25 person max raid size for expansion

[Lissa]

Well the reality is there will be no difficulty slider for 25 man raid content. There will be for 10 and 5 person dungeons. Therefore Blizzard has two options: 1. Appease the masses and make the 25 person raid dungeons fairly easy ala ZG20 or AQ20. or 2. Make it the same difficulty as Naxxramas. If the reduction of 40 person raids to 25 person raids was to make content more accessible my gut feeling is that they have no choice but to go with option 1. This move makes no other sense other than for technological reasons. Apparently 25 people stress the servers quite a bit less than 40 do. But again, there theoretically should be a lot more people raiding under a 25 person system than a 40 person system which should stress the servers more.

So i am still leaning towards Blizzard making easier raids simply for the fact that it appeals to the most people and will make them the most $$$ in the short term. Casuals will not stay in this game for a long period of time. The reason Everquest is still around 8 years later is not because of the casual its because of the hardcore. So i am very concerned about the direction of the game. I would hate to see a brain drain from this game (best players leaving for more of challenge) because players will move on if raids are easy.

I think you may have hit on why Blizzard is doing this with your assessment of the stress placed on the instance server by 40 people vs. 25 people. A good place to see this is the Vael fight where every couple seconds you have updates occuring for all 40 people in the raid with Vael's AoE. In essence you have a person getting information from 39 people every couple seconds and they are intern sending info to 39 people as well. This means you that you have 39^2 transfers of information, or 1521 pieces of information going out. On the other hand, if you go with 25 people, you would have 24^2, or 576 pieces of information going out. That's almost a 2/3 cut in information being sent which would put a lot less stress on the server just there alone. Good catch, might even want to mention this on the R&D forums at Blizzard and see if Tigole bites.