I've seen a number of complaints that 25's pose a logistical problem under the new system because people won't want to come in for "just one boss", when they could go do 10s anyway.

Assuming people are there for
a) getting to be in the guild and help the guild progress
b) see at least a reasonable percentage of the encounters week-to-week (if not all in one week)
c) get reasonable gear

Then the extra loot drops off 25 should already cover that vs 10. The most common number I've seen suggested (and the one that makes sense to me) is 6 drops vs. 2. Assuming it was set that way, then a perfect guild of 10 people, who show up all the time, would need 80 boss kills minimum to fill all of their 16 slots. And that's with 100% attendance, no extra roster. Every extra person on the roster adds 8 boss kills, minimum.

A 25 man guild, getting 6 drops per boss, can outfit a raid roster of 30 people on the same boss kills. So the first 5 extra people are getting gear just as fast as the "perfect" 10 man, even if some weeks they're benched the entire time, or only for one boss kill.

As an officer for 25 man, the biggest logistical headache is dealing with waitlists and people sitting, etc. As long as the gear drop rate is high enough to allow us our bigger waitlist without slowing people down, then people should be willing to sometimes be in for just 1 boss kill.

Its pretty much a certainty that under the system you are proposing, the best skilled guilds on a server would be selling loot almost immediatley. It would also create some wierd scenarios. Say your core team of 25man raiders kills the Lich King, none of them are eligble for loot from that boss if they kill him again. Theres nothing to stop them from swapping out 5 people, and bringing in some of your benched players to kill him again. Those 5 new players would then have a pretty good shot at whatever items they wanted, since 20/25 people wouldnt be able to loot it anyway. Youd actually engineer a situation where it was better from a loot perspective to be benched on the first kill of that lockout.

You could also repeat that quite a few times in the same week, bringing in people from outside of the guild for large amounts of gold. I guess you could try to limit this by saying more than half of the players in the raid must not be saved to that boss for the lockout, otherwise it doesnt drop any loot. But then things start getting complicated.

We do need more control and granularity over raid IDs, but that needs to be balanced against people abusing the system.

The easiest solution to that is to allow only one 25 and one 10 every week. Yes, you could have the scenario you descirbed with 10-mans, but you have that already with alts runs and splitting up into two 25-man runs to get mains more gear faster as it stands.

If you limit each raider to 1 25-man ID and 1 10-man ID, and limit loot to one drop per boss - it does kinda work out. There are a few annoying things, but it mostly functions ok. The big annoyance there is the compelling of doing the 10-man when there's nothing for you; that's another logistical nightmare.

There was no safety net in TBC. Yeah, there was ZA, and you could consider BT the 10 man once Sunwell was released, but the concept of having a consolation raid is new in WotLK, and people lived with it before. Especially since, as you said, 10 mans might not give them any good loot. There's badges, but putting required gear on badges needs to die anyway. It won't be so bad with a decent cap on valor points, but running 4 TotCs a week sapped my will to live, let alone raid.

That being said, about letting 25 mans die, if there is no intrinsic value (fun, I guess) to it, I think that's the wrong view to take. Different people enjoy the game for different reasons, some of the people I raid with might consider getting achievements the most important aspect (not only literally, but also figuratively, killing a boss for example), some playing with friends, some like the challenge more than anything, some may even do it for the loot. I enjoy playing with them mostly (I'll admit, not all, but more than 9 anyway, much more), and I enjoy the larger group in itself (as a healer, it's a bigger puzzle to solve, even though in today's healing game, the puzzle is sometimes quite simple). I also acknowledge that not everyone thinks about it in the same way: some of our better players, the ones who are there mainly for the 'thrill of the kill', might think, come Cataclysm, "why would I waste my time with 15 extra people, some of which might be the cause for 75% of the wipes?". They'll quickly grab a couple of their good friends, some people who play for loot and they'll go form their own guild. Now, yes, some would enjoy it more, better loot, better progress, but people who play because they enjoy playing with friends will have to suffer due to the split.

