How do you cater to both the Progression player and the Casual player?

[netherflame]

Then put in the time. That you're complaining about not wanting to earn currency as a casual player doesn't change the fact that you'd still have to put in the work to earn other things in the game regardless. It isn't handed to you just because you pay a sub.

Legendaries and flying aren't handed to you just because you pay a sub either. You gotta work to obtain both.

The first post was a trap post because its constantly complained about how players have to do things when a new patch hits and its not just given to them. So thanks for proving that things should be earned not given.

[WowIsDead64]

I assume that there isn't a 100% perfect answer but in your mind what would come close to the best possible compromise between these two groups?

In my mind the best option would be to cap power obtained outside of progression systems to roughly normal/heroic while removing all/most long term progression systems from the game. As for long term progression I could see a mythic/elite recolor being available though a long term grind would be better reward.

What are your thoughts on it?

Ultimate solutions?
1) Difficulty slider - if I want flying and trivial WQs for bad rewards - it should be my choice
2) Making competition/PVP explicit choice - competition even with own faction = pseudo-PVP and PVP should be voluntary choice, like it was back in old times, when Wintergrasp and Tol Barad were explicit "PVP" locations, while whole world was purely PVE.
3) Making long term grinds account-wide - obvious thing, gating comfortable game behind time/grind/RNG-gates is bad by itself, but it's twice as bad, when it should be done on every alt.

[Triceron]

This is what is needed in World of Warcraft for world content, matchmade group content and yet to be implemented instanced solo content:
.

Solo instanced content is something that I really don't understand why Blizzard hasn't done by now. The competition has been doing this successfully for years now, if not decades.

Last MMORPG I played was PSO2. There were multiple avenues of obtaining the really good weapons in the game, including a super-casual Story mode that simply involves watching cutscenes and occasionally playing a mission with a choosable difficulty setting. Once you get to the key Boss-type missions, you can repeatedly do that content to get a chance of the drops you need, or complete certain difficulties for a guaranteed drop. They're actually quite challenging too, since you don't have the same support and failsafes as you would in a group setting where other players can res you if you die. So the easier way to get the drops you need is group content, which is RNG and more grindy, or you have the option of playing completely solo with your own level of challenge, and either slowly work up or be really good and get it in one go in a higher difficulty setting (which make also take much longer since difficulty is roughly the same as trying to solo a Raid boss)

Progress doesn't have to be exclusive to multiplayer modes, and frankly shouldn't. And I say this as an exclusive multiplayer random-group player.

[XDurionX]

Not assuming casuals don't want progression is a good start.

[Chickat]

I want more side content, more story quests, more comstic stuff.

Give me player housing, much better crafting, dance studio, instruments, LOTS more story content. Like quadrupled at least per patch. There isnt much meaningful fun casual content.

[WowIsDead64]

Not assuming casuals don't want progression is a good start.

Core motivation to progress for casual players - is to make game easier and more comfortable for them. But it's big misconception to assume, that making game initially harder to provide longer power progression = more content for casual players. There is threshold and casual players simply refuse to play content with difficulty beyond that threshold. That's why I didn't play Nazjatar and don't play Maw/Korthia.

[Caprias]

Not assuming casuals don't want progression is a good start.

This, everyone wants to have good gear and progress their characters strength, it's almost like a cornerstone to rpgs one might think.

Just make a gear currency based system with a weekly cap that will eventually give everyone a path to BiS, players that put in the effort to Raid, push keys or do rated pvp simply get there faster by having additional chances to get good/BiS gear.

There should always be a incentive to do higher echelons of content and give people an "excuse" to put in time for mythic raiding/rated arena/high keys, however there is no need to make these paths the only ones.

[Osmeric]

That's a bad player then, not a casual player.

There's a large overlap between the two sets of players, though, to the point that the terms are often used interchangeably.

There are many ways to get better at the game.

And yet, so many many players do not "get better". This cannot be an excuse the devs can legitimately use to justify slighting them.

[Adamas102]

Nobody stops you from wilfully not wanting to try.
I just find it quite odd that people with such mentality feel entitled to the same rewards as people that do.
And I find it even more odd that people with such mentality keep doing certain types of content where the rewards more or less follows your efforts.
There is plenty of content in WoW for people that wilfully refuse to do their best.

