Is "casual engagement" really to blame?

[Perryn]

Personally I'd have liked to see LFR relegated to the previous tiers, ie for the tier before the current tier, always. Keep up interest in normal mode raiding and give those who want to experience it the chance to do that when the next tier come out (or even in the MoP model, every non-raiding tier open up LFR for the current tier even, so ToT would become available for LFR in 5.3). I'm sure that won't happen but that's how I thought they intended to do LFR when it was first announced and that would've been fine. Now LFR "kills" the encounters and you have plenty of time to get sick and tired of it before you get to it on normal (if you like me are in a not-so-progressed guild )

[NatePsy]

Personally I'd have liked to see LFR relegated to the previous tiers, ie for the tier before the current tier, always. Keep up interest in normal mode raiding and give those who want to experience it the chance to do that when the next tier come out (or even in the MoP model, every non-raiding tier open up LFR for the current tier even, so ToT would become available for LFR in 5.3). I'm sure that won't happen but that's how I thought they intended to do LFR when it was first announced and that would've been fine. Now LFR "kills" the encounters and you have plenty of time to get sick and tired of it before you get to it on normal (if you like me are in a not-so-progressed guild )

Thing is, that would have worked if the encounters in Normal Mode weren't so complex. The reason they have LFR out for every current tier is because they want players to experience the content just like the other raiders, rather than lagging behind in the next patch if they were to go with your idea.

[Perryn]

I agree with that, but I'd also say you can't have normal mode be on the level of current LFR, that's taking it too far. But if progression results from wowprogress are to be relied upon, normal modes appear to be a bit excessive at the moment.

[NatePsy]

I agree with that, but I'd also say you can't have normal mode be on the level of current LFR, that's taking it too far. But if progression results from wowprogress are to be relied upon, normal modes appear to be a bit excessive at the moment.

I believe they should be puggable whilst still needing co-ordination and Ventrilo/TeamSpeak to pull the fights off.

[Slowpoke is a Gamer]

The problem wasn't too much to do, it was too much you had to do. Blizz likely felt a backlash of LFR's abysmal reception and made the decision to make all new features part of the gearing process.

I quit within a month of 90 because I'd burnt out on the Golden Lotus, hated scenarios, and knew LFR wouldn't be enough to gear me. Heroic Dungeons? No one was running them anymore because Blizz assumed they were obsolete content from old days.

[Brodeo]

This post summed up a lot of my thoughts. I use and somewhat enjoy LFR, but the ease of access and time it takes really kills my motivation to bother running normals like i used to. I cant adhere to a raid schedule, but at least before i could hop in alt runs and pugs. Those things dont exist now, and ill admit LFR has made me lazy. Its great and convenient, but i highly doubt im the only one its is having this effect on.

My former guild is breaking up because there is no talent pool to draw from anymore. New raiders havent learned raid etiquette, and thats not an elitist pov. There is much to be considered with ease of access, features dont exist n a vacuum. Everyone likes to complain about the 'school of hard knocks' approach, but honestly overcoming is what makes things fun, challenging, and engaging.

[Santoryu]

I agree with Santoryu. The content is designed with certain mechanics and difficulty in mind. LFR rarely reflects either of these. I believe that "seeing the content" means progressing through normal and heroic, in order to see what the content designers have in store for us. Sure I feel like I missed something when a new patch comes out or a new expansion comes how and I didn't finish the last tier or even the tier before it. (ie Naxx when TBC came out, and Sunwell when WotLK came out.) However to get to the end of any game one has to try and work for it. Any game you can stumble your way through to beat the final boss is not a well designed game.(cough LFR cough) Any game that requires you to learn how to play the game in order to beat it is a better designed game in my mind.

Well summed up.

And what Thylacine said about elitism - You're as good as I am, or you GTFO. - this kind of an attitude is a problem. You must give a new player the chance and opportunity to learn and prove himself. However, elitism has been too loosely used lately, namely as a catch-all phrase for "this player wants to be better than me".
Trying to be as good as you can should be encouraged, not stomped to the ground like something bad. Only when you become unreasonable towards new players and start acting condescendingly does it become a problem.

[Osmeric]

I've tried to steer clear of this debate, but it's certainly worth consideration. Personally, I don't PvP enough to really know how it's doing or how it's being received but, in all honesty, I've always believed the core of this game was in PvE and that PvP self-generates content, if you catch my meaning.

PvP got hit with multiple mistakes.

First, casual PvP gear was horrible. As in, almost no reason to get it. It was bad for PvE, bad for PvP. This removed many people from PvP who ordinarily just play casually (for honor and maybe occassional CP). The gear gap between honor and CP gear was just too large. Item upgrading didn't help the problem.

Second, too much CC. Being killed in a stunlock is not fun.

Third, there was too much PvE content. This doesn't sound like a problem, but it let those having trouble with PvP wash their hands of the experience.

