Originally posted by gestalt11

 

 

I could write a 20 page post explaining exactly why they do this and why they are wrong but instead I will summarize it.

Basically they, and almost all MMORPG game designers, do not understand the difference between a large organization and a small organization.  This is rather ironic given the medium.

They basically believe that large = harder.  Of course they seem to completely forget that smaller groups tend to be much more efficient and skilled.

Ever heard the expression "An amry moves on its belly"?  Yes well there are many layers to that very true expression. 

Anyway they have no real understanding of the difficulties involved in large scale operations and why they do not translate into smaller scale operations and basically believe the clusterfucks that happen in a large scale operation basically make it always harder.

This is false on many levels.  Unfortunately it affects their conception of diffculty.  For them a raid is as hard as it gets because frankly they do not fully understand "hard" or even understand that a large scale operation is just fundamentally different.

This applies to 80% of the MMORPG devs not just WoW devs.

I really like your analysis and yet at the same time I'm having a hard time understanding your conclusion.  Your analysis indicates that larger groups are fundamentally different.  How does that tie into the fact that larger instances do not have Normal/Hero type functionality?  You lost me somewhere.

The difference in difficulty between Normal and Heroic settings is amount of damge the monsters do and take.

The difference in difficulty between a 5 man instance and a 25 man is the other 20 men. It's no the bosses in raids that are hard. It's the other players in your team that defeat you.

Originally posted by baff

The difference in difficulty between Normal and Heroic settings is amount of damge the monsters do and take.

The difference in difficulty between a 5 man instance and a 25 man is the other 20 men. It's no the bosses in raids that are hard. It's the other players in your team that defeat you.

And I would tend to agree.  But therefore just being larger makes it difficult and therefore even if they made the 25 man instances have a normal/hard setup, it really wouldn't change anything.  This is why I'm having a hard time understanding Gestalt's post.  He seems to be implying that larger is different, but not necessarily more difficult.  That's where I'm losing him.  How is it different if not difficulty wise?

Originally posted by baff

The difference in difficulty between Normal and Heroic settings is amount of damge the monsters do and take.

The difference in difficulty between a 5 man instance and a 25 man is the other 20 men. It's no the bosses in raids that are hard. It's the other players in your team that defeat you.

The difference between Normal and Heroic dungeons is diversity. For the harder Heroics if you don't have a perfect optimal group then failure is almost a guarantee.

Heroics are much much much more discriminating to "regular Joes" than raids.

On the WoW forums, you "casuals" are hated and are thought of as whiners (stereotypes much?).  Their arguement is that you are making the game too easy.  They are right to a point, you guys have been given so much, making raiding that easy for the average gamer is a little unfair to them.

But, if you're a "casual" then you should not be raiding beyond Karazhan or Zul Aman, which requires only a few hours every week.  If you can't meet that, then raiding is definitely NOT for you.

Originally posted by gestalt11 CoX has and continues to support  any group size from one to eight.  Very few things can't be soloed and nothing requires a raid, although a raid does exist. 

 

In point of fact CoX has the only PvE raid I have ever enjoyed in the Rikti Mothership runs even though you can get every single good item in the game through a group.  But that is probably because its a true battle with many many versus many, rather than a boring many on one fight.

  thanks for the info

Originally posted by Xiaoki

 

Originally posted by baff

The difference in difficulty between Normal and Heroic settings is amount of damge the monsters do and take.

The difference in difficulty between a 5 man instance and a 25 man is the other 20 men. It's no the bosses in raids that are hard. It's the other players in your team that defeat you.

Stupid people will be detrimental to you in a 25 man raid, a 10 man raid or 5 man group. This is common sense to all except you.

 

The difference between Normal and Heroic dungeons is diversity. For the harder Heroics if you don't have a perfect optimal group then failure is almost a guarantee.

Heroics are much much much more discriminating to "regular Joes" than raids.

Negative.

Once you have fully purpled geared people in Heroics, you can do them with any old combination just as in normal once your gear level is high enough.

When I first did Normals and we were all in green gear, we needed to do it perfectly. Shattered Halls and Shadow Labs called for a well balanced team.  After a while our kit level gave us more slack. Exactly the same thing has occoured in Heroics. To start with we all needed to play perfectly, but now my tank can just stand in the middle of the room and pull everything again.

The difficulty level is set by the gear and no more.

Yes one idiot in a 5 man team may doom you. However, it easier to find a 5 man team with no fools than it is to find a 25 man team with no fools.

Neither is it a question of "idiots".

People who have not been somewhere before cannot be expected to get it right first time. They have to learn, they have to be taught. I'm sure you would recognise that it is easier to teach 5 people than it is to teach 25.

Even then, knowing what to do and then everybody doing it simultaneously is another feat entirely. At the theatre, actors who know their lines, still need dress rehearsals. They are not simply expected to instantly co-ordinate with others by chance alone.

