World of Warcraft's highest-end raiders have spent years perfecting a very strange tradition.
Before seriously progressing a new Mythic raid, build several raid groups filled with mains and carefully selected alts.
Kill the bosses repeatedly.
Feed as much useful loot as possible toward the characters that actually matter.
Repeat until your raid leader begins seeing tier tokens when closing their eyes.
These are split raids.
And Blizzard has now said something fairly blunt about them:
They are problematic, and they are not really how Blizzard wants players to play the game.
Blizzard Has Been Watching Splits for a Long Time
During a new interview with WoW encounter designers Taylor Sanders and Andrew De Sousa, the subject of raid splits came up while discussing high-end progression.
Blizzard said it has always viewed splits as somewhat problematic.
That is not especially surprising.
Split raids exist because top guilds want to concentrate several raids' worth of loot onto a much smaller number of characters before the hardest progression begins.
At Race to World First level, that extra gear can matter enormously.
If one additional trinket, weapon or tier bonus helps shave a tiny percentage off an encounter, the best guilds in the world are going to chase it.
They are competing.
The problem is what happens next.
Race to World First Habits Don’t Stay at Race to World First
Blizzard says one of the things it is specifically watching is how far split-raiding behavior spreads down through the competitive player base.
That may be the more important part of the whole discussion.
Very few guilds genuinely need to copy everything Liquid or Echo does.
But WoW has always had a powerful trickle-down effect.
The best guilds create five characters.
The next tier of guilds decides maybe they should create three.
A considerably more normal guild watches all of this and suddenly Dave is being asked whether his Hunter has a raid-ready Mage alt by Thursday.
Nobody remembers exactly how we got here.
But apparently Dave is now enchanting four sets of boots.
We have already seen a similar argument around Race to World First tuning, where regular players worried that decisions made for the very highest level of raiding were influencing how the rest of the game felt.
That debate became particularly loud during Midnight Season 1.
Split raids are another version of the same problem.
High-end optimization doesn't remain politely contained at the high end.
Why Doesn’t Blizzard Just Stop Splits?
Because that gets complicated very quickly.
Players are allowed to have alts.
Players are allowed to raid with different groups.
Guilds are allowed to decide who receives loot within the rules Blizzard provides.
Stopping splits without creating enormous collateral damage would likely require Blizzard to change loot eligibility, lockouts or raid progression rules in ways that could hurt completely ordinary players.
And Blizzard hasn't announced any such change.
The developers instead said they are monitoring how prevalent splits really are and how much of the behavior is psychological trickle-down from the very best teams.
That distinction matters.
If twenty elite guilds are doing something absurd because millions of dollars, sponsorships and a world-first race are involved, perhaps that is simply the cost of competition.
If hundreds or thousands of guilds begin believing the same behavior is required to raid properly, the game has a different problem.
Season 1 Apparently Put Splits Back Under the Microscope
Blizzard says split raids have become more of a focus following what happened during Midnight Season 1.
That tracks with what we saw during the tier.
Team Liquid's Midnight documentary showed just how exhausting the split phase could become, with the early part of the race dominated by preparation before the truly difficult progression began.
From a competitive perspective, it makes perfect sense.
From almost every other perspective, it looks slightly deranged.
And that is essentially the tension Blizzard now has to solve.
The Best Strategy Can Still Be Bad Game Design
This is one of World of Warcraft's oldest problems.
Players are extraordinarily good at finding the most efficient way to play.
Then they do it.
Then they complain because the most efficient way to play is miserable.
And sometimes both sides are completely correct.
Top guilds aren't wrong for running splits if splits increase their chances of winning.
Blizzard also isn't wrong for looking at that behavior and thinking:
We really didn't intend for you to spend Tuesday gearing six copies of the same class.
The difficult part is creating a system where competitive players can optimize without making the optimal strategy feel like a second job.
Blizzard hasn't solved that yet.
But at least it is now saying the quiet part out loud.
Split raids may be legal.
They may be effective.
They may even be necessary if you're trying to win Race to World First.
But they are not really how Blizzard wants World of Warcraft to be played.
And somewhere, an alt army just felt slightly nervous.
Source: Tettles interview with World of Warcraft encounter designers Taylor Sanders and Andrew De Sousa, summarized by Wowhead.
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