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I'd like to start by saying that this is a very interesting idea, but I have a few issues with it.
1) It's already been brought up that tuning a 25-man encounter down to a 5-man fight would be immensely difficult. Implementing a system like this would, I think, stifle the creativity of the designers when they want to push the envelope in new raid encounters. This system would force them to consider, as early as the initial development stages, how they'd implement the encounter for 5-man, 10-man, and 25-man groups. The development time that would be theoretically saved by not forcing the creation of new art and assets would likely be spent completely reinventing a given encounter to suit a 5-man run.
2) From an art/asset design perspective, the huge architecture used in raid dungeons is built to accomadate the size of the raid going in. When that raid can be busted down to a 5-man team, the volume of empty space around the character doesn't feel epic as much as it would feel ill-used, bloated. Gruul for a 5-man team would be ludicrous, since you have this huge room that has nothing in it but Gruul -- it would be creepy and unsettling, like walking through an abandoned airport.
3) I like the idea of a return to soft raid caps, where a 5-man could be 10-manned, or a 10-man could be 20-manned. Hell, I'd go the distance and say allow 25-mans to be 40-manned (the raid panel still supports 40, so there might as well be a use for it other than flashback radis). The penalty of taking too many people to the instance could be as simple as removing Badges of Justice from the loot tables. A system like this would control itself because casuals will get to see the content but face greater competition for boss drops, and raiders will want to keep the cap because they can at least get BoJs out of the run.
From a design perspective, it becomes a matter of when you stop designing the game for groups larger than 5 people. Consider Blizzard's multiplayer history: the Warcraft RTS games would allow 2-8 people to throw down together at one time. Starcraft may have upped that number. Diablo allowed small groups of people to team up. World of Warcraft is the next step: they want large groups of people working together. They realized 40 was too many at once, but 25 is a good number. I think asking their designers to curtail their 25-man dreams in order to provide content for 5-man guilds is hampering their ability to move forward in their design philosophy.
That's not to say that tuning a 25-man down to a 10-man is a bad idea. I think 10-mans should be the bare minimum for a raid of any kind, and I think that there should be 10-man friendly content. Because putting 10 people together is far simpler than 25 or 40, and it's not much more difficult than getting 5 people together. I think the people who can't pull together a worthwhile 10-man team are a dramatic minority, and it makes more sense for Blizzard to build for larger groups and ask the players to meet them halfway by bringing the manpower.
Thanks for listening. I'm really looking forward to discussing this further.
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