Originally Posted by
Myta
How 'Casualization' is Saving WoW For Raiders Whether They Understand It Or Not.
For years Blizzard has listened to the 'hardcore' fanbase (they aren't actually hardcore), which resented at every opportunity like the Immovable Object itself, Blizzard even developing casual content. Every time this happened from the fishing Artifact to the implementation of Pet Battles, Old World level scaling. These changes don't ever effect the ""Hardcore"" player base, they they complained still, yelled at Blizzard "Why are you doing this?".
As someone who started playing WoW in Vanilla who has played long enough, and is old enough to know Vanilla was extremely casual friendly (and also dogshit as an MMO), I have seen the highs and the lows, and also seen Blizzard listening to this extremely vocal minority. In fact whole expansions launched such as Cataclysm, on the basis that people didn't want the casual content in WotLK (despite H LK at the time was probably the hardest raid boss ever designed, not just in WoW but ANY MMO at the time). What happened? The userbase died.
We've gone from Hellfire Citadel in WoD to the Emerald Nightmare when people complained again that it was too easy, then they made Nighthold, and Tomb and guilds were dying in droves.
With the insane demands of it's phantom playerbase, Blizzard started to cannibalize the healthy lifecycle of the WoW guilds and their actual customer base. The hard truth is that without casuals, there is no WoW. Without casual guilds acting as feeder guilds to raiding guilds, there are no raiding guilds. People fail to realize this, and now are digging their heels and screaming at the top of their lungs as Blizzard reverses the years long deathknell for the WoW community. Firstly by killing master loot, which only leads an unlevel, and unfair system. There is no system in WoW of tackling loot which is fair, and drama free besides Personal Loot. Master Loot exists to create imbalances, either by funneling gear overtly or subversively to people.
Master-Loot Is The Worst System In All of WoW
The Only Thing It Is Good At Is Being The Single Largest Source of Misery In This Game
Every system derived out of Master Loot from DKP, to Loot Council, to GDKP, to Sell Runs are all inherently toxic and the only result from these systems is to breed abuse, nepotism, and greed, there is no ethical way to use Master Loot, at all. This is self-evident from how decades later, no one can create a way to make Master Loot even sort of resemble 'fairness'.
Coupled with the overworld changes, people are leveling characters again, they are meeting each other, adding each other to Battle Tag, grouping with each other. Some of these people will even play together long term, joining guilds or creating them, and this all happens organically and naturally, and this is the crucial structure of WoW at the moment, the ability to take a new player or a casual player and grow them into a raider. That system was lately interrupted through WoD, and most of Legion. This isn't an outsider speaking, this is from the perspective of a Mythic raider with the sense enough to see beyond the bubble of their own guild.
Because of casual players, WoW is alive again, people are playing this game, making friends, joining guilds, and soon in BfA the horrendous, guild-destroying, zero-positive system of Master Loot will also be gone. Now those players will not have that wedge drawn between them over something as stupid as purple pixels which the loot-mongering of Master Loot created.
Casuals are saving WoW. It's too bad that most ""Hardcore"" players do not have a broad enough perspective to understand that. I hope, like I think many others hope, that Blizzard continues to do what it is doing, that it has the guts to tell this over-active, narrow-viewed audience that what they want is not good for WoW as a whole, that what they in fact want will only lead to more dead guilds, more canceled accounts, more dead realms. Ultimately the people they hurt the most with their hatred of the casual playerbase is themselves.