So what happened to battlegrounds? Hardcore PvPers trolled them; bots made up a lot of the rest, and those casual PvPers who stuck it out got a very bad experience.

I suspect a lot of casual players doing the PvE legendary chain gave up when it came to the PvP part.

(Oh, and there were serious problems with ratings exploits early in the last season.)




---------- Post added 2013-05-09 at 05:13 PM ----------

Stop right there. Where do you get this from? I read the press release. I couldn't even find a reference to casuals or their engagement.

It was stated in the conference call yesterday. When the transcript becomes available (I thinking Seeking Alpha will have it, although you may have to create a free account to access it) you can read it. You can also go the activisionblizzard.com site (go to Investor Relations) and listen to a recording of the call.

[xixixviixiiii]

There are too many issues with MoP to even really list but personally I feel it largely comes down to these points:

1) Class homogenization. For some classes the talent redesign works (priest) and other classes it's god awful (warrior, rogue). Some specs are utterly crap and not fun to play at all either (like Combat).

2) Lame Faceroll Raiding (LFR) being the primary gearing / catch-up mechanism. Some people like it, others hate it. Generally speaking, the people Blizzard should be designing around are the people raiding every week and working on progression (whether in normal or heroic raids), not the LFR community. Forcing people to run through LFR to catch-up alts is dumb. I'd absolutely agree LFR gear drops should be equal to prior tier normal (aka ToT LFR would drop 496 or whatever).

3) The expansion itself. The source material, lore, whatever... no one really cares. Still don't feel the Horde / Alliance war really.

4) There's not much content. Scenarios are lame and while Challenge modes are okay, people quickly become sick of them from my own experience. Far too many dailies / grind this expansion. The cooking profession / Halfhill Farm basically embodies this entire expansion. A grindy, horribly convoluted mess.

5) PvP. Blizzard dropped the ball here so bad it's funny. The new talent system should play more toward PvP (since many classes still have cookie-cutter specs for PvE, from what I've found) but this simply isn't the case. So many talents are obviously under-tuned or garbage compared to others in the same tier. Gearing is a mess and despite all of the forced "get out in the world" stuff, I still don't see much world PvP (basically just gankers). A shame, really.

More food for thought...

I cancelled my sub (ends on May 16th) mostly because my guild is less active than ever and I'm bored of the current content. I primarily play a rogue (with a warrior and priest alt - both at 90).

Last patch, rogues wanted Hit and Run but Blizzard said, "no, it's too much work." They went ahead and added Cloak and Dagger anyway, despite it being fairly unpopular. Now, Blizzard will be effectively nerfing Cloak and Dagger to the point it won't be taken anymore (and only one spec, Subtlety, a primarily PvP-focused spec to begin with won't even bother taking it). I read Blizzard is happy with the new talent design but I can't imagine why. Just proof that GC and the talent designers are completely and utterly clueless.

Simply put, MoP isn't very much fun and the designers aren't doing their job very well.

[Santoryu]

There are too many issues with MoP to even really list but personally I feel it largely comes down to these points:

1) Class homogenization. For some classes the talent redesign works (priest) and other classes it's god awful (warrior, rogue). Some specs are utterly crap and not fun to play at all either (like Combat).

2) Lame Faceroll Raiding (LFR) being the primary gearing / catch-up mechanism. Some people like it, others hate it. Generally speaking, the people Blizzard should be designing around are the people raiding every week and working on progression (whether in normal or heroic raids), not the LFR community. Forcing people to run through LFR to catch-up alts is dumb. I'd absolutely agree LFR gear drops should be equal to prior tier normal (aka ToT LFR would drop 496 or whatever).

3) The expansion itself. The source material, lore, whatever... no one really cares. Still don't feel the Horde / Alliance war really.

4) There's not much content. Scenarios are lame and while Challenge modes are okay, people quickly become sick of them from my own experience. Far too many dailies / grind this expansion. The cooking profession / Halfhill Farm basically embodies this entire expansion. A grindy, horribly convoluted mess.

5) PvP. Blizzard dropped the ball here so bad it's funny. The new talent system should play more toward PvP (since many classes still have cookie-cutter specs for PvE, from what I've found) but this simply isn't the case. So many talents are obviously under-tuned or garbage compared to others in the same tier. Gearing is a mess and despite all of the forced "get out in the world" stuff, I still don't see much world PvP (basically just gankers). A shame, really.

I love the Lama Faceroll Raiding acronym ;D. Pretty much epitomizes everything wrong with the attitude on which LFR is based.

