What's so wrong with appealing to the 'casual' player?

[pretenses]

I was reading the thread about WotLK, and it got me to thinking.

Most of the complaints I read about the game are about how the game is too easy, or that it's directed at the 'casual' player. Why? I just don't get it.

I've been playing since vanilla, though I didn't play too much in BC, and played a lot in WotLK, and since I've been doing the cycle a lot of us are used to. Play, feels grindy after a few months, retire, come back a few months later.

I don't understand why everyone complains about how "easy" it is, or how "faceroll" certain things are, and really, the "end of the sense of community" drives me insane. WoW isn't worse off than it was pre WotLK (when a lot of this started happening). Do you remember how bad it sucked having to get a group together to do a dungeon? Do you remember how hard it would be to get a spot in a raid guild, or hell, even get a raid team together? It wasn't impossible, but it definitely was harder than it is, and I distinctly recall many people complaining about it.

As for the sense of community, we've always had little shits in the community, with their heads up their asses. It'll never change. WoW brings out the arrogance in certain people. It's still definitely possible to find a guild with good, friendly people. If you choose to join a hardcore raiding guild where noone talks, well that's your problem isn't it?

Really, what's so wrong with the direction WoW has been going in for the last 3 xpacks?

[bleh bleh 420 bleh]

It's not the game's fault, people are just bored so they are going to find something to complain about. And the game's not easier. You can still PuG dungeons, you can still do "most" things you used to do. If you don't like something, don't do it. And just because you do something doesn't mean you get the right to whine about it.

[pretenses]

Thank you for summing it up for me. Lol. I tend to get a little ranty when I get excited. >.>

[Stir]

Well...
Nothing, really. Being casual-friendly is, on the whole, very good for a game that promotes just having fun with one another.

There are a few things I'm personally unhappy about, however:
Gear. I'm sorry, but I'm so incredibly sick of grinding. Rep grinding, valor grinding... I want all my initial gear to come from heroics, and hop into LFR. Seriously. I want to play more, and grind less. Now; this is a 'casual' thing. People who couldn't play as much would have the option of still getting gear through grinding for rep... But in my opinion, that's a really casual-unfriendly way to go about it.
...
Actually, that about sums it up. Grinding is just not fun.

The problem lies with many people who believe 'casual' to be synonymous for 'bad.' Players who don't know how to gem, enchant, pull off a rotation, what talents to pick... Those inabilities are often, usually, ascribed to a lack of experience, and therefore, to 'casuals.' 'Casuals' wouldn't be able to beat difficult content because they're bad. And that's simply not true. The reason 'casuals' can't beat hardmodes is because 'casuals' don't have the time to attain the same levels of gear. I'd much rather invest time in researching a raid and then playing than I would in grinding gear, but skill is tertiary to WoW's endgame. And yes, that includes PvP.

[pretenses]

Well...
Nothing, really. Being casual-friendly is, on the whole, very good for a game that promotes just having fun with one another.

There are a few things I'm personally unhappy about, however:
Gear. I'm sorry, but I'm so incredibly sick of grinding. Rep grinding, valor grinding... I want all my initial gear to come from heroics, and hop into LFR. Seriously. I want to play more, and grind less. Now; this is a 'casual' thing. People who couldn't play as much would have the option of still getting gear through grinding for rep... But in my opinion, that's a really casual-unfriendly way to go about it.
...
Actually, that about sums it up. Grinding is just not fun.

The problem lies with many people who believe 'casual' to be synonymous for 'bad.' Players who don't know how to gem, enchant, pull off a rotation, what talents to pick... Those inabilities are often, usually, ascribed to a lack of experience, and therefore, to 'casuals.' 'Casuals' wouldn't be able to beat difficult content because they're bad. And that's simply not true. The reason 'casuals' can't beat hardmodes is because 'casuals' don't have the time to attain the same levels of gear. I'd much rather invest time in researching a raid and then playing than I would in grinding gear, but skill is tertiary to WoW's endgame. And yes, that includes PvP.

I just recently came back for MoP, so I haven't gotten that grind. I do get what you're saying though. After all I've read, the grind for gear seems endless for a lot of people, and that's really...not fair.
Logically, Bilzz could look at their playerbase and see that people tend to go on 'hiatus' when things get too grindy for their liking, so it really surprises me that they would force such a grindy tactic to get something as pivotal as gear. To me, rep has always been something for achievement hunters, not for end game raiders.

As for the casual player, I'm extremely casual myself. I really only play healers (aside from my mage), and my keybinds have 4 buttons and I keep 'oh shit' buttons and cooldowns as click only. That's how casual I am. (I know it's bad, too.) But still, people always praise my healing, because I know what I'm walking into, and I can manage myself in the fights really well. You'd probably never assume I'm a clicker if we were to be in the same group.

I don't know man. I just don't see the harm in appealing to people who just wanna have fun, too.

