I'm in one of the largest guilds in WoW. I am the raid leader of one of the sub-guilds that our main guild manages (complicated to explain, but with 5k members, we basically have had to be in nearly 7 guilds with an add-on that allows us to use one unified guild chat). The "raiding sub-guilds" are required to run a 25-man regularly to keep that sub-guild--but the majority of us in my raiding sub-guild are sticking to 10-man progression raiding with a once-a-week 25-man "fun run" on alts. Why? Because the end of the Wrath expansion and the homogenization of lockouts KILLED player/talent dedication to raiding and created a situation where the four "raiding" guilds were essentially cannibalizing each other when we'd lose players. Things got ugly; fights were had; feelings got hurt. I don't want that to happen again.I had to take a step back and say "hey, if I can still get achievements/mounts/a bit of prestige from doing 10 man (but not the gear) AND have fun running the raid; AND can depend on the 10 people I run with being GOOD PLAYERS who know their class; then screw gear..I'm sticking to 10-man." I wasn't alone---as at least 50 other quality players in the 4 25-man groups we had going at the height of Wrath quickly followed suit.Now? My raiding sub-guild is playing "host" to 5 really awesome 10-mans (all of us have icc drakes/starcaller/bane titles)To realize now that Blizzard finally GETS that running a 25-man raid is STILL not quite "player saturation" for the game of raiding; and that 10-player is perhaps the perfect balance between still offering a challenge but removing the "social stress factor" of the game...is something I am very grateful for. My hat is truly off to them for removing the distinction between 10 and 25 man playing. WIN WIN. Thank you Blizzard.
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
If, as julienpdx above me said, Blizzard wanted to remove the "social stress factor," then why not get rid of 25m content altogether? It's what they did with 40m content. They realized that having and organizing 40 players usually ended up being a job, so they tried to find a balance by offering 10m content for the casuals, if you will, and 25m content for those wanting to raid on a more serious note. You can't deny that all 25m content, as a whole, is significantly harder than 10m content. As such, 25m content awarded better gear, achievements, and other such items.When you strip away that which makes 25m content worth doing (the better gear, achievements, vanity items, etc), then really, what's the point in keeping it? If you can do the same content, get the same rewards, and not have to deal with an additional 15 players, why the hell would you want to do the 25m content? I see no advantage at all. Some might bring up the fact that you get "more loot, gold, justice points, etc.," but is that really worth the hassle of organizing 25 people, dealing with all of the personalities, a larger margin for mistakes and accidents to occur, etc. I could go on listing the cons, and yet the pros are barely worth mentioning.I would have rather they just straight out removed 25m content instead of this nonsense.
I was officer on hardcore guilds and the management, coordination, nerdrage and all administrative tasks is a nightmare. Now I'm on another guild semi-harcore/casual that is because we have five 10man groups (2 HC, 3 semi) and is really to easy manage/coordinate with another 9 guys. So, we are really glad with new raid system, because we'll have the same gear than other guys. BTW: Gearscore suck because don't tell us if you have two left hands or not :P
"social stress factor" was the only way I knew how to say that the "management" aspect of 25 man raiding burned me the F out. I think many of the really hardcore teams that have all members pushing themselves saw success and that those guilds didnt have to deal with constnatly pugging a person when someone was out or have to deal with severe player attrition during Wrath. But even at the height of BC; the really successful 25-man raids that cleared EVERY BOSS still only equaled out to 3%(?) of the total player base. Whomever mentioned that the "real big losers" would be the 25-man medium or social guilds was correct to a point--but a lot of us simply went down to 10s even before the announced changeMy 10-man finally met in person recently at Blizzcon and we partied like a bunch of college kids. I'd say that a 25-man would be hard pressed to have that same type of camaraderie; remember some of us do like to play and have fun and our fun isn't contingent upon having a "second job" running a large raid.
css, they made the change at the end of Wrath to get people used to the idea of the how the lockout system would work in practice--they however; did not merge the loot tables of the two dungeons---I'm not sure if they skipped that part out of fairness (25 and 10 still were more or less NOT the same fights) or if they just didn't get around to it. Cata raids will drop same loot (ilvl-wise) but will drop more items per boss and more valor points per kill on 25-man mode. 25-man players will therefore gear up "Faster" but not necessarily gear up "higher" than people in 10s. Achievements are no longer differentiated (thankfully) and neither are loot tables.They claim they have done all this as a response to player requests.and for the most part I believe that but I couldn't help but notice the "side benefits" to WoW developers with this change.. (hehe)1) Not having to tune each dungeon 4 times ( Normal/Heroic 10 vs Normal/Heroic 25)2) Not having to create 4 loot tables. (They've even followed this model in the 5-mans in Cata) {normal vs "heroic" version of the same piece of loot}3) Not having to code 2 versions of the same achievements