Ok, so a couple of things I've been thinking about lately have been cropping up and I wonder about them specifically. WoW v3.1 is coming around the corner soon, and that means a number of things: #1, a new raid dungeon. #2, it means that there's bound to be a tidal wave of complaints as new content arrives. Whenever people think about the raid game, the five most (potentially) dangerous words in game design are often uttered by an armchair designer: "Wouldn't it be cool if..." And it makes sense, since at the outset everyone has lots of ideas and many of them would indeed be cool. They think about them, and some people even flesh the ideas out on paper, or the internet, or whatever. And that's cool, it's fun for somebody to do. However, others seem to take that and think "I could be the next designer and get paid to do this stuff!". While this is true, it's actually less likely than you think... mostly because the difference between somebody who's been designing encounters for years knows a lot of details to think about that the regular armchair designer would never have thought of. Let's investigate what I mean.

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