Added:
And once more time: Plenty of casual players do competitive content at a high level in WoW. Stop skill-shaming casuals!

"Casual" has nothing to do with skill. At no point did I even bring up "skill" so you can stash that straw man elsewhere.

Casual is about mentality. If you're scheduling out your gaming such that you're expected to play at certain times then you're not a casual gamer as far as I'm concerned. Whether you're logging on once a week or everyday, doing normal raids or mythic. Doesn't matter. And yeah, you can be very skilled, enjoy challenging content, and always want to play optimally without wanting a group of 4/9/19/39 other people determining when you need to play.

The idea that games should make you struggle and put in great effort to be rewarded is a pretty silly idea. The vast majority of games (99.9999%) don't even offer players different rewards depending on whether they decide to play at a higher level of difficulty. More often than not, playing a game at a more challenging level is its own reward for those who enjoy that sort of thing, and players who want to play on easy mode aren't denied portions of the game as a result. That's why this notion of people deserving more or less in a game based on effort is such a ludicrous concept and one that is pretty much relegated to a very small handful of video games.

I don't think there's anything wrong with some games catering directly to people who enjoy challenge (games with essentially no easy mode). The issue pertaining to WoW is that it makes a point of attracting casual gamers with super easy, accessible entry level play and then at max level pretty much funnels them into repetitive "win or your time was wasted" content if they like the idea of continuing to progress their characters. That in turn also leads to bitter gamers like yourself who take umbrage with the idea of other people simply having fun and being rewarded.

[Glorious Leader]

you understand the rewards from things like mythic raiding are needing to progress through mythic raiding for 95%+ of mythic raiders right?

It needn't be. Simple scale.ilvl to whatever appropriate challenge. Much like challenge mode dungeons. Somehow I think mythic raiders will find this unappealing but we can dispel the gear is a tool argument and it just leaves naked desire instead. Which is all it really is.

- - - Updated - - -

Simply because the people who do put time/effort into the game will feel cheated.

Boo hoo. I mean at least your honest. The desire to retain the best rewards the game has for mythic raiders has NOTHING to do with need and is all about desire. Its incredible petty and small mind you and evidently you'd rather see the game tank then offer anybody else even just a taste.


Its really simple guys. You want to retain players? Great you need to offer them some way to continue progressing their character that doesn't involve dealing with pigs in the raid community because for whatever reason people opt out of the rat race that is raiding. The developers tried to skirt around this by introducing borrowed power as a means to keep progressing your characters. You all bitched about how much you hate borrowed power and "systems".

[Raven]

One of the biggest problem right now, Blizzard needs to give everyone something ingame that are fun to do, so every player have something they think is fun to do ingame and then players needs to just accept that not everything will or needs to be fun for everyone since its impossible.

[Adamas102]

You can't, that's not possible. I say this next bit because I believe this is where it all started, the problem has since evolved past it. Casuals need to accept the fact that they just won't have the best stuff in the game. Casuals, and those that simped for them, have ruined the game by mind fucking Blizzard into thinking that the casuals need to be able to be on the SAME level as those who are able to dedicate more time to the game. That's just how life works. You can't have your cake and eat it, too.

Good thing we're talking about a game and not "life". Gaming should absolutely feel like having your cake and eating it too. That's why for the vast majority of people it's a purely leisure endeavor. Gaming shouldn't need to feel like a struggle in order to be rewarding. This idea that casuals just want stuff given to them is just a meme created by people who take the game way too seriously. People want to PLAY the game, not DEDICATE themselves to it.

We know from Blizzard's own numbers that WoW lost over 90% of its subscribed accounts in its first decade. Raiding was a very niche mode of play early on so that sounds like a loooooot of casual players who were attracted to the game but didn't find it particularly fun or rewarding. I'm sure there's a variety of reasons those people came and went, but to say that "casuals have ruined the game" is probably one of the most idiotic quotes of this thread. Appealing to casuals with a very accessible entry level experience is what put WoW on the map and kept it there for many years. Maybe if Blizzard hadn't stopped appealing to those casuals once they hit max level the sub count wouldn't have topped out at only 10 million when over 100 million people tried out the game in those first 10 years.