25 people who know exactly what to do, will still be let down by one of them making a mistake.

And then we have concentration lengths, everyone's is different. Real life problems, the phone ringing, the doorbell ringing, the internet connection dropping, the dog running off with your mouse.....the chances of this occouring in a 25 man is much higher than in a 5 man.

The chances of getting 25 people together who all know what to do is vastly slimmer than chances of getting 5 men together who all know what to do, and the chances of getting 5 men to all excute the correct moves at the correct time are vastly higher than the chances of getting 25 men to all execute the correct moves at the correct time.

 Even just getting the right balance of players, the "perfect optimal team" is harder because you need to get more people in. Which means you need a larger database to choose from. More commited people, and that special kind of person, who won't have a complete tantrum and sulk, leaving the guild,  if he doesn't get to go on any or even all given occaisons.

The more people you add, the harder the task is to achieve.

baff - you are making raiding out to be way harder than it actually is. From your description it sounds like you are trying to PUG SSC/Eye.

The boss encounters in raids are really quite simple. If you have to explain the fight for as long and as many times as you say then those people will just never learn because they are idiots. The bosses don't get really complicated until Kael/Vasj. I remember in the early weeks of BC when guilds would skip Netherspite all the time because they thought it was too complicated. Like OMG, beams and rotations?! Head spinning.

Also, if a couple of those idiots die then you can still finish the boss. I've had 5 people die to the first Shatter on Gruul but we were still able to take him down. The only time 1 person dying will doom a raid is the main tank and thats almost always because the healers failed.

Lesson here - don't PUG 25 man raids

Originally posted by Pappy13

Originally posted by gestalt11

 

 

I could write a 20 page post explaining exactly why they do this and why they are wrong but instead I will summarize it.

Basically they, and almost all MMORPG game designers, do not understand the difference between a large organization and a small organization.  This is rather ironic given the medium.

They basically believe that large = harder.  Of course they seem to completely forget that smaller groups tend to be much more efficient and skilled.

Ever heard the expression "An amry moves on its belly"?  Yes well there are many layers to that very true expression. 

Anyway they have no real understanding of the difficulties involved in large scale operations and why they do not translate into smaller scale operations and basically believe the clusterfucks that happen in a large scale operation basically make it always harder.

This is false on many levels.  Unfortunately it affects their conception of diffculty.  For them a raid is as hard as it gets because frankly they do not fully understand "hard" or even understand that a large scale operation is just fundamentally different.

This applies to 80% of the MMORPG devs not just WoW devs.

I really like your analysis and yet at the same time I'm having a hard time understanding your conclusion.  Your analysis indicates that larger groups are fundamentally different.  How does that tie into the fact that larger instances do not have Normal/Hero type functionality?  You lost me somewhere.

Yes I suppose the connection is lacking there.  So I will explain a bit better and try to connecto the two concepts.

(Warning math and computer science in the next paragraph)

The idea here is that they believe the larger the group required the harder things will be.  They often rely on the idea of "complexity" to argue.  I do not feel like getting into the math of complexiity analysis, but suffice to to say that anyone who has taken an algorithms class in computer science should at leat be willing to entertain the notion that their analysis is far too simplistic to be meaningful in anyway.  Heck even in complexity analysis many PHDs are not entirely certain whether input size or or number of operations is the best measure.  And its a simple fact that some sorting algorithms are acually reach the known limit of sorting efficiency at a small input size but a different algorithm will surpass it as a higher input size, ie. an insertion sort versus a quick sort.

So if you skipped that part, the idea is that they believe everything is always more complex and therefore harder, but in fact have no clue what they are talking about and if you confront them with real complexity analysis like I have done before they will tell you to stop using math and then stick their head in the sand.

So why does this matter?  This is the weak part of my previous post. 

There are two reasons:

1) They judge their upper bound wrong

Well allow me to answer a question with a question.  Let's say you have to difficulties, normal and hard, for normal groups, then you make a raid a long the line of normal difficulty guidelines.  Then if you have the above erroneous belief will you not think that you have in fact made an encounter that is "hard"?

Since large is always "harder" due ot it own inherent "complexity", we would never want to use words like "overhead" because that might shrink out e-peens, and you do not want to make any encounter so hard no one can do it.  They cannot make something too hard and if group/hard is about as hard so that only 10% of the population could do it they will assume a raid designed a long the same lines would obvious be much harder and would go above their design sweet spot

2) They do not understand that a larger group size present different challenges.

They still design raids as if they are small group encounter * 4.  This means that they really do not take advantage of the whole point of a large group.

Anyone who has ever worked in a Large corporation, say 500+ people, and also worked in a small business know that they work fundamentally differently.  Each is good at different things.

The large organization has man power and resources, but communications get bogged down and bloated hierarchies cause overhead.  People hate meetings but they are a necessary evil to make sure everyone is on the same page.

