple math since new guilds < dying guilds means every cycle we have fewer 25m raiding guilds than we did before. This is not a stable population.

Blizzard has stated they want to fix this and I applaud them for it since I do play 25m raids and I feel that this game was almost built on them. Sure it was 40 back in the day but the game didn't really hit it's stride until TBC/Wrath. I mean the world first races didn't even really hit the main stream wow population until TBC, and that was with Black Temple.

This is the most simple way to express the problem. Now it's time to understand the problem. Why are we seeing this trend and what are some possible causes.

Causes:

10 and 25 sized raids are considered equal in terms of difficulty and prestige. I like to think of them as separate but equal. I don't think it's far to rank people from one bracket against the other. I'd be like comparing lightweight to heavyweight in boxing. You just don't do it. It's not that one is easier, or considered the "better" one. It's just that they are two different, it wouldn't be right to pit the two against each other.

This is what opened the doors for the problem in my mind. Once people felt like they could play the game and consider themselves going up against the "hard" content, that is the hardest content available in the games to them, on any raid size they wanted to it was an obvious choice for many players to switch down to 10. 25m just isn't desireable to a lot of people. Smaller groups appeal more and that's just fine for them. This isn't the cause of the problem this is just something that set up the problem in the first place. I don't think going back to 25m = "real raiding" would be a viable solution at this point and it's not fair *but* I'll talk about that in a bit.

Once this paradigm was in place we have to consider what the equilibrium point might be. The point where both populations are stable, the 10m and the 25m. The next bit here is probably going to be the most controversial in what is going to be said however I know it's been mentioned in other places though I just can't remember them at the moment. Credit goes to them for getting some of these ideas out there.

10m raiding teams are easier to run than 25m raiding teams. Have you ever tried to make a cat do something it didn't want to do? Have you ever tried to make 2 or 3 cats try and walk in the same direction at the same time? Nearly impossible unless you've got food (or in this case possibly gear) at the other end of the path. Now think about doing it to 10 or 25 cats. Not going to happen without a lot of work. Us humans are basically the same. Try getting together 25 skilled players that all have a similar attitude and can work together as a team. Now try getting together that same group but you can stop at 10. In reality it's closer to 14 and 30 ish considering raid teams have to be a bit larger.

I could go on and on about why a 25m is more difficult to maintain, manage, and organize but I'm sure you guys get the idea. I can clarify more in the comments below if it's really an issue. Now lets take into account some of the ways the game itself creates the distinction between the two in managing it.

Food: There are two different feasts that need to be made. The 25m one requires double the mats. Sure this makes sense initially in that you have more than double the people so it's more efficient. However in a lot of cases, especially the ones that are using feasts (which is probably a majority of the raiders out there) you have 1 or 2 people taking care of feasts for the raid. This usually boils down to using guild resources to buy feasts or to cover farming them yourself etc. So why make it more difficult for the 1 or 2 people in a 25m raid just because they have more underlings? This doesn't make sense upon scrutiny.

Additionally with food now you have this silly idea about asking people to spend insane amounts of time and resources just to get an extra 25 stats (bit more for stam). Sure it sounds silly to a lot of you but heroic mode progression raiders are going to require it. It's a lot more effort to make sure 25 people are doing that than 10. It's just a numbers game at this point. This particular point isn't such a big deal but the feast thing really highlights the issue that it's significantly harder to worry about a 25m raid team than a 10m.

Flasks: Many guilds just ask raiders to get their own flasks. This is reasonable and requires minimal effort on the part of the officers except to make sure people are using their flasks. However some guilds will provide flasks for their raiders. This was largely due to the cauldron mechanic from Cata. Many guilds set up this structure in the guild and it's stuck around. No more cauldrons makes managing flasks for the guild basically a nightmare for 25m teams and really not that bad for 10m teams. Sure it's not easy for them either but just looking at numbers and resources it's a lot of effort. Consider potions here as well but just think how many potions, especially with pre-potting, people can go through on a given night. Don't want to talk about this much since it's basically the same as both food and flasks so you get the idea by now.

Funds: Repair costs for 10 and 25 raid teams varies greatly. You're getting ~2.5x the repair costs (think in the realm of 100g per wipe to 250g per wipe straight to the gbank) on a night that has maybe 20-30 wipes for difficult fights, plus battle rez during the fight. We're talking in the order of 5-7k vs 2-3k per night of repairs. Sure it's not that much but 3x that per raid week we're talking a difference of up to 15k per week. Some guilds just don't have the income to support that. Yes you get 5% or whatever of looted gold going to the gbank but in general the size of the guild itself doesn't change that much. You might get a bit more there but it's just a drop in the bucket so to speak.

