The casual vs. hardcore war

AFKGamer has a very nice article on Epics for Tigole's Mom, about an interview in the NYTimes (under "other sports") focusing on raid-level content, the protests by casual gamers following it, and Blizzard's countermeasures to calm down the casual crowd. Read the story there, I'm just giving some comments here:

The war between casual and hardcore gamers is based on some facts of life which are unlikely to ever change, thus the war will be with us probably forever. Fact is that some players in a MMORPG play far more hours than other players. And as one of the basic principles of MMORPGs is to reward you for your actions in the game, the people who play the most end up with the best rewards. So some of the complaints of casual players are clearly unjustified, you simply can't give out an epic reward for a soloable quest which is equal in quality to another epic reward for doing hundreds of hours of PvP or coordinating a group of 40 players several hours in Molten Core. If you would create an easy way to get to the same reward, it would simply destroy the PvP system and the raid system. Everybody would get the reward the easy way instead of the hard way, and then there would be nothing left to do for the people playing more.

The more difficult part of the war is the discussion on how much effort the game developers should spend for creating content for the different play styles. When Blizzard creates a new high-level 40-player raid dungeon, there are lots of players who will never be able to see it, because they don't have the time and the social network to go on a raid. On the other hand, hardcore players are consuming content faster than casual players, and spend a lot more hours online, so if Blizzard does *not* create new high-level 40-player raid dungeons, the hardcore players grow bored and quit.

The battle around the NYTimes article, which described upcoming new high-level raid content, is mainly caused because many people feel that Blizzard is adding too much hardcore content, and too little casual content. There has not been a single new dungeon for small groups below level 50 added to the game since release, but several high-level raid dungeons. Raid dungeons and PvP, which isn't casual player friendly either, together cover 90% of the content added to the game. Of course some of that was needed, because there was too little high-level content at the start. But now the casual players are getting restless waiting for their turn of developer attention, and not getting much.

The developers argument is based on looking at demography, at any given time there are now more level 60 players online than all the other levels combined, so they say they must create more level 60 content. That argument overlooks two important considerations: 1) There are a lot of level 60 players precisely because all the content is there, and people rush to 60 to attain all the new shiny content. And 2) World of Warcraft is not paid per hour. While the hardcore players might spend more time in the World of Warcraft, the casual players are more numerous, and thus are paying a bigger proportion of the monthly fee. If you can make only one of the groups happy, it would be financially more advantageous to lose 100 hardcore players than to lose 1,000 casual players.

The best decision Blizzard has made in this war is to raise the level cap from 60 to 70 in the upcoming expansion. That *looks* very much like a support for high-level players, but in fact will end up adding a lot more casual content than hardcore content. Unless the developers throw previous design principles over board, casual players should be able to level up to 70 without being forced to ever join a raid, and they might even be able to do so with nothing but soloing. That will give them a lot to do. I just hope there will be plenty of 5-man dungeons added on the way to 70. At the same time, once the casual players are level 70, they will be able to at least visit content that has previously been locked to them. They will still be excluded from the new level 70 raid dungeons, but they might well be able to do Molten Core in a smaller, less well organized group, ploughing through Lucifron and company considerably faster than a current level 60 raid group.

The reaction of Blizzard, announcing more casual content to be added in the next content patch 1.10, at least gives some hope that they are aware of who is paying their salaries. A lot of the war is based on appearances, caused by bad marketing from Blizzard, which is always announcing the hardcore content first, and hides the additional casual content somewhere deep in the patch notes that nobody reads. To be attainable by all players, content needs to be accessible by soloing or playing in small groups, with not too large consecutive blocks of time needed.

[Edit: Absolutely needed to include a link to Brokentoys, Scott Jennings opinion on the subject is a must-read.]
- posted by Tobold @ 10:43 AM Permanent Link