Did casuals ruin WoW and if so how?

[ipaq]

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?

Well they keep creating insipid thread on mmo-champ.

[melodramocracy]

Of course not. But if someone isn't getting what they want from whatever it is they're paying for, the common sense solution is to stop paying for it and find something else.

And instead, we get pages of complaints asking that the game be altered to please customers that aren't going to stick around anyhow.

[Kreeshak]

We don't work for Blizzard's product. We pay for it. You don't see the difference? If you want to work for rewards get a job. WoW is a game. Demanding value for the money you spend is not entitlement.

and games are competetive in my definition. Do you see amateur football players playing for recreation and not to win?

"oh lets concede another goal - that's fun! it's just a game" said no one ever

EDIT: Even tetris a single player game can be competetive if people compare high scores.

[Osmeric]

And instead, we get pages of complaints asking that the game be altered to please customers that aren't going to stick around anyhow.

And yet, a profit-oriented company with literally hundreds of millions of dollars on the line has decided that attempting to satisfy those customers makes sense.

Did we evil casuals use mind control on Blizzard, or are these temporary customers so overwhelmingly numerous that focusing on them just makes sense regardless of the difference in individual playing time?

[MoanaLisa]

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

There have been and continue to be threads created about LFR that simply proceed from the premise that people should be required to earn the right to see raid content; that after you pay your 15/month (or whatever) it's up to other players to grant or deny access to pieces of the game. This is representative of a number of people who viewed raiding as 'their' content and their personal access to it designated them in their own mind as superior players to others. These threads started the same day that LFR and its purpose was announced which was several months before anyone actually saw it. For that matter there were echoes of it way back when normal/heroics were split with more than a few threads about how the new 'normal' mode wouldn't be real raiding either.

I think it's largely true that most people who raid could not care less about this. But there's a rather small and dedicated group that continues to beat at it even though Blizzard as made clear that what they're arguing about is incorrectly premised and that LFR isn't going anywhere. It's a bit like when a private country club golf course goes public. There's a lot of outrage from members about the riff-raff getting in. Whatever the case, the noise created is proportionately in excess to the actual numbers who really give a damn about it either way.

Blizzard has no interest in a business sense spending a lot of resources developing game content that only 10% of the players are going to see. So here we are: Blizzard continues to expand the opportunities for anyone who wants to engage in raiding content whether in a highly-coordinated group of good players, a more casual, less-structured group of friends and family, or if you just want to do a little something on your lunch hour.

[Kreeshak]

I can't argue with that. But I also think that the "anti social behavior" thing is exaggerated. I don't think have nearly as much of a bad time as some claim.

Even a few negative experiences can make you have strong feelings against the tool. That's human nature. I wouldn't go to extreme examples as rape and it's consequences to your rest of your life, but imagine being rejected by your crush in high school in a humiliating way. Some people are thick skinned and would go on. Some people would carry the negative experience and it would haunt them for a long time period. Just because you might be thick skinned that doesn't mean that the experience is less negative or that people exaggerate about their experiences.

[melodramocracy]

And yet, a profit-oriented company with literally hundreds of millions of dollars on the line has decided that attempting to satisfy those customers makes sense.

Yet more casual content was delivered, with a much wider variety, and look what happened. Perhaps attempting to satisfy those customers isn't working, because what they want is more or less at complete odds with the MMO genre to begin with.

[Osmeric]

Yet more casual content was delivered, with a much wider variety, and look what happened. Perhaps attempting to satisfy those customers isn't working, because what they want is more or less at complete odds with the MMO genre to begin with.

I'm leaning toward the theory that the inclusion of ANY hardcore content repels the casuals. So Blizzard has to bite the bullet, stop resorting to half measures, and just throw the hardcore players under the bus.

It's not as if they have a choice in trying to please the casuals, you know. They've basically come out and said doing that isn't optional.

[LeperHerring]

And yet, a profit-oriented company with literally hundreds of millions of dollars on the line has decided that attempting to satisfy those customers makes sense.

