The return of the casual?

[Lolites]

SL was the worst grinding experience I've ever had. Near constant grind. Every single day.

what did you grind in shadowlands at release?

later sure, in korthia archives (which were not really necesary, only power that could not be aquired in other way was sockets which had minimal impact) and in ZM cypher (which again, unless you wanted to do things in ZM itself were not necesary...

but at release? no power grind at all... only thing you COULD grind was anima and that did not give you any power beyond 1k weekly which you literaly did by doing whatever you wanted in game, no grind necesary...

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you also had to grind soul ash and, later, soul cinders.

do you understand meaning of the word "grind"? seems like not, bcs torghast at release was on weekly lockout (at least the currencies)...

you had to grind for covenant rep

there was literaly no power locked behind covenant rep... if you mean renown - as you clearly have issue with words and their meanings - then you are still wrong as that you literaly COULDNT grind, as it was timegated...

what game did you play ffs? bcs it seems it wasnt WoW:SL...

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You have to spend over 100-200 hours in FF to actually get to the endgame, and it gets even longer with every expansion. Sure, all of the content is scaled to you as you go through, but you need to dedicate months to the game (which also runs off of a sub model) to even get anywhere close to playing current content.

GW2: no idea on that one.

something being tedious and unnecessary long is not hardcore by any means...
at least not in context of videogames

[kaelix1]

Hmm, based on what i have seen so far and how gear rewards scale and the fact that you don't need rep or professions give 'too much' power, i dare to say this expansion should be a 'casual' heaven, i sincerely don't see what casuals what more, if the rumors are true that WQ rewards will scale till normal raiding level, its perfect

[Koollan]

what did you grind in shadowlands at release?

later sure, in korthia archives (which were not really necesary, only power that could not be aquired in other way was sockets which had minimal impact) and in ZM cypher (which again, unless you wanted to do things in ZM itself were not necesary...

but at release? no power grind at all... only thing you COULD grind was anima and that did not give you any power beyond 1k weekly which you literaly did by doing whatever you wanted in game, no grind necesary...

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do you understand meaning of the word "grind"? seems like not, bcs torghast at release was on weekly lockout (at least the currencies)...


there was literaly no power locked behind covenant rep... if you mean renown - as you clearly have issue with words and their meanings - then you are still wrong as that you literaly COULDNT grind, as it was timegated...

what game did you play ffs? bcs it seems it wasnt WoW:SL...

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I'd like to point out that you cherrypicked out a few examples to fit your narrative whilst entirely ignoring my other examples, such as forced and mandatory max level legendaries, forced and mandatory max ilvl conduits, forced and mandatory max level covenants (which, if you didn't do every single week, you would be left behind, until the first patch when people bitched about it and made you able to catch up through dungeons). I don't know what to tell you. The expansion was objectively bad and a forced grind every week. Full stop.

Also, saying Covenants didn't give you player power is a straight up lie. Literally a lie. You needed renown for stat increases, for activity unlocks, even for the horrible forced Conduits system, you needed maxed out covenants for your best Soulbind. Which was also horrible.

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On a casual level, this expansion has shown me more joy than any other expansion to date. Genuinely, the level of discovery and exploration and just the ability to go wherever and do whatever you want with no worry about missing out on power gains or anything stupid like that - I've never been happier with the direction of the game in that aspect.

I just found myself flying around to the various objectives and treasures, or seeing side quests and enjoying them just to enjoy them. Exploring just to explore.

[potis]

I think a lot of people take this as disengenious because the casual players have been gaslit by so many people.

No, its because casual meaning is different for everyone and then there are the multiple "echo chamberers" that spam their own definition, expecting others to agree with them instead of admitting they are wrong and generally suck at the game they are trying to claim they are casual at.

SL was casual as fuck, 1 hour/week for "mandatory" systems after the initial first week "THIS IS NEW THEREFOR I WILL PLAY A LOT", and thats it, but no, some average terrible Little Billy will tell you about conduits and legendary and all that mumbo jumbo that are fixed by simply being decent at the game.

DF is casual also, but boring as fuck, absolutely nothing to do, apart from clearing M0 and waiting for the raid, which gives me a negative feeling as the start of an expansion, but in a month i wont care and enjoy it, cause i want to do my raid, my 1-4 M+ and nothing else.

[Miffinat0r]

On a casual level, this expansion has shown me more joy than any other expansion to date. Genuinely, the level of discovery and exploration and just the ability to go wherever and do whatever you want with no worry about missing out on power gains or anything stupid like that - I've never been happier with the direction of the game in that aspect.