Let's take the idea of raids in absurdum to illustrate the point, to make it patently obvious why they are off kilter.  Let's say that WoW had a huge dragon and it was designed to require 500 people to kill.  No lets shift ourselves to the real world.  Can you imagine any small task that would actually even get done with 500 people on it?

There are a few but they are general things like gathering lots of resources or whatever.  If you told 500 people to go make coffee and said "no really, this is way more complex because there are 500 people invloved.  It will be a real challenge for you."   Anyone hearing that would be completely baffled, its just plain stupid right on its face.

You could never get 500 people in the coffee room.  And swapping people out in shifts to do so would be stupid and cause tons of useless overhead.  You could move the coffee room to an open field, but again this is just stupid.

Is it more complex?  In a way.  But not in any useful way.

The fact is some tasks are just better with a few people.  If we are talking about building the pyramids yeah form a raid that is a great idea.  If we are talking about making coffee, almost anyone grasps that not only would that just not work, but that it is an intrinsically worthless use of 500 people.  It offers no gain and the organizational overhead means.

When you put many many people onto a very small point oriented task you will invariably run into the  types of things that the above rather absurd case illustrates.  A single dragon fight versus many people is not a good use of 72 people.  72 is a lot of people, that single boss dragon is just too small and way to simplistic to actually call for 72 people.  There is almost no way to have a decent and efficient DIVISION OF LABOR.  In fact an ecounter like that is going to be guaranteed to be 50% or more of just plain wasted effort.

Let us go back to our Coffee example and go from the absurd to the useful.  Let's say wee need to make a a lot of coffee for some huge conference, but we don't have a huge brewer.  Instead we drafted a few people and borrowed a few coffee machines.  What is the best use of things?  Well we probably want to make a sort of assembly line of our 4 coffee machines and have a few people doing dedicated taskes.  We don't want to many people because then the entire works would get gummed up and the task would actually be performed worse.  But we need enough people to man the appropriate task.  We do not really need 4 people just because there are 4 coffee machines either.  We can probably have one person go machine by machine filling the grounds and the watter, one person gathering the brewed coffee, and one preparing things foe the filler.

Throwing more people at this problem does not make it harder.  It makes it stupider.  It makes it a clusterfuck and there is not way to make less of a clusterfuck once you have thrown too many people at this problem.  Throw too many people and the task become virtually impossible.

Most Devs have not really accepted or thought this out.  This is evident by the number of many vs one rather than many vs many raids that currently exist.  They simply multiply the hp and damage by the raid size and call it good, plus add in a few funly powers or scripted events.

Therefore they fundamentally cannot acutally increase the diffculty in meaningful ways because they will essentially be tweaking the wrong things and be completely backasswards to what actually causes the difficulty.  Only occasionally do they not do this and that is obviously via blind luck not understanding.

They truly believe the organizational overhead is part of the challenge of a raid, without fully understanding what the true consequences of such a thing.  If you cannot decompose the situation so that small effective teams are put onto the various decomposed parts you will have clusterfuck.  And that does not make a situtation "hard" it just makes it a mess.  When you put the wrong size organization on an inappropriate task you get an unavoidable mess.

They do not realize it but their real design principle is not larger= harder.  It is actually messier = harder.  And even most laymen know that is incorrect.

 Edit: 

And as a corrollary it is a fact that any small team of a large corporation that is compared to a small team of a small business is considerably less efficient due to organizational overhead.

This is important to fully understand.  This means that no matter how good they are and no matter how good the rest of the organization, they are slowed down and restricted by the organization.  And this is a necessary evil.  You must have these processes in place because when a large organizations actually organization falls apart its a huge morass of plain junk.  But a small organization can shift and be far more fluid and even just simply automatically reasseamble.

The really important part for the purposes of this discussion.  Is that this effect has nothing to do with a person's ability.  5 small groups each fighting 5 bosses in a single encounter will always have some amount of overhead that no amount of skill or ability or intelligence will ever surmount.

The more of that type of overhead you put into an encounter the less it is appropriate for a large organization.  The less actual challenge you are creating for that encounter.  The less fun that encounter actually has.  This is sort of the heart of my absurd coffee making example.

Is it more challenging when you put in 500 people?  Yes, but  it is for the same reason putting a square peg in a round hole is a pain in the ass.  Its not a real challenge.  Its just shovelling meaningless crap onto people.

Its true that stupid people are a burden.  But you have to realize that you will get the equivlant of stupid behavior due to organizational overhead from fairly competent people.  And that the more inappropriate the task the more "stupid" or obscructionst behavior you will get.  Not only get, but it will be completely impossible to avoid.  If the designers truly followed their design pinciples to the full conclusion they would essentially make encotuners that were impossible and actuall believe its because they are hard.

