Raid Math

Not what you think, either. This isn't about TPS reports or anything like that. It's about people.

In any given group of people, it's useful to think of the number of person-person interactions that are possible. If there's two people, you've got one interaction (or two, if you worry about directionality - either "Phil and I get along" or "I think Phil is okay AND Phil thinks I'm a tool"). If there are three people, you get three connections. However, with four people there are six connections, and with five people there are 10. You can calculate this number (which is referred to as the "choose" or "combination" operation in most combinatorics, and can actually be computed with google) as N!/(2*(N-2)!). The important part of this function is that it scales fairly rapidly.

Why the math? Simple. In a 5 person group, there are 10 interpersonal connections. In a 10 person group, there's 45. That's a fair amount, it's easy to see why there's more raid drama in 10-mans. In a 25 person grouping, there are 300 interpersonal pairings. Three hundred different chances for two people to just hit it off wrong and step on each other by accident, causing drama. A 40 person raid has 780 connections.

That's just a first approximation, too. In 25-person groups and higher, you can't really ignore the weird group dynamics that emerge with 3- and 4- person groupings. Everybody gets along fine normally, but when you put these 5 people in a group together, someone else starts getting pissy. Because, you know, those 5 together end up talking politics or start calling things "gay" or doing other random behaviors that annoy the crap out of me, even though I could group with any two of them individually and be just fine.

What's even worse is that group stability goes up with raid size. That is to say, if you're in a crappy 5 person pug, you can drop group. If you find four other like-minded people, you can run a lot of regular instances. But in order to field an actual 25 person raid, your choices of raid partners are going to be very limited. A raid leader simply cannot afford to pick and choose people based on interpersonal relationships - if you bring in one new person, you can't make sure 24 other people like them first.

There's really only one answer to this - professionalism. To succeed in a 5 person group, you just have to be a decent player and be pretty social. To succeed in 25 person raids takes an entirely different set of social skills, the ability to work with people you don't particularly like.

Dang, this game gets more and more like a job every day.