Did casuals ruin WoW and if so how?

[ThatsOurEric]

The answer is simple, nothing has killed WoW. No player base, lore change, systems change, graphics change,etc.
Nothing has changed in such a degree that it has *killed* WoW. WoW is currently 4 expansions in, and it is STILL
the highest subscribed MMO out there.

I think anyone who makes statements like "X has ruined WoW" really needs to take a step back and get off their
proverbial high horse. There have been many changes, some for the better, some for the worst, and some that
will always be argued for/against. But when you have a game as old as WoW, there is bound to be stagnation and
even moreso bound to be unhappy complaints and misguided delusions of "the good old days" that veterans cling
on to.

[Darthcullen]

BC was time-consuming not hard. You literally could be a horrible player but put in 10 hours a day on any of the simple pve classes and clear all of the content because you put in the time to get the gear. A few classes even had 1-2 button rotations, more had 3. It was a simpler game.

[krysla]

If something takes more time, it is by definition, harder.

Also, I take it you never actually tried 4 horsemen back in Vanilla, or KT, or M'uru, etc etc.

So, reading a book is harder than giving birth? Man, i've led my life completely wrong, thanks for clearing that up.

[klaps_05]

"grinding" felwood flower buffs
gathering resistance gear (fire>nature>frost>shadow)
gathering gems that drop/mined in the instance and that was the only source(bt/mh)
having to get revered to get the key for heroic mode of a FIVE man dungeon
having to kill 2 end bosses to get to the ultimate boss
nigh impossible heroic dungeons even with good gear(bc halls, botanica, alcatraz, shadowlab)
grinding winterspring firewater since you could stack every pot buff in the game
attunements
getting all reputations to at least revered/exalted for enchants/etc
killing a billion bugs to get a recipe and eventually BIS ring
devote people to farming mats so tanks can get frost/nature resistance for hydross
make addons/scripts to kill/exploit shit faster(vashj,putricide)

some of these things were HARD in form that if you didnt have a plan and didnt organize - they would literally take you forever to complete, if you even complete them at all. so if you didnt have a group/community you couldn't rly do those things(esp the bugs in silithus were a fucking nightmare since pvp moved from plaguelands to silithus once summons became popular.

[Celista]

BC was time-consuming not hard. You literally could be a horrible player but put in 10 hours a day on any of the simple pve classes and clear all of the content because you put in the time to get the gear. A few classes even had 1-2 button rotations, more had 3. It was a simpler game.

Rotations were a lot simpler but I think healing was more difficult. Also, there were groups wiping on Sunwell trash well through Wrath release.

[Deleted]

They stop playing.
1st .
Was cataclysm where casual gaming = Pugs etc was raped/destroyed leaving almost 80% of back/wotlk raiders(casual ofc) outside.

2nd was Lfr.
Ok i'm seeying the last boss qq..
Ok lets farm..
Ok im 5 month trinket doesnt drop ...aswell....weapon doesn't drop...dsdfdsg ok f this i got bored of mindless grind just for next patch 2 start again.

That is for casual raiding..

Anyway casual are seeying the content without any effort. This apply the game as a movie...===So how much times you will see the same movie???

[Vishiz]

I think MMO-Cs forum goers ruined WoW by over analyzing everything.

/leavethread

[Osmeric]

Rotations were a lot simpler but I think healing was more difficult. Also, there were groups wiping on Sunwell trash well through Wrath release.

CoH and Chain Heal spam were hard, I heard.

[Polarthief]

Before I start, there's two categories of players: Casual/Hardcore, and Good/Bad. Just because you are casual does NOT mean you are bad, and just because you are hardcore does NOT make you good.