But what they are actually doing is simply telling you to put a square peg in a round hole and when you can't do it they think that its a hard task.  But what happens when you tell a normal person to put a square peg in a round hole, they think you are the stupid one and certainly don't think the task is hard.    They shrug and say "Uh this can't really be done but its not hard."  and the designers say "Well if you can't do it then it must be hard".   The normal person just says "Ok, let me get my sledgehammer, but when I accomplish this task you might not like the result, Mr. Smartypants"

Originally posted by shrunken_man
What are you an efficiency expert? You need to be more efficient in your explanation, as nobody will want to read all that (i.e. more text does not equal better explanation, to put it in your own terms). And I though Blizzard reduced raid size requirements with Burning Crusade content. Am I misinformed? Not a raider, just thought I read about it. And unless you're a Dev, how can you know how Blizzard or any other Devs think? A pretty grand assumption.

If you expect a concise explanation of complex topics when I have limited time then you are silly.  If you want to argue my points then fine do so, but I see no arguments.

Originally posted by gestalt11

 

Originally posted by shrunken_man
What are you an efficiency expert? You need to be more efficient in your explanation, as nobody will want to read all that (i.e. more text does not equal better explanation, to put it in your own terms). And I though Blizzard reduced raid size requirements with Burning Crusade content. Am I misinformed? Not a raider, just thought I read about it. And unless you're a Dev, how can you know how Blizzard or any other Devs think? A pretty grand assumption.

If you don't like it, don't read it.  I was responding to Pappy.

 

 

If you expect a concise explanation of complex topics when I have limited time then you are silly.  If you want to argue my points then fine do so, but I see no arguments.

If your going to take the time to write a wall of text and try to sound like some expert on whatever it is your getting at. Spell check it . http://www.spellchecker.net/spellcheck/ 

I am generally not to picky and have been known to be pretty bad with typo's and grammar myself. But if you want people to read a wall of text as mind numbing as that at least attempt to present it well.

Originally posted by gestalt11 If you don't like it, don't read it.  I was responding to Pappy.

 

 If you expect a concise explanation of complex topics when I have limited time then you are silly.  If you want to argue my points then fine do so, but I see no arguments.

I read all of it, even understood the vast majority.

You are indeed a very intelligent person, yet the presentation may need a little work :)

And the best part is, you're right.

To (try) and sum it up for others (and please correct me if I'm wrong) :

1. 25 person raid should NOT = 5 person dungeon X 5

Why? Different set of challenges, just multiplying the health/damage by 5 doesn't make it 5 times more challenging.

2. Throwing more people at a problem isn't neccessarily the best idea. In fact, it can make things a lot worse, a lot less efficient, and just plain wasteful

3. To use a more.... reader friendly example....

In American Football, you have 11 guys on each side. 22 players on the field at once. Right?

If you doubled that, would it make the game twice as hard? No. It's make the game too complex and awkward without adding anything to the game but confusion and disorder.

Complexity for the sake of complexity is NOT challenge... it's complexity.

4. Smaller groups of people have to be more specialized, and specializing in a task is more challenging then having a great many people who are generalists.

The same is true of 5-person dungeons vs. raiding. In the smaller group setting, each person's role is more important, and thus the encounter is more challenging because each person has to contribute more.

What did I miss.... ummm... I'll have to read it again! :)

Originally posted by gestalt11

 

Originally posted by shrunken_man
What are you an efficiency expert? You need to be more efficient in your explanation, as nobody will want to read all that (i.e. more text does not equal better explanation, to put it in your own terms). And I though Blizzard reduced raid size requirements with Burning Crusade content. Am I misinformed? Not a raider, just thought I read about it. And unless you're a Dev, how can you know how Blizzard or any other Devs think? A pretty grand assumption.

If you don't like it, don't read it.  I was responding to Pappy.

 

 

If you expect a concise explanation of complex topics when I have limited time then you are silly.  If you want to argue my points then fine do so, but I see no arguments.

Great post mate, best read I've had on this site in the last 12 months. What do you do for a living if that's not too personal a question please?

Originally posted by baff

Originally posted by gestalt11

 

Originally posted by shrunken_man
What are you an efficiency expert? You need to be more efficient in your explanation, as nobody will want to read all that (i.e. more text does not equal better explanation, to put it in your own terms). And I though Blizzard reduced raid size requirements with Burning Crusade content. Am I misinformed? Not a raider, just thought I read about it. And unless you're a Dev, how can you know how Blizzard or any other Devs think? A pretty grand assumption.

If you don't like it, don't read it.  I was responding to Pappy.

 

 

If you expect a concise explanation of complex topics when I have limited time then you are silly.  If you want to argue my points then fine do so, but I see no arguments.

Great post mate, best read I've had on this site in the last 12 months. What do you do for a living if that's not too personal a question please?

That is a strong statement I know, and perhaps slightly exaggerated but not much.

Originally posted by heerobya

 

Originally posted by gestalt11 If you don't like it, don't read it.  I was responding to Pappy.

