Did casuals ruin WoW and if so how?

[Deleted]

Well obviously, casual is a very vague term but it has a limit of acceptability.

Let's push your theory to the limit, are world first raiders who raid 12+ hours a day when content is released and have their alts waiting outside fully geared and ready to go in case the next fight requires that class to be stacked a casual?

Absolutely not.

I'd say the limit of being a casual is spending 16 or so hours a week on the game personally, others may feel differently, but it does have a limit after which it completely loses meaning

Game-time clocked as a fine line dividing 'Hardcore' from 'Casual'...

Soooo.....

one is either a casual.... or a basement-dweller.

[wych]

Game-time clocked as a fine line dividing 'Hardcore' from 'Casual'...

Soooo.....

one is either a casual.... or a basement-dweller.

I did not say that, I just questioned the reasoning that everybody playing WoW is casual by pointing out the extremes.

[Zaqwert]

I'm skipping this whole thread because i know it's probably just a gigantic flamefest.

Long story short, WoW is a worse, but more popular game because of the casualization.

I would prefer a WoW that had 2 million subscribers and was the way it used to be than a WoW that has 8 million as it the way it is now.

A bigger, more profitable game? Yep, casualization is a smart business decision.
A better game? No way.

[turboblake]

Blech, arguing about casual vs elite is SO Wrath of the Lich King...

[LeperHerring]

I'm not the one calling for LFR to be removed so that I can feel special about my tier gear. I'm not the one demanding that everyone be forced to only raid heroics so that I can muster up the motivation to raid again. I could care less about what others do and don't have.

Neither am I. Although unlike you I do care what others have, because I want everyone to have content that suits their playstyle. That leads to a game with a variety of content and people in it, which makes for a much more exciting game world. I've always said that you can and should have 5-mans, and LFR, and 10 mans, and easy raids, and whatever else. Just like there should be TBC style progression raiding that I enjoy. The key is to make different content for different playstyles, not try to use the same content for everyone because that just doesn't work.

My problem with the game is that it excludes most of the players that I actually enjoy spending time with and encourages anti-social behavior.

I watched the game evolve from vanilla to Cata. By far the biggest source of anti-social behavior is LFD and LFR.

Maybe you enjoyed telling your friends that you can no longer raid with them because they just can't squeeze out the extra 10k DPS needed for the current fight, but that isn't such a great feeling for me. That has nothing to do with my ego and everything to do with wanting to play a game that is actually fun and doesn't throw off my sleep cycle.

Of course you wouldn't understand that because everything to you is in terms of bads and l33ts and if you're not l33t you're bad and should feel bad about it. In your mind the burden is on every player to "better" themselves to the point where they can fully appreciate "true raiding."

Here goes your ego defense again. End-game raiding isn't actually like that (except maybe in the world first race), you just have concocted this fantasy of how terrible the top guilds and their players are to protect your ego. You must find flaws, because you cannot admit that in most of the top guilds the players are far more skilled than you and they're also great, nice teammates.

I'm sorry to say that business just doesn't work that way.

The facts say otherwise. During vanilla and TBC, which saw explosive growth throughout. In WotLK the growth hit a wall and stopped, and since late 2010 the game has been losing 2 million subs per year.

[Deleted]

Blech, arguing about casual vs elite is SO Wrath of the Lich King...

Until the subs actually return to their peak level, we are going to have this debate reignited time after time again - because those make for a perfect whipping boy.

[Halicia]

Truth of the matter is, every last player WoW has/had is a casual.

^

At the very basic, there's 'no' death penalty, except a VERY short corpse run, and rarely even that. So regardless of skill, EVERYONE will reach max level. Previous MMO's often didnt even HAVE a max level, let alone any sort of guarantee of reaching it.

[Ineluki]

There has always been casual players, and always will be. The only difference between vanilla/bc and now is that they have multiple difficulty levels for different levels of skill/interest/time commitment. Many heroic mode fights are much harder and/or complex than they used to be. The only reason people say its been dumbed down is because its not only relegated to those with skill and/or tons of time like it used to be, even though there is still an area designed for that part of the player base.

[Binko]

You mean those bastard players who pay their monthly fee but don't strain the servers or clog up the queue by constantly being logged on? Those bastard casuals who go through content slowly and generally don't bitch about "nothing to do" because they're still leveling a toon through old content, or just getting to Thunder because they can't raid twice a week or even once a week, but can run LFR whenever it suits them? Those damned casuals who don't know how to PvP so are always easy pickings when they show up undergeared in the battlegrounds? Those lame-ass casuals who, without even trying, float the guild xp, contribute to the guild vault, and buy and sell regularly on the AH? The dastardly casuals who account for the vast majority of players in WoW, without whom more servers would be dead, realm economies would be basically non-existent, and you could never find a decent pug again?

