Ghostcrawler’s ‘More Raids’ Outlook

There’s a problem that’s been coming up on the World of Warcraft developer Ghostcrawler’s twitter feed whenever players ask about things in the world that would require much effort. He compares the effort required to

  • Allow flying in Silvermoon
  • Update Azuremyst Isle
  • Repair stormwind
  • Restore the invasion of Undercity as a scenario
  • Create more 5-man dungeons like the Zandalari content
  • Revamp old raids…

to the creation of a whole new raid.

This worries me.

It worries me because now that the Raidfinder tool is in the game, Raids have gone from being niche content that needed serving alongside all other forms of content, to being the content that everything else inevitably met. There’s a more deliberate sentiment towards (for example) PVP players where they are told a minority of players indulge in their activity, and therefore, the PVP community has to just suck it up when things need fine tuning for them. Doing a large number of dungeons in Cataclysm was a route to things I wanted (mounts and gear), but it’s not in Pandaria.