(Disclaimer: ZOS does not like to call their endgame large-group PvE "Raids" but that's just silly)

Anyone else disappointed that Raiding in ESO seems to be for 24 people?

In my old guild, I used to be the one in charge of putting together 25 man Raids. Do you know how hard it is to find 25 people who can consistently get together at the same time? and if just 5-7 people don't show up, do you know how hard (and boring) it is to have to find replacements. Although I will admit that 25 man raids are a little bit more fun than just 8 or 10 people Raiding, it is REALLY not worth it.

I was really hoping in ESO we would get 8 or 10 person large-group PvE content, so I am little disappointed.

I would have far preferred if ESO would instead implement Flexible Raiding (similar to what Blizzard is introducing in WoW in the next patch), where you can have anywhere from 10 to 25 people in a Raid and the encounters scale in difficulty depending on how many people have. This way, if some people don't show up, you don't have to cancel the Raid or spend hours spamming chat for replacements.

Overall 24 man Raiding being the only option sounds like too much for me (if that ends up being the case).

Thoughts?

It will be fine if the raids are scaled. Such as you can bring 8 or 24(or any other multiple of 8). I am not sure if they have stated that it must be 24.

nope, i think its just right.

Hah. I raided in the 40-man days in WoW, so I am not impressed by the difficulty of putting together a 25-man Not a challenge to do if you have a guild where everybody's oriented towards progressing the guild, as a team and on a schedule...our problem was more who to leave OUT of the raid than filling it.

However, it's a minority of gamers that want to play on that kind of schedule, and deal with the hierarchy, politics and metagame organizational challenges that go with it; it certainly makes gaming into something a lot like a job. Personally, I'm not sure I am up to it anymore the way I was 10 years ago.

Here's hoping 24 man is a maximum raid size and not a minimum. Is there any confirmation that the content WON'T scale to smaller groups?

The 10/25 man raids that Blizzard did for WoW was the starting decline of their raids. Do you realize how poorly balanced the 10/25 man raids were? A lot of the times the mechanics of the boss fights were perfect for 25 man but were to difficult for 10 man. Then they would have to nerf the counter for 10 man even had a chance of beating the encounter but then 25 man just became a cakewalk. And vice versa on some fights were it was easy on 10 but not 25.

ZeniMax needs to do what Blizzard did in Vanilla and TBC create content for only ONE raid size. I enjoyed the 15 man content Blizzard made because it was balanced for that size. It's damn impossible balancing for multiple sizes without cheapening the content or make one size easier than the other.

Plus you have to realize that they are using the Megaserver technology here. So in WoW the most populated servers were aroubd 30k people. We are going to have all (insert number of people here) on one Megaserver. Yeah you have the whole "channels" thing but I think it will be easier to find people to do that content compared to WoW.

And really how are we to know of it is too large or not. None of us have even played the game yet, so a topic like this I feel is very irrelevant due to the fact that we have no way to tell one way or another.

Edit: And honestly if you are so worried about it join a guild where you know people will always be on for raiding times. That's exactly what I did in TBC and WotLK. I went out to find a guild where people were punctual and made sure they were on time every single time for raids (yeah sometimes real life happened so it was ok if you missed). The guild I was in we had to actually tell people they couldn't come because there were to many online during raid times. Join a guild like that and you will never have to worry about anything.

Sounds fine to me. Loved doing dragon raids back on the classic servers on DAoC. Did them as an alliance and would normally be between
4-6 8 man groups was hell a fun. Lol

It depends.

But yes, getting and coordinating 25 people together is never really fun. The organisation and logistics, waiting 45 minutes until everyone has arrived, has the right consumables, buffs and gear .. horrible!

That said, it also depends on how "tight" it is. I remember doing Coilfang Resevoir in WoW TBC. Our main tank got disconnected. Effectively it meant it had all been for nothing and everyone could go to bed.

If dungeons are made in such a way that you need exactly 1 main tank, 2 offtanks, 4 healers, 3 crowd controllers and some DPS and they have to have the appropriate gear, know exactly what to do and you really need voicecom - then it's a pain. Effectively rendering big dungeons only accessible for big, dedicated raiding guilds and excluding more casual players and people without seas of spare time.

If dungeons are more "loosely" designed with random mobs and behaviour and there's room for improvisation, then requirements are far lower (like GuildWars' Fissure of Woe) - and 25 man could work.

But personally my favourite composition is 5 to 10 players. It gets the best "team" feeling.