25 person max raid size for expansion

[Sword_of_Doom]

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.

In Naxx there is a particular encounter, Thaddius, that is almost impossible for a raid group because of server load. Its not uncommon for raid groups to experience 4 or 5 disconnects per attempt. Apparently its a great encounter and unfortunately i have not seen it yet, but even if you have a high end computer you lag on that encounter. From what i gather, reducing raid sizes will do as you have pointed out in the Vaelstrasz encounter, reduce lag and make it possible for all the raid group to enjoy the encounter. It also explains why they almost magically now can change the debuff system from 16 to 40 even though Tigole[u] on the Elitist Jerks forum tries to deny it.

http://forums.elitistjerks.com/viewtopic...d=7880&p=2

The change in the debuff limitation and the change to the raiding size in Burning Crusade are totally unrelated. Lowering the raid size had nothing to do with being able to allocate more resources to tracking debuffs on raid monsters. We've been doing our best to imrpove the number of debuffs for quite some time. Obviously,we haven't raised the cap as quickly as people would like but there are a lot of things that go on behind the scenes that make this difficult. Implementing the change in patch 1.13 would call for a massive re-tuning of all existing raid content. If we simply wait for the Burning Crusade at this point we can tune the new encounters around the new raid size as well as with the new debuffs/spells/abilities in mind. While some of the loot of the old raid encounters might feel relavent to some, the difficulty certainly will not.

I know some of the changes and decisions we make seem arbitrary to you guys. Someone mentioned there being no reason to have a 500 person cap on guild size. But you can rest assured that there are reasons for caps like that. WoW is an extremely complicated game under the hood. Occasionally we hit technical limitations.

In fact, the change to raid size was debated and decided a long time ago. So long ago that there was talk about Naxx being a 25 person raid (with the same difficulty and loot). However, this would have been too harsh a change mid-stride in a live game. What people aren't considering right now is that when Burning Crusade comes out, they are going to spend a significant chunk of time (depending on playtime, dedication, employment) to get to level 70. It's not like you'll be standing around the day after the expansion comes out lining up to raid. There will be a progression into entering the raid game (leveling up, gearing up etc.).

Also, the reality is that guilds will already be facing challenges. Many people will re-up their accounts and guilds will face an influx of new people. Some people will use the expansion as a "game over" moment, to bow out of the game. Guild churn (both coming back and leaving) is historically very high during expansion releases throughout MMO's. Experienced MMO vets know this.

The expansion affords the development team the opportunity to improve the game. It's the "right" time to make long-needed changes. Also, by the time the expansion ships, all of our sites worldwide will be on upgraded hardware. As techinical barriers are removed, we can re-address certain areas that we saw as problems. The debuff limit is a perfect example of this.

Interesting comments.