The numbers are in and WoW raid participation has fallen off a cliff.
We are not just talking mythic raiding. Normal and Heroic raiding are both doing atrociously. This is even more problematic taking into account that tier sets in 9.2 actually incentivize doing raids for gear that is useable in content like M+. Whereas the lack of tier sets in BFA and 9.0 + 9.1 gave no good incentive to run raids.
So what´s going on? Why do people, generally, not raid anymore?
Raiding has become too hard to placate the top 1 % of the WoW playerbase
I think it is pretty obvious what is happening, and it is something Asmongold talks about frequently and can be seen in his content.
If you watched Asmongold content you would know that some of his most popular content was creating Pug raids when the new raid tier would be released. He would create a raid with the intent of getting world first normal clear on normal. Of course the entire thing would be a big joke that his viewers were ´´in on´´, it would be sort of like WWE wrestling in a WoW raid setting. Asmongold would put on his fake tough guy raid leader persona and complain when people were failing mechanics, and threaten to kick them, even though he himself and his friends were constantly dying and themselves doing an awful job. Asmongold would also intentionally invite bad players to make the thing more challenging. At the end of the day though, Asmongold would finally clear the normal raid and give a speech to the team about what a great job they did.
Well things have changed, because as the raids have progressively gotten more difficult, Asmongold´s normal pug can no longer clear the normal raids on release day in Shadowlands.
Well what do the top players and the RWF have to do with normal and heroic difficulty you might ask. Aren´t they only interested in mythic raiding?
Well. The problem is simple. RWF are now full-time WoW players where the raid leader doesn´t even play the game anymore. Where massive amounts of money is spent to buy the best gear. Compare this to the average WoW player, a boomer in his / her 30s with limited time and a full-time job.
To make up for the competitiveness in the RWF, Blizzard have made the raid significantly more difficult each tier, to the point of absurdity with Limit literally giving up. This has catastrophic consequences for the mythic raid tier. Players throw in the towel early, because they realize clearing mythic is now totally out of reach. Guilds are now settling to become heroic raid only guilds instead… But even heroic and normal are affected.
Because in balancing mythic for RWF it would become weird if normal and heroic were complete joke walk overs for the raiders and the difficulty suddenly did an insane difficulty spike at Mythic. I mean, how would it look on Twitch, if the best players in the world just owned the heroic raid in 4 hours? There has to be some kind of natural progression into the uber difficulty of mythic, and thus heroic and normal is affected.
Keep in mind, normal is supposed to be content for friends and family, it is supposed to be incredibly easy. Heroic is supposed to be the level above that. Yet with the increase in difficulty both tiers are now becoming much more difficult. With even the best raiders in the World who are now doing this professionally, having a harder time on heroic raids than they did 4 years ago.
First impressions matter, and having the raid be an unbalanced mess, because you were afraid that RWF raiders would make normal and heroic look like a joke is a massive problem. Because to people who play WoW 70 hours a week normal and heroic IS supposed to be a joke.
What should be done?
So here we are. Raiding, which used to be one of the most important parts of WoW has now been ruined for the majority of the playerbase, not just on mythic difficulty, but on normal and heroic, to please a minority of the playerbase.
The truth is that Blizzard should just completely ignore the RWF. If these players want to nerd out so hard that they are ruining their own fun let them. Let them clear the mythic raid in one day. Look at the massive success Classic WoW and Classic TBC WoW had. Why were they so popular? Because a bunch of in their 30´s boomers can easily clear the content whilst semi-drunk having fun on discord. WtlK was also ridiculously easy, with massive raid participation compared to Vanilla, and it was the most popular iteration of the game ever!!
The entire design philosophy in WoW was about creating a game for casuals, it´s why it had such a massive success compared to EverQuest. Blizzard need to go back to their roots and completely ignore RWF raiders, pretend they don´t exist.
Solution? Make raiding much easier. In fact I would argue that Blizzard should be aiming to have 10 % of the population finish the hardest difficulty of the raid at the end of an expansion. If this is to be achieved by also adding extra powercreep for players, like we had with corruptions, or powercreep through borrowed power / titanforge and insane tert stats in addition to ease of difficulty, then so be it.
TLDR?
The mythic raid tier is becoming more and more difficult every tier to make the RWF more interesting.
This increase in difficulty hurts the mythic raiding scene. Mythic raiding simply becomes too difficult, leading to lower participation, which is bad, because less people engaging in content is bad for the game.
This also has the consequence of hurting normal and heroic raiding, because the normal and heroic difficulty also get affected by Blizzard´s attempt to make the RWF interesting. This massively hurts the casual playerbase of WoW and is therefore, obviously, bad for the health of the game.
The End
(EDIT)
Added proof of current retail raid ´Sepulcher of the First Ones´ doing awful compared to the current TBC Classic raid.
Sunwell plateau has significant more logs compared to normal + heroic + mythic raid combined.