Recruitment: This is where it gets interesting. It is incredibly difficult for a 10m raid team to up-scale to a 25m raid team. This would require getting 15 (roughly speaking, in reality it could be slightly less depending on your current bench or slightly more if you want a decent bench for 25m) new members in relatively short order without any also deciding that they don't want to sit for the first bit while you make the transition. Now you are a 25m and you have to maintain that roster. After raiding since mid-TBC I can say with absolute confidence that raid teams are, for the most part, very transient. I mean to say that you will not be with the same 25-30 people for an entire expansion. It's extremely rare that you'll have an identical raid team for an entire raid tier. People's schedules change, people burn out from the game, people have real life things come up. Some people get injured or worse. It happens in the game and it's something you have to deal with.

Sure comp is a pretty big deal in higher end 10m guilds but I'll get into that in a bit also. Maintaining a roster is rough, and lets say that you drop down below the "I need this many people to put a raid together" threshold, how easy is it to switch to a 10m raid, cherry pick the best people you have and keep on going strong under the different raid size. Some guilds do this on a regular basis to push extra progression nights or do clean up. I've done this before and this isn't a shot against the 10m raiding scene but making that switch is almost too easy. We have killed bosses on 10 and not managed to get back to them on 25 for *weeks* or cleared things in a half hour that would normally have taken us several on 25m. This is probably the biggest long-term cause for the raid scene switch.

Lastly I wanted to talk about raid comp: Having raid ready alts is a big deal and with guilds competing on the realm/region/world first level, whatever it may be. Throw in requiring top level food for all those alts and flasks for them all. This is rough, and it isn't limited to the 10 or 25m raiding scene. Imagine new people wanting to raid, seeing this and thinking to themselves "this is way too much for me." Not that hard to see. I think I might take a step back if I was required to have an alt that was just as raid capable as my main at all times. That's a lot of time on the game. This also leads a bit into the idea of varying amounts of healers/tanks for certain encounters but that's basically the same thing and has more to do with bench team than alts. Not related to the problem.

What isn't the cause:

I also wanted to take a moment to discuss what things aren't causing the problem we're seeing. While I mentioned that the equality of the two raid groups was a catalyst for this, it is in no way a cause to this problem. Sure if 10m wasn't there everyone would be 25m but we'd have a drastically smaller raid pool in general. We all want more skilled players in our game for a variety of reasons including more people to play with, better players to recruit, more enjoyable and meaning competition. These are just a few things and I'm sure you can think of more. This is an MMO, and that second M is for multiplayer. The more of us the better.

I really don't think gear is a problem anymore. More and more of the people I talk to point at killing bosses and the experiences as the reason they'll play these games. Sure there are a lot of people who kill bosses just for the loot and I'm not saying that they are bad or don't belong here. I'm just saying that they aren't necessarily a majority of the player base and that if there was some weird disparity in gear (that managed to mechanically fit and not disrupt the balance) we wouldn't see a major shift.

Ease of content. Easy content will make a lot of people shift but I'm fairly confident in saying that the two difficulty settings are, as I said earlier, equal but separate. The design team has spent *far* longer working on 25m raid content than they have for 10m. 2 Full expansions actually. They have a better idea when it comes to certain aspects of encounter design in 25m. I'd like to point specifically at DPS checks. I've found time and time again that on 25m the dps checks are really well tuned. Sure it might come out a bit rough like garalon but when progressing on the fight it feels like it's right where it should be. I can't say I have any real experience with it on 10m but all of the "progression" I've done, primarily on alts, it's felt almost exclusively a healing tuning. The dps checks were almost laughable in some cases during DS (more than a minute on enrage for our first ultraxion kill) while the healing was wonderfully tuned with our healers commenting on strat changes that made it almost bearable.

Fixes that, imho, will not work:

Anything gear related. You're either going to alienate every 10m guild out there by shifting gear to the 25m guilds, or let a tear drop into the ocean. This thunderforged thing they announced isn't even remotely in the right direction for a fix to this problem. I also have to agree with some other videos I've been watching that say this isn't likely to be their initial plan. I have a feeling it might have been that the thunderforged gear wouldn't drop in 10m but they changed it. This particular change actually makes other problems for both 10 and 25m guilds, but that's a topic better left to another of my boring gear distribution days. With a change like this, you're not going to get anyone switching from 10 to 25. People aren't going to switch from 10 to 25 just to have a better chance at gear, in fact most might not even want a garunteed chance at better gear if the shift isn't big enough, but too big and you run into the problem of alienating people again.

Throw support behind 25m raid teams and ignore 10m. Like I mentioned in the previous block of text, you're just going to alienate the vast majority of your raiders and lost a whole ton of subs and gamers. This is obviously a bad idea and I wish people would stop wishing for a return to the glory days as they put it. Going back to 40m is stupid as well.

Achievements. I'm not convinced this is the right way. I'd love them to split the realm first achieves but this wont cause anyone to switch either. There's also no elegant way to solve the situation of a 25m getting realm first, then just dropping to 10 the next week to pick that one up as well. Again a topic for another day but I'd like to see a revamp of the way they do realm firsts and I'll talk about this in a bit but to stay on topic it's just the same as mentioned before. Achieves are not going to make people switch to 25m, nor are they going to stop people from dropping down to 10m.

Finally, we come to the section that people have been waiting for. What can be done to fix it.

