Did casuals ruin WoW and if so how?

[Deleted]

I dont think anyone ruined WoW. I just think a game that has been out this long and with its low graphics, has done a pretty amazing job at surviving this long as an MMO that still does subs of more than 1million.

No one likes change. Thats all there is to it.

Casuals and Hardcore can moan and complain all they like because if they didnt moan, I would be seriously worried.

The only thing that is going to ruin WoW is time and how they deal with more and more content being added ( removing content will just really piss people off but something has to be done to the stuff that hardly gets used)

[Dundebuns]

Another thread mis-defining the word casual. The word you are looking for is bads. Casual != bads. I knew casual players whose skill far exceeded that of hardcore raiders.

[schicklgruber]

casuals didn't ruin wow, blizzard did by trying to hard to make a game that's easy and hard and everything in between
and they failed miserably. now they blame the players for everything and are in milk-mode

[Crookids]

No.

/thread

[Deleted]

If anything, casual players are the major reason WoW still exists. How did they ruin WoW? They didn't, most players are not even participating in forums, or even reading patch notes, there is of course a vocal minority of casuals here and there and there are of course the "hardcore" players, most of which take active participation in forums on different WoW related websites. If anything, the "hardcore" voice is much more taken into consideration, because of the fact it is mostly the only voice heard on the forums, so in reality who did ruin WoW?

I rarely see highranked hardcore players but mostly wannabe scrubs with very little progress who want to keep their few heroic peices to themselves being the loudest.

[potis]

Casuals did not ruin WoW.

Casuals never cared about epics, or wearing stuff, the actual casual took months to even finish farming his heroic dungeons therefor he was happy with what he had because the term casual is for those that do not have the time to play.

WoW was ruined by "bads" which took on the word casual and abused its power.

There are many people that play 10 hours per day and achieve nothing simply because they were uninformed, not bothering to research and learn to be better.

Blizzard catered to them since they were the majority and kept shouting "Casual, casual" and here we are, simply because they couldnt achieve what others could while the others put less effort into the game.

Its the same way everyone calls hardcore gamers "no lifers", the average real hardcore raider in WoW, will raid 100-200 hours the first couple of weeks then simply clear everything in a 3-4 hours because thats how they are, while most of the people whining would require 500 hours over a course of months to do the same.

[Raelbo]

Do y-you... do you play the same game we're playing? Were you not there for the quarterly reports?

If it's the shrinking subs you are referring to, one could argue that, in spite of WoW being a nearly 10 year old game, it still managed to hold onto over 80% of its players this year. I consider that rather remarkable.

[Kreeshak]

if this game still had the tbc model i think the subs would be even lower to be honest.

so casuals are prob saving this game

Mcdonalds food is probably amongst the higher earning type of restaurants. That doesn't make the food good or tasty. A tiny 2-3 person local restaurant could actually and does actually server better and tastier food.

- - - Updated - - -

Hardcores destroyed wow with their pre-cata crying.

Three significant things caused mass uproar in the true majority of players.

1. The clusterfuck that was the early cata heroics. After wow's peak in wotlk with easy mode heroics the absurd jump to the cata difficulty pit a lot of people off.

2. The changes to healing, though needed drove off a lot of people who loved that aspect of the game.

3. The gating of vp gear in MoP, I personally know quite a few people who quit or refused to resub due this.

Extra credit answer: the game is aging, the player base is aging, there are not a lot of new young players buying and sticking with wow.

The counter-argument would be that softcores destroyed wow in wotlk

The faceroll that was early wotlk heroics. You could faceroll your keyboard for 10 minutes and still win!

[Raelbo]

Mcdonalds food is probably amongst the higher earning type of restaurants. That doesn't make the food good or tasty. A tiny 2-3 person local restaurant could actually and does actually server better and tastier food.

So what exactly does this have to do with WoW? All you are doing creating a strawman (McDonalds) and then assuming that WoW is unto gaming as McD's is unto restaurants without offering kind of evidence to support this analogy.

There are many differences between McDonalds and WoW:

For example: Some of the key competitive edges of McDonalds:
Cheap food - WoW is not cheap, in fact it is one of the most expensive to play.
They are fast - WoW takes it time to produce content.

The restaurant and gaming industries are very different. While I would agree that being the most popular does not always equate with being the best, you cannot claim that being the most popular equates with being the worst.

At best your McDonald's analogy serves to illustrate that WoW's popularity may or may not have anything to do with the quality of their product.

[judgementofantonidas]

qq'ers come closer to ruining WoW than anything else.

exactly. and there are more casual players that QQ they want what the elite players have hence casual players control blizzard's decisions.

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They are fast - WoW takes it time to produce content.

WUT? French fry burger. That must have taken tons of development time and funding!!!!

[Deleted]

I think catering to the lowest common denominator is the main reason WoW is in the state it is in.

When was the last time you were happy about a blue item? Everything has to be epic, because epic is the best gear outside of a few legendary items (even those were readily handed out this expansion).

The issue with WoW is that the core values of the game have been either lost and become muddied or simply streamlined so much that it's not fun anymore.


The last time I tried to level any character, I got sick of it by level 23. Back in the day I'd have had ~12-15 skills to use, this time around I had maybe 4 to use regularly that weren't just buffs.

Talents did the rest for that. And the Warlock rework which basically made the class I enjoyed a dumb faceroller *sigh*

[Raelbo]

WUT? French fry burger. That must have taken tons of development time and funding!!!!