[Drfireburns]

I think the BC formula worked the absolute best for gear and raids. Getting good blue items and one-twp epic items to drop from the final boss was nice. It made you want to go back and run that dungeon the next day for a certain item, which at the time was really needed, especially once jumping into T4 content. Getting exalted with factions did offer some nice gear, but usually by the time you were exalted with a faction you had something as good if not better. Grinding then offered nice enchants, patterns, pvp items, etc.

[BergErr]

Because it make the game boring for ppl that want to put little more time into it.
WoW pretty much got no grind, only first week or two (depending on gametime ofc, I did full 471 from HCs in a weekend). After that its just killing some boss and pray for your item.
Grind for gold to improve your char? Nope.
Grind for item to improve your char? Nope.
Grind for some enchanting system to improve? Nope
Grind for levels? Barely, new exp and ppl hit the cap in hours/days. Afaik 1-60 in vanilla took time, now not so much.
Check like Lineage2 where first player reached lvlcap (went from 85-99) 5months after update and he played 20h~ "a day". Last I checked there was no "casuals" that had reached max lvl, its over 1year since patch.

[Deleted]

I think that peoples only wants to paint them as oldfag by forcing themselves to think that older means better, on BC everyone were thinking that the expansion sucked, on WotLK everyone were thinking that WotLK sucked but that BC and Vanilla were good, etc .....

It's a giant conformism whirlpool, peoples thinks that older means better simply cause ... other peoples thinks like that too...

That's a lot of hatred here, but i'm tired of peoples saying shits and not accepting the truth, they're all saying that the game is too easy when there is blatant proof that it's actually harder, most of thoses peoples are PvE boys and they're complaining about raids being easy, but they never touched to hardmodes and their stuff is only made of LFR pieces...

[Pann]

I think the BC formula worked the absolute best for gear and raids. Getting good blue items and one-twp epic items to drop from the final boss was nice. It made you want to go back and run that dungeon the next day for a certain item, which at the time was really needed, especially once jumping into T4 content. Getting exalted with factions did offer some nice gear, but usually by the time you were exalted with a faction you had something as good if not better. Grinding then offered nice enchants, patterns, pvp items, etc.

The system of gearing up in TBC was terrible which is why you saw people jumping into PVP in order to bypass it and get into entry level raiding, it served to exclude many players from running content and was a major hassle for guilds that needed to revisit old content in order to gear replacements for lost players.

[Osmeric]

I think the devs have data showing hardcores tend to stick around longer than casuals, which leads to them being favored.

What that rationale ignores is that the end game has catered to the hardcores, not casuals, for most of the lifespan of the game. So OF COURSE the casuals tend to drift away: the game is not being designed with them in mind, except very grudgingly. Self fulfilling prophesy is self-fulfilling.

[OmniSkribe]

I'm the only one who thinks that "Casual" has nothing to do with "grind" and all the butthurt is always about casual players (peps who whine that they have a real life and can't spend 4 nights a week in raids) are getting access to the same gear and game content as people who spend time to be the best, no?

[vep]

Do you remember how bad it sucked having to get a group together to do a dungeon? Do you remember how hard it would be to get a spot in a raid guild, or hell, even get a raid team together? It wasn't impossible, but it definitely was harder than it is, and I distinctly recall many people complaining about it.

As for the sense of community, we've always had little shits in the community, with their heads up their asses. It'll never change. WoW brings out the arrogance in certain people. It's still definitely possible to find a guild with good, friendly people. If you choose to join a hardcore raiding guild where noone talks, well that's your problem isn't it?

Really, what's so wrong with the direction WoW has been going in for the last 3 xpacks?

Yes, I remember how "hard" it was to get a group.... Not! It was never hard to get a group if you were in a semi decent guild. It was also not hard to get a spot in a raid group or a raid team, to that matter. The same problems one would encounter then, when it comes to raid groups, are the same problems one encounters today.
If you had a decent guild you could do well in raiding. If you were good at healing and not dying from the fire, for example, you would always get a spot in a raid.
So all those points that you mentioned are bullshit, honestly. It was never hard to get a group together. At least not if you weren't picky.

As for the sense of community.... Waaaaat? Today's community is terrible compared to what it was in TBC. Sure you always had some trolls or rude people but they weren't anonymous like they are today. Why? Because of LFG and LFR tools. You see a guy once and he's a total and utter bastard and what you gonna do? He's just gonna queue up for another dungeon while no one cares about him. Back then you'd sure as hell spread it through trade chat and people actually wanted to know who to avoid having in their groups. And with that, such behavior was abolished.

I was a ret Paladin in TBC. Back then when people didn't want ret Paladins. But I did my job well. I got good gear, I did more than decent damage and I earned myself all the "GJ's" I got at the end of the instance.