Yeah, those jerks really ruined the game.

Many Raiders grudgingly accept that those players exist. But they really don't want to see or hear from them. They don't want them asking for things or wanting to be included or posting their opinions on the forums.

There is a major logical disconnect in how Raiders view casual players. You often hear the following:
1) The majority of the players are casuals, otherwise known as "bads" and are clueless, lazy, unmotivated and low skill.
2) If casuals want to see the raid content they should join a good raiding guild.
3) Good raiding guilds are only for the top tier of best players and don't want the inexperienced or unskilled.

Huh?

[Lord Blackmore]

Do y-you... do you play the same game we're playing? Were you not there for the quarterly reports?

Mop is fine. You know why I think it's fine?

The biggest reason is that I don't get a hair up my ass when things change. I have NO control of what Blizzard does and if they do something that ruins my enjoyment of the game, I'll quit and find something that suits me better. Unfortunately, there seem to be a bunch of people around here who just can't move on. Even if they quit. It's stupid, childish behavior. It's the forum equivalent of a temper tantrum.

[rootfifth]

Yes, for the longest time casuals whined, bitched and moaned about not being able to see content. Wrath comes around and they are handed fairly easy 10 mans for casuals to experience. That wasn't enough, no, no, no, they wanted more, they eventually got LFR, but this still wasn't enough, People were supposedly stealing "their" gear. Personal loot was added in MoP to combat the supposed loot thievery, still again it wasn't enough, they weren't getting a piece of gear off of every boss so they whined and they cried. ToT comes out and loot drop rates had been changed from 12.5% to 18% per boss, as expected it wasn't enough, so they whined and they cried and they tossed the word elitist and nostalgia around as they always have. Now another tier is coming with an extra tier of loot in another fashion of downs syndrome easy raiding that is flex mode. What will happen this tier? My bet is on whining and crying on loot not dropping enough, followed by tossing the words elitist and nostalgia around when people tell them to man up and eventually Blizzard breaking down and handing out more to the babies.

In TBC the "casuals" wanted to see content and they were giving access to that content, but the reality is that it was never about content, it was about being the biggest group of loot whores to plague any MMO to date. They swear that they are the ones that pay the bills yet subscriptions declined in WOTLK and dropped from the last tier of WOTLK forward. WoW saw massive population growths during vanilla and TBC yet only saw a whopping 0.5 million added during wrath (which is championed as some success story by casuals everywhere)

[Osmeric]

Yes, for the longest time casuals whined, bitched and moaned about not being able to see content. Wrath comes around and they are handed fairly easy 10 mans for casuals to experience. That wasn't enough, no, no, no, they wanted more, they eventually got LFR, but this still wasn't enough,

You lied by omission about the part in between those two where Blizzard SNATCHED THOSE 10 MANS AWAY. The difficulty of normal mode raids was dramatically increased after Wrath.

[Lord Blackmore]

And what I'm saying is that you only think my posts come off as narcissistic because it's an ego defense mechanism of yours. I bet I can take a list like yours and lift comments out of context for any user with 500+ posts that superficially appears to match (not that the quotes you lifted even matched the definitions you posted).

Both of you need a timeout.

[Phood]

back then it was harder trying to clear content

Nope. Bosses weren't harder.

and the game in itself was a lot harder since there was no LFR or group find for anything plus you had to flyout to the actual instance

.

Huh? This makes no sense. LFR and flying to raid entrances didn't make anything more difficult.

So basically if you werent in a hard core raiding guild you werent going to see any content.

I honestly don' believe you played in TBC at all and since you're name is "mmowin" and you have a whopper 18 posts as of this reply, I also doubt that this was a serious question and/or post. That being said I'll go ahead and play along. In TBC there were attunement quests (now we have ilvl requirements) you had to complete before you could enter a raid zone. If you lost a raider you had to find another (or someone who had a max level alt (almost unheard of TBC)) and drag them through the attunement chain. You could then enter the raid even if your gear really really sucked. Almost everyone that wanted to raid saw Karazhan. Many teams made their way into SSC by the end of TBC. Serious raid teams made attempts, successful or not, on BT. The hardcore teams got to experience Sunwell and completed it. TBH Sunwell had a really strange feeling. Like it as tacked onto the end of the xpac as an afterthought. My guild in TBC never made it into Sunwell as we considered deafeating Illidan as completing the xpac (and we ran out of time because Blizz just started letting people do these fancy realm transfers and we wanted the hell off Cho'gall)

My question is how exactly did the casual "ruin" WoW?

