08-16-2006, 03:15 AM
Quote:See, this is the part oft-quoted but rarely argued. How many "more people" is this content accessible to?
Perhaps my wall-of-text post earlier on discouraged readers. Let me make it short and sweet.
The only people this change helps are hardcore players who cannot currently reach 40 players by way of some external constraint. Except for these players, anybody who does not max-limit raid now will not max-limit raid in the expansion.
You can approximate the number of people who will benefit by looking at the number of people who regularly raid Zul'Gurub and the Ruins of Ahn'Qiraj, but who do not raid Molten Core. On my server, there are very, very few of these players. I suspect it is the same for other servers.
Your assumption is exactly that which I attempted to refute. Simply put, 40 -> 25 will behave as you describe if there were no difficulty mechanism in place. The introduction of a difficulty slider means that 25 pug can complete a lvl70 x 25 instance on 'Easy' mode. Thus more people have access to more content. The same difficulty slider will keep the gear differential between casuals and raiders by rewarding those that play on the higher difficulty settings.
Your argument is a straw-man:
A: The only people this change helps are hardcore players who cannot currently reach 40 players. (Fallacy)
B: Given 'A', the number of people this helps is small.
The argument is presented plausably but fails because the first statement is inaccurate, the difficulty slider enables a wider audience to be 'helped'. Additionally, the principle of constraints I outlined explains how forming a smaller group is also easier.
-Kershner