The point I was making was to highlight the differences between McD's and WoW, hence illustrating why the analogy made by the previous poster fails.

A big part of the reason that McD's are so successful in spite of offering a lower quality product to their customers is that they make their product faster and cheaper than their competitors. The customer doesn't have to wait for his burger, and it doesn't cost him a lot.

WoW on the other hand makes it's customers wait a very long time for new content. The fact that people do in fact wait for the new content instead of losing interest, and pay monthly subs, is, if anything, an indication that the product quality is good.

[Stolberg]

Mormolyce is back to troll some more peeps.

[Kreeshak]

So what exactly does this have to do with WoW? All you are doing creating a strawman (McDonalds) and then assuming that WoW is unto gaming as McD's is unto restaurants without offering kind of evidence to support this analogy.

There are many differences between McDonalds and WoW:

For example: Some of the key competitive edges of McDonalds:
Cheap food - WoW is not cheap, in fact it is one of the most expensive to play.
They are fast - WoW takes it time to produce content.

The restaurant and gaming industries are very different. While I would agree that being the most popular does not always equate with being the best, you cannot claim that being the most popular equates with being the worst.

At best your McDonald's analogy serves to illustrate that WoW's popularity may or may not have anything to do with the quality of their product.

The analogy was to demonstrate that sales does not necessarily represent quality.

[vesseblah]

When was the last time you were happy about a blue item?

Since day one of WoW blue items dropped from five-man content and epics from raids. Problem is not the abundance of epics but lack of five-man content.

The issue with WoW is that the core values of the game have been either lost and become muddied or simply streamlined so much that it's not fun anymore.

WoW's core values have always been making fun and easy game everybody can enjoy. It was more fun and easier than MMORPGs 10 years ago, and it's still fun and easy today. Core values haven't changed, you're just doing apples to oranges comparison.

The last time I tried to level any character, I got sick of it by level 23. Back in the day I'd have had ~12-15 skills to use, this time around I had maybe 4 to use regularly that weren't just buffs.

Care to share with the rest of the forum which class had more buttons you used at level 20 in vanilla compared to MoP? Yes, classes had more abilities in spellbook because you had all three talent trees there and multiple ranks, but you used only something like 3-4 of those.

[melodramocracy]

5 man dungeons and heroics gameplay suffered during Cata's first patch. MoP improved on it, but is still behind TBC/WoLTK/Vanilla for variety

Sorry, but for all the things this expansion did ok, the 5 mans are the least interesting in the history of the game.

[Kreeshak]

The point I was making was to highlight the differences between McD's and WoW, hence illustrating why the analogy made by the previous poster fails.

A big part of the reason that McD's are so successful in spite of offering a lower quality product to their customers is that they make their product faster and cheaper than their competitors. The customer doesn't have to wait for his burger, and it doesn't cost him a lot.

WoW on the other hand makes it's customers wait a very long time for new content. The fact that people do in fact wait for the new content instead of losing interest, and pay monthly subs, is, if anything, an indication that the product quality is good.

Actually the truth is quite the opposite. In wotlk the customer didn't have to put any effort to win, and winning was fast. as in eating in mcdonalds. That made the sales skyrocket. In TBC you had to put in effort to get rewarded and everything was harder to accomplish. Making the game easier, means the sales are rising, but the level of challenge and/or the quality is getting lowered.

[melodramocracy]

Actually the truth is quite the opposite. In wotlk the customer didn't have to put any effort to win, and winning was fast. as in eating in mcdonalds. That made the sales skyrocket. In TBC you had to put in effort to get rewarded and everything was harder to accomplish. Making the game easier, means the sales are rising, but the level of challenge and/or the quality is getting lowered.

Or to look at it another way, easier / faster gaming = less reason to stick around after you've accomplished whatever it is you set out to accomplish. This brings the question 'is MoP actually appealing' around, something that is difficult to answer without looking at all the various mechanisms in it.

When talking about sub losses, it's easy but completely unrealistic to point the finger solely at end-game mechanics, when it's quite certain that most folks who left the game never hit 90 in the first place.

[Deleted]

I'm really tired of the Word "Casual" being thrown around, a Casual is NOT a moaning b**** who demands to be handed everything, a Casual is (most of the times) a Person that plays maybe 4-6 hours a week but still has properly Enchanted/gemmed Gear and knows how to play his Class (and Raids once a week for 2-3 hours)

I know i'm being a hypocrite here, but it's just that those Elitist are so lazy that they don't even bother to understand the difference between a Casual and a Bad Player that demands more and more

[Gangplank]

It must be realized that Blizzard is fully in control of the direction of their game. They decided to make it more accessible, not the "casual" player. The only party that can truly ruin Wow is Blizzard.

As someone who was here from the original beta, I remember the time commitment this game used to demand, and I could say without a shadow of a doubt that if that same time commitment was still required, this game would would have less subs than it does now. Less subs means less attention required to keep the game active with new content. The direction Blizzard took WoW was probably for the best.

The only thing truly ruined was the ivory tower that all the successful 25-man guilds looked down upon the rest of Azeroth from. The addition of LFR and 10-man groups did not sit well for players who enjoyed being part of a small percentage of the population that got all the high end content and items. Not that there's anything wrong with wanting exclusive rewards for doing the most difficult content, but ultimately the desire to keep the elite looking elite is what was 'ruined'. Unfortunately though, for the greater good of the game's lifecycle, changes had to be made.

If you're a hardcore Wow player and still enjoy the game, you can partially thank Blizzard for allowing a wider audience to fund their game so they can continue developing content.