And the results of that decision can be read from the subscriber numbers. Just because they have "literally hundred of millions of dollars" doesn't mean that every choice they make is right. Nokia once was worth literally hundreds of billions, yet they were just sold for a few billion because they made bad choices.

[melodramocracy]

So Blizzard has to bite the bullet, stop resorting to half measures, and just throw the hardcore players under the bus.

It's not as if they have a choice in trying to please the casuals, you know. They've basically come out and said doing that isn't optional.

I'd almost like to see this happen, just to observe the results.

[LeperHerring]

I'm leaning toward the theory that the inclusion of ANY hardcore content repels the casuals. So Blizzard has to bite the bullet, stop resorting to half measures, and just throw the hardcore players under the bus.

It's not as if they have a choice in trying to please the casuals, you know. They've basically come out and said doing that isn't optional.

They weren't pleasing casuals, they were pleasing bads. Casuals don't care about hardcore content, that's what makes them casuals. It's the bads that play a lot, but get nowhere because they're bad, that whine for this dumbing down.

[Rahl]

I don't understand these types of posts. If you want to play the game hardcore, you can, is you want to play it casually, you can do that too. If you want to be hardcore then maybe you should try for world first kills, or maybe go for gladiator. Hell, go for both of them at the same time. If you don't have much time to play then you can play casually as well. That's why lfr exists.

These discussions serve no purpose other than to create arguments. The game being casual friendly takes nothing away from hardcore players, it just means there's more people running around.

No one is more entitled to anything in the game whether their casual or hardcore. Yes, we all have to pay a fee to play, but what we do once we're in game is up to us. If you only have 5 or 6 hours a week to play, you're not going to be running around in heroic gear. At the same time if you have no job and are able to sit and play all week long, you have no right to tell others with less time to play what they should and should not be able to do.

[LeperHerring]

I don't understand these types of posts. If you want to play the game hardcore, you can, is you want to play it casually, you can do that too.

Don't you think that if you actually could do that, then people wouldn't be here complaining? In theory, sure, you can do anything. The problem is that the practice is very different from theory. On my realm we had dozen solid 25-man end-game guilds on both factions from TBC to Cata. Now there are none. Zero. I'd like to do 25 man progression raiding, but I cannot.

The root of the problem here is that they try to use the same content for everyone. Create different sets of content for different groups and bulk of the problems disappear. Sure there will be some kids whining that someone else has some toys they don't, but that's unavoidable in a game full of kids.

[Grimble]

Do you feel compelled to buy other products that aren't aimed at your specific interests? I enjoy hockey, maybe I should buy tickets to a baseball game.

So does that mean you hardcore types are all going to quit finally? Because the magical day when Blizzard removes LFR and rolls back to Burning Crusade is never coming and we all know it.

- - - Updated - - -

And the results of that decision can be read from the subscriber numbers. Just because they have "literally hundred of millions of dollars" doesn't mean that every choice they make is right. Nokia once was worth literally hundreds of billions, yet they were just sold for a few billion because they made bad choices.

I'm just going to keep pasting this at people like you.

I bet if they kept the TBC model, subscriptions would have stayed at peak forever, right? No matter how old the game got, or what other games came out, or how free they were to play, people would just sit around in World of Warcraft looking at your epics and doing hardcore raids until the heat-death of the universe, yeah?

But don't worry, sure Blizzard is foolish enough to ignore the endless money-geyser that catering to a tiny, noisy, elitist minority provides, but that doesn't mean everyone else is. Surely some other company is about to come out with a hardcore raiding MMO that will set the world on fire, gain twenty million subscribers, and put those Blizzard fools out of business.

Bpfffahahahahah-- sorry, I couldn't keep a straight face. Yeah sorry, but MMO developers have finally realized that your ilk isn't worth the trouble. Have fun hating everything in this genre until the end of time.

[LeperHerring]

I'm just going to keep pasting this at people like you.

You can keep pasting it all you want, it still won't make any sense.

[Grimble]

You can keep pasting it all you want, it still won't make any sense.

