Evening All.
From our guilds perspective, 16-man Ops are seen as the way to go for a few reasons. Firstly, we have a player-base that has been together over a number of MMOs/online games, so it makes sense to involve as many as we can. Secondly, 8-man encounters feel slightly undertuned (or at least that is the perception we have). Clearing in 16-man gives us a greater sense of achievement.
We took our first steps into Nightmare operations this week and were pleasantly surprised by the challenges we faced. Lets not kid ourselves, Hardmodes aren't exactly that big a step up from normal (all things considered). Wiping should be part and parcel of endgame content.
But the question remains, how do you incentivise guilds to run larger Ops?
I like the idea put forward by an earlier poster of introducing a 16-man only Operation into the game. I appreciate that this may alienate a few smaller sized guilds, however, is it really that difficult to have 20 or so active players.
More loot in 16-man? I see it as being fine as it is. You shouldn't expect to gear an entire guild within 3 or so weeks. There are the added problems with Master Looter. We have our raid leader control group loot, asking our members to roll on each item as it is clicked. It takes time, but until Bioware sort the issue with less items/Alien Data cubes dropping on encounters with ML enabled, this is what we'll have to make do with.
How about having a bonus boss for 16-man operations? Okay, I may get lambasted for this. Just a thought.