[Scarnage86]

Change game rewards system
- Power reward should be the same for all, strong player got it faster, causal got if after longer farm. At the end both have same power
- Power should NOT be the main reason to play, PRESTIGE is what will matter. Mage tower, challenge mode, title, mount and on and on...
A good thing that ppl forget about WOTLK, was the introduction of achievement. That is should be aiming more!
New an avarege player when see a player with 30K achievement vs 2K should wanna say "Damn! i need to do that thing to!" or when see a mount or trasmo it must trigger the jelosy and competitive of "having it too"
Power is just a mean to an end...

[Kralljin]

Good thing we're talking about a game and not "life".

And humans are still humans, the same things that push your buttons in real life, also push your buttons in a video game.

I can't use a cheat code in real life to complete everything, however in a lot of games, that was completely possible, yet it is commonly accepted that using cheat codes often leads to a diminished experience.
Any (progression) based game that instantly hands you the best rewards sees little retention, because the game has already handed you everything and the player has little incentive of continue playing.

We know from Blizzard's own numbers that WoW lost over 90% of its subscribed accounts in its first decade.

This is such a hilariously dishonest take that i'm just baffled.

Yeah, they lost 90%, but still had over 10M subs.
Doesn't matter how many players you lose, when you retain such a huge amount, at a certain point, your "target audience" simply caps out, you can't make a game that appeals to literally everybody.
WoW was a culteral phenomenon at the time and was quite likely tried out by people that aren't even interested in MMO's to begin but did so because everyone was talking about it.

I'm going to make a wild guess and the vast majority of those accounts already quit before they reached the max level and didn't even engage with the endgame of WoW at all.

It really takes some serious mental gymnastics to look at original WoW and say "Well, it actually sucked because it didn't retain enough players" when literally every MMO can only dream of the heights of WoW numbers.

If it were that easy, someone else would've done it and dwarved WoW's success.

[Sucralose]

Re-educate "progression" players on the virtue of having the gear "first", rather than other people just not getting it at all. Time is an element to gearing that is completely ignored in debate on who should get what, despite being the only thing that makes that gear relevant to progression.

The only person who gives a shit what you are wearing is you.

The problem with that mindset is it isn't true though...

Raider io was a response to how popular it became to get gear for doing trivial content. It negatively effects new players as well since rather then jumping into end game immediately they now have one more barrier to entry. Needing to either run their own keys forming their own groups or spend an egregious amount of time getting over the freebie gear hump to be considered for groups.

Now I know they can simply join a guild but a guild taking new members through keys seems rarer then guilds running mythic raids. The idea that in a game where the simple act of fishing and putting your items on the AH effects the entire server thinking that giving out free gear doesn't effect the entire community seems...well incorrect.

- - - Updated - - -

Solo instanced content is something that I really don't understand why Blizzard hasn't done by now. The competition has been doing this successfully for years now, if not decades.

Last MMORPG I played was PSO2. There were multiple avenues of obtaining the really good weapons in the game, including a super-casual Story mode that simply involves watching cutscenes and occasionally playing a mission with a choosable difficulty setting. Once you get to the key Boss-type missions, you can repeatedly do that content to get a chance of the drops you need, or complete certain difficulties for a guaranteed drop. They're actually quite challenging too, since you don't have the same support and failsafes as you would in a group setting where other players can res you if you die. So the easier way to get the drops you need is group content, which is RNG and more grindy, or you have the option of playing completely solo with your own level of challenge, and either slowly work up or be really good and get it in one go in a higher difficulty setting (which make also take much longer since difficulty is roughly the same as trying to solo a Raid boss)

Progress doesn't have to be exclusive to multiplayer modes, and frankly shouldn't. And I say this as an exclusive multiplayer random-group player.

I mean they have tried.. visions though gimmicky did rather well with that aspect I felt though they shouldn't of been gated by a currency. Torghast... well if you look at the intent of torghast it was a decent idea just horrible enacted.

It is hard to do good single player instances the best I have played in an mmo was deep dungeons in FF14 but even those had a bit of a shallow element to them.