[Sevyvia]

Casual engagement is only to blame insofar as Blizzard has failed to take a dedicated stance on it. Things moved from what I'd call a middle-ground between casual and hardcore at the end of TBC to full-on casual in WotLK, and Blizzard has since then been reeling the casual in in some respects and pushing it more in others. The end result is that they have failed to retain the inbetween demographic they got in TBC where the game saw the majority of its subscriber growth, with WotLK "only" adding an extra 2 million or so. It has been downhill since, because they have listened to the community in some respects, but not really listened and then factored it into some overall vision for the game. I sometimes wonder if there is one at all, because the game is by now a horrible mess of "casual" and "hardcore" elements, to the point that it's undesirable to play for -both- segments.

Being a part of a server's community is now a choice rather than a necessity, there is less accountability, and these two things have lead to far fewer friendships being formed in the game, and thus the community has changed radically. Playing a WoW character used to be a journey, a journey that both casuals and hardcores could enjoy, albeit at different points and places. Now, the game is a sweetshop where everything is free. You point at what you want, and you get it. Sometimes you have to wait an hour or two, but you will get it. You don't need anyone else to get your candy, either. It's just a giant crowd of people in the sweetshop, all getting their sweets for free, struggling among each other occasionally when there's too much or too little of one kind of candy.

Wow, that was probably a bad metaphor. But anyway, that's what I think. Casual engagement isn't to blame, Blizzard's wavering course on just exactly what they want the game to be is to blame. That, and failing to recognise what a few key features would do to the game.

[wrynil]

Guys, I really don't want an argument about the talent redesign; please stop trying to turn this thread into one.

If you think the talent redesign is great, then good for you - I think it's garbage, because it's robbed me of the choice I became accustomed to as a Protection warrior over the past two expansions.

But that's my opinion, and you're all entitled to yours.

Please try and stay on topic.

Excuse me for being a bastard here though for keep speaking about the talent redesign. Have you seen Path of Exile? Its a fan made game for how some would have loved Diablo III to be more like. There they have a skill tree which is perhaps the direction they should have taken. That surely gives alot of choices. Try take a look on their homepage inspiration

[CrossNgen]

I'm just gonna quote what I've said in the other thread:

Blizzard doesn't know the difference between casual and skillfull, a skillfull player can still be a casual, a casual is defined by the time he has in his hands to play, or the play time he chooses to dedicate in general.

Blizzard are currently making a gap between skillfull casuals, and skillfull hardcores, because, lets be honest here, you don't need skill to go up into raiding, just basic knowledge, casual players are currently blocked by this huge wall, this wall is called the time sink wall, which is NOT what the casuals want.

[bohapjut]

This game would be much better at catering to a wider audience by simply implementing 4 (arbitrary) difficulty levels. That way you can have anybody do the content at the difficulty they are most comfortable with.

That sounds like DDO's dungeon scaling- they have 5 difficulties: Casual, Normal, Hard, Elite, and Epic

[Moradim]

i'd argue the problem isnt "casuals" at all. low pop servers arent really a MMO experience and pale in comparison to say, illidan.

need to fix that problem.

[Moinaldo]

What is the problem with all this people???? I have seen too many threads about this same thing... casual just means that: casual... it has nothing to do with what people do ingame or skill level... it's just a literal meaning: casual players who log in from time to time... nothing to debate about that point, the casual players can be talented pvpers or raiders, but the difference is that they are not in a hardcore mode where they log in every day during the whole expansion... even top raiders guild can be called "casuals" now because they just play during the race to world first and then unsub until next content is realease...

[Ryve]

So your idea of choice is to never have to make a hard choice between 3 useful skill? And any time you have to make a hard choice between 3 useful skills, well, we'll just call it restricting the toolkit.

Funny you mention choosing between throughput and fun. Because that's what you had to do in the old talents system. Choosing between the fun talent and the DPS increasing talent. The DPS increasing talent won every time. And now that problem is solved in the new talent system.

Err... No... Most of the time they took three skills you already had (or two and a new one) and said "LOL pick one at any given time". Now you have to alter your spec to get the other stuff... Before you had almost every ability from your trainer... Were you even playing this game? Oh, perhaps your username is the giveaway there...

[Nouk]

Err... No... Most of the time they took three skills you already had (or two and a new one) and said "LOL pick one at any given time". Now you have to alter your spec to get the other stuff... Before you had almost every ability from your trainer... Were you even playing this game? Oh, perhaps your username is the giveaway there...

That's mostly true for Rogue and Mage only. Who would've guessed, two of the most PvP-dominating classes, which had ridicilous Base-Kits which needed to be broken down.

I kind of find it really funny that people cite Vanilla as the triumph of game design in this aspect: Right after Release, Blizzard already announced the first Talent-Redesign for Warriors, since they sucked monkey-balls.

1) Class homogenization. For some classes the talent redesign works (priest) and other classes it's god awful (warrior, rogue). Some specs are utterly crap and not fun to play at all either (like Combat).

True since day one, as proven again and again. Reiterating bad Talents/Specs/Glyphs/Classes (warlock *cough*) is actually one of the things how Blizzard sets itself apart from the Rest.

