Quote Originally Posted by Ryel View Post
While 24 man raids may be named as such in their classification, they do not fulfill the same role in the content hierarchy as the 8 man raids do. Sure they may be called "raid content" but their ilvl rewards and difficulty do not provide progression on the content ladder which is what remained stagnant up until the expansion release.

To many players the fact that raids are released every 6 months but are usually cleared in less than a quarter of the time is already seen as an issue, catch up patches and 24 man content does very little to entice players who are already at the higher ends of the game as by that point many of them are gearing alternate classes through the same raid that they did for their primary.

An extra 2 months for a playerbase that has been bored for 3 is still a long time.
It could be argued that the 24-man raids help raiders with a few extra pieces of gear to further progress in the current 8-man raid, since it's the minority that clears the 8-man raid in less than a quarter of it's lifespan.
That said, high end raiders are a small minority to begin with, so that part getting bored doesn't necessarily mean that half the playerbase will drop the game.

I did take this into account and if we go further and account for the delay to 3.1 as well as diadem's quick content decay this means that from 2.4-3.2 we saw what was effectively two 8-man raid releases in well over a 14 month period, something that sounds suspiciously close to the same issue players had raised with Blizzard.
Perhaps raidwise, but unlike Blizzard, SE doesn't completely focus on hardcore raid content tailored towards a small minority, and has released other content in that 14 month timeframe of yours.