I just found myself flying around to the various objectives and treasures, or seeing side quests and enjoying them just to enjoy them. Exploring just to explore.

That's why I haven't knocked the game yet. I'm usually very vocal about casual gameplay. I haven't gotten to DF yet. Hunter is still only 25. I'm going through WoD, and it's a beautiful expansion. I'm gonna do DF but I swore to myself I'm doing absolutely no end-game competitive modes.

I'm firmly in the camp that competitiveness ruins MMORPGs. It's like trying to imagine how to play competitive DnD. It just doesn't work.

But as I said before and you still see this even in this thread so many people have gaslighted casual players. It seems like every expansion that Blizz releases the first month or two everyone always says It's the most casual expansion ever! which we know is not the case. The only reason I'm playing right now is because I saw the Ion interview with Preach and he openly admits he and his team have done a disservice to non-competitive players over the years. Which is why I'm a bit more optimistic about DF. BFA was okay, way too much to grind for nothing, and the game forced pushed you into the competitive endgame modes. SL was literally Blizzard being like nah RWF are the players you should be like, and that blew up in their faces.

[Johnjohn]

I dont think anyone thought shadowlands was casual friendly at all. Seems they addressed most of what the community wanted when it came to BoA type things in DF

Um what? Like the poster you quoted said, we have had this narative that WoW has become more casual friendly rammed down our throats for many expansions now, including SL, when in fact the gear and skill gap has never been bigger.

As someone who played the game since launch day, I still cannot fathom how anyone can seriously say the game is easier and more casual friendly now. Even when WoW classic opened and people steamrolled the content right before our eyes, people still deny this and act like you are crazy.

Either people have very selective memories, or like that poster said they gaslight as they really enjoy having an edge as most hardcore players do in mmorpgs as that edge over others is what they get off on and want to keep it that way.

My guess is the latter

[ifrah]

Unless you had some gotta catch em all and/or min-max OCD, or were doing world first level of stuff, I fail to understand which part of SL was not casual friendly, and fail that in epic scale.

[Noobslayer]

Just play the d@mn game and shut up. Leave people alone and do your own thing. You are all just pixels on a screen.

[wowrefugee]

I consider it hardcore if I have to,

1. Buy an expansion.
2. Pay a sub.
3. Spend months and months to get anywhere close to endgame participation and dedicate all of my free time to it in order to get my money's worth.

Let's say you purchase Endwalker because all of your buddies have it, and they swear by the campaign. You start leveling once you get home from work every single day, and make very marginal progress over months. Endwalker costs 40 bucks. To be generous, 2, 3 months of sub to level. That's 85 dollars to get anywhere close to endgame. That is, if you don't buy a boost. If a game requires me to spend that much money and time in order to get anywhere close to endgame, it's hardcore to me. I do not have the time to dedicate myself to that journey. It's simply inaccessible - which is what 'hardcore' means to most people. Inaccessible.

You misunderstand FFXIV. Boosting to Endwalker to experience its campaign would be a massive mistake no matter the praise it gets. You have to play the base game and expansions in order to get the praise-worthy experience.

Most people use hardcore synonymously with competitive or difficult content. Persona 5 Royal, for example, is not a "hardcore" game just because it's close to 100 hours long.

Factoring in money is silly. Is God of War Ragnarok more hardcore than Dark Souls 1 because it has a significantly higher cost? lol

[shadowmatrix]

Spending more time leveling is probably not a great definition of "hardcore."

Leveling is the most casual of content unless your game mandates groups, which modern games don't do anymore.

FFXIV requires group content to progress the story, they are working on it but still not completely there last I heard.

[Miffinat0r]

Either people have very selective memories, or like that poster said they gaslight as they really enjoy having an edge as most hardcore players do in mmorpgs as that edge over others is what they get off on and want to keep it that way.

My guess is the latter

This is exactly what I was getting at. Literally right below me you have someone insisting it's so casual friendly. Lol. That's objectively funny because it's just so wrong.

[Koollan]

You misunderstand FFXIV. Boosting to Endwalker to experience its campaign would be a massive mistake no matter the praise it gets. You have to play the base game and expansions in order to get the praise-worthy experience.

Most people use hardcore synonymously with competitive or difficult content. Persona 5 Royal, for example, is not a "hardcore" game just because it's close to 100 hours long.

Factoring in money is silly. Is God of War Ragnarok more hardcore than Dark Souls 1 because it has a significantly higher cost? lol

You completely ignored all of my points in talking about what makes an MMO hardcore for me. You know, the whole '1 2 3' list? That you forgot about? Or deliberately ignored?

