WoW would be a really good casual game if more people ran heroics; its the only thing I have time for at the moment, and there's enough progression for me from badge rewards and rep reward (singular, there's only one good caster rep reward in the game) for me to last a while. Then I would keep running them if there was some way to convert badges/rep/whatever to gold so I can get my epic flyer - and there kinda is if there's a market for nether craftables.

Unfortunately, pvp rewards and raiding are 'too easy' compared to heroics, so no-one really runs them on my server. I can usually get the daily quest done, but I find it rare to get a second one.
 

"Unfortunately, pvp rewards and raiding are 'too easy' compared to heroics, so no-one really runs them on my server. I can usually get the daily quest done, but I find it rare to get a second one."

I agree with the basic sentiment of your statement, but it's not like the under-equipped casual players have a choice. If you (and especially if the tank or healer in your group) don't have the gear, you won't be successful completing any of the harder heroic instances.

For example, a guildie wanted to do heroic SH the other day with a PUG and asked me to come along as cc. Both the tank or healer died about a dozen times, which would then result in the rest of the group wiping about 1/2 of the time.

I doubt either will be trying heroic SH again until they get better equipment either from raiding or BG. Or at least one of the easier heroics.
 

If you’ve got a job, kids or a significant other, you’re no longer playing nightly for hours. And if you still are, you probably soon won’t have a job, kids or significant other."

/agree. My wife put up with, and was even supportive -at first- with my decision to raid. She likes TV, I like WOW, it was win win at first. Raiding didn't become a problem until I hit the
30+ hours per week mark. Once that happened, I had a choice to make: I could either cut my raiding time, or cut my family time. Being sane and rational, I chose my family.

So now I'm casual, my guild has progressed to where my char isn't as useful as she once was, and I am an alt-o-holic, since there isn't much else for casuals to do other than PVP. no thanks....

I find that xbox live is fitting my casual lifestyle much more these days. Less drama, more action, and when I need to leave, I leave without worrying about guild *ahem* guilt trips.

Wolfgangdoom
 

Dittos to all above. I have "kids, mortgage, career, etc" so I only get about 1.5 hours each night after kids are in bed and before I crash. Being that (and I wouldn't have it any other way), I am super casual and rarely run even the basic instances, not to mention heroics. I will inevitably be PVE until this game gets erased from my HD!
 

Can someone explain what a heroic is?
 

a dungeon in wow, but in hard mode
 

So when you enter the instance, you get to choose a difficulty setting?
 

I pesonally find heroics to be the ultimate wall for casuals.

Heroics are there due to lack of meaningful content aimed at casuals. They bore me and my guild senseless... because it is just rehashed content we have already been doing for nearly a year.

I still think a 10 or 15 man raid is the way... no attunemnt, no gear check, at say heroic levels or just before kara in level.

Something you can do that breaks the norm of constantly pugging or running with the same same 4 people.

Easy enough to rock upto when you have the time and just go play.

At the moment, casual is lacking the... Just go play factor.

Casuals have to:
Attune
Rep Grind
Gear Grind

Again not suggesting the exisiting content be made easier... just suggesting a raid be produced that can counter the problems we have already. Would that not be better than the up n coming 'patch 2 point.less' as I am now calling it.
 

The issue I find with pretty much why a casual player is casual is - time. Time is the limiting factor in practically everything. If a casual had the time to log on and play for 4 hours a night without interruption, they wouldn't be casual, they'd be hardcore.

To get around that, content that is easily achievable in 1.5 hour periods should be part of the game. So instead of requesting easier content, break up Karazhan into smaller wings.

It would be interesting to see what would happen to Blizzard's profits if "gametime charged by hour" was introduced as opposed to a flat monthly payment system.
 

"I still think a 10 or 15 man raid is the way... no attunemnt, no gear check, at say heroic levels or just before kara in level."
Why are so many casuals so obsessed with playing in large groups? Back in BWL-Days the group around our raid was about 60 people. Even after raiding 3 days a week for one year I didn't really 'knew' more than 7 of them. Now our Kararaid konsists of 12 people and I know every single one.
The smaller the group the closer you know each other, so why do you want to raid with 10 or 15 people instead of 5?