As with all new Systems, they need time to balance and try things out. And as usual, People don't have the Patience or Understanding for it....since day one.


On topic, yeah, the pacing regarding Rewards and so on was really too low for mostly casuals. As a hardcore raider i found this expansion to be greater for gearing up then ever, and i didnt farm more than two reps at once (why would you, Valor cap didn't need you to do more at any given time), but i read many complaints about this especially. The only reason i can imagine how too much content is actually a problem for a player is pacing: if he doesn't feel his investment got rewarded accordingly, than it IS a problem. WotlK and Cata set the tone here however, thats the disconnect to MoP. In a vacuum nobody would complain about these things.

[ringpriest]

First let me say, thank you for an interesting and insightful post. I had fun reading it and basically agree with a great deal of what you said. However, there is one thing that's been kind of running around in my head about "casuals" and a line in your essay made it come together for me. You said:

O
- There’s never been more to do in the game than there is now.

I'm not sure that's actually true, particularly for "casual" (horribly over-used word, I know) players. A lot of the real-life friends I played with in my first guild were definitely casuals. They weren't interested in gearing, or in rep grinds, and barely ran end-game 5mans. Heck, they weren't even that interested in getting to 60! (Although most of them got there eventually.) What they did really like to do was socialize, explore, quest, and craft.

The socialization has been covered at length. That aspect of the game is basically dead and gone. Who needs friends or a guild when everything that's not soloable is done via queues that magically teleport you and fill out your group.

Exploration is actually something that MoP seems (from the little I've played of it) to have kind-of brought back, although I don't know if it's possible to bring back exploration like it was in vanilla without an Azeroth-sized world. And when I say exploration, I'm not just talking about filling-in the map, I mean that they liked to actually go and poke into every corner of the game, fight their way to the depths of every elite-filled dungeon, find those odd vendors tucked away in the back-end of beyond, and even have the occassional "wow, there's a quest giver way out here!" moment.

Questing was something else the casuals I knew used to love. Some of them had played other MMOs before, and they loved how many quests WoW had in comparison. They especially liked big, long quest chains and group quests. A fun evening could be logging on, hanging out for a while, getting some potions or other items that would be useful or necessary for a particular quest, getting a group together, crossing half the world to get there, and then finally finishing the dang thing. (Or finding out what the next step would be.)

I don't think players who started in Wrath or later realize just how big, complex, and quirky crafting used to be. Stuff was useful. Not just a for a week or two, and not just an item or two per profession. There was tons of stuff that people wanted: for looks, as improved gear, for raids, for particular fights or quests or leveling. And all crafters were far from created equal. Besides the specializations (remember those?) there were patterns that were hard to get, where maybe only a few people on the server had them. These folks got satisfaction from making a rare, high-end piece of gear, and were happy to spend an evening (or several) making it.

For these people, Warcraft was never about the endgame. They didn't want it to be easier, or more accessible (or harder, or more of a challenge) because it wasn't the game they were interested in playing. (Although many of them did complete attunement questlines.) The casual players I knew would have hated LFR with a passion. I say "would have" because every single one of them had quit by the end of Wrath. Every one. The only things I've seen in MoP that I think they might have actually enjoyed are the scenarios and the Treasures of Pandaria. And I only mention the scenarios, because they're a (crappy, imnsho) replacement for group quests.

When Blizzard talks about "making the game more-casual friendly" or "more accessible" what they've actually done is removed the parts of the game some of the players liked and then shoved those same players into a version of the endgame that they didn't want to play in the first place.

[xixixviixiiii]

True since day one, as proven again and again. Reiterating bad Talents/Specs/Glyphs/Classes (warlock *cough*) is actually one of the things how Blizzard sets itself apart from the Rest.

Too many bad changes, imo. The only complaint I heard about Combat rogues in WotLK was that the rotation was too simple, which was a commentary more on how such a high percentage of rogue damage was from passives. This never changed. If anything, it became worse.

Now, you have Bandit's Guile (awful), Adrenaline Rush energy capping you unless you spam abilities like crazy (so bad that Blizzard lowered the GCD with the T15 set bonus - awful), the new Blade Flurry (awful), Revealing Strike (not fun - awful), Killing Spree (only being a decent DPS cooldown if you use it under strict conditions - awful). The new talent system didn't make Combat anymore PvP viable really, utterly destroyed the identity of the Sub rogue... about the only positive change is that all three specs have Shadowstep now.

As far as the new talent system itself, sorry but it sucks. Are you and I looking at the same talent trees? You realize that 90%+ of rogues and warriors basically have the same talents? The fact that Blizzard will need to change it again to even make it work for the next expansion is a sure sign it is fail to begin with.

Glyphs too... fail (I'm looking at you Glyph of Hoarse Voice).