Not attempting to revive the one thousand and twelve part thread. Just the lack of readily available statistics on an activity that pretty much forms THE basis for most MMOs end-game niggled. Those statistics would be known to developers - super easy to pull from their databases - but are rarely advertised.

There are many anecdotal claims that WOW released a 5% early on. But I couldn't find the source for that. NCSoft released a powerpoint presentation with lots of detailed statistics for City of Heroes but that was back when they had no end-game content at all so wasn't useful for this.

My search wasn't a complete failure though.http://www.wowprogress.com/post/120_MoP_first_week_of_raiding_results published one useful statistic from the first week following the opening of a new raid dungeon in WOW's panda expansion:

835,000 unique players raided in Mogushan Vaults in the first week with a guild registered on the wowprogress.com site

While that only counts players who raided with guilds registered on the site, because of the time-intensive and serious nature of raiding (one person goofing up can screw everyone) I think it's likely that the majority of raiding activity is guild based. I also think its likely that a high proportion of those guilds would register with a site like this.

At the time those stats were generated WOW's population was about 10 million players. The site collects data not just from the US servers but also the European and Asian ones so there's no reason to believe the 835k figure is just for US players. Conservatively that gives us 8.35% of players raiding.

Even allowing for PUG raiding and guilds not registered on the site I strongly doubt the full proportion would be above 20%.

Anectodal Evidence

Stats like this can be found peppered around the internet. I wouldn't call them super reliable but there could be a basis for them. If nothing else it speaks to the perception of the popularity of raiding. People seem to think WOW released an official figure but I can't track it down.

http://http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/3053677929?page=1

I would like to know what is the % of wow players that is actually involved in the endgame raiding, i remember that back in vanilla it was about 5% of the wow community and in BC it hit like 20%.. what is it now?

And by endgame raiding I mean regularly (at least twice a week scheduled) going into a current level raid instance with the intent of a full clear or boss kill.

Another Twenty Percenter

Someone else pulling stats from raid sites ended up in roughly the same place. You can read how they arrived at it http://vokshumbleopinions.blogspot.com.au/2012/02/how-many-people-raid.html.

Fourteen Percent?

Possibly this poster did some calculations to arrive at the 14% figure but they haven't detailed them. Their 11 million'ish US players is obviously way off but they refer to a statistic taken from wowprogress.com, which we know collects data from all regions so it's unlikely to be a US specific statistic anyway. If actually US specific that would significantly increase the 14% figure to .... roughly 70% of players but taking the 8.5% figure from the most recent expansion into account, would also speak to a sharp decline in raiding. That seems much less likely to me than this mysterious statistic in question being a worldwide one. Plus there's the anecdotal 5% figure.

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/3053677929?page=2#27

@OP, for the US Realms estimate using wowprogress from the start of this xpac. The rough estimate is around 14% of the player base.

241 realms: 1605430 toon names counted

Presuming the 11ish mil total player base for US realms.

Take the numbers with a grain of salt as a very rough estimate only.

What About TESO?

It occurs to me that ZO may have reliable statistics on this which informed their decision on end-game design. Ten to twenty percent is a substantial proportion of players but leaves the vast majority unaccounted for. Some probably leave while others loiter more or less aimessly. That's kind of what I was doing towards the end of my days in WOW. Fishing, harvesting and crafting for guildies, making money on the AH, etc. But that didn't amuse me for long.

There are some aspects of "traditional" raiding that I enjoy and so far ZO's few statements about their plans in this department have me intrigued and a bit hopeful about TESO's end-game offerings.

A lot from WoW is based on the raid finder now, it skews the results to an unknown number. Blizzard never said a number *or* said raiders were in the minority. That is a misquote people use.

Just my opinion

Well we can argue and debate just how many people raid and do large group end game content forever but that sort of misses the point IMO. Bottom line is and has always been for me on this topic is that those that enjoy that type of content is not an insignificant amount. Certainly not insignificant enough that you can ignore them and just think you can get by w/o having that type of content in your game. Fortunately it appears ZOS realizes this as well.