Casual = Low time commitment - Associate this with any player who says they can't raid because they have jobs in the morning, or just don't play too much in the game
Hardcore = High time commitment - Associate this with any player who spends 30+ hours into WoW

Good = Good player; high skill - Associate this with any player you think has a lot of skill (do not mistake this with raid progression. There are a few of my raiders in a 12/13H guild that are just absolute crap and are being carried)
Bad = Bad player; low skill - Associate this with any player who you think is just dog shit [e.g., players who do nothing but LFR and brag about their DPS in it] (Again, do not mistake this with lack of progression]

For example, I actually don't play nearly as much as I used to, so I would consider myself "Casual", and (though many may find this narcissistic) I consider myself above the average player, so I'd say I'm "Good", too. So you could say I'm a "casual good".
There are also a lot of bad players that play this game and simply cannot do raids do to school or whatever, but still play the game for hours on end. These would be "hardcore bads".

As far as "who ruined what", I wouldn't necessarily say anyone in particular ruined WoW but Blizzard. They chose to cater to a specific audience and I feel that they simply chose poorly. Think about it: Were any of you guys in BC/LK and didn't raid nearly as much? I only killed a few bosses in T5 and I was in school, barely able to raid, but it was still super fun to me (more than clearing all Heroic content nowadays). That sense is gone because they're trying to cater to the demands of literally everyone, which you just cannot do.

No "Casual player" isn't a special type of player, if I like the game more, I will play more and will be something you call it "Hardcore" and if game is not fun for me, I'll play less and will be what you call it "Casual".
Basically putting a lot of time in game isn't fun anymore that's why blizzard is making game what you call it "Casual" friendly, which is an ok move.

Except MoP isn't all that casual/alt-friendly by ANY means. Yes, it's a LITTLE better than previous expansions, but it's still bad for them. Flex will help, but that's at the end of the expansion.

No the elitists ruined WoW with their demands..
Nothing was hard just time-consuming. Lots of free time=you can have and IQ of 10 and still clear any content you want. BLizz like any other business saw the time constraint so they had to lower the difficulty along with the length of raids/took prebuffing out of the picture(like resistance buffing yourself, fire prot potions so forth) and introduced easier mechanics

... How so?
Oh, okay. You just explained the exact situation in which casuals and bads (both mutually exclusive to one another) were the reason that "ruined WoW". (PS: Read above. I don't think anyone actually ruined it. Just a poor audience choice)

[Deleted]

What ruined Wow for me was some of the decisions made by the team, not the players.

[Celista]

CoH and Chain Heal spam were hard, I heard.

Downranking and the limited mana pools made healing relatively more difficult than it is today. Or do you find MoP healing more challenging? >.>

A lot of bravado in here considering that less than 1% of the player base killed anything in Sunwell before 3.0 launch.

[the game]

I dislike that threads like these need to keep existing. The casual vs elitist war just needs to stop. If people would just do what they do and let other people do what they do the world would be alot better place. Everybody is so worried about what the other guy has or does. It's really not casuals or elitists ruining the game. It's the toxic attitude that there needs to be a line drawn. Why can't we all just be people who like to play video games. Hate will get us or WoW nowhere.

[Deleted]

Downranking and the limited mana pools made healing relatively more difficult than it is today. Or do you find MoP healing more challenging? >.>

A lot of bravado in here considering that less than 1% of the player base killed anything in Sunwell before 3.0 launch.

Now thats funny.
Do you know why Blizzard abandoned downranking?
Because it was simply stupid and far too easy. All you had to do was to pick the spell rank you could cast literaly forever. You didn't have to watch your mana pool at all.

By the way most raids in BC were realy easy.

[Celista]

Now thats funny.
Do you know why Blizzard abandoned downranking?
Because it was simply stupid and far too easy. All you had to do was to pick the spell rank you could cast literaly forever. You didn't have to watch your mana pool at all.

If you just spammed one downranked spell you were doing it wrong.

[Zython]

I'm just going to go ahead and point out something to those that claim that Vanilla was harder than any other xpac. Imagine if, instead of MC, Vanilla had Heroic ToT (damage and health pools scaled appropriately, of course). I would claim that no one would have been able to clear it. Fights like Dark Animus and Lei Shen would have been considered impossible back in the day.

So what happened? Well, it's simply that the game has grown. Players have much more knowledge about the game and more tools at our disposal. This has allowed for the top guilds to clear content much faster than they used to. However, this has also allowed blizzard to develop more interesting encounters.

