Wowinsider has a great post up today arguing that 25-man raids should give the same gear as 10-man raids.  Eliah makes a number of good points about why he thinks this should be the case.  He goes on to argue that even if both raids gave the same gear, 25-man raiding would not die.  He ends the post with a poll (the results currently seem to be going against his point).

I’m currently an officer in a 25-man raiding guild.  I’m actually the main organizer of the guild (sort of like the guild leader).  I love my guild and everyone in it.  But, I can guarantee that I would not have worked so hard at growing the guild so large and recruiting so much if 25-man raids gave the same gear as 10-mans.  In fact, once we had a good 10-man group going, I probably would have mostly stopped recruiting.  There would be no reason to continue to grow the guild when 10-man raids gave the same level of gear.  There’s a number of reasons for this:

1. Recruiting new people to your guild is always a risk.  You don’t really know who the person is or how they well they will fit in. 
2. The size of your guild has to increase tremendously to be able to consistently raid 25-mans.  You really only need about 15 people in your guild to raid 10-mans, but you often need over 40 people in your guild to be able to raid 25-mans, especially if you run a casual guild like mine. 
3. Managing all those people is much more difficult and running a 25-man raid is much more difficult than a 10-man.  You have a lot more people who need to leave early and who afk and your entire raid slows down. 
4. It’s obviously more difficult to get 25 people together than it is to get 10.

Now that we have a good 25-man group going, I love doing 25-mans.  But, I can guarantee that if 25-man raids gave the same loot as 10-man raids, my guild would not have grown to the size it is now, and I’m sure that the same would be true for many other guilds.  25-man raiding will drop in popularity considerably if 10-man raids give the same loot.  There may be some guilds that continue doing 25-mans, but I’m sure many people will find 9 other people they really love to raid with and know are good and just stick with them.  In general, I believe less people will raid since all the “good” people will be grouped together in 10s, leaving the not-so-good people out in the cold.  There will be less PuGs and less raiding overall.

I’ve found that an amazingly large number of people only raid because their guild schedules it or because they are asked to go.  Good guild leaders and raid leaders are relatively rare.  With most guilds only doing 10-man raids, WOW will need over twice as many good raid leaders to lead these raids.  I don’t think WOW has that many good raid leaders.  There are many people who are quite content doing their own thing and doing PvP.  They enjoy raiding, but they’re not going to go out of their way to try to get into a group.  They certainly won’t organize their own raids or their own guild.  These people will likely end up not raiding at all except for the occasional PuG or if they manage to get into a guild with a good raid leader.

Personally, I don’t care either way if 25-man raids give the same gear as 10-mans.  I’ll probably end up running 10-mans a lot more and loving it.  But, I think it will hurt the game overall.  People like to raid but they don’t like to lead, deal with drama, deal with loot issues, etc.  Less people will raid and more people will get bored with the game.  Subscriptions will go down.  Overall, I don’t think it would be a good move for Blizzard.