[saixilein]

I would like to see:

Sets for each Content (Raid, M+, PvP, Openworld) with specific Bonuses + increased Itemlevel when you doing the Content the sets to belong. So a Mythic Raider has no advantage in M+ compared to some1 who is just doing m+ and has the best m+ Gear.

World Quests/Open World activities should be more fun and REWARDING. I mean i dont need any Rewards from World Quests a Week after SL Launch, cause you just got useless items or minior amount of useless currencys/mats.

They should introduce more solo/smallgroup content like Visions, Thorgast, Mage Tower etc, but on a bigger level. So you dont run the same sh1t 10x each week, instead you do one run a week, or one every 2 weeks. More cosmetic & CLASS/SPEC specific rewards would be nice aswell. Its cool that you get all these Covenant mounts & Transmogs, but none of them fitting in my Mistweaver or Brewmaster Designe. Its all so generic.

Get rid of Powerprogression System and give us instead more cosmetics, challanges and let people who doing only Content A have more advantages in Content A then some1 who get the BiS gear from another Content.

[Edward Wu]

People misrepresent the term hardcore very much, which is where the problem lies.

There are lots of people who regard themselves as hardcore because they have some noteworthy accomplishments in game and regularly achieve them. It doesn't make you hardcore. These same people are usually looking to Blizzard to design things in a way where their playstyle is also throttled, like a casual's, but throttled because of design and not as a choice. These people are not hardcore, since they are looking to be throttled. There are very few hardcore players in reality, and none of them really complain about grinds or how much they have to play, they simply do it because they have a fiery competitive spirit. To be hardcore is to accept all aspects of the game and excel in it regardless of what is asked of you, regardless of what a toll it takes on your life. A good example of someone who might have been hardcore before but is most definitely a casual now is Preach, who went from being in WFR attempts to whining more and more to Blizzard about the game taking up too much of his time. That's a casual mindset (there's nothing wrong with that FYI).

The real problem lies in the fact that Blizzard is bad at serving casuals, which are still the majority of the playerbase and will always be. They still do not understand how to effectively reward people who regularly throttle their playtime. WoW is still a massive time sink and commitment, unfortunately. Attempts need to be made in reducing this, and more people who are actual casuals will be happy.

I have never seen the hardcore vs. casual debate determined by what type of content you do, but your mindset on the game which largely influenced your play time.

[Adamas102]

Any (progression) based game that instantly hands you the best rewards sees little retention, because the game has already handed you everything and the player has little incentive of continue playing.

Convenient how you left out the part I said about people wanting to get rewards by playing. This isn't an argument between doing something for rewards and doing nothing for rewards. This is an argument between people who think you only deserve rewards for an arbitrary amount of effort and dedication, and the average gamer who plays games for low stress fun and enjoyment. The moment you are able to wrap your mind around the idea that playing a game for fun isn't the same as "doing nothing and having everything instantly handed to you" then you'll understand why making gaming a struggle is unpalatable to the majority of people.

This is such a hilariously dishonest take that i'm just baffled.
Yeah, they lost 90%, but still had over 10M subs.
Doesn't matter how many players you lose, when you retain such a huge amount, at a certain point, your "target audience" simply caps out, you can't make a game that appeals to literally everybody.
WoW was a culteral phenomenon at the time and was quite likely tried out by people that aren't even interested in MMO's to begin but did so because everyone was talking about it.

I'm going to make a wild guess and the vast majority of those accounts already quit before they reached the max level and didn't even engage with the endgame of WoW at all.

It really takes some serious mental gymnastics to look at original WoW and say "Well, it actually sucked because it didn't retain enough players" when literally every MMO can only dream of the heights of WoW numbers.

If it were that easy, someone else would've done it and dwarved WoW's success.

Talk about a dishonest take. Did I say 10 million subs wasn't an achievement in and of itself? No. Did I say WoW "sucked" because of its retention problem? No. Did I say WoW should appeal to "literally everybody"? No.

