Blizzard, what is your plan for 40-man raids?

Q u o t e:
2004-2006. The fastest growing years for World of Warcraft population.

The raid content: Extremely difficult 40-man encounters.

Molten Core
Onyxia
Blacking Lair
Four Emerald Dream Dragons
Lord Kazzak
Ahn'Qiraj
Naxxramas

Are we going to have at least some 40-man content in the Cataclysm or will you stick to Burning Crusade & Wrath of the Lich King's 25-man/10-man formula for every single Cataclysm endgame encounter?

The technology is here. The innovation has been tested. The fun factor still exists.
What are your plans for 40-man raid content? I'd love to hear anything you can say on the subject.

Thanks in advance! :D

Right now our plan is to look back on 40-player raids fondly as a format by which we were able to evolve and customize what we feel to be the best raid formats for World of Warcraft. I don't believe our developers have ever stated that they'll absolutely never do a 40-player raid again, but we're really happy with the raid variety we have now with 10- and 25-player raids featuring normal and Heroic difficulties.

The game did rapidly expand from 2004-2006, but I'm not sure it's safe to assume that such a growth in the size of the player base related specifically to what was happening at the endgame. In fact, it had much more to do with the game's overall accessibility, engaging quest experiences, interesting lore, and strong game play mechanics. It was such a growth that ultimately encouraged our desire to make the raiding game more accessible to the new types of people we were introducing to the MMORPG genre.

So while we haven't rapidly expanded our player base over the last year, we've retained our record subscription numbers after five years since World of Warcraft's release. We feel this in part due to the updates we've made to the endgame. We see a greater percentage of players raiding now than ever before, and not just one or two of the easier raid dungeons as in the original game and first expansion. We're seeing much more casual-oriented players serious about fighting the Lich King, while also seeing some of the most advanced guilds in the world begin to work out the strategies for besting him on Heroic difficulty. Our next step is to go back to the early game in Cataclysm and provide additional updates and improvements to bring it closer in line with our development experience, today's technology, and the type of gamers we want to attract. This is in addition to encouraging existing players to try the game again, but have it feel much more like a new experience.

As a long story short, we'll continue to iterate upon the raiding game to improve it, but we feel we have a working formula right now. In order to appeal to a wider range of players, sheer numbers and time devoted should not be the primary determining factors of success in this game.

Q u o t e:
So.. just found out Sindragosa Hard Mode was already achieved.

Unbelieveable.

Patch has been out for what, a week and already the second last boss is defeated in supposed HARD mode?

It used to take guilds months upon months of learning an encounter to defeat it finally. When does the easymode end?

Let's keep things in perspective here. There is a very small percentage of players who have defeated every raid boss in this game consistently for five years straight now. That kind of experience is unparalleled. There's also a very thick system of online resources for providing and sharing strategies which were not nearly as robust for the original game as they are today. The community that's grown around this game has somewhat changed the way the game is played. That's okay though. That's natural.

The fact that at least 25 members of our player base have killed Sindragosa on Heroic difficulty doesn't say much about whether or not the encounter is more complicated than, say, Twin Emperors. In fact, most of the raiders I've talked to who are at, or have killed the Lich King in 25-player mode say that Icecrown Citadel has provided some of the most fun and interesting mechanics this game has yet to offer. Most of the fights today are technically more complex than the fights of old, but the difference is in the tuning and the polish.

I can think of at least a couple of bosses that took a long time for any guild to kill where bugs were a major factor. As soon as the bugs were fixed, the bosses were defeated. There were also several bosses, take Princess Huhuran for example, which weren't necessarily incredibly challenging from a mechanic perspective. The challenge came in the form of requiring that players farm resistance gear from that same instance for weeks and weeks until they stood a chance. Resistance fights have since more or less disappeared. We want the interesting mechanics of a fight and the fun factor of that fight to be what players remember, not that they had to wait for major bugs to get fixed, or farm enough of a specific type of stat to even stand a chance. Of course there are gear checks still in the game, but they're much more reasonable. They allow you to customize your character to your wishes and prove your talent by successfully performing your class/spec role, while also successfully learning and reacting to the mechanics of each fight. These are areas in which guilds like the one to which you're referring excel to an impressive degree.

Q u o t e:
Little did people know, you actually needed to use AQ40 gear to defeat C'thun. Tier 2 was not enough.

My guild did it in 2006 only a couple weeks after the patch came out that actually made him defeatable.

Yea, that was kind of my point. Sure, it took guilds a long time to kill bosses, but that didn't really mean they were reasonably difficult. We're much happier with our fight mechanics these days. We believe new boss fights -- particularly in tiered progression -- should still feel fresh, not just different avatars with generic mechanics. We also believe we have a much better sense of testing and tuning right out of the gates. Sure, it's not perfect, but most of the bugs released are fairly minor and our response time to correct them via in-game fixes has gotten much faster. ;)