Here's the thing: What you think doesn't matter. You're not a participant in a spirited debate, you're a target dummy. This battle is over, and the hardcores lost. LFR is never going away, TBC is never coming back, and you know it. You can piss and whine a bunch of bullshit about how a nine-year old subscription MMORPG could ONLY be losing players due to your idiot pet issue, but nobody takes it seriously. We don't, Blizzard doesn't, and neither does anyone else in the industry.

Where are the games, jackass? Where are all the super hardcore raiding games stealing Blizzard's thunder? Why has all this bullshit about casualization harming subscriptions apparently not occurred to anyone else anywhere in the entire MMORPG industry? Maybe because you're just some crybaby jackass irrelevant hardcore pitching a bitchfest from the trash heap of history.

Now excuse me, I have to go queue for LFR and polish my welfare epics with your fucking tears.

[RickJamesLich]

Wasn't casuals exactly that ruined wow, but bad players (LFR guys, but obviously not just them) that wanted everything over nerfed.. now everyone clears content on Tuesday or Wednesday and have nothing left to do lol.

[Ronduwil]

Yes, it's a game that requires you to play it to get anywhere. Purchasing any game at all is simply a grant of access, not success. Why do you expect this one to behave differently?

Why not just make a level 1 character, then start putting in tickets asking why you aren't 90 yet?

Name one account of a casual player who put in tickets demanding features. That's a fantasyland scenario that you concocted. I never said that you should simply be awarded gear without even playing. I simply said that Blizzard needs to offer diverse content if they want to attract a diverse crowd. If all they offer is raids all they're going to get is raiders, and raiders have historically been a very small segment of the in-game population. If I don't like raiding why should I pay for access to raids?

Look at the game from my non-raider's perspective. In WotLK we had 16 different Heroic dungeons, and I could run one every single night with the expectation of repeating instances maybe twice a month (if that). I had to save up a month's worth of badges to get an upgrade but I was OK with that.

In Cataclysm we started with six new dungeons and two rehashed ones. I could save up justice points, but there was no chance in hell of getting anything better than what had already dropped from those dungeons. If I ran just one dungeon every day I could expect to repeat dungeons weekly. Let me put it another way. As a casual player I only got a third of the content that WotLK had been giving me. If you exclude the rehashed instances that goes down to 1/4 of the content. I was OK with that for a bit because I thought the situation would get better.

Then the troll heroics hit. Both of them were rehashed raids, gave higher rewards, and had to be queued for separately. So now we're down to only two dungeons to pick from. Now I'm at 1/8th of the content that WotLK provided! Blizzard made some concessions by offering the current tier's gear for VP, and now that I could now reasonably valor cap through dungeons I could purchase raid gear. That didn't change the fact that I only had two dungeons to run and you can only run them so many times before getting bored. So I started to raid FL.

My first observation: Shannox and Beth'tilac were easier than Jin'do. Why were their drops 25 ilevels higher? That's kind an an arbitrary "f u" to non-raiders to me. My second observation: Raiding is boring as hell. Raiders are constantly running one and only one instance on any given week. That gets old fast. The content is consumed in two phases: first you bash your head against the boss repeatedly, imploring everyone to avoid bad things and/or perform their role better. At some point the magic line is crossed and everything becomes second nature. From then on that boss is "on farm" and you're mindlessly hitting them up for gear. The middle ground where you participate in a suspenseful battle to see if you can take down the boss in time lasts maybe two weeks, but outside of that you're either experiencing extreme frustration or extreme boredom. Unlike dungeons, you can't even switch out players or bring in alts to spice things up a bit because one ungeared character derails the whole raid.

So now I was raiding, my guild split, and I opted to follow the splinter group lead by the guy who actually put some effort into leading the raids because he got a really raw deal from the old guild's leader. These kinds of politics are the reason I quit raiding in WotLK shortly after starting, but since there was nothing else left for me to do in the game I was resigned to deal with them. By this time all the non-raiders had basically left the game so no one who wasn't already locked to another guild's raid was available to shore up deficiencies in the roster on a given week. From time to time I would see my old friends return to check things out, but they never stuck around long enough to be raid-worthy. This was already the state of the raiding scene and note that it was before LFR was even introduced.

