How can this be accomplished? One suggestion is to have 25-player bosses drop more "badges" to buy gear with, another is to have 25-player bosses drop slightly more loot per person but with the same loot table.
What is ignored in this discussion is that 25-player is more efficient than 10-player at gearing up the raiders with precisely the same loot per boss. Intuitively this is actually pretty easy to understand. Suppose you live in a simple raiding world where a boss can drop five different items, you want one of those items, and you can fight the boss by yourself. Each week you have a one in five chance of gearing up. Suppose instead you have to fight the boss with four friends to defeat it, but the boss drops five items, rolling on its loot table five times. Assuming that your friends want different items (or that some of your want different items at the very least) you can now hand the loot out to the people who need it. If the boss drops item 4 and you want item 2 then at least someone gets item 4. And when you go back next week you know that you have five chances at item 2 and if it drops you get it because the other four people don't want it.
That's a very simple example, but it shows the principle. If we got a roll on the loot table for everyone on the server and then handed out loot to people who need it, almost everyone would get what they wanted, and those who didn't would be virtually guaranteed of getting it the next week.
How does this work in practice? Well, raid loot is pretty easy to simulate. Here is the gearing progress for 10- and 25-player raids fighting bosses that drop 1 item per 5 participants, 12 bosses a week. Tanks are selected randomly from all tank specs, same with healers and dps. 10-player raids are 2 tanks, 3 healers, 5 dps and 25-player raids are 3 tanks, 6 healers, 15 dps. There is one of each type of item in the mix (1 mail shoulder with intellect and another with agility, for example) and the chance of each item dropping is proportional to the number of people who can use it (there is five times as much plate itemized for dps than there is for intellect, for example). Finally, I assume there is only one useful trinket available to each raider despite having two trinket slots (this is how things seem to always work). These assumptions are not what the reality would look like, but they work to show how the curves look. Here is 8 weeks of raiding:
For reference, the bars show the number of shards per raider. Of course because the 10-player raids have less useful loot they have more shards per person. The percentage shows the total percentage of slots filled in the raid. Each person has either 14 or 15 slots, depending on whether they use items in both hands or use a single two-handed weapon.
So after 8 weeks, 70% of 10-player slots are filled. That means the typical 10-player raider has 10 or 11 pieces of gear, leaving 3 to 5 upgrades left in that raiding tier. After the same amount of time a 25-player raider will have 12-ish pieces of gear, meaning they need 2 or 3 more upgrades.
Here's the same chart for 15 weeks of raiding:
You see that both 10-player and 25-player raids are plateauing at this point. Extended infinitely both would tend towards 100%. But for realistic length of time, 25-players raids will tend to gear out their raiders about 95% of the way while 10-player raids will only tend to gear out raiders about 90% of the way.
So 25-player raids don't need more "badges" or more drops in order to gear up more efficiently. They gear up more efficiently by just rotting less loot. In fact, even if 25-player raids get less loot per person, they can still come out on top. This is 15-weeks of raiding with only 4 drops from 25-player bosses:
On this chart we see that while the 25-player raid starts out pretty even, it pulls ahead as time goes on.
What we have here, then, is really a problem with innumeracy. People want there to be an incentive to raid 25-player because it is harder to raid 25-player. Finding nine friends you like to play with or nine people who are really pretty good is not nearly as hard as doing the same thing when nine becomes twenty-four. It turns out, though, that if we actually understand how the math works out, that incentive exists with the same rewards per person for both raid sizes.
What should the developers do with this information? In a perfect world I'd say set the drops per boss and "badge" rewards to the same per person for 10- and 25-player raids. In reality, the amount of time they would spend explaining why this makes 25-player raids more efficient is probably pretty prohibitive, and their current plans of giving more rewards to 25-player raiders is probably the better one from their perspective, even if it is a tragedy from mine.
Appendix A:
Appendix B:
I think there's a small problem with your analysis, and it's that you're assuming the same loot system for 10 and 25 and the same proportional attendances between 10 and 25. My gut feeling here is that the average 25 man guild will have more issues with the bureaucracy and will end up making less than optimal use of their loot which will drag some of your numbers down.
ReplyDeleteIn particular, we've been running 13ish raiders for most of this expansion with very low turnover. When we were a 25-man guild we had 40+ people as raiders with a much higher churn. So you don't really need to look at 10 people vs 25, but you need to look at 13 vs 42. (Or come up with better estimates for guild size and use those.)
Then you need to account for wastage due to the loot system. 10-man guilds can get away with loot systems that make more ideal distributions of loot than 25-mans can, I think. Also we've always prevented people from taking same ilvl upgrades to smooth out loot distribution but lots of guilds don't. They aren't getting shards or loot from those drops, they're just throwing them into the bin. Loot earned by people who quit is also thrown in the bin, and it's more likely to have that happen to a 25-man guild than a 10, I think. (At the very least, the 25-man guild is more likely to survive when a clique of 5 people quits all at the same time. A 10-man guild just dies.)
I'm not sure I agree that there is a reason to think that 25-player guilds are any more likely to hand out loot badly. Obviously our experience was a complicated system for 25-player and simple and efficient system for 10-player, but that really might just be us.
ReplyDeleteAs for higher turnover, as you note, 10-player guilds are probably more likely to simply collapse because a couple of people leave. I don't know that it would be right to claim that a 10-player guild is more efficient at gearing because it is more likely to cease to exist while the 25-player is less efficient because it has turnover. I don't know how to rate ceasing to exist in gearing up efficiency, but intuitively I would call it "bad" rather than "good" or even "neutral." I think because of this problem I'm tempted to continue to ignore the turnover issue.
As far as having larger rosters, that is probably a valid point. I also would tend to expect that 25-player guilds carry a larger number of players per raid slot, and that gear can get diffuse for that reason.
Also, I didn't account for secondary specs. The main reason I didn't incorporate secondary specs was that it seemed like it was going to be a real pain to code, but I think trends will be the same with and without secondary specs, though numbers will be different.
I should be able to modify my program easily enough to build a guild as well as a raid and have each raid fill with random members from the guild to see how that affects gearing. We'll see how that works out.
So I checked it out, and it seems that carrying a roster on the bench hurts 10-player guilds more than it hurts 25-player guilds. I think this makes a lot of intuitive sense. If holy paladin loot drops, what is the chance one is along for the raid? If you are a 10-player guild you may or may not have a holy paladin in your guild and the chance the paladin is along is number of healers in raid divided by number of healers in guild. For a 25-player guild you are very likely to have a holy paladin, and quite likely two. If you have one you have a slightly worse chance of having one with you than a 10-player raid with one, but if you have two you have a far better chance. Probably being more likely to have one in the guild is what makes the biggest difference.
ReplyDeleteOf course this doesn't take into account the other factor: that a 25-player guild is pretty much *always* going to have a holy paladin in their raid. But trying to model how people actually choose who to bring to a raid is going to make this really, really complicated, and I can't think of a reason why it would chance the results.
Above I have added Appendix A, which shows the same charts as shown above, but this time with a 13 person 10-player guild and a 40 person 25-player guild. Each week they switch the raid up at the midpoint (so one raid composed of random guild members of the appropriate roles get half the drops and a second raid composed the same way get the other half). Even with the 10-player guild having only 23% of its roster on the bench and the 25-player guild having 37.5% of its roster on the bench the 25-player guild still gears up a lot more effectively.
Appendix B shows the same thing but with equal bench ratios: a 14 person 10-player guild vs. a 35 person 25-player guild. You can see how this seems to hurt the 10-player guild more by comparing it to the graphs above.