I'd say the single biggest difficulty in guild organization comes down to recruitment and putting people on standby. Having some leeway in the number of people that fit inside the instance certainly could help, especially seeing how non-heroic mode needn't be very tightly tuned to start off with (so just doing some basic encounter scaling based on number of people present could be enough).

DKP and loot distribution can also be an issue but I don't see it as the major one, even if can be a cause of drama. I don't know if it might be helpful to have the guild interface incorporated a simple DKP system or an API - most current implementations tend to be a bit clunky.

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One more thing which is worth considering is that 25-man raids suffer significantly more from random disconnects and lag (including machine lag), a pretty strong argument to go 10-man in cataclysm unless server performance improves. This is doubly true now that you can't just go do the 10-mans during the laggy hours but will be basically doing nothing instead.

They've already more than just suggested that they'll be spreading around and diminishing the importance of raid buffs. Already dps and tanks are so close to interchangable they would make do. Healers will probably need to be homogenized quite a bit more for 10 man balance, but it kind of sounds like that is happening as well. Add in this new system and I would expect them to be paying a lot of attention to problems with 10 man raid comps.

I disagree that 25 mans suffer significantly more than 10 mans from random disconnects and lag. Yeah, they're more likely to have that be a problem at any given time but the effect of it is not as significant. Partially, that's just because diminishing one person in 25 is not as bad as the same thing in 10, but that effect is probably not so noticable on tightly tuned content. It's more because it is extremely difficult to get people to sit in a purely 10 man setup. Even if you do have someone sitting, it is not a given that they can be exchanged for the person having trouble, you need a minimum of 2 people sitting per person who may have connection problems and that's assuming that any player of a given archetype is exchangable with any other. 25 man guilds, on the other hand, expect to have a few people sitting all the time, for active ones it's not unreasonable to always expect atleast one person sitting who can sub for anyone in the raid.
There is a lot of finesse associated with keeping a roster together and happy with 10 man that a group aiming for 25 mans wouldn't experience because there's more fudge room in the numbers.

Besides the balance difficulty that you could take any 25 man raiding group and build a 10 man from those players that would be, on average, just plain better than the 25 man group there are also problems with what makes a fight difficult for the different sized raids. Basically, problems related to positioning tend to be much easier for a 10 man group to handle and problems related to incapacitating or occupying players tend to be much easier for a 25 man group. That probably means that they will be different fights in each instance that are the hard ones for each raid size. Blizz will want to balance it so that bosses at the end of dungeons or wings will be the hardest things in there though. That may mean that, depending on what mechanics the final boss uses, certain dungeons may heavily favor being completed in 10 or 25 player mode for those running guilds large enough to choose.

If itemisation and loot tables were the same (or even equivalent), in terms of types and relative quality of items provided, i'd agree with you. But one of the major problems with 10m only raiding in WotLK is that the 10m loot tables almost always have significant holes in them (ie, plate dps belts - the first upgrade from the one from Nexus heroic is from the Northrend Beasts in ToC10), and in a few cases, even when 10 and 25 both drop items for the same slots, the 10m versions are just horribly designed, even compared to the 10m alternatives from previous tiers (the ToC10 trinkets being a good example). Although that can also go the other way, with occasional 10m items that work out to be BiS or close to it for certain specs (such as the Whispering Fanged Skull being amazing for enhancement shamans, for example).

In many cases, it feels like 10 mans are itemised to fill holes or provide alternatives (for offspec gear, or just a different stat spread) for 25 man itemisation, rather than being a fully-fledged progression path.

Now, that's not necessarily an inherent problem, as they could itemize both raid progression paths equivalently, at least in terms of what item slots are covered (although i imagine trinkets would remain problematic due to the difficulty balancing proc type items), but at that point you're now doing twice the work to design items, and you end up with either a lot of items that are very samey (but just not as good in the 10 mans) and everyone complains about loot being "boring", or you end up with weird outliers where the stat spread on the belt dropped in 10 man is amazing, whereas the 25 man version is mediocre (or vice versa) and everyone complains about having to run a raid they don't particularly want to raid in order to get the well-itemised item (this would be especially problematic in a world with shared lockouts).

At that point, you may as well just give up, save yourself the hassle, and give everyone the same items.

You can't "filter" the situation you describe on the server side. Unless you want to give up knowledge of usefull and necessary information. The server already does a very good job of limiting the information the client receives. You need to realize that you don't receive the combat log message itself... The client receives information that generates the combat log.

If the server filtered that you 'entered' the region of an aura... You wouldn't receive a debuff/buff displayed. The server would know but the client would not.... Say the aura provides haste, then the client would process based on one GCD value and only have the correct value after getting an update after receiving a confirmation of cast from the server. That confirmation has latency that would negatively impact you. This is a simple example.

The reality of many client to server synchonization in a wan environment is not a simple task.

I think we can all agree that the two biggest issues with raiding (or dungeons for that matter) are organization time, and actual boss kills. If people are forced to wait around for an hour just to organize a raid, they are having pretty much zero fun during that time. If people are not downing bosses they are not having any fun either.

