Rewarded for being 40

One thing that struck me when comparing Molten Core with Zul'Gurub was that the two places are pretty much equal in difficulty. My guild's chance to wipe due to some hickup is as high when killing a MC boss than it is when killing a ZG boss. And for me as individual participant in the raid the difficulty is also very much the same. The only difference is that for MC you need to gather twice as many people, and then you get much better loot in MC than in ZG.

On yesterdays raid from two bosses we only got one real epic, the Will of Arlokk. We got two Primal Hakkari items, which can be exchanged for epics, but a) you need to have good faction for that, and then b) the epic item you get is slightly worse than MC loot. Compare for example MC's priest set, the Vestments of Prophecy with the ZG priest set, the Confessor's Raiment. And even if you consider the Primal Hakkari items to be as good as Molten Core loot, in most cases the ZG bosses just drop one of them plus one or two blue items, while the MC bosses drop at least two epic items each.

So as long as you can get 40 people together, going to Molten Core instead of going to Zul'Gurub is a no-brainer. Better loot for same challenge, great. Only when numbers are low, or you are waiting for MC to reset, or you are just looking for some variety, you are going to Zul'Gurub. Nobody would ever suggest that a guild first needs to get equipment from ZG to be able to go to MC, it is not a stepping stone on the way to BWL and Naxxramas as MC is.

So what the players are basically being rewarded for when going to MC is for their ability to form bigger groups. Which is something that I find strange. A 5-man dungeon is often more challenging for the individual player than a raid. But the 5-man dungeons yield the least good loot, and then the quality of the loot improves with the number of players. Now getting 40 players together at the same time is certainly not easy and requires some organizational talent. But that talent is only required from a few people, the guild and raid leaders, not all 40 participants. No wonder that raiding is so popular, the majority of participants is being rewarded with epics for the organizational skills of someone else. Organizing a good group to Scholomance yourself would be more difficult, and give you less reward for the same number of hours spent.