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Wraith - you're (at a minimum) ignoring why I want player training to be examined:
There are a load of non-trivial tasks in wow that are not at all intuitive from the game. Hunter shot rotations? Game sucks ass as making them clear. Warlock dot rotations? Game sucks ass at making them clear. Warrior threat rotations? Game sucks ass at making it clear. How to heal and conserve your mana? Not automaticly obvious.
Even if it was just a series of npcs as groupmates and a tossed together "end of the encounter, here's the blizzard WWS" it would be vastly superior to the existing out of the box wow. While it's nice to say that "the game is extendable, and the player community provides a lot of player training" that doesn't absolve a game dev of their core responsibilities, some of which involve "teaching new people to play their game". Look at how many resources the average raid leader of a bleeding edge guild has availabe, and then consider how likely it is that (for instance) a 30 year old non-gamer who pored themselves into the game would find them from the game alone. They'd probably have someone point them out, or they'd head out to google, but wow itself doesn't do a very good job, it depends on people teaching others or google stepping in to index and that's bad design.
I don't think player x the lazy/stupid is going to be helped. I do think player y the ignorant can be. It's nice to say "type it into google, get an answer" but given the number of real people I deal with on a regular basis who simply don't know about google, that's not an acceptable position for the dev team to take. Someone buying wow from the walmart stand isn't guaranteed to have played any other game before. It's likely they played solitaire on their window's pc at least once, but assuming everyone's gone through the player training in "The Legend of Zelda" wherein many people learned to hit everything with your sword, just in case seems foolish. Wow already has a fair bit of player training built into it's leveling - and it did incredibly well as a result. It seems that if we want raiding to do as well as the game as a whole, we should at least consider the merits of additional player training related to raiding.
Personally, I don't care if random mouthbreather z can raid - I do care that the total raiding population increases, and I can acknowledge that to increase the population requires more mouthbreathers learning to play.
In the long run - if the entire game can raid, then there's more dev time spent on raiding, which as a raider you should enjoy the benefits of. Same deal on the pvp side. As we've gone over - raiding in wow isn't particularly taxing in terms of actions per second. So raiding should be fairly accessible to the general wow populace. What likely holds it back is that the entrance requirements are non-trivial (find matching schedules) and the mechanics of organizing/functioning in a raid are noticably different from the single player training.
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