If you'll look at the reason the dungeon finder is so popular, it has nothing to do with the loot it drops, but rather that it reduced the organization time to nearly zero. Likewise, the most successful raiding guilds are the ones who can organize a raid quickly and down bosses. This new system will almost certainly increase the number of guilds that are 10 man focused, but I think the majority of raiders in a guild don't care whether they are raiding a 10 or a 25 man encounter as long as they aren't forced to wait an exceptional amount of time to get the raid together, there is loot that is an upgrade (so they aren't wasting time there), and they actually down bosses.

Successful 25 mans won't have an incentive to break down into two sets of 10 mans, as then you have to find twice as many good raid leaders, but marginal 25 mans will almost certainly break down into 10 mans until the leadership can gets their organization level improved. So I see this as most likely to be a "rich get richer" change than a guild breaker. Of course, the other issue is where you have guilds made up of players with staggered timezones, so they have trouble getting everyone on at the same time. These will most likely stay 10 man.

Regarding the "finishing last boss in 10 man instead of 25 man" example, I think this is likely to be a headache, but then again, there's always the option where they can choose to extend the raid lockout into next week if they think they're close. So you're giving the raid a choice between giving up all the loot in next week to get this one boss, or let a smaller group work on it and let the rest of the raid get their loot off the starter bosses next week. If you put it to the raid like this, there will be less of a potential problem, I think. The biggest issue is where players feel as if they are not allowed to make a choice, and are being pushed out of potential rewards unfairly.

As far as the problem where coming in off the bench in 25 man means you lose out on 10 man loot, I think this is exactly why they're deciding to break the raids down into smaller numbers of bosses. So basically you are taking on the larger raids a wing at a time instead of all or nothing like it is now. This means that getting saved to a raid will be less of a big deal as you probably won't miss out on more than a few bosses.

The real big issue I see with this change isn't about loot, badges or gold.

It is about having backups to fill the raid.

Every successful 25 man raiding guild out there have more people in their rosts than it's possible to fit in a raid group. They NEED more than 25 people to raid successfully every week, it can't be done otherwise, unless everyone runs at 100% attendance (aka impossible).

So what? Well, a guild form its raid group, put those 25 players in and put 5 replacements on hold. At the current system, this is not an issue, if someones internet dies midway you grab a replacement out of your pool and get going, the guy that was dragged in won't be upset even if 70% of the place is cleared, he can run the place later that week in 10s and its all cool.

Come Cataclysm said guy won't be so happy about joining an ongoing raid, meaning guilds will have little attempts at clearing a place, because the odds of having the same 25 players online the next day aren't that great. People will refuse to fill raids to work on a new boss if that means they'll be blocked from a clear run of 10 man.

One could argue that they also mentioned more than one raid every tier but I'm not buying it. We have been having 1 or 2 raids every tier for years now and considering the quality of dungeons they spawned after Ulduar (mainly ToC - and it was the only one for T9) makes me dread this plan.

This makes no sense. In the current system there is nothing stopping him from doing both 25-man and 10-man later in the week. If anything, the lower number of bosses/instance in cataclysm will make it easier to finish an instance without the need for replacing people.

I agree that there is a problem with backups though. In the old 40-man raids, let's say you want to bring 7 players of a specific role. If everyone has 80% attendance, you can for example keep 10 people around. On any given day, you will have 11% chance to have 10 people online, 27% chance to have 9, 30% to have 8, 20% to have 7. There is only a 12% chance you will have less than 7 and be unable to raid, or as low as 3% chance if you deem 6 players acceptable. On the other hand, on any day you will be sitting out roughly 1 person. With a rotation system you will be sitting out ~12% of the time which most would say is acceptable. If you wanted to make it even surer that you will have 7, you could go up to 11 players, but that would mean you would be sitting out 22% of the chance, which may not be worth it. 10 seems like a very good number.

Enter 25-man raids. Let's say you now need 4 players of that role in every raid. You can either keep 5 or 6 players around. You will also be less likely to be able to raid with 3 players than in the 40-man case but it might be possible. 6 Players will give you a 90% chance to have 5+ players and 98% chance to have 3+ players. However, you would need to expect to sit out 17% of the time. 5 players would reduce the sit out chance to the miniscule 3%, but on 26% of raid days you would only have 3 players or less.

This makes things a bit harder to manage, but it's still possible. Let's look at a 10-man raid. 2 players with the role is needed. Only having 2 would leave you with 32% chance to cancel the raid. 4 would require you to sit out 38%. 3 Players is the golden average but would still mean you have to sit out 20% of the time and 10% raids will be cancelled since it's not possible to go with 1.

10-man guilds planning to form only one raid will either be dependant on pretty much every single member being online, or will leave a lot of people having to pug the instance. I predict that most 10-man guilds will contain a larger number of players in order to form multiple raids. The exact number is hard to speculate on, but current 25-man guilds may simply opt to keep their players and make 3 raids. A problem might be if people start to drop off and the A-team players does not recognize the need for the B and C team even though they are vital parts of the guild to fill in for the A-team players when they are missing.

Disclaimer: Obviously it's not as simply as everyone having 80% attendance, people in the same guild will be ranging from 100%-60%, and people will also be more or less willing to sit out. I used these numbers to simplyfy the calculations.

