What would you consider makes someone a casual player?

[Low Hanging Fruit]

What would you (me in this case) consider makes someone a casual player?

Schedule is a big one. If you play on a really set schedule with a team that is good/bad, highly/terribly progressed, seven/two days a week you show yourself to be dedicated to something beyond yourself. Next is I would say you care about progressing your group, guild, or gear beyond the hand me out line. So if you only raid LFR and your gear item level surges every patch when they up the baseline world loot table than you are pretty much on hand me out status and its hard to say you aren't casual in my eyes with that. Then finally is the personal one and that is what does the individual think. If they think they are casual than by god you got to give it to them because they tells you they could be a lot more hardcore for example.

[arkanon]

What would you (me in this case) consider makes someone a casual player?

Schedule is a big one. If you play on a really set schedule with a team that is good/bad, highly/terribly progressed, seven/two days a week you show yourself to be dedicated to something beyond yourself. Next is I would say you care about progressing your group, guild, or gear beyond the hand me out line. So if you only raid LFR and your gear item level surges every patch when they up the baseline world loot table than you are pretty much on hand me out status and its hard to say you aren't casual in my eyes with that. Then finally is the personal one and that is what does the individual think. If they think they are casual than by god you got to give it to them because they tells you they could be a lot more hardcore for example.

One issue - and a major one at that - Where exactly is the "handout line"? it used to be fixed - a firm ilvl that was your absolute max you could obtain through a certain system - only questing and crafting? this is your max ilvl. Heroic dungeons? here it is. Normal raid? here is your max, and heroic, here is yours.

With WF / TF, that is completely out the window, meaning the idea of someone being ilvl capped is essentially gone, and the lines are heavily blurred, intersect, and cross each other.

[Lochton]

I'm not good at this statement. I would call myself casual due to playstyle, but hardcore due to what I do (like, almost everything but not Mythic raiding).

[Lex Icon]

when it comes to games it's usually just slang for bad.
most players are probably pretty casual though.

if you're hardcore you pretty much treat it as a job and most likely can't relate to someone who's just doing whatever because "it's fun".

[Low Hanging Fruit]

One issue - and a major one at that - Where exactly is the "handout line"? it used to be fixed - a firm ilvl that was your absolute max you could obtain through a certain system - only questing and crafting? this is your max ilvl. Heroic dungeons? here it is. Normal raid? here is your max, and heroic, here is yours.

With WF / TF, that is completely out the window, meaning the idea of someone being ilvl capped is essentially gone, and the lines are heavily blurred, intersect, and cross each other.

No exact science. I am not trying to determine the orbit of planets but just a personal opinion on video game players and how I determine them to be casual or not.

[arkanon]

No exact science. I am not trying to determine the orbit of planets but just a personal opinion on video game players and how I determine them to be casual or not.

Right, i understand that, but i am saying your means of measuring isnt fixed - it fluctuates. Thats like a ruler with the numbers randomly placed on it, and they move all the time - how do you measure anything without a scale?

[Khaza-R]

Casual - Treats WoW as a hobby and logs in when it fits for their schedule

Hardcore - Has an obligation to raiding/pvp and structures their schedule around WoW

[Low Hanging Fruit]

Right, i understand that, but i am saying your means of measuring isnt fixed - it fluctuates. Thats like a ruler with the numbers randomly placed on it, and they move all the time - how do you measure anything without a scale?

It isn't that hard.

TF/WF? Simple. Look at the item. Does it say LFR on it? Is it 415? Great item. Hand out. Is it that random world trinket I throw in the shredder 4 times a week. Is it 425 with a socket? Great item, sure. Hand out.

Only someone either extremely dense or lazy could not compute this. Or the more likely its on the internet so punching holes makes me popular game. The actual value of the digits is totally gone in BFA.

[Elias01]

Being casual have nothing to do with time as some people tend to pretend. It is about your mind set. It is abouy how you aproach game ans challenges withing game. Where you set your goals etc. Being casual have nothing to do with time spent playing.

[Tumile]

So, recently me and a friend where arguing about what makes someone a casual gamer

He called me a hardcore wow player which i then denied as i believe that i am, at least to our communities standards, very casual.
Basically, we ended up arguing for a good 30 minutes about why i think that both of us are rather casual gamers and not hardcore while he keeps on going that we are at least part of the semi hardcore crowd.

He isn't a wow player, tho he did try it out one time when legion came out.
He however is an eso player and claims that he is rather hardcore (which is, to me, complete nonsense as he barely plays the game at all).

