To recap my suggestion, my proposal is that any leaderboard placement would require exactly 20 still. If you want to compete for world first, you have to run 20. If you want to shoot for HOF, you have to run 20. If you want to show up on raider.io as a top 250 guild, you have to run 20.
I acknowledge that balance between different raid sizes would likely be a mess. But at that point, who cares? So long as every raid size is still significantly more difficulty than the fight at that size on heroic and all group-to-group competition is locked to a single size that Blizzard balances first and foremost, the imbalance between 12 and 17 and 21 player raids is going to be significantly less important. Hell, let’s even make the loot that drops when not running exactly 20 capped at hero track, for all I care.
Flex when it was added was its own standalone difficulty. If you wanted to get a normal or heroic raid experience you still had to play by the restrictive roster requirements those modes imposed. By the time it was rolled out to be standard for normal and heroic, it’s impossible to track any other factors that might have come into play.
You may be right that participation wouldn’t change, I won’t try to claim to know for sure. But I do think the situation is quite different from the previous rollout of flex raiding that simply applying those metrics here doesn’t seem like a valid way to project what it might be now.
Comparing to raiding in classic is a big false equivalence. Every raid available in classic requires a specific roster count even when looking to progress through different difficulties. If you clear normal ICC with 25, you don’t need any roster changes to step foot into heroic ICC 25. But in retail you can clear heroic Amirdrassil with any number of players from 10 to 30, but unless you used exactly 20, you have to make roster changes to even attempt the next difficulty.
My statement in no way implies that nobody will raid with strict roster limits, the fact that there are guilds doing just that across both classic and retail proves there are. I just think it creates a significant gap the game would be better to fill.
Sure, but the problem I want to solve would still exist. There are a lot of ways mythic raiding and raiding in general could increase participation. But so long as the pinnacle of raid difficulty has a locked size while at least one stepping stone is flex, there will be teams clearing the flex size early in the tier with slightly more or less than the next difficulty calls for faced with the unenviable choice to either play the roster boss or call it quits until next tier. And personally I think the game would be better if those players didn’t have to face that choice.