[Would be nice]Raid spectator mode!

It seems that pretty much everyone in this thread (so far) agrees that this is a good idea and so do I.
Unfortunately as far as I’m aware we don’t have any current plans to implement such a feature any time soon, we know that some players have been asking for spectator mode to be added to arenas for quite a while now, but that’s something that would require a huge time investment from our dev team and we need to assess if the amount of players that would benefit from such a feature would be large enough for it to be worth such an investment.
In the end everything is a trade-off, that’s why prioritizing the most relevant and important ideas is so important to us.

I will take this suggestion to the devs though, maybe they will be more open to prioritizing this idea a bit higher if the playerbase affected by it is large enough, since this could easily apply to both raids and arenas, so, to both the PvE and PvP communities, and this is where you come in, if you think this is something you would definitely use and are looking forward to seeing in-game, please tell us about it here.
My (wild) guess is the tech required for such a feature would probably work somewhat similarly for any instanced event, requiring only smaller tweaks to adapt it to particular ones like the arenas.

Thanks for the suggestion; I really hope that one day we can have such a feature as I’m sure it would turn sitting out of a raid and watching arenas into something much more exciting.
I’m only slightly concerned about the possibility for spoilers, since this could potentially allow players to see all the content without really experiencing it, but of course this makes little to no sense at all in a world with YouTube and LFR. It’s also all about the framework, there’s a ton of ways we could restrict this feature, achievements would probably be one of the easiest filters we could use.

19/10/2012 11:20Posted by Aldrox

I can even imagine it can lead in such absurd things that every player will have some personal couch watching things and giving real time advices on skype so for complex fights he is just guided by intelligent person who thinks ahead which will be much more effective than how boss mods works nowadays.

I agree, that doesn’t even seem that far-fetched to me. That’s why I like these discussions; there’s always some really good points being made, and even if this is just brainstorming about something that might never make it to the game, it’s very helpful for us and the devs to get any suggestion polished by your collective brainpower.

19/10/2012 11:20Posted by Aldrox

Solution (not easy technically probably) can be that spectators will have some sort of short delay or limitaion of what can they view or how they can move. If for example they see everything which happens with 20 seconds delay, this tactical superiority would be practically useless - all what they can do is just make some general recommedation what vent wrong, but this can be easily done by external methos already nowadays.

Exactly, a possible solution could be simply introducing some delay, I’m sure there’s many more ways we could minimize the drawbacks of this idea, our dev team is pretty good at coming up with intelligent solutions.

Also, I would like to reinforce that this is currently just a suggestion, I understand that when a blue posts on something, expectations might rise a bit, but I’d hate to have to avoid posting on such threads only on the basis of not creating false expectations, I always approach people assuming that they’re smart and reasonable and I only back down when proved otherwise, I’m sure you understand that this only means I personally liked the idea and that I think it’s worth brainstorming about it, if I can contribute by bringing some attention to it, great! I believe that really good ideas can come from the community and if presented in a logical and structured manner, they can help us a lot by providing fresh out-of-the-box ideas that sometimes are incredibly hard to come up with when you’re on the inside.

So, thank you for being so constructive and for taking your time to help us improve our games! As soon as I get any more information about this I'll make sure to let you know.

Quite funny tbh... In what way were "Pet Battles" relevant and important?
I've had my stand on Pet Battles ever since the idea was announced and always thought the time it took developing it could've been used to other ideas, such as this... Seeing how this is a great idea, that can end up doing good, being used as a teaching instrument and such.

Pet Battles are a great addition, some players might not like them but we see that a lot of players are using them to the point of almost not levelling their own characters by spending time only doing Pet Battles, which proves its success, something that is this entertaining has to be relevant and important, as we’re talking about a video game.

But I do understand your point, you’d probably like to see improvements to the parts of the game you enjoy the most in WoW, but that’s the issue, there are so many different kinds of players and different types of content that appeal to each of those groups, so we have to prioritize what we think is more relevant, there are so many different kinds of things that could use some development time, we need to decide which ones get it first, and while player numbers aren’t the only variable that matters, it certainly has its weight when making decisions about priorities.

If you’re still unsure about Pet Battles popularity, we even have a forum completely dedicated to them, check it out ;)