For me, my biggest wow "achievement" was getting ahead of the curve: guldan during legion.
My raider.io score is pretty low, the highest dungeon i ever did this expansion was a +9 so far.
I have cleared uldir entirely on normal, only got 3 kills on hc.
I have just 5 kills in normal BoD, 2 kills in BoD hc.
I haven't even touched CoS on any difficulty yet.

Raider.io for reference:
https://raider.io/characters/eu/aggramar/Sherana
Armory link is in my sig. (blue text)

Imo, a casual is someone that has no interest in delving into the higher end game. (aka, higher keystone lvls, mythic raids or high ranked pvp)
Whether that comes from simple uninterest, or RL reasons, is irrelevant.
Casuals tend to not play all too much, but definitely can.

My friend also claimed that because im a fan of wows lore and know most of it, that alone puts me above the casual crowd.
I disagree entirely on that, as being a lore nerd doesn't make someone automatically good at the game or interested in any of the tougher end game content.

So, would you consider me a casual gamer?
If so/not, please give some insight on why you think so and it'd be nice if you could give your opinion on what makes one a casual player generally.
And do you consider yourself a casual? if so/not, why?

Note: I know this has been probably talked about to oblivion and beyond already, so mods feel free to close this at any moment you wish.
Though, i think it'd be interesting where people currently stand, especially seeing as BfA made people change their views quite drastically on this forum alone. (at least from what i have seen/read)

Now, Casual and Hardcore are terms that altered and warped when it comes to gaming, some people may stay rigid to their original descriptions and go by a dictionary. which is fair.

But when it comes to gaming, and ill use wow as the example, the definitions get altered a little. Hardcore in the context of this post will mean to be uncompromising, extremely focused, dedicated. sadly these terms just fit really poorly for an RPG game. The term most applicable of the bunch would be dedicated, but that still isn't quite right, the term we are looking for when we talk about a "hardcore wow player" is Committed While wow has been trying to go towards becoming an action MMORPG, it still isn't. The amount of command inputs you can give is limited by global cooldowns, it has a shallow (as in the literal sense, ex. a Shallow Pond) resource system. where if you look at games like Starcraft and look at Minerals, the amount of minerals u can contain, and harvest per minute compared to consumption makes it a Moderate Resource system, and other games mostly mobile games have a resource system where its meant to progress over weeks, months, and years, which would be a deep resource system. it's important to keep in mind that Shallow and deep does not mean shallow or deep design, but rather expenditure vs income.

The point being, that the typical definition of Hardcore can be used fairly accurately in action packed, short term games, like someone who takes a game of Counter strike or Call of duty incredibly serious.

Today we use the term hardcore gamer differently than its original definition and it describes your commitment to the game. not necesarrily your achievements. it is How much do u play per day, or week, and for how long have you done this? there will never be a definitive line to cross to become hardcore, "oh you went over 20 hours this week, you are now hardcore!". But A hardcore player for most people, atleast the vast majority of people whose opinion on this matters because of their validation through personal experience, you start getting across the hardcore border once you treat the game, timewise, like a job, you hold a job for years, and you work atleast 37+ hours a week if you're full time. Do I personally think 40 hours a week or so is considered hardcore? fuck no, but it is fairly subjective beyond that point. for me, a hardcore player, cannot have a normal life besides the game, full time job, family, pets, house chores etc, can't do them all, but you can do some. i used to raid 14 hours a day 7 days a week for the first 10 days (if it took that long) of a new tier coming out. that may sound like a lot to some, and others may go "yeah but it was only 10 days, now u just log on wednesday, clear the raid, and dont log on for 6 days, for months till a new tier comes out" but that isn't the case, i had to put in close to the same amount every day doing other things, New xpac launch? levelling and gearing 6 characters, and our difinition of gearing is a different world compared to yours, OP. even previous to BFA launch, we spend 10+ hours a day, planning, beta testing for the sake of finding advantages, and having no intentions of giving blizzard feedback if we found anything dubious or shady that could be used without being deemed a downright "banable exploit" little things like doing Volduun as ur last zone, so u did the quest to obtain the lightning procc damage trinket at 120, to make it as high as possible was a very obvious one, a lot of people may have heard about it before BFA launched. This trinket was obviously nerfed because of the attention it got, but we found maybe 100-200 things similar to that, some bigger, some smaller. so, then there was raid testing, making strategies from what we saw, comps that needed to be changed with every new change blizzard made before launch, spreadsheets of gear, M+0 groups to minmax how much loot we could trade, the list goes on and on, all of this took hundreds upon hundreds of hours in total. This was before the xpac even launched, because once it did, we knew by the schedules that we had made ourselves that we wouldnt have time to do this shit. we had to transfer Guildbanks from other servers, and fund them first, because there wasnt enough materials for feasts, pots, and flasks on the ENTIRE SERVER of stormscale to support our needs. we had guild members buying cocaine for launch as well as other insane shit just so they could cut out sleep for 1-2 days giving them an extra 16 hours to play in the first week.

