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.