You can argue the game was harder back in the olden days, but I'd claim that it wasn't hard for the right reasons.

[Lord Blackmore]

I wish the people in charge around here would clamp down on stupid threads like this. OP, who has all of 18 posts, couldn't be arsed to do a forum search, find other similar threads and read then before starting yet another sh*t stirring thread.

- - - Updated - - -

Now thats funny.
Do you know why Blizzard abandoned downranking?
Because it was simply stupid and far too easy. All you had to do was to pick the spell rank you could cast literaly forever. You didn't have to watch your mana pool at all.

Anyone who only used downranked spells was a lousy player. Good players knew how to manage ranked spells and choose the one that fit the situation best.

By the way most raids in BC were realy easy.

By the way: wrong

[muto]

Rotations were a lot simpler but I think healing was more difficult. Also, there were groups wiping on Sunwell trash well through Wrath release.

No it wasn't. Healers had endless mana in Wrath.

[Whiskra]

People are looking at this in the wrong way all the time as I see it. No, casuals didn't ruin the game, neither did the hardcore players. What ruined it was Blizzard giving in to heavy demands from both sides of the spectrum. And I'm not talking about raids really, I'm talking about the game in general. Everything is streamlined, what was adventure then is considered waste of time now. People don't want to focus on questing, they want to raid because that's where the "rewards" are. So they made questing from zero to max a weeklong process at most, and threw people directly into the raids, because that's what they asked for. Instead of perhaps fewer and larger quests, that could perhaps inspire a sense of adventure into players again, they became more and smaller, while increasing the XP ammount gained for each quest completed. I'm not saying that "fewer and larger quests" is a global solution to the boredom that is the leveling process, but the current situation hasn't really helped the game itself at all. They have a whole world out there up and running, but it's almost always empty, despite Blizzard's seemingly greatest efforts to grab people out into the world again. Why is "progress" only limited to that of an instanced raid? Why can't progress be counted for a player's accomplishments out in the world as well? Make the world and the raids blend together in some way?

But on the other hand, the content that acctually is hard just keeps getting harder and harder, while not really giving people a bigger carrot to chase, rather the contrary. People are discouraged to raid, even if that's what they want to do. The game doesn't teach you how to raid. The game doesn't even teach you how to play properly, so Blizzard, once again took the easy way out and invented LFR, threw in all the demanders there and called it a success. At the same time, "real" raiding has been hampered and butchered. Fewer and fewer players raid for real anymore, because it's no longer worth it. Sure, raids are harder, and sometimes even better than they previously were, but the carrot for these people is growing moldy.

They once had a good moderate level between casual and hardcore in the game, but now they've tipped the scales over in both ways, and it's not good for anyone. They've also dug themselves a hole they can't crawl up from, because people will continue to demand more streamlining and more convenience in their game, while at the same time asking for the hard content to be even harder. The game is hurting, and it won't stop.

[Deleted]

Downranking and the limited mana pools made healing relatively more difficult than it is today. Or do you find MoP healing more challenging? >.>

A lot of bravado in here considering that less than 1% of the player base killed anything in Sunwell before 3.0 launch.

This post is bravado imo.

Bit of background...

I have only seriously healed with my Resto Shaman (main since start of TBC, hunter Main in Vanilla) so this come purely from that PoV.

We where working on Muru before the nerf hit.

I am far more casual now (we are 12/12 normal's).

Yes I find MoP healing far more challenging to use your word, I would use the word interesting though.

Mana management and healing style is far more complex now than it was back in Sunwell (by a million miles).

[vesseblah]

Ive seen a lot of posts on other forums talking about how WoW has been dumbed down to the point where its unplayable now and everyone is blaming the casual player for this. My question is how exactly did the casual "ruin" WoW?

WoW was made to be casual game from day one, and every decision since then has been made to ensure the game stays as one of the most casual friendly MMORPG as time goes by.

Forum whiners are simply too damn stupid to understand that concept.