It's not Blizzard's place to 'police' guilds, yes, but it's their place to create an environment which doesn't encourage fragmentation of groups of friends. People play the game for different reasons, and I don't claim to know which is the prominent reason, but I'm pretty sure that a lot of people wouldn't enjoy the game as much if they couldn't play with their friends. In the end, this is an MMO and Blizzard have said they want you to feel more powerful in groups, and a group is more than the sum of its parts.

Another mattert worth considering is that a lot of people claimed 25 man groups have increased logistical requirements, but I am also not sure that is true (as some people already pointed out). Yes, it might seem easier now to run 10 mans, since they are inherently easier than 25 mans, but if (and this is a big if) they will cease to be, the same stacking requirements will emerge, and this time the leeway will be even smaller. You cannot bring a friends alt paladin as your second required paladin for handling infest, because now their contribution to the raid is not 2.5 times bigger (or however the number of required helaers scale). You also cannot afford to have two, even three of a class/spec, since you would have to bench them 50/66% of the time (assuming 100% attendance, MasT did a very good job at trying a more comprehensive analysis).

The worst part of it is, there is no huge problem that requires this solution. None of the, admitedly true, issues raised in this thread have this change as the sole solution, except the oft quoted "if 25 mans die if they have no extra rewards, they deserved to die anyway!". They do, however, have advantages, a larger group of people to play with and more flexibility (due to the extra granularity), even though they might not be obvious at first sight, or acknowledged as being important. And if guilds do split up, only to find out that it's not as easy or as fun running a 10 man guild, the damage has already been done.

But there is a carrot being provided:

After considering the matter, I think that if you could already get 25 players in chairs plus a few reserve, and assuming that raid difficulty is the same, there is a small incentive - time (about 3-4 hours a week) and improved loot selection (more loot/boss means more chance Desired Item X will drop). While some may argue this isn't enough, we have to go on the assumption that Blizzard thinks it will be enough and make our plans accordingly.

Where I see change occurring is that guilds will be forced (by pressure from their reserves) to push their 25-man runs closer to the start of the raid week (Tuesday through Saturday) so that reserves can run 10-man PUGs on Sunday or Monday if they weren't called up.

These changes are just steps along the road towards capped 10 man raiding since the larger population will have most opportunity to raid in that format. Develpment times and costs will be greatly reduced, server loads much less and adjustments and balancing much simpler. A game design that allows clearing raid content quickly and without any significant time investment means there's a lot more time for the player base to venture into other Blizzard products, the new mmo rumoured for release, diablo3, starcraft2 and so on.

It's speculation ofc but I reckon the business design is probably to keep moving wow towards a much softer gaming experience that doesn't require significant amounts of time, effort or ability to achieve success so they can get multiple subscriptions for other blizzard products from players.

Yeah but you also have 2.5 times more players who want the gear too. Granted, the chances of getting the item you need will vary depending on group make-up and luck with drops, but if you have an almost perfectly balanced class/spec makeup and every item on the loot table drops with equal chances for your guild, then no, it won't be a carrot. Also, if a boss drops 2 items in 10-man, it needs to drop 5 items in 25 to keep things equal, and while that may seem excessive right now, with a shared lockout in Cata, it might be necessary to increase the amount of items per boss that drop in 25s or it'll take forever to gear up.

One thing they could do was having raid lockouts 'per boss' but still tied to an overall 25man raid lockout structure.

For instance, if a 25man raid kills 9 out of 10 bosses on 25man, and then decide to go 10man on the last boss for whatever reasons (like lacking players monday just before a reset), then only the people who are actually in the 10man gets saved for the 10th boss.
Whereas 10 others from the former 25man raid could start another raid, and enter a new instance. The game would see that the new raid leader (or another person in the raid who was locked furthest in the 25man, i.e. 9th boss) was already saved for the first 9 bosses and despawn those, giving them direct access to the last boss, just like the other 10man group.

