There is no doubt in my mind that there are a lot of elite players who can do the majority of the game with small groups. However, I believe the majority of players, I'll call them "the average players" cannot do or are not willing to do because of time constraints. In my current clan there are about 20 people and you can pretty much break them down into 3 groups.
-(Hardcores) 5 are hardcore guys who play all day everday, can do just about everything, and legend their characters in the first week.
- (Average) 10 are average players, who play 3-5 days a week when they get home from work etc, who just want to log on, get summoned to group and zone and have fun. Some are legend, some are not, those who are are working towards it but just do not have the time.
-(Superdads) the remaining 5 are guys who basically can play like 2-5 hours a week, log on from their phone while their wife is taking a shower or asleep so they can get in some mud without getting wife.agroed. They barely play but they play when they can and they still enjoy the game and the grouping.
However, since the 8 man change, the superdads NEVER get into groups now, and we have had 2 average players and 1 hardcore already quit because there is just never any room in the group for them, mostly based on class dynamic. For example, if you are a mage, thief, or second healer, there is literally never any room for you in the group unless everybody else has logged off. Mages do nothing to contribute to a group nowadays that they can't do outside of the group (locating or zone specific stuff), and after flank being removed, thieves do jack shit in groups, and if a thief gets tired of the solo content, he is saying goodbye to arcticmud. A second healer is pointless, because if there is already a healer, the secondary healer cannot output dps (since animate dead nerf) so he is utterly useless as well.
Basically because of the 8 man groups, we are forced to have are best 8 guys in the group at all times. Those are the guys with the best gear and best class dynamic. And since they are all of the aforementioned they are also getting the most rank ponts and outranking the already behind guys. And I know there are all these theories like "create a second group" or form a new clan. But that doesn't happen in reality and people just quit from boredom and find other games to play.
So my point is I agree that if anything they should remove the group cap or expand it back to 13-20 when arctic was the most fun. Nobody has hypothesized yet so far that the arctic population has shrunk because the group size shrunk, but instead they claim the opposite, that the group size shrunk because of a shrinking population. However as somebody already previously stated, the group size was made smaller because characters were double annialating instead of massacring, not because the playerbase was dwindling. The population shrinks because players get bored, players get bored because they cannot zone. Players cannot zone because there is a limit to group size. The end.