I am not paying 80, 90, 100 dollars to experience a whole MMO. I'm not spending months at a time just to get the experience that I want out of the game. What's 'hardcore' about it is that it's a 'hardcore' expenditure of my time and requires my full dedication in order to even remotely enjoy. I don't want that. I want to buy the game and enjoy it. FFXIV does not have that, as far as I'm concerned, and it's worse for it. I would be less critical of it as a 'hardcore' game if it didn't have a sub, because doing the main story quest for months of sub time (essentially making you pay a monthly fee to keep playing the story) is asinine and ridiculous. Either make the story portions playable on the free sub (up until the most recent expansion), or get rid of the sub model entirely and just have the playerbase pay a higher premium, like 60$ for the expansion, since it's practically a "new game", as so many people laud.

Let's be honest. 'Hardcore' in an MMO is directly synonymous with the amount of time you spend in the world and how many resources you expend, IRL and ingame, to get there. Mythic racing in WoW requires a lot of dedication - time, know-how, practice. Anybody can do it if they put enough time into it. FFXIV is precisely like that in the sense that you must spend a ludicrous amount of time ingame to get towards even the most baseline goal. If I'm going to nitpick here, the difference is that in WoW, people aren't forced to be hardcore - people are not forced to do Mythic raiding, or high keystones. In FFXIV, you are forced to spend months of time dedicating yourself to the game to get access to content that people have had access to for months at this point, and you're being left behind.

Sounds fun, right?

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That's why I haven't knocked the game yet. I'm usually very vocal about casual gameplay. I haven't gotten to DF yet. Hunter is still only 25. I'm going through WoD, and it's a beautiful expansion. I'm gonna do DF but I swore to myself I'm doing absolutely no end-game competitive modes.

I'm firmly in the camp that competitiveness ruins MMORPGs. It's like trying to imagine how to play competitive DnD. It just doesn't work.

But as I said before and you still see this even in this thread so many people have gaslighted casual players. It seems like every expansion that Blizz releases the first month or two everyone always says It's the most casual expansion ever! which we know is not the case. The only reason I'm playing right now is because I saw the Ion interview with Preach and he openly admits he and his team have done a disservice to non-competitive players over the years. Which is why I'm a bit more optimistic about DF. BFA was okay, way too much to grind for nothing, and the game forced pushed you into the competitive endgame modes. SL was literally Blizzard being like nah RWF are the players you should be like, and that blew up in their faces.

I will also say that the new Professions system really props up the casual gameplay side. It's actually incredible and has made for some amazing moments.

[dlld]

Well as a self described casual I can see myself continue to Play DF longer then any expack since wotlk, shadowlands I quit after doing one torghast after reaching cap after having been bored through the entire leveling.

[Ginnung]

So just to be clear - FF14 copied wow, even though its predecessor, FF11 came out two years BEFORE wow, and was an mmo?

Beside that, you say "its not hard to figure out" but then really struggle to explain what you are actually saying? What ARE you trying to say?

FFXIV definitely did take heavy inspiration from WoW in ARR when they rebooted it, Yoshi-P has said as much himself and made his team play WoW to learn from it.
Altho funnily enough a lot of the unpopular things that were changed over the course of expansions was a lot of those influences ( especially in raid design ).

FFXIV today however bears almost no resemblance to WoW in basically any way.
They're so fundamentally different on almost every level.

But mainly the inspiration that Yoshi-P originally took from WoW which is pretty funny in hindsight is the same lesson that WoW learned from Everquest.
FF11 was too convoluted and difficult, it was hardcore to a fault.
And it was redesigned to be more casual and modern and used WoW as a framework.
But that was all that it was really, like I said the game has evolved drastically just like WoW has since Vanilla ( or devolve depending on who you ask, but it's not a direct comparison ).

FFXIV requires group content to progress the story, they are working on it but still not completely there last I heard.

Yeah there's something called '' Trust '' where you basically do the dungeons with NPC's from the story which is actually pretty cool, they have unique dialogue and even some unique behaviour.
For example they'll solve mechanics in unique ways that makes sense for their personality ( one might casually walk, another teleport while another figures it out last second and sprints ).
You level them up too and can even use them to repeat dungeons to level up if you don't want to play with others.

It's not even close to all dungeons yet tho, but I think Yoshi-P said that the goal is to have it for all of the story dungeons at least.
It's the old expansions that are behind with it, Shadowbringers and Endwalker have it for all of them.

Edit: One of the trials ( '' raid '' boss fights ) actually had it in Endwalker too which was a bit shocking.
Not sure if that was just a one-time thing, it makes sense in the narrative if it was a unique one-time thing too but it'd be cool if they added it to the trials too.