To the topic of making WoW casual:
- Make clear which heroic has which difficulty.
- Let the difficulty step up slowly, perhaps from Rampants heroic (easy) to Arcatraz heroic (very hard). At the moment its a bit harsh, the one moment you are in easymode Steamvault, the next moment the same mobs crush you in heroic.
- Give every raid instance 'easy' switch. Those easyraids give tokens like heroics, but a different kind. They are at the same difficulty as the hardest heroics, perhaps like Karazhan but with more class flexibility.
- Make more rewards for heroic badges available. Every class should be able to get a full set (every slot including rings, trinkets, etc) for every playstyle (example: [Druid] Feral, Moonkin, Tree).
- You get better gear by handing in easyraid-badges, but the concept is like heroic-badges.
- Itemlevels: Instance < Heroic < Easyraid < RealRaid
- Difference in itemquality should be noticable, but not hopeless. Someone in Heroic gear should be able to beat someone in RealRaid gear.

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Note that these steps are not perfect, I'd still prefer group content over raid content. This simply makes everything more casual-friendly and makes all lore-related content available to a larger scale of people without being too much work for Blizzard.
 

I think there wouldn't be this kind of discussion around if the instance difficulty was progressing properly from early on without gaps and you could level in decent time from zero to hero just by doing instances.

Bli$$ard could take the whole instance set they have from RFC to ZA and tweak them so that it's worth to run them all (for an alt or newcomer) instead of taking the easy way up by soloing and hitting the brick wall after all the fun.

I haven't had the problem of casualness because I'm still in the levelling game which suits me well. I have noticed, though, that even the old world instances can take too long to complete and when you drop out of one, you most probably will not enter the same instance with the same toon again. That, my dear friends, sucks big time.

But I agree in the basic concept of the original post: we are casual, not brain dead.
 

well, i really think that this is too much ado about nothing.

WoW is the most casual friendly game on the market and to prove it, just check the number of subscriptors... in one or two years, when they are down to a merely three million subscriitpros they will still be the biggest game on the market.

I think that the problem with WoW are the people who just want to be entertained instead of playing a game think that just because they pay 15€ a month they are intitled to the same things as everyone else and that's wrong! You are entitled to have the same chances as everyone else. You just have to commit yourself.

Other way of putting it is that WoW ,as well as any MMORPG out there, is more thatn a game, it's an hobby. And as every hobby, the more time you put in it, the better the return. Wouldn't you find ridiculous if someone was complaininf about the galleon model he assembled looks like shit but the galleon model of is neighbour is so nice, because the neighbour spent 100+ hours doing it while he spend 15 hours...

And who says you have to complete a queste in twenty minutes? complete what you can that day and finish it tomorrow. Or the day after.

Even raiding. The game is not the problem, people are. I am in a guild which just killed Gruul and is about to start SSC. We are a guild mostly comprised of thirty-somethings, some with kids and even some couples. And we raid between 11 and 2 am. There are raids most of the week, but any member will attend mostly 2 (the younger ones are there all the time :)).

So, we have a nice little organized setup, where there is friendship, respect and organizational competence, so the raids do start at 11 and end at 2. And come on, sleeping one or two hours less once in a while won't kill anybody.

Ill give you, though, that blizz could increase the content which is not raid or pvp. New rep quests could be made so that anyone will have something to do. But please, raiding is about time spent but is much more planning and real objectives. If you have a guild with nice people, who respect each other people and their time than you will be able to raid once or twice a week, run heroics, level professions, do quests and all that in less than 10h play a week or even less.

But i might be speaking with my mouthfull because i had the chance of finding a great guild with great people.

:)
 

Why are so many casuals so obsessed with playing in large groups? Back in BWL-Days the group around our raid was about 60 people. Even after raiding 3 days a week for one year I didn't really 'knew' more than 7 of them. Now our Kararaid konsists of 12 people and I know every single one.
The smaller the group the closer you know each other, so why do you want to raid with 10 or 15 people instead of 5?


It would seem that 5 man groups would be more casual. But the fact is in the implementation that BC gave us the 5 mans that are supposed to replace casual raids are just the same thing we've done but they hit harder and have more hitpoints. It's not more content. And add that to the fact that they tied the 5 mans to rep grinds and most people don't want to go back to the 5 mans once they have thier rep and you end up with mostly inexperienced people running them.