No matter how you want to spin it, having a low retention rate isn't good. WoW obviously did a lot of things right in order to get that many people to give it a shot; simple and fluid game play mechanics, vibrant visuals, excellent music, a strong foundation from the IP, very forgiving combat/death systems, etc. WoW became a standout in the genre BECAUSE it was so appealing to casual gamers rather than just the hardcore MMO crowd. And yeah, I'm certain a good chunk of those accounts quit before hitting max level, but that doesn't mean they were a lost cause from the get go. There's really no way to know how many might have quit before hitting 60 because the friends that got them in to begin with told them there wasn't anything to do (from a casual perspective) once you hit max level. Either way, getting someone in the door is a good start, and pushing away >90% of those potential customers is not great. It doesn't matter how WoW compares to other MMO's. They attracted a whole lot of casual players, but their endgame design doesn't foster rewarding casual gameplay.

[Kralljin]

Talk about a dishonest take. Did I say 10 million subs wasn't an achievement in and of itself? No. Did I say WoW "sucked" because of its retention problem? No. Did I say WoW should appeal to "literally everybody"? No.

That this however the logical implication of saying "they've lost over 90% of their players", you can't say something like that and then turn heel when people read it was a criticism, because that what this sentence effectively is.

No matter how you want to spin it, having a low retention rate isn't good.

Again, it ignores the fact WoW managed to gain relevancy far beyond the MMO Target audience and it takes no genius that someone who has had no interest in MMORPG's, but simply picks it up because he heard about it, is less likely to actually enjoy it, because they previously have shown no interest in MMORPG's.

When you manage to draw in people far beyond your target audience, it's by no means a bad sign that your retention rate increases but simply a natural thing as people outside the target audience are frankly less likely to become regular players.

People who have previously shown interest in a product are more likely to buy a product of that type, than people who have previously shown no interest in a product of that type, that's not exactly a farfetched theory.

WoW became a standout in the genre BECAUSE it was so appealing to casual gamers rather than just the hardcore MMO crowd.

The casual player that is however completely aversed to raiding or any form of social interaction would've also shat on Classic WoW.
Also, Vanilla was a casual MMO, but not a casual game, those things are very different.

And Vanilla also very much catered to those hardcore players, R14, Scarab Lord, you name it.

And yeah, I'm certain a good chunk of those accounts quit before hitting max level, but that doesn't mean they were a lost cause from the get go. There's really no way to know how many might have quit before hitting 60 because the friends that got them in to begin with told them there wasn't anything to do (from a casual perspective) once you hit max level.

I think those people that actually had friends that played WoW with them were far more likely to become regular players because the social interaction between players has been citied as one of the big reasons why WoW exploded in the first place.

Most people likely quit because they simply didn't enjoy the game, this is the simplest explanation.
The idea that someone who plays WoW, brings in another friends and once they started playing, tells them "Oh btw., there is nothing to do at endgame unless you're interested in something called raiding", without the new player actually understanding what raiding means and then quits is just such a completely biased view.

Either way, getting someone in the door is a good start, and pushing away >90% of those potential customers is not great.

No, it's not, when you on the other end manage to keep over 10M players.
Again, if it were that easy, someone would've dwarved WoW's success, but no MMO has come even close to that number.

[Argorwal]

Good thing we're talking about a game and not "life". Gaming should absolutely feel like having your cake and eating it too. That's why for the vast majority of people it's a purely leisure endeavor. Gaming shouldn't need to feel like a struggle in order to be rewarding. This idea that casuals just want stuff given to them is just a meme created by people who take the game way too seriously. People want to PLAY the game, not DEDICATE themselves to it.

We know from Blizzard's own numbers that WoW lost over 90% of its subscribed accounts in its first decade. Raiding was a very niche mode of play early on so that sounds like a loooooot of casual players who were attracted to the game but didn't find it particularly fun or rewarding. I'm sure there's a variety of reasons those people came and went, but to say that "casuals have ruined the game" is probably one of the most idiotic quotes of this thread. Appealing to casuals with a very accessible entry level experience is what put WoW on the map and kept it there for many years. Maybe if Blizzard hadn't stopped appealing to those casuals once they hit max level the sub count wouldn't have topped out at only 10 million when over 100 million people tried out the game in those first 10 years.

So you think maybe it’s because just the very idea of playing the same video game for a year, let alone 2 years, or 17 years, is so absolutely foreign to how the vast majority play video games that massive bleeding is to be expected?

Only on these forums do I ever hear people talk about playing the same game for years as some sort of “normal” approach to games. The random casual isn’t doing anything like that.