Your are funny.
Give casuals free easy gear and they quit because there is nothing to do.
Literally every expac, patch ppl cry about 6-10 month raid cycle yet never even beat half the previous content (Due to welfare making it obsolete) or current content even on real diff. What purpose does casual have to do anything when it is alrdy full gear? They don't do it for fun... or else they actually would... now...
Content drought is a combination of catchup mechanics and no new content.
"There is a pervasive myth that making content hard will induce players to rise to the occasion. We find the opposite. " -- Ghostcrawler
"The bit about hardcore players not always caring about the long term interests of the game is spot on." -- Ghostcrawler
"Do you want a game with no casuals so about 500 players?"
I get that but that's is what mmo's generally are. The more skilled you are the higher gear you get to do higher skilled tasks. Maybe they can try out fortnite or something. Or just do the 500 other things in game if you can't learn how to effectively play. Like I said there are plenty of things to do. The cool thing is too that you can practice and not be as bad to an extent....I meet people in 208 i lvl who don't know their rotation. Who spam arcane shot as bm hunter. People don't want to invest time or learn their character. They want things handed to them and not to actually play an mmo. If I sucked at pacman because i kept running into ghosts, I wouldnt message the creator and say this game sucks because I keep running into ghosts, now let me eat the ghosts all the time so I don't have to worry about skill...
lol promptly fired for catering to the demographic that's actually bringing in the money these days? riiiiiiight.
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No definition of the word casual in the English language implies the people you're saying as even the closest one "relaxed or unconcerned" doesn't apply to the people you're calling casual as they clearly are neither if they're whining about gear.
This is the problem really - everyone has a different definition of hardcore/casual, everyone has a different definition of playing the game "a lot" - for some that's an hour a day, for some that's 10 hours a day. Everyone has a different definition of hard/challenging content - for some heroic raiding is extremely easy - for some just the idea of joining a random M0 is intimidating. For some a "low key" is a +2, for others, they farm +14's without a second thought.
When people say things like "Blizzard are favoring X group", we hit a wall because no one can even define what Group X is, and who is included. Then we get some who self identify as Group X start saying they feel left out, and others start saying they are not even part of Group X.
I mean it doesn't really matter as the term originated from people who DIDN'T have time to do content that mattered which was fine. Now people are making it include people who just don't want to play the game's actual end game content and still get the rewards for it. World content will never be rewarded the same as upper end game nor should it be and their utter refusal to participate in the game at that level is enough to justify not needing nor receiving said gear and if it makes them quit then so be it. Hint: they aren't leaving.
They are generous so far, that system is different, that gear u can upgrade to 233 isnt the maw-touched gear, since the gear actually is labelled as such, and maw-touched gear can go all the way to 237, 2 ilvl less than heroic, so this looks like just another avenue to get gear outside of m+,pvp and raid.
PvP gear for bdk has best customisation for any other high difficulty content (haste+vers). Covanent gear is high ilvl but it's pure trash with insane amount of mastery.PvP route is also way less RNG. The content you farm isn't necessarily linked to the content you want to run.
The player base got it all backwards. You need the proper gear to do the content (think farming frost res. Gear), but these days you must have high ilvl gear just to get accepted to a run you allready outgear by a mile (+link achieve).
Also, doing the SAME content over and over again isn't more content. It's just more time (and cash grab) consumed.
To me, everything feels made to be sluggish, slow and stop you from continuing. Take renown for example, eventually your catch up renown just stops "dropping" and you can do 10 raid bosses in a row and get nothing. Why not let people decide for themselves when to stop? If I have the time one weekend to grind out all renown to actual cap, it sucks when it just doesn't happen after a while. "Oh, so I guess I have played enough this week?"
So many sluggish systems, and catch up-renown is just one of them.
I also see no reason why I should do Torghast. I liked it, but not enough to just do it for nothing. I have better progression related activities I can do.
And anima. Blech.
Because the hardcore crowd would QQ to no end about the Mandatory™ grind. And we can't inconvenience those folks now, can we?
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This. For all of the rivers of tears about, idk, running MoS in Legion for AP until their eyes were bleeding, they never quit. Or if they did, it was so unnoticeable that no one realised it
You migh throw on casuals mythic gear as you want. As long as getting gear isnt tied to proper and fun gameplay experience + social structure where you actualy have to play with other players casuls wont have fun anyway. I dont get what current players have this delusion how is more and better rewards will keep players playing more. No. Thats not how it works.