Quote: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.
25 man decreases server load: Each avatar's location must be messaged to every other avatar via the server. Neglecting NPCS, for any group of size N, this is N*(N-1). For 2 avatars, it's 2 messages. For 4 avatars, it's 12 messages. For 25, it's 600 messages. For 40 it's 1560 messages. Thus, Blizzard can load-balance new raids onto different hardware in 1/3 size increments with the smaller groups.
25 man decreases social load: Similar to the server load problem, each person that you add to a volunteer organization must have (at least) mutual tolerance with every current member of the group. This can be modeled as 0.5*N*(N-1). For 2 people, it's 1 relationship. For 4 people, it's 6. For 25, it's 300. And for 40 people it's 780. The social complexity (which a guild master must manage) of a 25-person group is ~62% less than that of a 40 person group.
Accessibility to Blizzard's endgame is dictated by the number of players who are both willing and able to manage the complexity of a 50-100 person guild with 1200 to 5000 relationships that could all go to Drama-DEFCON1 at any time. By lowering raid size, they increase the pool of potentially successful guild masters and increase accessibilty to the content without decreasing the difficulty of the raids.
Of course, in both server and social concerns, these numbers only explain what is possible, not what Blizzard will choose to do.