Quote:I tend to agree with his position on 10 man vs 25 man. As was noted in the DnT incident there is a lot of moaning about he casualization of WoW but if "raiders" really wanted a logistically difficult fight regardless of loot rewards than 10 man versions of raids, etc. wouldn't impact anything, they would still do the logistically difficult fights. If 10 man versions of the 25 man instances were introduced with equal rewards and nobody did 25 man instances anymore doesn't that just imply that people don't want to do those anyway and only put up with it because of the loot?

Quote:No. Because "equal" rewards aren't as easy as putting the same items in the same instances. Sirlin isn't looking at his article from the reverse perspective, which is to say, if you make rewards easier to get in the 10-man, people who would much rather be raiding 25-man will raid 10-man instead for rewards, even though they find it less fun. Putting the same items in the same instances inherently makes rewards easier to get in the 10-man because they're easier to organize.

"Easier to organize", by the way, is not, as Sirlin takes it, an automatic indicator that 25-man is less fun and therefore something people only do for loot. Things can be both harder to do and more worthwhile when you can do it. It is more difficult to learn to play chess than it is to learn to play tic-tac-toe, but the rewards of having learned chess are greater. That said, if I won $100 every time I played either tic-tac-toe or chess to a draw, I would never play chess again. That doesn't mean chess is unfun or bad.

Equal rewards means "equally proportionate to the difficulty of achieving them". And difficulty is not unfun. That's what Kaplan gets and Sirlin doesn't.

Quote:As long as the gear progression moves from 5-10-25 the 5 and 10 man instances will always be "easy", not because of the social requirements but because the loot has designed them that way.

Quote:But why would you bother doing a 25-man if you could do two 10-man locks with the same group of people, get twice as much equivalent loot, and continue on your merry way? As noted in your quote, the powergamer views things from an "economic" point of view, and the clear choice between receiving two carrots and one is two. :lol:

Again, stemming from the risk vs reward objective analysis, if 10-man loot = 25-man loot, 25s will never be run. Or at least will be about as common as "old world" runs - things people do for the hell of it once in a blue moon, but not "srs business".

Quote:Which is exactly the point. If we assume that by introducing equal loot in 10 man instances as there is in 25 man instances would turn the 25 man instances into ghost towns than that just goes to show there is an inherant problem with the design of the 25 man instances.

Quote:You offer the example of "why do a 25 man when you could do 2 10 man instances in that time!!!!" but that argument still relies on the faulty idea that the instances need to be designed the same way they are now (because of the loot progression). But there is no reason why there can't be 10 player instances which take just as much time and effort as a 25 player instance. The only reason it's like that is because of loot progression.

Quote:Or it could show that you are getting two and a half times more items from the ten-man. This is what I meant by the fallacy of "equal". If you put the same loot in both instances, merely by virtue of numbers, the ten-manners get more, even if the content is equally difficult and time consuming.

I'm not sure how you're misunderstanding the point, but Pantalaimon put it perfectly. If I, as a self-maximizing raider, have a choice between getting two items and one item, that's obviously going to be a massive factor in the choice of the content I play. That doesn't show that something's wrong with 25-mans. It shows that you get more items per person from the 10-man, and it shows that people like getting items. Neither of these are contentious propositions.

Quote:So if you get at least 2 drops from a 25 man boss and sometimes 3, but you only ever get 1 from a 10 man boss even if they have the same loot tables how does that work out?

Quote:So if you get at least 2 drops from a 25 man boss and sometimes 3, but you only ever get 1 from a 10 man boss even if they have the same loot tables how does that work out? That should work out to the same rate of drops unless you end up on the extreme end of the curve for if you got 2 or 3 in the 25 man.

Quote:From the info I've seen (which should not be taken as any more reliable than a blog...:rolleyes:) my best guess is that, e.g., the 10 man might drop 2 ilvl 200 epics, and then the 25 man would drop 5 225 ilvl epics. Thus, each raid is gaining ~20% of the member max (10/25) in drops, but the larger raid is going to be receiving slightly higher ilvl stuff for the challenge of cat-herding 25 people.

Peace,
~FragB)

Quote:I suppose i didn't explicitly state this, but I meant to imply in my definition of "equal".

Quote:I do not feel that you should be able to go into a 10 man and get X amount of loot and have that be equal to the amount of loot that you would get in the 25 man version. Just that the Tier of loot should be the same. If you can get 10 loot drops in a 10 player you should get 25 in a 25 player (and even slightly more from the 25 allowing people that do the 25 to gear up a bit faster than would in the 10).