So sure opinions on this are a dime a dozen but I've been thinking about this for quite some time and you'll just have to judge my points on their own merit.

Another disclaimer here. I don't think this is going to be solved by one big change. I think this really has to be solved by many smaller changes and possibly some big ones as I'll mention in a bit. Problems like this aren't going to solve themselves and I really don't think there's a band-aid style fix. This is why I think steps need to be taken now and they have to be effective. So, here we go.

1-Consumables. Cauldrons should make a return. The fact that you don't have to worry about which flasks or how many of each ones or whatever is amazing and works wonders for the people organizing guilds. Same goes for feasts. Make it one feast that doesn't have a cap on how many people it feeds. Make the cost non-prohibitive and easy to manage. Fix pre-potting, this is a huge drain on my wallet and time that doesn't need to happen. I could write another wall on pre-potting and those type of effects but suffice it to say that getting rid of them would help this problem.

2- Another small thing but, drop more gold in 25m raids. I mean drop more per person. It doesn't have to be a lot but something a bit bigger to accommodate the difficulty of putting things together. Also perhaps consider rewarding more VP per boss on 25m. I know this might not sound like it's popular but 25m raid officers likely put more time into the guild than do 10m. At the very least it's more man-hours (total time spent not time spent per person). This could help them by giving more time outside of raid for other things like real life.

3- Vanity items. Things like a garunteed drop on the fire hawk in 25m and a 10% or something in 10m would be neat. Other things like "costumes" dropping would be amazing. I know a lot of people who love the orb of the sin-dorei. I'm curious why more haven't been put in. These things are hugely popular and would be something to incentivize people who want them early (not an expansion later). Again it's a small thing but it's along the lines of rewarding people in 25m, this is a dangerous road as mentioned earlier since you don't want to alienate 10m raiders.

4- Gearing up for the bigger ones now. This is the one that will take a lot of effort and dev time from blizzard but I think is really really worth it, along with the next one I'll mention. Official guild rankings. This could be something as simple as having a list of guilds that have defeated boss X and ordering them by number of bosses killed. Sure people may not agree on the rankings but it's simple and you would be able to *show* the community that you think 10 and 25 are separate and incomparable by putting them on two different lists and never putting them together. This would tell the world what you think of the two brackets and lead into the next section.

5- Revamp your LFGuild and LFPlayer forums. They're a mess. Within 10 minutes on the general LFGuild forum posts are essentially buried. The search system doesn't tell you anything and requires people to edit/bump/repost to update new boss kills. Imagine for me a system basically like wowprogress, but officially tied to warcraft. You could even have in-game tie-ins through the guild ui that guild masters or officers could have control over. I'm not going to try and design the way it would work but an official page of progression for guilds and a way to facilitate recruitment would a HUGE boon to the raiding community for both 10 and 25 raid teams. Most of the guild searching I did was through wowprogress, it's a great system that has the flaw of not being official which means many people might not know about it. Especially if you're just getting into the raiding scene. Get new players to see things like this might increase the raiding pool significantly and help get people to where they want to be. I'd love to be able to go to an official wow channel and pick options like "looking for guild at least X/Y Heroic, I can/can't raid between times AA:AA and BB:BB and am looking for Z times per week." Sure this would require a lot of effort to be done right, as I know blizzard likes to do (not faulting you guys for it I just want to clarify that this would take a *lot* of time and work) so maybe not soon but I think this would be the greatest single change that could effect the situation.

6- Also related to recruitment this one is something that I know is a bit bad for business but who knows what the numbers look like. Lower transfer costs. There is nothing so prohibitive to joining a new guild at the right progression level than server/faction transfer costs. This is insane. I had to pay 55$ just to move a character to a new guild. To put it into perspective, that's over 5 hours at minimum wage. That's almost 4 months of warcraft's subscription cost. That's also only for 1 character. Players that have many alts, or are required to have alts are going to have to pay more. Lowering the costs doesn't even have to be by a lot. Simply offering combo-deals is a huge way of making it less of a problem. For example you leave the server transfer at 25$, drop the faction transfer to 25$, and make it so that doing both only costs you 30 or 35. Again I'm no expert on the sorts of costs that go into this however this would let a lot of people move more characters. Also for those with lots of alts. Give us a deal where it's something like 25 each or everyone on that realm gets to move for the cost of 3 or 4 transfers.

In summary. I think it has a lot more to do with the infrastructure that is 25m raids than with anything else in the game. This is why my suggestions are geared towards this change. I'm very much invested in keeping 25m raiding alive and going. The more of us there are the more reason there is to generate content directed towards us, so please if you feel my points had any merit or even gave you something to think about. Forward it on to other warcraftians you know, and get people talking about this. If for some reason you don't play warcraft and made it this far send it to someone who does.

As always feel free to comment below. I'd love feedback on some of the suggestions. Hopefully I'll get back into posting more regularly especially with 5.2 coming. In the meantime, best of luck with your raids and may your rng be ever so slightly above normal.