Variable Raid sizes

At the dawn of MMORPG raiding the idea of a “raid tool” was unknown. You simply collected as many groups of players as you possibly could and threw them at the raid mob in question. This lead to some rather negative consequences of course but you virtually never told a player you “didn’t have room.” I’m starting to miss that little perk and it has got me thinking. Do we really have to have hard caps on raids?

The answer most people will quickly throw back at me is that, yes we do or you’ll be able to zerg raid mobs. That would certainly have been true before but as MMOs become more sophisticated and can track things like “the number of attempts” or “who was recently resurrected and how many times” I have to wonder if we can’t do more. Could we take the hard cap off of our raids and float our raid’s difficulty?

I imagine developers could implement some sort of scaling model that could look at the total number of players and increase a raids difficulty through health, damage per second and other “simple” metrics. Where I imagine the difficulty would arise is in handling classes. Does this scaling take into account how many DPS classes you add or does it simply just make the raid hit harder and essentially dictate a need for more healers? Could a raid be smart enough to adjust what it does based on the classes over the cap? More healers? Hit harder! More DPS? More HP! It would certainly seem interesting to me.

You’d also have to look at the issue of risk versus reward. Does adding a player tip the mobs balance towards easier or harder? If it does angle towards harder are there greater rewards available? Could that be easily exploited? It all comes down to the fact that I am disappointed when we have to cut a raider out because we have too many. I believe we can do better! Is this just something I’m into or do others find value here?