I meant to go far beyond what you were saying yes. But my original response to you still holds true. Even in the current system you would lock yourself of any other 25-man raids for the rest of the lockout. The instance you lock yourself out of now is twice as big as the one you will in Cataclysm. I'm not saying you should clear every raid in one day during progress periods. Merely that someone who gets brought in for the current 9th boss out of 12 will be unable to do the 8 first bosses. In Cataclysm, he can still do bosses 1-6 with another raid if he wants to.

In my opinion it is also a problem now that ICC (and earlier Ulduar) takes so long to PuG that it's hard to do in one day, making it hard to do at all. The likelihood of PuGs finishing the doable bosses of an instance should increase.

But now you still have the option to run the place in 10s even if you did a single boss in 25 man and have some fun! Maybe grab a piece or two of loot, but you're still able to see all the content.

Come Cataclysm you just can't! How come you can't make a distinction between a shared lockout of 10s and 25s and separate lockouts? OF COURSE one can still do 1-6 bosses with another raid, but I'm not thinking about the player, I'm putting my concern into 25 MAN RAIDS, and the guilds behind them, not into a single player.

Am I really that bad of a writer? I'll just give an example of a situation...

Imagine the shared lockout system to come with Caclysm is working right now in ICC. Imagine also this is a 25 man raiding guild.

Its Tuesday, the first day of the week for any WoW raider, your Raid Leader invites people and you are left out of the group, but you and 2 other guys are on hold if you are needed.

Raid goes alrighto, the group moves fast towards LK but you hit a brickwall at Sindragosa, you dumb people just can't kill the dragon! Raid time is over, raid is called.

Its Wednesday now, Raid Leader starts to invite those present from Tue. but he's now missing 3 of the saved players. 2 of them posted on the forums, they said their dogs died (they killed each other it seems), the 3rd one just called you because a hurricane is knocking his door.

Now the Raid Leader is like WTF and asks you to join the raid.
You: Sure, whats left by the way?
RL: Sindragosa and LK
You: hmm... hows it going? Think we can get it down?
RL: We wiped there for 2 hours yesterday
You: ugh

Your options are:
- lock yourself into ICC and lose the opportunity to get a 10 man group going on later that happens to drop exactly the same loot, but you'll have all bosses (even the loot piñata guy and he drops that trinket you're dying to get).

- Tell your RL to suck it up and show him that you were online both days, he is a bastard for not inviting you Tue so its his loss DIAF and stuff, and you get some friends to run 10 man.

If the RL can't fill the raid again, the raid will be called, he'll have to kick 12 players from the raid and hit a 10 man version of it. If he does fill the raid it will be at expense of 3 players, those 3 will feel griefed by his RL and Blizzard.

Except they've already tied their hands. Remember Vashj? I might get some things wrong here cause I was kiting a flying mushroom of doom most of the time; But part of the difficuly in that fight was the fairly massive spread, and assosciated range/LoS issues. The reaction times required to get the Box - and the randomness of where it appeared - and then the organization and positioning required to get the Box from point A1-4 to point B1-4. How'd you mirror that for a smaller size?

I'm not saying the sky would fall down - it clearly hasn't - and we'd only get bad raid content, but we are getting content that's less than what it could be if the developers had more leeway to utilize the specific raid sizes. Purely from a customer perspective, I don't see how it's in our best interest to encourage that kind of design.

I can't say I see the problem. Poor itemization is poor itemization, and it's a real problem. If fixing that problem results in loot being "boring" we're right back to player psychology. If getting loot that looks the same but has slightly lower stats than loot in a raid you have no desire to do, when you do content in which you have no need for the increased stats that offers is a problem, then that problem has clearly stopped being about actual in-game advantages and is instead an emotional reaction. And we're back to an issue you can't defeat with design.

But not everything scales so nicely. To give you just two examples, Val'kyrs on the Lich King and Penetrating Cold on Anub'arak. Both are the same ability, scaled upwards quantitatively. The 10 man versions, though, are infinitely easier to handle. On Penetrating Cold, you can have one person healing the two targets in 10 man, whereas you need to assign people to marks in 25 man. On Val'kyrs, you can just plant your ass somewhere on the platform in 10 man, confident in knowing that as long as you're not exactly on the edge, it won't really matter, as opposed to having to stay bunched up next to the boss so that you can properly cleave the 3 Val'kyrs on 25 man.

Edit: There are also abilities which don't scale so well downwards, and I'm pointing at Sindragosa here, where you can easily have 2/3 of your healers incapacitated in 10 man (1 with the debuff, 1 in an Ice Tomb), compared to maybe 4/8 (or how many you run with, but getting an extra healer is a smaller loss in terms of % of RDPS in 25 than in 10, so it's easier to get some leeway). And even that doesn't tell the whole story, since you can get your last healer beaconed and then you're 3/3 out of the fight.

Basically, while 'automatic' scaling is a nice idea on paper, trying to get even just both fights (10 and 25) on the same difficulty is going to be nigh-impossible, without limiting their available toolbox (something they said they don't want to do) and creating less varied (and less fun) encounters.