Little bit of memory: I spent like an hour and a half at Halaa just fighting with 3 hordes. First time I saw them, I just jumped in and killed them all. Other times I had no cooldowns so they killed me. But it was fun as hell

[Trubo]

The system of gearing up in TBC was terrible which is why you saw people jumping into PVP in order to bypass it and get into entry level raiding, it served to exclude many players from running content and was a major hassle for guilds that needed to revisit old content in order to gear replacements for lost players.

Removal of individual characters needing to be attuned would have solved a lot of issues in TBC.

[Raelbo]

Because it make the game boring for ppl that want to put little more time into it.
WoW pretty much got no grind, only first week or two (depending on gametime ofc, I did full 471 from HCs in a weekend). After that its just killing some boss and pray for your item.
Grind for gold to improve your char? Nope.
Grind for item to improve your char? Nope.
Grind for some enchanting system to improve? Nope
Grind for levels? Barely, new exp and ppl hit the cap in hours/days. Afaik 1-60 in vanilla took time, now not so much.
Check like Lineage2 where first player reached lvlcap (went from 85-99) 5months after update and he played 20h~ "a day". Last I checked there was no "casuals" that had reached max lvl, its over 1year since patch.

There is a certain blue who has commented on this regularly, and I agree with him. Some people hit level 90 in 2 days. Most didn't. It took me three weeks to reach level 90. I play around 3 hours a day every day. I was the 6th person in my guild to reach level 90, and those that got there before there put in a lot of effort (above what they normally do) to get there.

MoP has been out for what, like 6 months now? I play 3 hours a day and still have tons of stuff to do and I barely manage to find any time to level an alt or do pvp.

Honestly, if you absolutely need to find something to spend more than 100 hours a month on, then maybe play something else in addition to WoW...

[melodramocracy]

From where I sit, the problem with most casual players is that they are unwilling to accept the fact that there are elements of the game that might require more effort / time than they're willing to put in, so consistently demand that nearly all things be modified to suit them.

For them, subscription should equal access AND success. That's the problem.

[Osmeric]

From where I sit, the problem with most casual players is that they are unwilling to accept the fact that there are elements of the game that might require more effort / time than they're willing to put in, so consistently demand that nearly all things be modified to suit them.

So, your problem is that other people don't want what you want them to want.

Is it ok that we ignore what you want? Or does that only work in one direction?

[Deleted]

Well...
Nothing, really. Being casual-friendly is, on the whole, very good for a game that promotes just having fun with one another.

There are a few things I'm personally unhappy about, however:
Gear. I'm sorry, but I'm so incredibly sick of grinding. Rep grinding, valor grinding... I want all my initial gear to come from heroics, and hop into LFR. Seriously. I want to play more, and grind less. Now; this is a 'casual' thing. People who couldn't play as much would have the option of still getting gear through grinding for rep... But in my opinion, that's a really casual-unfriendly way to go about it.
...
Actually, that about sums it up. Grinding is just not fun.

The problem lies with many people who believe 'casual' to be synonymous for 'bad.' Players who don't know how to gem, enchant, pull off a rotation, what talents to pick... Those inabilities are often, usually, ascribed to a lack of experience, and therefore, to 'casuals.' 'Casuals' wouldn't be able to beat difficult content because they're bad. And that's simply not true. The reason 'casuals' can't beat hardmodes is because 'casuals' don't have the time to attain the same levels of gear. I'd much rather invest time in researching a raid and then playing than I would in grinding gear, but skill is tertiary to WoW's endgame. And yes, that includes PvP.

This needs to be on the main page, I agree 100 percent with this.

[Immitis]

go play some of the mmos before wow,

wow has always been very casual its just when it came out the mmo crowd was way more hardcore then it is now so casual back then is pretty much hardcore now

[Drfireburns]

The system of gearing up in TBC was terrible which is why you saw people jumping into PVP in order to bypass it and get into entry level raiding, it served to exclude many players from running content and was a major hassle for guilds that needed to revisit old content in order to gear replacements for lost players.

I never saw this once. The only time I saw people getting PVP gear was for PVP. If you think this only happened in BC then check again. Several people were running around the start of Cata in PVP gear just to have the ilvl needed for dungeons. As stated attunement issues caused a lot of problems in BC, specifically T5 content. Running heroic dungeons in BC was enough to get you into Kara which gave you gear needed for SSC/TK.

[urasim]

Ugh... You don't seem to understand what the definition of casual is.

Casual: Someone who doesn't spend more than four hours a day playing games.
Hardcore: Someone who spends most of their day playing games.

Casual does NOT mean bad player.
Hardcore does NOT mean good player.

I know several people who don't play much, but they are amazing at video games. I know several other people who play so much they don't come out of their rooms, but they suck so bad at gaming...

Is making the game more casual friendly bad? HELL NO! Is dumbing down the game so much my two year old can beat it bad? HELL YES! But, this is an MMORPG... Meaning that Blizzard will NEVER make the game good for casuals. They will, however, dumb down the gameplay so that anyone can play. They want you to spend time playing the game, and they don't care how easy it gets as long as people are playing.