Is it time for a dungeon blacklist?

An interesting question was posed recently on Twitter to Ion Hazzikostas: is there going to be a dungeon blacklist option, like there is with PvP battlegrounds?

For those unaware -- when you queue up for a random PvP battleground you can pick two battlegrounds that you don't want to do. The system honors those blacklist selections and you won't be placed in those matches. This is very useful for days when you constantly get Arathi Basin (like I do all the time).

The idea of applying this to dungeons is interesting, and one that I think has some merit to it. When running dungeons there's always a few that no one likes to do, or at least that's the perceived opinion. I'm thinking of things like Heroic Deadmines. There were points in there that were a virtually guaranteed wipe in a PuG. And this expansion I'm not a fan of the Stormstout Brewery... it can just be so long at points, with someone always getting stuck behind the doors for the big bad rabbit of carrot death.

So while it's obvious that the utility of the list would be nice, I think it's questionable if it would be useful from a game perspective. There's a lot of battlegrounds -- but there seems to be less and less dungeons to run. If there's only a handful (or slightly more) of them to run in WoD, then eliminating one or two from the list would have pretty negative consequences for a large number of people. You can't just decide which three dungeons you want to run over and over again, and it's not fair to the other players that the collective community decides those three favorite dungeons are the only ones that should be run.

To put it in another way: if the total number of dungeons to select isn't large enough, then things are not going to work out good for the game in the long run. Blizzard won't do things (at least intentionally) to harm the base gameplay, and in my opinion this has the potential to hurt things.

Now ... there's a magic bullet here. If we were to get a gear scaling mechanic added in, as has been heavily hinted at and even discovered in bugs before, then it could open up all the dungeons in WoW to be ran at max level. Throw in some sort of reward system, and then allow for two dungeons to be blacklisted. Bam. You've got yourself a helluva good system.

And that system? That's a system I would go crazy for.