I think wow needs to become casual again.

[KYH]

link your /played and ill tell you if youre casual or not

[xcitng]

Yeah, even if you are talking about time investment, its still extremely casual, how many games bring out catch ups on gear & AP after 3 weeks of release

[Loveliest]

I didn't know casuals as a term changed to meaning being utterly awful at something. I thought people who were awful simply claimed to be casual.

As far as I've seen, people use it for 'easy'. For example, some people call themselves casual if they don't raid Mythic or do Mythic+, even if they play 16 hour a day. I've seen a lot of people claim that 'My neck is level 22-23 and I'm a very casual player'. Or 'my ilvl is 362 and I'm very casual', or 'I am exalted with all reps and I'm a casual player'.
People forget that doing something casually, by its dictionary definition, implies doing something irregularly, in a relaxed manner.

[Lasting Journey]

As far as I've seen, people use it for 'easy'. For example, some people call themselves casual if they don't raid Mythic or do Mythic+, even if they play 16 hour a day. I've seen a lot of people claim that 'My neck is level 22-23 and I'm a very casual player'. Or 'my ilvl is 362 and I'm very casual', or 'I am exalted with all reps and I'm a casual player'.
People forget that doing something casually, by its dictionary definition, implies doing something irregularly, in a relaxed manner.

Kind of weird... only the second example would be possible to obtain casually to the best of my knowledge at this point. I don't get why the term evolved it seemed easier to just call people good or bad at the game.

[Alex005]

I agree with you. But how to do that?

[Battlebeard]

I agree with OP, it is not friendly to casual players at all.

Over the years, I raided Mythic (or previous endgame with another name). There were no cutting edge achivs vanilla to cata, but if there were I'd gotten them too. This I don't say to brag, it was just how I played the game and the difficulty that suited me.

The game is harder now than ever, sure, but once a Mythic raider, always a Mythic raider. I should not be doing world firsts or realm firsts, but rather normal paced Mythic raids. I should be at 4/8 Mythic right now, to match my performance.

However, I have about 1-2 hours a day to play. Most raid guilds require at least like 2 days with about 4 hour raids. That is litterally impossible for me with my IRL, and while I enjoy raiding, I am not gonna quit my job to do so.

Therefore, I see a huge problem. As someone who by skill should raid Mythic (again, sorry if I sound like a douche), but who simply cannot attend raid hours of guilds, I am in a very awkward position. I can't be alone in this situation.

The game is not tuned for casual people. My definition of casual is those who can't dedicate themselves to the game very much. Casual has NOTHING to do with how good you are. Most things are so crazy time consuming.

I don't buy this "this game is not for you then" cause the game developers should be flexible and not the other way around. I don't want to quit a game I am good at and who I already spent a lot of time in. They need to change it to have equal options regardless how much you play. More solo content with proper rewards would be a start.

[Mad_Murdock]

link your /played and ill tell you if youre casual or not

Is that per toon or accounts wide?

[FAILoZOFF]

Become? It been casual-ified to death already.

funny cause, I remember WoW being so much more casual friendly as well as being much more relaxed at keeping up, hell you didn't even "have" to do more than a few specific quests if you didn't like to (for instance I don't like quests and would choose mob grind any-time)

[Aquinan]

funny cause, I remember WoW being so much more casual friendly as well as being much more relaxed at keeping up, hell you didn't even "have" to do more than a few specific quests if you didn't like to (for instance I don't like quests and would choose mob grind any-time)

There is an artifact knowledge (cant remember what its called) mechanism, that makes it pretty easy to catch up.

[lollermittens]

I agree with OP, it is not friendly to casual players at all.

Over the years, I raided Mythic (or previous endgame with another name). There were no cutting edge achivs vanilla to cata, but if there were I'd gotten them too. This I don't say to brag, it was just how I played the game and the difficulty that suited me.

The game is harder now than ever, sure, but once a Mythic raider, always a Mythic raider. I should not be doing world firsts or realm firsts, but rather normal paced Mythic raids. I should be at 4/8 Mythic right now, to match my performance.

However, I have about 1-2 hours a day to play. Most raid guilds require at least like 2 days with about 4 hour raids. That is litterally impossible for me with my IRL, and while I enjoy raiding, I am not gonna quit my job to do so.

Therefore, I see a huge problem. As someone who by skill should raid Mythic (again, sorry if I sound like a douche), but who simply cannot attend raid hours of guilds, I am in a very awkward position. I can't be alone in this situation.

The game is not tuned for casual people. My definition of casual is those who can't dedicate themselves to the game very much. Casual has NOTHING to do with how good you are. Most things are so crazy time consuming.

I don't buy this "this game is not for you then" cause the game developers should be flexible and not the other way around. I don't want to quit a game I am good at and who I already spent a lot of time in. They need to change it to have equal options regardless how much you play. More solo content with proper rewards would be a start.

I think this assessment is correct: the game is designed with "casual" mechanics (low barrier to entry to most activities in terms of skill investment) but any worthwhile achievement is gated behind a requirement to be consistently involved in playing the game every day.

For anybody with a limited schedule who wants to achieve the high-end stuff, it might be impossible. Even with the introduction of M+ dungeons, anybody with a limited amount of time who dedicates all their video-game time to it, it might not be feasible to ever reach beyond M4-5.