Wow isn't ruined by casuals. In fact I'd contend that Blizzard tiptoes around the hardcore raiding crowd because that group is so small yet they keep turning out extra bosses and continue to emphasize a mode that few people really play.Wow has just aged along with many of the people that started playing in Classic when they were in there late teens and 20s. Life happened. Simple as that.

[Lord Blackmore]

No one was keeping anyone out of anything. If you wanted to raid you just needed to make friends, make a guild and learn your class and the encounters. While it certainly wasn't easy to make a successful raiding guild in vanilla or TBC, it became much easier when raids became 10 mannable.

But keep in mind that it wasn't people bitching about not getting into raids that drove Blizzard's decisions. Blizzard looked at all the time and money they were spending on raid content that a fraction of the playerbase ever got to see (for whatever reason). The decision to include a low skill version of raids was driven largely by the desire to allow more players to see the content.

LFR isn't a cause for the decline of the game, except in a mostly minor way. LFR is the effect of what I talked about above.

[Alerzhul]

Sup everyone so ive been playing WoW since about the start of BC and I know back then it was harder trying to clear content and the game in itself was a lot harder since there was no LFR or group find for anything plus you had to flyout to the actual instance. So basically if you werent in a hard core raiding guild you werent going to see any content. 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?

Absolutely, yes. LFR/LFD = Death of WoW and possibly the entire mmo genre

[Lord Blackmore]

Yes, for the longest time casuals whined, bitched and moaned about not being able to see content.

Except they didn't. It was pretty much all a Blizzard decision to try to get more than a fraction of the player base the ability to see raid content.

I'd also love to know who these "casuals" are that have allegedly complained so much, when casual is so generic as to not have any precise definition.

[Fluorescent0]

Nope, casuals didn't ruin the game. Bad people who want everything just because they pay a subscription did.

[Freeasacar]

The entire concept of WoW from development day 1 was to make a big MMO that was simplified enough so that the masses could access it. Back in Vanilla they were still learning how to do this so the forumla wasn't as defined, but definitely still very accessible for many people who wouldn't have even thought about picking up an MMO before. The formula was in such flux that we saw widely differing levels of raid progression eventually coming to a head in original Naxx where Blizzard just simply made it too hard for most people to even chip away at.

TBC is regarded by a lot of players as the best raiding expansion because of just how well Blizzard nailed the accessibility of raids. They were still doable by most people if you put the effort in, yet they were difficult enough for the gear you earned in them to still have prestige. It was at this time where the prestige of gear was at it's peak and as such many players had genuine motivation for raiding, and as a result enjoyed it greatly. Ulduar was similar to this by being a huge and mostly accessible raid with lots of options if you found a certain wing too difficult.

From Cata onwards it just went downhill because of the widening gap between casual players who desired accessible raids and others who pined for the days of TBC when the just-right difficulty of raids still supported the prestige of gear and raid progression while also being accessible for those willing to put in the time to learn them. It was at this point when Blizzard had a very important choice to make.

Either spend a lot of time, effort and money perfecting the difficulty of raids and other content in the game so that all players could find challenge from them (and prestige from overcoming that challenge) or separate difficult raiding from the rest of the game while also allowing those who aren't willing to put in the time to get better at it complete access to almost everything in the game without effort.

The former would be harder to do but would guarantee the culture of the game stayed intact and many players would be content, the latter would be much easier and only guarantee more subscriptions as well as destroying any sense of prestige that raiding gear and progression once had. You already know which one they chose. It also turns out when you don't put enough effort into your game that players actually take notice and you end up haemorrhaging subscriptions as we've seen happen over the course of this expansion.

In the end Blizzard only catered to those who weren't willing to put in the time and effort to get better at the game because it was so easy to do so, but ended up shooting themselves in the foot by doing so. A huge chunk of the playerbase wants to be challenged and earn prestige from overcoming those challenges. Taking that option away was then WoW jumped the shark.

[taheen74]

People have been whining about casuals since tbc i don't know why people are so up in arms suddenly in mop 0o You can only listen to so many "QQ x, y or z killed wow QQ" before you want to punch them in the face :S

I have a theory on why all of these posts have been getting worse and worse since late DS LFR:

Remember in the original LFR DS you still had the faulty NbG system (in other words everyone and their mom rolling on crap even if they didn't need it)?

This whole crying so much about casuals thing wasn't a huge issue until after Bliz changed it to personal loot. I mean, sure, you'd see some bitching about it, but the moment Bliz made it to where it was individual loot, it got 5 times worse.

I don't think one day goes by in which someone doesn't make an anti-LFR thread on the US general forums.

I'm wondering if a lot of this stems back to when the looting system got changed (for the better in my opinion).