[Johnjohn]

For this game to cater towards casual players again the following should happen:

Remove mythic plus, remove timed anything in dungeons. Instead make the dungeons as hard as say Cataclysm heroics so that casual players are still challenged but it's not a gogogo min hax hardcore fest (and for those trolls who want to say cataclysm heroics are harder than most mythic plus dungeons, you are wrong). Also release way more dungeons to keep people's interest. If you must keep mythic plus, have achievements and skins rewards, no gear.

Have 2 raid difficulties. Normal which is between current LFR difficulty and normal raids, and heroic raids which are between current heroic and mythic difficulty raids. This way Johnny casual can see raids if he really wants to, but hardcore players get their raid niche.

Make battlegrounds the priority and again have arenas just for achievements, no gear).

Have the gear gap at most be 10% between hardcore and casual players

This makes casual players way more involved in the game and closes the gear gap. If they feel like the carrot is at least in range they will keep playing.

Currently casual players are just fodder for bored hardcore players in random bags. They are also welfare cases with the best rewards coming for mindless grinds like dailies and world quests.

It's not rocket science. In fact, blizzard got it right towards the beginning of the game. There was a reason the game hit 10 million subscribers, and it was not because of the current game design philosophy

[Wyrt]

I consider it hardcore if I have to,

1. Buy an expansion.
2. Pay a sub.
3. Spend months and months to get anywhere close to endgame participation and dedicate all of my free time to it in order to get my money's worth.

Let's say you purchase Endwalker because all of your buddies have it, and they swear by the campaign. You start leveling once you get home from work every single day, and make very marginal progress over months. Endwalker costs 40 bucks. To be generous, 2, 3 months of sub to level. That's 85 dollars to get anywhere close to endgame. That is, if you don't buy a boost. If a game requires me to spend that much money and time in order to get anywhere close to endgame, it's hardcore to me. I do not have the time to dedicate myself to that journey. It's simply inaccessible - which is what 'hardcore' means to most people. Inaccessible.

You're playing FFXIV wrong then. FFXIV isn't a "The real game starts at endgame" kind of game. The real game starts at level 1. If you don't like story games and just want to do raiding then FFXIV just isn't the game for you. Raiding is more of a side thing in FFXIV to compliment the story.

WoW is the opposite. The endgame is the real game, the story doesn't really matter, and raiding is the central focus of everything.

[ifrah]

I'd say raiding is quite a lot less in the central focus of everything than in the salad days of WoW.

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It's not rocket science. In fact, blizzard got it right towards the beginning of the game. There was a reason the game hit 10 million subscribers, and it was not because of the current game design philosophy

It's not rocket science indeed. There was the adventure game era. Then the FPS years inspired by Doom. Heck, the Guitar Hero games were booming in the WoW's early heydays, but faded in a rapid downfall soon after. All these and the other unsung heroes obviously due to their developers not sticking to the winning formula of their greatest hours.

[Soikona]

You're playing FFXIV wrong then. FFXIV isn't a "The real game starts at endgame" kind of game. The real game starts at level 1. If you don't like story games and just want to do raiding then FFXIV just isn't the game for you. Raiding is more of a side thing in FFXIV to compliment the story.

WoW is the opposite. The endgame is the real game, the story doesn't really matter, and raiding is the central focus of everything.

This takes the biscuit on most idiotic thing I have read today. You can’t “play” a game wrong.

Going by this stupid logic, I have been playing WoW wrong since launch because I play for the story, and story is what motivates me to raid.

This is why I am not playing DF now. The story is god awful.

[kosajk]

You're playing FFXIV wrong then. FFXIV isn't a "The real game starts at endgame" kind of game. The real game starts at level 1. If you don't like story games and just want to do raiding then FFXIV just isn't the game for you. Raiding is more of a side thing in FFXIV to compliment the story.

WoW is the opposite. The endgame is the real game, the story doesn't really matter, and raiding is the central focus of everything.

its one of the resons i havent played more than 6 months of last 2 expansions did just not had time to raid
although i strongly belive that shifted alot in s4 of SL, if they keep up it may be werry sucesfull game subjectivly

[Forum Action]

This takes the biscuit on most idiotic thing I have read today. You can’t “play” a game wrong.

Going by this stupid logic, I have been playing WoW wrong since launch because I play for the story, and story is what motivates me to raid.

This is why I am not playing DF now. The story is god awful.

You can entirely play a game wrong... if you can't understand how pieces in chess move no one is going to tolerate your ass playing the game.

What kind of idoitic take do you have in that you believe games can't be played wrong? Its a game... it has rules and clearly defined success and failure states.