 

 If you expect a concise explanation of complex topics when I have limited time then you are silly.  If you want to argue my points then fine do so, but I see no arguments.

 

I read all of it, even understood the vast majority.

You are indeed a very intelligent person, yet the presentation may need a little work :)

And the best part is, you're right.

To (try) and sum it up for others (and please correct me if I'm wrong) :

1. 25 person raid should NOT = 5 person dungeon X 5

Why? Different set of challenges, just multiplying the health/damage by 5 doesn't make it 5 times more challenging.

2. Throwing more people at a problem isn't neccessarily the best idea. In fact, it can make things a lot worse, a lot less efficient, and just plain wasteful

3. To use a more.... reader friendly example....

In American Football, you have 11 guys on each side. 22 players on the field at once. Right?

If you doubled that, would it make the game twice as hard? No. It's make the game too complex and awkward without adding anything to the game but confusion and disorder.

Complexity for the sake of complexity is NOT challenge... it's complexity.

4. Smaller groups of people have to be more specialized, and specializing in a task is more challenging then having a great many people who are generalists.

The same is true of 5-person dungeons vs. raiding. In the smaller group setting, each person's role is more important, and thus the encounter is more challenging because each person has to contribute more.

What did I miss.... ummm... I'll have to read it again! :)

But the general idea itself it an important and actually very well known phenomenon when looked at from a distance or generalized vantage point.

To me there are two aspects that really are the most important to understand:

The inherent increase in entropy/choas.  I think most people agree that random chance is not really a challenge.  Although not the same thing they are similar enough for people to grab a hold of and evaluate .  Initially this may seem like part of the challenge.  However that would imply there is a solution, a way to decrese the entropy.   You can mitigate this entropy to some degree, by being organized, but you can never reduce it to equivalence of a small group style thing.  Because the process you do to mitigate has its own overhead.  Its just not possible.  There is always something tacked on top.

Secondly as the organization gets larger it is LESS able to effectively deal with entropy.

So you have two related factors causing a probably exponential effect.  An increase in entropy and a decrease in the ability to deal with entropy.

I think most of use can agree that small organizations deal with unknowns quicker and more effectively than large ones.  So hopefully that is not controversial.

I think it will also not be controversial that more people causes more entropy.  You could call it chaos but that is not entirely the point it is really just stuff lost to the system.  Could be someone running around doing stupid stuff, could be someone doing nothing.

The key aspect and the reason this misleads so many people is that there is no solution to this.  You can mitigate to some degree.  That is the best you can do.  People see this as a burden that can be surmounted.  Yes it is a burden but no it can't and won't be surmounted and eventually will make some tasks so top heavy they are impossible.  Like trying to walk through hip deep mud.

It really is not a conincidence that the larger the organization the more it seems like people with an IQ of 10 run the place.  Even though often they have very high IQs or MBAs or whatever.  Its not just that there is a sort of size appropriateness to things.  That is important don't get me wrong. 

But the subtle part is the larger the group the more that even smart people are reduced to sometimes doing things in a way that would seem to make them raving dumbasses.  And further these people may even be doing the appropriate  thing even if it makes them look like a raving dumbass.  Or even where thinking is just the wrong thing to be doing.

There is a reason that most armies do not want their enlisted men to think.  It seems stupid but it serves a purpose.  There is a reason for this being consistent in all armies across the globe for millenia.  Part of it has to do with getting them to perform in deadly situations but a lot of it has do with executing the overall strategy.  If everyone is a general, there is no army.

But at the same time many Spec Ops types ( many of whom are enlisted ) are encouraged to think and to be as innovative as possible and they almost exclusively operate in small teams, except the army Rangers and the army Rangers tend to think other Spec Ops guys are reckless/cowboys/rebels because of it.  Its a subtle thing often attributed to culture instead of functionality.  You can see this if you read the novel version of "Black Hawk Down".  There is always tension between Delta and the Ranger officers because of this dynamic.  The thing is they are both right.  You could go on an on about that sort of analogy and about the tasking those various organization have etc.  And it would be very enlighting most likely.  But I am no expert on Spec Ops.

For specilization I think you may have it backwards for individual but perhpas correct for the group.  Larger organization tend to specialize people, smaller groups tend to have more generalized individuals.  But a small organization tends to be a specialist at a certain domain.

And in the end the challenge is implementing the solution.  I don't really think challenge translates to specilization or even complexity.  Its like the A-team.  It is about the plan coming together.  That is the challenge.  But how and why and what you plan is the real varying factor not anything else.

I think that everything I have said here is something you can draw a line directly to the common complaints about raids.

For example they say things like there is no challenge for the normal people just the guild leaders.  That is because you are an enlisted man.  You aren't payed to think.  You see where I am going with this.

Does that mean raiding is not challenging.  No it doesn't.  It means the way you plan/execute is different and has different challenges.  I think when you consider a decent real world analog it is hard to say that being a sergeant in the army is easy.  At the same time the complaint itself is not only valid but echoed by those very same enlisted men in the real world.

