To All the Elite Raiders Out There

Congratulations on being at the top of your game. I mean that sincerely.

I was reading a response to GeeCee's post about how to deal with a guildmate/raider who is consistently not pulling his or her weight in a raid situation. The player had been a member of an elite raiding guild running Blackwing Lair, Ahn'Qiraj and Naxxramas. He bemoaned the current "ease" of raiding in WoW, looking back on the days of Vanilla WoW when men were Men and women were Healers. (OK too much sarcasm, I couldn't resist.) Back then, being a Raider meant something, Raiding was for dedicated, elite players who "put in their dues."

Now let's look at how Blizzard saw it, pre-BC. Developers spending well over half their time (80%-90%, who knows?) developing content that maybe 5% percent of the *paying* player base was seeing. Trying to balance two wildly different faction-exclusive classes so that neither side would feel that they were being shorted. Constantly nerfing and buffing different abilities for all classes for PvP balancing (again for a smaller fraction of players), causing those abilities to be warped relative to PvE content.

Meanwhile, for the players, raids were taking upwards of 20 hours a week for a pittance of rewards. Most players were paying full monthly subscriptions for content they would never see because they didn't have the time to commit to what amounted to a second job, much of which was spent waiting for others to get organized, anyway.

Even well into BC and WotLK, I have sat around accomplishing little or nothing, because I am stuck in a raid group waiting for people to join/get organized. And I can't finish that extra daily or whatever. And don't say I should already be at the instance location, because that would be just as big a waste of time, waiting around for people. Not my idea of a relaxing evening playing a game after I've been working all day.

I was in a guild where they would sub people in and out depending on the boss fight, because they needed gear or just as often because the raid couldn't make it past a boss without some particular class and spec. Luckily for me I wasn't anywhere near rading at the time. All the same, it irritated me. IMHO, the reason for raiding should be what is happening in relation to the story/lore of Warcraft, not the meta-game rewards of gear or achievements. The raid composition should be interchangeable within designated roles. Even then, I think it would be awesome to have a class system full of true hybrids, rather than having a few classes be "pure" DPS, or Tank or Healer.

So if you have been part of a 1337 Raiding Team that knocked out BWL, AQ-40, and Naxx, great. I know you spent a lot of time and worked hard to achieve those things. But most of the 9-12 million people who have played this game have not had time to do so, and yet they paid the same $12-$15 dollars a month you did. And they seem to think, and Blizzard apparently agrees, that might just be an innappropriate allocation of resources. Honestly, that's why the raiding content has been "dumbed down." So more people can see it. Dont worry, you can still run ICC in heroic 25-man mode. Or maybe, as Amuntoth from Manifest Pixel suggests, you could try running it without all your addons, just like the good ol' days.