This is what hardcore means to literally any player worth anything in any game. u can take or give a little here and there, but its within that scope that the players who know how to play, who know the ins and outs of game would put "hardcore" now we understand that other people *cough* filthy casuals *cough* will never truly understand this untill they experience it, or sit down and genuinly invest time into figuring it all out and wrapping their heads around it. so we understand when people use the term "hardcore" to describe a player who might raid 20 hours a week, or w/e, and most of us aren't exactly socially inept enough to not understand context clues.

But that being said, you can go tell your friend, that he sucks at everything in life, because he has obviously never truly tried being good at anything, ever, since his conception if that is his definition of hardcore. and he would most likely struggle pouring water out of a boot if the instructions were written on the heel.

[clevin]

I think you can measure Casual > Hardcore on two axes:

1) Time spent. Some people spend a lot of time even if they don't raid or push M+ or PVP ranking. Some people login for a little here and there. Spending less time and being less rule bound about it ("I login when I feel like it...") is the casual end of that. Someone who grinds rep, does every WQ, does all of the warfront stuff etc etc is more 'hardcore' though in this case I'd use more 'serious'.

2) Attitude. Some people login and are very serious about what they're doing. They min-max gear. They worry about the right traits and sim things. They hit practice dummies to refine rotation. They want to be the best they can be. Other people aren't as worried. They know what they should have for armor type and they're best stat but they don't worry about whether (say) haste or crit is better, etc. They equip whatever Azerite armor is higher level. And so on. AS long as they can do what they want reasonably well, they're fine.

[potis]

People misusing words again.

Casual means your mentality towards it is low, lacking, the thing you are doing is unimportant for you, you just happened to choose to do it over taking a walk.

Hardcore means you devote your actual brain power to learn it, and you devote some time for it as you would do for a hobby.

In the past because the game was different when there was such an insane lack of info for the majority that for them "Time= skill" because of how bad everyone was and therefor you had this comparison.

Generally since mentality is followed by disinterest to spend more time on something, obviously the casual player will play less.

But at this day and age there are so many variables to have a clear meaning.

Someone that plays 40+hours/week to never improve because he chooses not to, is not a casual, its just a bad player, or you can say he has a casual mentality towards the game but no way in hell he is on a casual time schedule.

In the majority when i am busy with life and bored with WoW (basically the last couple of months between raid patches) i play less than 6-8h/week, yet my character is as geared as it can be with HC raiding/M+ 10-15s, fully enchanted, same with all my alts that i could have been playing more actively earlier in the expansion to something like 20h/week in total.

I scale from very casual hours to "casual towards normal hours" but my mentality is disgustingly hardcore, i cant even pretend i am performing bad, i am gonna play, i will do as much as i can on my newly dinged alt, the crappy WQ ring will be enchanted , i will play with my friends to gear it up as fast as possible and generally will do anything in my power to make that character "up to par" for the active timeline of the game, i will sim all the time, i will check logs i will make sure my character is performing properly at everything.

There is nothing casual in the way i play, apart from the fact in the majority of the expansion i will probably be playing around to 6h-10h/week max, mostly because i hate downtime, i am not gonna log on to do a transmog run or a BG, quick 30m WQs every 3 days for the emmisaries, 1-2 M+ and my 4h/week raid.

So again, casual is more than one thing, it depends how everyone views it.

I am a casual time based player in the majority for the 3-5 years of the game but there is nothing casual about my mentality.

Despite saying that, i will admit that because of alts the last 2 months i have played more than 8-10h/week to something like 30h/week (M+ spam can be fun at times) but thats because life has allowed it, before that i was in my usual maximum 8-10h/week schedule

[Trend]

"Casual" is an inherently subjective word, it has no concrete meaning. Instead it is simply a description used for comparison by the person using the word. Anyone who plays less seriously than me is a "casual" just like anyone who plays more seriously than me is a try-hard nerd with no life. I exaggerate, but you get the idea.

The other use would be as a comparison between my former state and my present state, but again it is completely subjective. Take for instance, "I use to play seriously but now I'm a casual." From that you can get meaning, but not precision. The word "casual" is like the word "less". It does mean something, but just as you can't say what "less" looks like, you can't say what is inherently "casual".

As an example: take someone who formerly was in a world top 5 guild and now they're happy just squeezing into the bottom of the HoF for each tier. Compared to most raiders, and even mythic raiders, they would still seem pretty hardcore. But from their own perspective (and their old friends) they have sunk to being a bloody casual.

