Depends. There’s two major scenarios - first is that the change is a feature or enables a feature that is worth it. If someone made the call that changing group sizes would improve player interest or engagement or whatever, it becomes a straight $ to invest in development → $ in expected financial return calculation. As long as that’s a good ratio, it’ll get priority.
The second scenario is technical debt. If an old code/codebase is making future changes take X% more time/$ to have to work around, someone can make the argument that the first step in doing a new feature is to refactor the technical debt out. Usually, that’s also done in a way where you’re projecting improvements in future development (or upgrading old libraries to newer/easier to develop and manage ones). Sometimes that’s a spiral tho. Let’s say it’ll take 1 week of dev time to refactor in one go. If not refactoring is costing 1 additional day for a new feature, people might just eat the cost because the deadline is more important now (1 day vs 5). Do that enough times, and you might end up “losing” more over time, but each individual decision to skip refactoring was the “right” one at the time it was made.
It’s also the kind of thing that can be done piecemeal. If you’re doing a new feature, do it the “new” way and leave the old stuff untouched. Then, over time, as you’re touching the old stuff, you bring bits and pieces over to use the new. Eventually, you may get to the point where you can deprecate the old, or it’s a much smaller effort to finish the job.
A raid group of more than 5 is possible, but that brings other potential complications that I don’t believe you can simply dismiss without at least considering them first.
Is there? I had a brief think about that, but most of the party-specific spells and buffs are now gone, many people already play with “Show Party as Raid” type UI’s, overall it might end up meaning that the whole Party UI goes fairly unused for a while, but idk that there’s any major complications that I can see from the outside - at least from a gameplay PoV.
If their group finder system doesn’t allow “partial” parties, that might be a weird one to have to work around.
I don’t think such a suverying mechanism exists, and frankly I wouldn’t be surprised if this was a moving target.
While there’s AN argument for group size adjustments, I don’t think that’s the main key. I think the bigger problem when it comes to tank vs dps vs healer and what players enjoy comes down to a few other factors. Take tanks:
- Does the game encourage new players to consider tanking? If the big ads or characters are Mages, Rogues, Hunters, etc., that’s what people who are picking up the game for the first time are going to be thinking about. How many people are thinking stuff like “IMA BEAR RAWR I PROTECC”.
- Is the new tank experience easy to learn? Practice? Are there things in being a new tank that turns people who try it off? What IS the fun of being a tank?
- Is the problem something to do with tanking as a whole, or group finder as a whole?
- Have the changes to tank gameplay been good? Take kiting - plenty of people I know hate the normalisation of kiting. Or the various shifts we’ve had in self-sufficiency, scaling, etc. Target caps, Vengeance, affixes, all kinds of things to consider in how tanking has developed and changed over the years.