I'm not saying Vanilla WOW was perfect. But before BC launched we had groups pugging LBRS, UBRS, MC,AQ20, ZG and even BWL on some servers. Plus there where still old hard core raiders running strat, scholo, and DM for gear or for fun. There is nothing comparable for the guy in the middle in BC. BC catered to the "true hard core" casual who just wants to get on for 30 minutes to an hour and do anything, and the Hard Core type A's who have the time to raid.

Anyone in the middle, regardless of the reason they are in the middle is pretty much screwed. In BC its all or nothing. If you like to rep grind or have the time to hard core raid or PVP then it's heaven.

Pre BC most of us in the middle where perfectly happy with the fact that we'd see BWL or NAXX while the Hard Cores hit the new BC instances. Then that rug was swept out from under us and we were beat over the head with "rush to end game or forever suck"

This is why you keep seeing this issue popping up. Most of us understand we can't keep up with some person who is willing to put 30 or more hours a week into his or her favorite activity. But we would like to feel that we can get there in our own slow time if we so desire. But BC proved that the devs don't understand that there are more people in the middle that aren't truly hard core and aren't truly casual than in both fringe groups combined.
 

It's very interesting that leveling has help for people with lesser time commitment. I.e. rested bonus.

But anything in endgame has no such mechanism. Stuff like rep grind and attunement take longer for casuals, in case of attunement it can be even worse than linear.

A casual raider will miss raid days, on a regular basis.

Say you want to get through the Mount Hyjal/BT attunement still in the game. You need the following:

SSC Vashj<->TK Kael

and

SSC Fathomlord->TK Al'ar->Winterchill

Doesn't sound bad, basically 2 instance clears. Now of course while learning you don't get clean instance clears that overlap with raid days.

For example I am stuck at Al'ar with my BT attunement. And it's not because my guild isn't farming Al'ar but just because RL just so happens that I exactly miss the Al'ar kills each week.

A hardcore with 95% has 0 problems here. A casual with 30-40% attendance is a very real problem.

Basically attunements specifically but also rep is not designed with low time commitment in mind.

And that's independent of ability, because I actually have killed Al'ar, but unfortunately that was before I hit SSC for the fathomlord, so no cookie.

And if SSC/TK attunement would still be in place you'd get the exact same phenomenon for people in transition from Gruul to SSC.

I was ranting about that back in March already and yes I did get the "you just want a free ride" back then. But it mostly means that people miss the point. I have no problem at all if hardcore do insanely hard attunements and be proud of it. I have a problem if the game fails to scale for different people's time needs independent of their skill.

And yes I currently only raid SSC/TK with hope for MH/BT because my guild puts in a lot of extra effort to make this happen.

In a sense hardcore have the ability to making raiding as easy as possible by raid stacking, by requiring 90% attendance, by forced flasking, by min-maxed builds, by taking the most skilled over the best friend. So in this sense hardcore actually has it easier...

I wonder if there is a design that actually makes the game scale properly with time investment. Currently WoW doesn't really scale right.
 

Why are casual obsessed with playing in large groups?

1) It's the most social and most cooperative form of play.
2) It's the coolest content and strongest story lines
3) It's a different challenge and fun

Really the only difference a hardcore and a casual may well be time available. So the answers are _exactly_ the same as the question "Why are hardcore so obsessed about large group content?"
 

Why are casual obsessed with playing in large groups?

Because it is the one thing we are excluded from. A MMORPG is a game of many parts, and if one of these parts has a barrier in front of it and doesn't allow access to a certain group of players, these players naturally complain. What if Blizzard introduced some mechanism that people who play more than 20 hours a week can't enter 5-man instances any more, or can't craft any more? Then the hardcore would complain about being excluded from those parts of the game.
 

You know, a game heading in the more casual direction is "The Agency" and it could actually be a decent MMORPG-lite. But then, that motion-sickness of yours will get in the way with that one.

Still, for me and for many, I think its encouraging to see more and more games flaunting the idea of "short-play session" gaming.
 

There are some really cool points here... would nice to know that someone who actually 'counts' reads them... I am sure they do.

Anyway... I still think a framework needs to be devised to describe a players approach to the/a game instead of Casual/Hardcore.

I might use my bio background to come up with some form of cladistical convention.