The worst thing that ever happened to raiding was that people believed the simplistic notion of difficulty.  The current analysis is completely black and white as well as missing the point.  It has stunted the growth of the raid game in a horribly perverse way.

Every argument about raiding eventually boils down to this idea of challenge and what you wind up with is 10 arguments on both sides that are all true and then people try to find a black/white yes/no answer to which one is more challenging.

Sadly this won't change.

You know why I say so?  Because I have seen a variation of your Football analogy before, on the AoC boards.  You know what happened?  The raid proponents insisted that Football was inherently more challenging than basketball becausse it had more people.   I think that is right about when I gave up on that thread.

 I do not believe 5-man is more challenging than 40-man (I know its obsolete, but its a larger difference ot illustrate the point) in any circumstance (assuming some scaling etc).  It is really about what is appropriate for the situation.  A 5-man is simply better suited to a single boss fight. 

Either way under ideal circumstances there will be a plan.  Everyone will have something to do.  And they will do it.  By ideal I do not mean perfect execution.  I mean when all 40 people are talented and competent.  those 40 people will still have a far more imperfect excution than an ideal 5-man, but since they are competent they will know this and plan ahead with redundancy.  Again we find overhead.  And I think almost raiders will be forced to agree it is necessary.  Because relying on perfection is a fool's game.

But when you make a 40-man attack a single boss and you have a system like WoW with 3 basic "roles".  You are baiscally making the encounter extremely redundant for most people.  Healing rotations, mass groups of DPS, one tank and off tank.  Now divide by 40.  People like to say this makes it more challenging because there are more points of failure.  That is wrong.  Any decent leader of a large organization ALWAYS plans around points of failure.  Because they ALWAYS happen.  Because that is the nature of large organzations. 

At the same time if we change the encounter to have 3 bosses and say a large group of normal mobs.  Then this obviously causes many problems for the 5-man and the 25-man or 40-man is suddenly far less redundant.  In this case it is the 5-man that is far more likely to run into a point of failure.  Even worse they are most likely not able to plan around that point of failure.  I mean if they have the mage take the group, have the rogue evasion tank one boss, and have two tanks take the other two, well obviously the margin of error is pretty slim.

Both can be made "challenging", if we use a very broad sense of the term, for either type.  But the point is that clearly they have different abilities to respond to different situations.

And really what most of all the complaints about raiding are is because many raid encounters are just designed to be a 5-man *5 or *8.  But then you see a few encounters that aren't and then they are held up as the golden example of why raiding is really not boring or really is very challenging.

Unfortunately people then go back to simply arguing about what is better chocolate or vanilla.  Rather than examining these things.  The fact is both sides have an intuitive understanding of these issues and they express it in their complaints, but people are so invested in saying my way is the good way that they beleive any counterpoint must somehow be wrong or qualified when in fact both are actually right when you apply them to the correct thing.  But due to this idea that "There can be only one!" there is never any progress made.  Well this isn't Highlander even if we really want Sean Connery to do some voice acting.

Look Molten Core sucked.  Everyone knows it.  Further it was not that hard.  Even most heavily invested raiders admit that now.  But Blizz made some more raids and changed things up a bit.  Some of those raids are considered more fun and more challenging, even at the 40 man size.  These better raids almost always consistently take better advantage of the large size of the raid.  Either with waves or complex scripting requiring vraious groups to do thing in coordination etc.

When you get to the stuff most raiders considered examples of better or more challenging raids they are encounters that actually make very little sense to even try in a 5-man.  When comparing the good 5-mans to the good 40-mans, what you find is they are not comparable.  They are apples and oranges, chocolate and vanilla.

In the end it is quite simple.  You have a margin of error for your situation.  If you execute your plan well and have a good plan you will surpass that margin of error and should be rewarded commensurratly.  If your margin of error is extremely demanding then its challenging.  Otherwise its easier. 

Combine these two things and what you have is raiding is not harder.  Grouping is not harder.  But they do actually have a fairly similar metric for difficulty.  But what changes is the plan.  Sometimes radically, sometimes not much at all.  One of the tricks is that when the plans are not that much different one of them is probably either not suited for the encounter or the encounter itself needs some work.

What your margin of error will be depends on the demands of the scenario and what you use to accomplish it.

Look at the plan for some Molten Core bosses.  They are almost exactly the same as a plan a 5-man would come up with just with more people healing and more people DPSing and maybe some rotations or something.   The only difference is that you slightly alter your organization to deal with the inherent problem of 40 people.  You put in redunancy and things like that to deal with the inevitable problem of not being fully coordinated.  There is no inherent difference in challenge.  Depending on how they tweak that encounter you could have exactly the same margin of error for a 5-man or a 40-man.  Because raiding is not intrinsically harder it just makes you plan for the inevitable and unavoidable incompetence that the 40-man environment itself generates even in otherwise competent people.