Quote:I feel that blizzard's solution to the "25 player raids require more social effort and frustration" by giving them stronger items has only compounded the problem. And the end result is a weapons race of loot. Not only do you have to deal with the inherant social issues of getting 25 people together but you also have to deal with the fact that many people are there not because they want to be, but just because it is the next stop for them on the loot train. I think this shows in the epic collapse of DnT which was linked above.

Quote:To assert that DnT's death was because of loot is to fall into the stereotypical trap, as Dave Sirlin does, of assuming all high-end raiders (or an overwhelming majority) hate the game and raiding and are there only for loot. Nothing could be further from the truth, but non high-end raiders take it as such gospel that they merely assert it and do not offer arguments in its support, as Sirlin does in his article. Don't believe it.

Quote:I understand your point perfectly, Skan, and, like GG, I have no problem with a tier higher loot for 25-mans vs 10-mans. However, there's a lot of high-end raiders who whined horribly on EJ about 10-mans even getting to see the same content, and get even 1 tier lower loot than them, the 'elite' raiders. It's those people who make the rest of you look bad, really. Sure, Skan, I know who you are, and more or less what you're about. I at least have a passing acquaintance with some of your guild members, so I know they're not all assholes. Just Gort, if he's still there. :P (Hi, Gort! I was just kidding!). Anyway, the proposed system as it is makes good sense to me. And, I'll admit that with the 25-man raids getting a tier better loot, those loot-whores I mentioned won't be in my 10-man raids. I'll be happy to take a little less to keep them out of my hair.

Quote:.
That's a perfectly valid point of view to take. On the other hand, note that once you're making this argument, you're into a different kind of discussion altogether. You're no longer discussing whether it is right or not to give 25-mans more (which Sirlin is; he claims that giving 25-mans more implicitly implies inferiority, just as giving 10 mans more than solo content presumably does), but only arguing about the mechanics of how Blizzard is giving 25-mans more. That's a major difference; you've gone from principle to practice. Blizzard has a certain idea of how much is proportional, and yours disagrees, but again, this is quite different from Sirlin's post which is not a proportionality discussion.

Quote:Sirlin Says:

May 15th, 2008 at 5:52 am
What I’m saying is no more or less content. As a 25-man raid participant, we’d expect you to spend X hours to get Y sword. In a 10-man raid, I’d also expect you to spend X hours to get Y sword. This is not less content, that has nothing to do with anything. You might also say “but it’s hard to balance those two things to be equal.” Yeah it is. But I suggest trying, rather than committing to a 1 tier difference automatically, before you’re even out of the gate.

Quote:There's a different aspect to the difficulty in a 25-man as compared to a 10-man than the organizing.

The more players you have, the more difficult coordination within an encounter becomes. If the encounter's difficulty relies on that coordination, it cannot be directly translated to a lesser-sized group. The encounter has to be significantly revised.

Assuming that Blizzard can successfully revise every encounter to keep the same difficulty in a 25-man as in a 10-man is a stretch, frankly.

That, combined with the problems involved in organizing 25 people compared to 10, more than justifies the "roughly one tier" of quality the 25-man raids will have over the 10-mans, at least in my eyes.

Quote:The lionshare of that increase in difficulty is on frequently on the raid and guild leaders.

Quote:Make those tasks complex, and the chance of success drops like a rock for all involved.

Would Blizzard make an encounter where 25 people have to complete complex tasks? Probably not. But then, they wouldn't make 10-man encounters where 10 people have to complete complex tasks, either.

Quote:Let's say five people have different tasks. They each have a 99% chance of completing their own. The chance for overall success is .99^5 ~ .9510, or 95.10%.

25 people increase this to .99^25 ~ .7778, or 77.78%.

Quote:Hi,

Frankly, I have no stake in this discussion, being a complete newbie in WoW. However, when I see an example of mathematics being tortured, I must speak out. Lets start with:

Quote:If complex tasks are not an issue, then why bring up complex tasks at all?

Quote:But to go one step further, the complexity of a task is only slightly related to the probability of success. Simple example; dancing a waltz is more complicated than walking a tightrope, yet the probability of failure in the population at large and with equal amounts of instruction is very likely greater for the tightrope.

Quote:Let's say five people have the same task. They each have a 20% chance of completing it. The chance for overall success (i.e., the task getting completed at least once) is 1-(1-.2)^5 ~ 67.23%.

25 people increase this to 1-(1-.2)^25 ~ 99.62%.

OK, these results are just as meaningless as yours.

Quote:Together they represent some kind of boundaries between the cases of everyone having the same task and each person having a different task. Just where raids fall on that continuum is not clear to me, and probably wouldn't be if I'd done four raids a day since beta. And of course, the numbers for probability of success have been plucked out of thin air (not my first thought, but I'm trying to be nice).