Then Dragon Soul hit. I was excited that we got three new heroics this time, but my excitement was short-lived because I was able to faceroll all three of them in less than two hours. They were on yet a third tier of queueing so even though my dungeon choices went up by one, it still felt like I wasn't getting much content. If I had wanted to go back to my dungeoneering lifestyle I would still be repeating dungeons an average of two times a week instead of three times a week.

LFR was a temporary boon because we were temporarily able to bring non-raiders into our normal raids without having them instantly die. It also gave me a chance to practice mechanics and innovate new strategies in a low-stress environment where misjudgements weren't so costly. Unfortunately, it also exposed the loot arguments and angry elitists that raiding inevitably spawns to the masses.

Now we get into the MoP era, which promises to bring the game's appeal back to the casuals. At this point I was weeks off of my Heroic DW kill and after doing the same content week in and week out I was pretty sick of the game. I didn't even buy the expansion and I took a break from the game. When the expansion went on sale for $20 I couldn't resist trying it out so I picked it up. Because I had subscribed to the annual pass I still had a few months on my sub. What did I find? Level 90 in about a week. A crap ton of dailies. Six new dungeons and three rehashed ones. So we're basically back in Cataclysm again, except the dungeons are complete facerolls. As a healer I spent about 10 seconds per boss healing and the rest of the instance I might as well have been on autofollow. Scenarios were even worse. If I even tried to heal those I would get raged at for not being DPS.

What's worse is that in the meantime my guild has been unable to retain raiders. I wasn't 90 for two weeks before they were pulling me into raids to heal. By the time the next month was out I had taken over as the primary healer because our monk left the game to deal with family issues. I felt like I was back in the same old grind again: Faceroll through MSV up to Elegon and then spend hours pushing into new phases with a 6-man core team and four puggers/infrequent raiders. Within the month my VP gear and raid drops were far better than anything I could get in LFR with the exception of the Sha-touched weapon. I saved my coins and killed the Empress three times a week to no avail. The frustration of running the same old crap week in and week out was compounded by bad RNG. I have to say that LFR is not fun and I would never in a million years have dreamed of quitting normal raids to make time for LFR. That is a complete myth.

Blizzard is failing to engage casuals because this is the casual experience that WoW offers now: raid or be bored out of your mind. If you don't like the raiding experience then it boils down to: be perpetually frustrated or be bored out of your mind. LFR doesn't help the casual experience very much, but blaming it for killing raids is overstating the situation. Without LFR the casual experience would suck even more than it already does. No one ever whined for raids. No one ever put in tickets demanding better gear or instant levels. Most players were simply less optimistic than I was. When Blizzard first made their opinion of casuals clear via their early Cataclysm design decisions many casuals saw the writing on the wall and split. The rest of us have just taken longer to come to the realization that it's probably never going to get better. WoW is now a raiders' game that is best left to raiders. I doubt that I'll change your mind, though. Keep believing that casuals won if it makes you feel any better.

[Occult]

Yes casuals ruined wow. I remember playing during BC and hating the long graveyard walks and the difficulty in leveling. However the fact that everything was so difficult made having a max level character all the more rewarding. That sense of accomplishment is gone when I can get to 90 with heirlooms in a week. Having a lv 60 or 70 was a big deal back in the day. Now SW and Org are swamped with 90s and any noob can do it fast.

[melodramocracy]

I'm just going to keep pasting this at people like you.

That argument falls completely apart when you consider how this game played while it was growing, and how it plays now while subs declining. Unless you've deluded yourself into thinking that Blizzard is making all the right moves now, it's simply that nearly half the playerbase has left because of 'it's old' or 'other games are f2p'. That's a splendid way of deflecting any blame or shortcomings on the product itself.

It also makes the childish mistake of assuming that everyone who enjoys a more challenging game does so explicitly because of some inferred exclusion of other players.

In short, the statement is rubbish, and re-posting it doesn't make it any more correct.