But when you consider some of the Black Wing Lair encounters you could not even come up with a plan that made sense to execute for a 5-man to succeed.  And if we slightly altered the numbers in some of them the margin or error for that 5-man might still be pretty crazy hard.  In the case of the Molten Core encounter you simply make the boss do 8 times less damage and have 8 times less HP to achieve equivalence.  That is why the couple straight up tank and spank fights in Molten Core make the claim that raiding is hard look completely ludicrous to the people who have tried them.  But look at some of the BWL encounters.  To scale them down is not anywhere near so simple. 

And that is the kicker.  This is what makes it completely obvious.  If you actually scaled some of those BWL encounters to a 5-man you would essentially have a completely different encounter.  Because its not just about HPs or Roles or DPS, its about what you can and can't do with what you have.  Anything that needs 3 tanks is obviously gonna present problems for a 5-man.  Anything that is a simple tank and spank is a complete snooze fest in a raid, because it is filled to the brim with overcompensation and waste due to the inherent problems of 40 people working together.  Huge over healing was often common in the 40-mans.  And modest overhealing was expected even for good priests/druids. 

This doesn't mean a 5-man can't have very complex scripting in an encounter.  You could make the scripting extremely complex, you simply can't have 10 things happening simultaneously like you can in raid.  But at the same time a 5-man may be able to react to multiple things going on much quicker and more efficiently than a raid, but at the same are easier to overwhelm.  Especially if it involves say the group needing to move to a random location quickly.  There is almost no way a 40-man would all simultaneously react as quick as a 5-man.   It would not be hard to make a situation with multiple random location changes that a 5-man could complete but a 40-man almost never would.

And so we are left with two situations where only one of the two options can perform that situation and signifncantly altering that situation such that the other may perform it may drastically alter it to the point of being unrecognizable and therefore nothing was really accomplished in the first.

And that is why the difficulty difference is a complete myth.  Because they are simply not comparable when applied correctly and when you shove them both in a situation either could perform they are obviously equivalent and only vary in their planning, and that is only to a small degree.  This is about as close as you can get to a proof of the situation.  They both have things neither one is capable of.  They must be different.  It is inescapable.  Even more compelling is the overlap of the two has essentially been recognized by both sides a push.

Its not about who contributes more per person or whatever.  All of that is always considered in your plan.  When you design a 5-man you are going to expect certain efficiencies from a healer and a different over all efficency in a 40-man and a different one in a 25-man when each one fight a single boss.  They simply balance the fight around those expected numbers.  It really doesn't matter if the 5-man healer is 95% efficient and the 40-man average is 60% efficient.  What matters is how much does your group needs to be a cracker jack group to get to those numbers.  And when people tackle stuff, once they do it a few times, they have basically guesstimated these things and that is part of their plan.

Any raid that relies on close to 95% healing efficiency is really just making an impractical plan.  That is just highly unlikely not just because of averages in ability but because of the scaling of mobs damage and hps etc.  Its just safer to overheal in a raid sometimes.  But also it can be safer to simply tab target and cast a heal or cleanse over and over and if you mis-cast a few on people who didn't need it oh well.  You can rely on a 5-man to be able to remove the right thing at the right time and quickly because doing a quick scan is possible.  This may not be possible in some raids, you may be forced to sacrifice accuracy in favor or speed or vice versa.

It is not a good measure to have efficiency or importance of an individual role be what determines challenge.  However you are on the right track because a role can be much more imporant.  This comes into your planning and whether you are able to even make a decent plan for a situation.  It has a huge effect on your margin of error in some situations.  In other situations it may not matter much at all.  In a tank and spank scenario you may not have a second tank to step in, but at the same time your healer may not be in huge danger so that roles failure (in this case the failure would be dying) is not such a concern.  But when you are in a more chaotic situation where your tank can't hold all aggro then you this concern taking on vastly different scope. 

The key point is that it may be that a 5-man's healer can operate at 95% efficiency and will need to have at least 90% efficiency to succeed but that is what their job is and their environment makes it a reasonable thing to expect.  That is their target.  A raid healer may have a target point of, say, 60-70% and that same healer may achieve 95% in a 5-man.  And may in fact consider both to be similarly challenging.  This is often because their jobs are slightly different.  But even if they had exactly the same job the fact that spot healing from others is highly likely to increase your overhealing and there is no way you can reliably account for that without losing out on spot healing.  So you must choose between efficiency and safety, and choosing efficiency will nullify one of the inherent advantages of being in a large group.

In both cases their jobs roles whatever may be equally challenging.  Even in the bad Tank and Spank single boss encounters of Molten Core.  Their jobs might be boring, but performing them well may still be challenging.  Fun and challenge are not always the same, although they can be related.