Now, the issue this beings is one that the game has never been able to resolve: how should all content be accessible to the majority of the playerbase? If I remember correctly, the GMs or devs on the forums confirmed that the expansions were they completely removed all barriers to entry to pretty much everything, player retention decreased.

It's a very complex problem. If we allowed everything to be doable by everyone at almost anytime, what's the point of even playing? It's the equivalent of removing the carrot from the stick and just handing you the carrot which removes the motivation to accomplish things within the game altogether.

But, currently in BfA, I do believe that the game is not very accessible to casual players who fall on the more extreme side of casual gaming.

[Prime92]

Rofl, you get to complete "chellenges" around a year after they were released with 2 tiers higher gear, having LFR afk bullshit drop gear 15-25 ilvl higher than they were designed for with 2 basically guaranteed items of whooping 100 ilvls above the intended gear level. You get a basically guaranteed kill on each mythic raid tier, where bosses are just big target dummies with literally 1 extremely easy mechanic. You get items of current HC base ilvl for essentially doing a AFK scenario, you get a mythic level item every week for little effort in m+ or hc level base for literally walking through a low tier m+ each week, you can literally accidentaly stumble upon normal-raid tier gear doing some stupid quests even before the raid opens and much more. How fucking casual can it even get? Like you want to log in, cast dice for loot, gather mythic level gear that people devote tons of hours of their time in order to get, log out, rinse and repeat daily? Fuck that.

[Zorachus]

I have been playing WoW since launch, and hands down it was way more causal the early days than compared to the later expansions. FACT.

At launch a ton of the player base were casuals who liked to spend time leveling up 60 levels, doing professions, exploring the huge new WoW world of two full continents and 30 or so zones. Yeah the Raids were [H]ardcore, but not a big % of the playerbase ran those, only the elite few.

Now a days WoW end game is all about Raiding and mythic dungeons, and that's pretty much it. Casuals blast right through the new 10 levels and half a dozen new zones, and then that's it, onto the Mythic end game stuff if you wanna stay.

So yes, WoW is geared more towards the [H]ardcore, more than before.

[Taenaeris]

It pretty much needs to go the opposite way - with Blizzard sending a clear message to all those carebears that they won't give in to their whining anymore.

Asking even more "casual friendly" stuff is just ridiculous just after Blizzard has completely ruined the game for anybody who's actually playing it on a serious level with their free welfare loot and people complaining about dungeons being too "difficult" when in fact there hasn't been any expansion before where they've been that easy.

[Thelin]

I have been playing WoW since launch, and hands down it was way more causal the early days than compared to the later expansions. FACT.

At launch a ton of the player base were casuals who liked to spend time leveling up 60 levels, doing professions, exploring the huge new WoW world of two full continents and 30 or so zones. Yeah the Raids were [H]ardcore, but not a big % of the playerbase ran those, only the elite few.

Now a days WoW end game is all about Raiding and mythic dungeons, and that's pretty much it. Casuals blast right through the new 10 levels and half a dozen new zones, and then that's it, onto the Mythic end game stuff if you wanna stay.

So yes, WoW is geared more towards the [H]ardcore, more than before.

Lol what more do you want? They've added achievements for people, pet battles, easier entry into PvP, you can basically afk and get free 370s. Lfr let's you see all the content. This game is plenty casual and if you played since vanilla your initial response is bullshit about it being more casual. There was literally NOTHING to so besides raids. Epic items only came from raids and coordinating 40 man raids took a shit load of time and effort. My guild was full clearing and BWL and people would instantly leave PvP BGs when they saw our guild name because they'd be so undergeared.

[Battlebeard]

I think this assessment is correct: the game is designed with "casual" mechanics (low barrier to entry to most activities in terms of skill investment) but any worthwhile achievement is gated behind a requirement to be consistently involved in playing the game every day.

For anybody with a limited schedule who wants to achieve the high-end stuff, it might be impossible. Even with the introduction of M+ dungeons, anybody with a limited amount of time who dedicates all their video-game time to it, it might not be feasible to ever reach beyond M4-5.

Now, the issue this beings is one that the game has never been able to resolve: how should all content be accessible to the majority of the playerbase? If I remember correctly, the GMs or devs on the forums confirmed that the expansions were they completely removed all barriers to entry to pretty much everything, player retention decreased.

It's a very complex problem. If we allowed everything to be doable by everyone at almost anytime, what's the point of even playing? It's the equivalent of removing the carrot from the stick and just handing you the carrot which removes the motivation to accomplish things within the game altogether.

But, currently in BfA, I do believe that the game is not very accessible to casual players who fall on the more extreme side of casual gaming.

It is possible to play high M+ keys. Last expansion, with my current schedule, I did +22-23 dungeons but in order to do so, I had to lie about raider.io score and pretend I had more characters etc. It's not fun to lie, but I simply had no time to grind keys and to build my own raider.io score, however, I had no problem doing +20 and above, since I can play my character and know the tactics etc.

However, most players are kinda ignorant and only look for achiveements and score etc, so for me to play at that level, I simply must lie about score since there is no chance at all for me to get that score (timewise, I would have it if I had the time).

However, I did +22 with full heroic raid gear, which was enough. But in order to do Mythic raids, which are significally harder than Mythic+, I need more gear and more time to do it. Doing a +20 with full heroic gear is doable in 1-2 hours, which i can do, but doing a full mythic raid with full heroic gear in 1-2 hours is impossible.