[InTheEnd]

It is subjective, but if we try to be objective, then I'd say the following:

It comes down to 2 primary factors:
1) How many times a week you log in and for how long
2) How angry/disappointed you feel when other stuff gets in the way of your playtime

I would say casual is if you log in less than 3 times per week and play for fewer than 6 hours in that week.

[Ange]

People misusing words again.

Used for an MMO like WoW with nearly zero competitive game play, I would argue it just means time spend.

It makes no difference to me if someone plays the game for goldfarming, raiding or petbattles, if they spend just a very short time, they still remain casual players, no matter what they "achieved" in that timeframe, because its meaningless in this by obsolescence driven MMO.

Seasonal raiders with very limited time, overplaying in vacations/holidays for a very short time period misuse the casual term alot for what ever reason. Instant gratification doesnt work that well in this kind of game and never will.

[PenguinChan]

Considering all WoW gameplay except Heroic and Mythic are pretty casual, anyone who does anything but. Once you have someone who stops doing PUGs and begins to adhere to a schedule, they are not a casual anymore. They are more considered hardcore, or dedicated. Sure - the experience of a heroic raider or mythic player may be pretty casual and fun, but they are not doing something that is casual in nature. They have schedules, they have mechanics they need to perform and many aspects of it require time dedication that can't be picked up and put down.

However, basically every other aspect of WoW is just like that, super casual and not anything you can worry about. You can play 3 hours one day, 8 hours another, then 1 - and all of that generally has some amount of progress or effort that can be meaningful. Obviously you need a few hours a week at least to get any sense of progression, but.

[MoanaLisa]

It makes no difference to me if someone plays the game for goldfarming, raiding or petbattles, if they spend just a very short time, they still remain casual players, no matter what they "achieved" in that timeframe, because its meaningless in this by obsolescence driven MMO.

So if Method knocks off for a few weeks between raids are they more casual than someone logging in every night? They would be playing less and you said their "achievements" don't matter because of obsolescence? Having a very hard time with your conditions.

[Iseir]

I do not consider myself a casual player, but i can see that im quite far behind you in terms of stuff that has been done and in progress, so I would not say that you are a casual player.

when I think about what stage i would consider myself a casual compared to hardcore player, i think many factors come in, but there is a few clearer points.

If you are raiding outside of LFR, you would be a hardcore player, because many people simply does not touch raid at all, instead sticking to dungeons.
same i would say with mythic dungeons as ive personally avoided it when i was playing more casually, but after getting into mythic 0 to get stuff done, i can see that its something that casual players might also be doing, but it blurs the line a bit. however, pushing past mythic 0 to get to higher mythics is not something i would consider a casual thing to do, mostly due to the effort not being something that i would consider a casual thing.

then there is the playtime, with the easiest casual thing being jumping into wow to play a bit, without a spesific long-term goal, and then logging out, with binging weekends being exceptions if its occationally. Farming daily quests each day is something a casual player can do, but not something i would consider a casual act after the first few days.

But this is my interpretation of it, and thus there will be people who have different interpretations and disagree, overall however, i think that my vision of a casual should generally be accurate for most, while i expect a bit more disagreement of what stage someone becomes a hardcore player.

[Ange]

So if Method knocks off for a few weeks between raids are they more casual than someone logging in every night? They would be playing less and you said their "achievements" don't matter because of obsolescence? Having a very hard time with your conditions.

Not sure what you are asking, the /played for most of those raiders is not a small number. They are not really taking a break after progression raiding are they?

[siskokid21]

Imo i see it as 3 categories:

Casual - Where OP lies, and majority of WoW's playerbase. Generally this includes players who only dabble in LFR -> Heroic Raids, Medium keys (around 10-17, below 2k io), or easier PvP content, such as 1-1750 arenas/RBGs or just random ques. I view most of the content that a casual player does, as queable, or puggable without much effort.

Semi-Hardcore - Where majority of WoW raiders lie. I view this as the average mythic raider, who doesn't push for world firsts or even top 100. You'd see people who clear mythic later in the tier, or not at all in this category. Keys around the 18-21 range (2k-2500 raider.io), and medium pvp ratings (1800-2200). Nearly any player can reach this stage with some time and effort.

Hardcore - Very small percentage of the WoW community, these are the hall of fame raiders, 2500-3k+ io players, and 2200-3k arena players. These players, invest crazy amounts of time into the game, and generally have very competitive attitudes. Generally your average hardcore player is going to take time off work for raid launches, reroll to the fotm classes, do multiple split raids, maintain multiple geared alts, and spend 80+ hours a week raiding during progression.