So yes it is true that often losing one healer is not the devastating blow in a raid that it is in a 5-man although in the case of a tank it can be.  But that does not really mean the healing task in any harder for the individual.  What it comes down to is the extra robustness of roles in a raid makes it more appropriate for certain situations.  At the same time you can make a raid where roles are close to as important if each group had to operate on their own or whatever.  One could imagine a domino effect when a healer or two died and a second group had to take on two groups instead.  In the end the ecounter will be designed such that a certain amount of attrition is acceptable.  So if 5 deaths are acceptable per AoE then probably its not great for a 5-man, but maybe ok for a raid.

It may seem like I am saying there is less risk in a raid because a dead healer in a 5-man is often a wipe and one dead healer in a raid is usually expected and has little negative effect.  Therefore less risk.  But the risks are different.   A large raid necessarily dilutes using death as a measurement and this is shown in the mentality of raiders.  Death means very little, only a wipe is what matters.  Death in a 5-man is often an "Oh snap" moment, in a raid people laugh when the rogue dies and everything else is going ok.  When you look at the encounters the death of one group member in a 5-man is about as common as things that cause total wipes in Raids. 

Basically individual death has had its value changed.   But this says nothing about the challenge.  However this is confusing because it is so often the case that individual death IS the measure.  This again underscores the fundamental differences.  The fact the it radically changes people's conception about a fundamental mechanics should be rather telling.  It should be an "Ah Ha" moment when parameters change to such a large degree. 

That is the key.  They couldn't reduce the challenge so they had to change the meaning of death to preserve the challenge due to the effect of this phenomenon of greater role importance you mentioned.  It should, hopefully show just how different the two really are.  It should show how easy it is to design around something to achieve an intended result without actually knowing what you are designing around.  Because it is not until you then go back and try to make death mean the same thing in a raid that it used to in a group that you will find yourself running into a paradox.  You then run into an "Um hold on" moment.  Because the equivalence model starts to break down and putting the pieces back together just plain don't make sense when you try to also maintain a similar amount of  "risk".  By risk I mean, you need your plan to go well to succeed and when it does not go well you don't succeed.  Because when you succeed even in the face of vast incompetence there was obviously no risk because no plan is that good.  If it requires a large degree of competence then it was risky since your margin of error is high etc etc.   People often identify death with "risk" and is usually the justification for death penalties. 

Thus this hold over causes even more confusion.  And incidentally also shows how some death penalties are actually rather poorly designed.  Strangely a debuff  Guild Wars/LOTRO style death penalty may actually be more appropriate for raids.  Imagine if a death applied a raid wide debuff like the Dread debuff in LOTRO.   Then individual death would re-acquire risk because it could contribute to a wipe, which is the real measure of success/failure in WoW.  Repair bills are just part of the farming anyway.  But anyway that just illustrates the kind of thinking you would need to go through to even get back to some semblance of where you started in regards to death when raiding is involved and the importance of unavoidably roles changes.

The only thing left is that organization is a pain in the ass and therefore 40-mans must be harder.  Well first off you always have to organize.  Second off, a developer  can put in whatever pains in the asses they like to balance it out so that is really moot to begin with.  A pain in the ass in not a challenge its busy work.   I think we all know about consumable farming and the like.   A good plan is challenging to come up with whether its big or small.   And execution is execution, the margin of error depends on the the type situation and the balancing.  How big or small affects that is entirely situational.

As to presentation.  The presentation is fine when you consider I wrote this by request for one person and if they didn't understand it I simply would have tried again.  Plus I wrote this while taking a dump and had to finish before I went to work out so I was rushed.   I really don't care if people don't like the typos.  If this had been an starting post for thread then whatever.   When I responded to your post initially I tried to be concise precisely because of this.

But when people put in a TLDR that is only saying TLDR using 4 sentences and those other 4 sentences are meant to invalidate the post through attacks with no arguments then yes I will say something.  If that had simply been TLDR I would not have responded.

So yeah I wrote it while I was taking a dump.  So sue me ;).  Since people complained I wrote an even larger wall of text ahahhahahahahahahahahahahahah.

If you write code like you write responses and explanations, then you are no better then the raid designers you criticize. And you still didn't answer my question in regard to BC. Are raid sizes not smaller? Take your own advice and be more eloquent and less complicated.

And I did bother to read your wall of text. At least the first less mocking one.

I'm gonna agree with the OP on this one.  I would be considered a hardcore gamer, merely by the number of hours I log per week, yet because of my rotating work schedule it makes it very hard to commit to raids. 

I think making content that only 2% of the playerbase will see is wasteful.  98% of the playerbase should not be funding content for the 2% that basically looks down on them as lesser players.

One possible solution might be to have these instanced raids with scaleable difficulty and rewards.  Not sure if anyone has ever tried this before. 

People who can express themselves like Gestalt11 understand far more than the typical, "Raids are easy because I beat MC" garbage that gets posted here weekly.  If you don't have the patience to read what he wrote, no wonder you don't "get it".