08-13-2006, 10:14 AM
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 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.