While I don't totally disagree here, I think you're missing the value of alts. The group of the best 10 continually raid and do the best. There's no motivation for other people to leave the guild - they still get to play with these guys elsewhere, they're likely friends, and it's not likely that they'll just jump into another comparable guild's top team.

In come alts. Lets say you're putting together a 10man in guild. It's not the most progressed one. Odds are, one of the 10 people available is an alt (assuming this is a different night then they usually raid). Suddenly you have someone experienced in the instance that's also a good player in your group. That wouldn't be the case in another guild. The alt probably won't be undergeared for long - with so little raiding available, it's really a secondary (or tertiary) main. You also have other players' alts that are decently geared, but maybe don't play enough (or want to) to have all of their toons in scheduled weekly runs. This is the major selling point of a big guild - you have good players to fill raid slots that don't mind not getting in raids, because they already have 2/3. This character is not their priority, it's just a way to spend an off night. They'll help the guild if needed, but otherwise will pug/farm/pvp, etc.

Now lets say that someone in the most progressed 10man isn't available one week. Someone else gets pulled into the raid. That raid benefits from having the sub - he's not amazing, but he's probably still good, knows his class, has decent gear, and is far better than any pugger available. The sub benefits from getting to see new fights, probably getting more drops because the group is better geared than him. His normal raid group benefits from him now having experience to teach them the fights next week. The only hole in this plan is his normal group this week, that just lost him. Presumably he's either gotten someone in that main group with an appropriate available alt to commit to filling his slot, or there will be someone online to fill that spot.

I think you're missing the fact that there always seem to be available alts that would be more than happy to come to a scheduled raid to help out, but aren't set on being in one every week. If your guild is small enough to just have 1 weekly raid group, you're SOL if you miss it, if you're benched, or if the time doesn't quite work.

That's utopia, my friend. Very few guilds (yes, very few) can boast that they have equally talented players, able to form equally talented 10-man groups. If you try to distribute skill (in other words, sprinkle the better players among the worse), you'll end up frustrating the good players who know they could go further with the right guildies in the group. And if you have an A team, you frustrate the worse players in the other teams.

This won't work except for the few solid guilds out there, with a reliable and skilled roster. And if you have that, chances are... you can run a very efficient 25-man anyway.

Unfortunately, there are plenty of examples of guilds breaking up over A team vs. B team. That was common in BC when most players (statistically) didn't have access to 25s and tried to fit in the various 10-mans out there. In Cata, not every guild will come out of this unscathed.

I have to agree with Tinwhisker too. Blizzard can't ignore social repercussions. If they send players packing, it's money lost...

Reference bold in the quote. That's my point - if it's 10 or 25, mutually exclusive - they no longer raid with the guys elsewhere, unless you're counting 5man Heroics. And I'm sorry, but running 5man Heroics with the "good" people and being "forced" to raid with the "bad" people will not satisfy very many players, especially after the first two weeks/month of being 85 and the Heroics no longer hold any useful upgrades.

Your reasoning explains why the current system functions. Mine explains worries about the proposed setup.

The main drawback of running multiple non-exclusive 10 mans is that it presents the same logistics problems as running a 25 man. If they can borrow members from each other to cover absences, that can be a scheduling nightmare, and the ones who run later in the week can get screwed by their members getting locked having to cover the earlier runs. It is also just as easy, if not easier, for hard feelings to develop between groups who are perceived as having different skill levels as between different segments of a single 25 man, particularly when the "better" group has priority access to players.

I speak from a bit of experience here, as this is exactly what happened during early TBC, when the raiding guilds working up to 25 man raids had to split into groups to raid 10 man content. Karazhan itself was fun, the player logistics much less so.

As much as EJ may contribute to the theorycrafting that exists, it's still a fairly small population. As much as I like 25man raiding, I (and everyone else here) is fully aware that our reasons for being a 25man raider are not necessarily the same as everyone in our guilds.

As two examples, there are people in my guild that are in it for the shinies and others are there for the challenge of hard content. When (if) the 10man content becomes just hard as the 25man and the loot becomes the same there are players that will migrate to where they can put together a smaller, more focused team to accomplish their goals and I don't want them to go. I like my guild and the people in it. I get along with them and I want to raid with them in Cataclysm. If they leave, I can't do that anymore except with some throw-away alt.

The EJ forum is actually a pretty narrow window into the population of WoW. It takes a certain type of individual to seek out the information provided here. For individuals who are truely into end game, bleeding edge progression, I don't see any reason to drop down to 10 man raids. Even a small incentive would be enough to keep them going in their current direction.

But, for the majority of the population, I really think they only do 25 man raids because they feel it is mandatory. With the extra drops and better gear, I have always gotten the feeling that people feel the 25 man is the "true" version of the raid. With those incentives gone I suspect that more and more people will begin to accept that it is perfectly fine to avoid the 25 man raids altogether.

It's a simple numbers game. An average raiding guild has enough members to raid 25. This includes enough alternates to accommodate scheduling (player cannot attend a given day) issues.

Not all members raid for the same reasons. Some portion only wants the loot and thinks 10 will be the better route. Example being the thought of "I can ditch the bad 15," whether or not it proves true.

How many leaving would prevent the rest from being able to continue to raid 25? They may desire it and love 25man raiding with a passion, but cannot.

The current changes don't "only" remove the burden of doing both sizes (and this holds true for both 10 and 25 men raiders). Every 25men guild except top 200 has a variety of player's skill in their roster which is balanced for 25 men. If they could short down to 10, at the cost of a social issue, they will surely have a much more progress-able group.
What is annoying then is that for 25men guilds 10s raids are much more appealing NOT cause of the joy of playing in a smaller group.

If there were no guilds today then this change would make sense, but after 5 years I'm not even sure it will be great in therms of subscriptions if it stays as it is presented. So until there is no additional information it's not a surprise that the reaction is mostly in disagreement.

That's the whole problem, if those 25man guilds are lost in the first tier, we're not likely to see them come back in 4.1. TBC saw the first tier with Karazhan, a 10man instance. If Cataclysm does "kill off" a lot of 25man guilds we'll see that the first tier is again dominated by 10man guilds (for a different reason but similar outcome). In TBC, the next step was 25man - players wanted to go to 25man. But how many guilds couldn't scale up from 10 to 25? How many failed experiments in combining guilds did we see? Guild leader and officer egos clashing, too many chiefs and not enough Indians, and 100 other metaphors and problems.

Post-nerf Gruul was never any harder than Karazhan, but so many guilds couldn't make the 10man to 25man jump and the same applies here. BLizzard needs to hit it out of the park here because history teaches that a change like this is "one strike and you're out."

I agree with Tinwhisker. That first tier or raids is going to determine the shape of raids for the rest of the expansion. Some people have suggested that the guild system would be a good way to give incentive to 25M guilds. However, if you actually have to level this ability up I would guess that most guilds won't be able to max this out within the first tier of raiding. If the incentive is not there initially then that shift down will happen quickly, and that will be hard to recover from in later tiers.

And how many alts are going to be able to raid from the start? Your main raids a 10man. The other group are waiting on your alt to cap in order to be able to raid?

If he is exclusively talking about alts, he missed my point. First raiding tier of an X-pac. Average guild member levels in 2 weeks or less, and wants to raid immediately. Alts are not yet leveled unless you multi-box or are neglecting gearing your main through 5mans (Heroic or not). You do not have this mid-to-late X-pac resource.

If your group is short a few and need someone's alt to run, are you content to wait until they can level? Intra-guild stress builds.