Of course some sort of fail-safe would have to exist in such a system, so that the 25man raid didn't go out and make 25 different instances of the end boss in 10man. I guess the newly created instance could have it's ID linked to the original 25man somehow, only allowing two 10mans to be created from one 25man ID.
Likewise anyone entering this new instance who was not saved to the 25man already, would immediately get locked for the first 9 bosses, just like it is today.

Might even go the other way as well. Two 10man groups who killed the same bosses form up and make a 25man instance out of it (and get 5 others in of course). Lots of flexibility (and probably some exploitability I missed as well).

It would not be possible for any single member of the raid to kill any boss more than once. Nor should that be possible to be honest. As nice as it might be for a 'helping friends/guild members' feature, I cant see how that would ever not be exploitable.

I think disabling your character or porting them out would be a solution to this, so essentially there is no way to participate in two kills of a boss, but you can participate across instances. The solution is not perfect and there would be annoying cases of players dropping on the pull cause they 'forgot' they had killed the boss, however that is only an organisational issue. Give the raid leader a tool to check which boss's players are saved to and it should be easy to sort out.

Under such a scenario I could see players joining groups for the current progression boss's then maybe joining a pug to kill the current farm ones. e.g. I may kill 6/12 in ICC now, but join a group with the specific goal of killing putricide and it would not matter what order I did them in.

Another problem with per-boss IDs is BoE loot: you'd have to remove those completely, otherwise it won't be long before you see people running 25 times 25m H. Gunship battles for H. Ikfirus (WotLK example obviously, but I'm sure there'll be some Cataclysm equivalent).

The solution of removing BoE loot altogether, however, is not a good one in my opinion, because BoE loot is a) a comfortable way of gearing alts, b) a nice compensation for tough RNG, and c) a way to actually make gold worth something (10k gold in itself is plain worthless once you've got an epic flyer on all your chars and your proffs maxxed out; however, when there are such things as Quel'delar and 264 BoEs, 10k gold is suddenly worth actual loot).

And what if the raids are balanced around spent time/reward instead of merely loot/size?

I mean, for a 2 Hours/day 25 mans raiding guild with 30-32 active members every night, it can take up to 45 min (less or more, depending on day, but lets assume its 30-35% of the raid schedule) to set up and make changes after every boss etc.

Now a 10 man raiding guild with 12-13 members, spends lets say 10 min seting up. On a difficulty basis encounter, the 10 man guild could kill 6 bosses while the 25 man would do 4. If you translate this into loot, given the nº of drops per kill of 2 vs 6, the 10 man would end with 12 drops while the 25 man would end with 24. For any guild that progress fairly trhough the content that will mean make it easily farmeable, the "overgearing" issue would still remain. Not in form of higher item lvl, but ppl would be clearing 10 mans with four times the actual tier items a 10 man guild can get.

instead of that, Blizzard makes the 10 mans A LOT harder than the 25 mans. While the 25 man guild kills 4 bosses, the 10 man guild kills 2, 3 at best. But the 25 man guild gets proportionally less items, lets say 3 vs the 2 from the 10 man. This could prevent the new "overgearing" issue, as well as giving those willing to raid 25 mans an incentive, since the WHOLE time spent (setup time + raiding effective time) gives still more loot per time unit, while switching from 25 to 10 for an specific boss is not just "Bring the best 10 players" as far as the 10 man version of the boss is as hard for those 10 players as the 25 man version is for the whole of the guild (10 better than average players + 15 worst than average players)

for a side note, I´m not talking about making the 25 mans easier, but making the 10 mans a lot of harder.

That would feet the 90% of the 25 man guilds, as well of the bast majority of 10 mans guilds which are interested on progression.

On the other hand, that would make the top guilds turn into 10 man raids, and on the other side, it would definetly kill those guilds who are not interested at all in progress since they would have really hard times killing every single boss on 10 mans. But really, "who gives a fuck". If you can´t make EVERYone happy, and you can make 90% of your custormers happy, quoting Brann Bronzebeard "Ok, let´s do this!"