Controversy about seeker raids and the upcoming nerfs illustrate why raids should be opt-in by default

Raids should require the player to build some kind of object to allow them to occur, instead of them occurring randomly. Here's why –

Valheim has always allowed players to choose when and how to engage with *all* of its content, *except in the case of raids*, which take away player agency in a game that otherwise *completely rewards it.*

There's nothing fun about making something beautiful that gets obliterated without your choosing.

I love the difficulty level of the game – it's got a great "Dark Souls lite" vibe – and I *also* love building aesthetically pleasing creations. I'm literally on both sides of the argument surrounding all this love/hate about the new content – I want to preserve the capacity for difficult encounters, and also be able to choose to make a cool base with wooden houses and things that just look *nice.*

An opt-in raid summoning totem (or whatever) would solve both sides of this complaint. I am fully capable of making a big ugly block of raised terrain surrounded by moats, etc etc, but Valheim has a unique beauty that comes from creations we make with the construction tools in the game. Raids have always felt well outside the bounds of "normal" compared to the rest of the game experience, because it's the only content forced upon players, and I'd rather see support for aesthetic creation in game in the form of making raids opt-in, rather than just telling players "build mathematically optimal survival bunkers or GTFO".

And yes, making raids opt-in would lower the overall difficulty curve of the default experience, but in every other possible situation in the game, *increasing the difficulty has always been left up to the player choosing to do so by the way in which they play*, but nerfing raids by making the harder ones limited to certain biomes isn't an optimal solution for either side of the argument, it's just a band-aid response to community outcry, at least from my perspective.