Its all a bunch of bullshit regardless.
Remove raid caps.
Let people zerg if they want.
Reward those that don't with different looks of the same gear, epeen boards with tons of stats to compare / contrast. Holy shit the meta game would be a blast to compare and contrast speed, average deaths, number to kill the boss, dps, heals etc etc etc. So many stats why they don't do something with all this info and put it out on their website / forums is beyond me.
The end result is people aren't locked out of any content, the good players get rewarded in multiple ways and everyone is happy. If you want to bring 100 puggers to kill the boss with 2 items be my fucking guest. You want to carry that lady that makes cookies and does phone sex on the weekends so be it. You want to go super hard core and go for the perfect victory achievement and win the "we did it with less" war you can do that as well. Same with timed runs, no deaths, lowest amount of heals, fastest time to kill etc etc..
All that adds to the meta game. Stop worrying so much about how people beat your shitty fucking raid mechanic and let us play the fucking game please. How and when we want. Time vs reward will take care of the rest.
The sooner developers STOP with the surgical developing and micro managing every little move the better. GTFO of my game because the only thing your rules and restrictions do is fuck up the fun.
I agree with your sentiment because if you can make content that everyone can do no matter what, the better. However, in the end, that's not how it works (I wrote about this a few pages ago). You're fighting a few different things with this design philosophy. If you design a really interesting raid encounter, and if you can just bring 10-20 extra people and cheese it, what's the point of making an interesting raid encounter in the first place? Why not just make a bunch of loot pinatas in the game and be done with it?
From your personal point of view, you got to kill a big bad guy and got loot with 2-3-10-50 of your friends. It wasn't very hard at all, but you got stuff. But you had fun because you saw some new art and got loot so who cares?
From an overall, macro point of view, the game has no continuity and sense of accomplishment becomes deflated. In the end, everyone will zerg, or two box, and all encounters become trivial. Then no one really cares what everyone else does. If everyone can just kill the big bad guy, then your accomplishment of doing it with 10 people has no value because everyone else did it.
Sure you might get a title saying, "I beat this bad guy with 10 friends instead of 50 so I'm awesome" but no one cares. Just look at WOW and how the raid game is just bland, and no one really gives a fuck if you did it on Heroic or if you did it via LFR? Progression is saturated and so does your accomplishments.
So the style of game you want exists in WOW and I personally don't like the direction they went. If you asked me 4 years ago, I would of agreed with you 100%, but looking at how raid saturation affected WOW, I see where Wildstar is going with their game.
