Of course I don’t think that. It isn’t about qualification or free time, it’s about interest. I’m speaking about the people who just don’t want to do that stuff. They used to be 95% of the playerbase.
In other words, players with casual interests are hurried through the part of the game they enjoy and can either run an endless rat race of unfulfilling world content that doesn’t treat them like real people to tide them over or do a gauntlet of endgame 5man content with all the job interviews that entails in preparation for stuff they don’t even want to participate in.
This is my point: you literally can’t conceive of the game as being anything but a conveyor belt into raiding/mythics/high end pvp. That’s how retail is built. That’s why it caters to raiders. The part of the game casuals wanna play is insultingly railed and stripped down, and over in an afternoon or two.
It has nothing to do with how much time the player has to spend or how skilled they are. A player who wants to raid but doesn’t have a lot of time or needs to work on their rotation a bit is a raider.
I’ve been pretty direct, actually.
Retail has made raiding more accessible. That’s good for raiders. Raiders of all stripes, all skill levels, all capacities for commitment. When you say “casual” in making your points, you mean the casual raider.
You’re arguing the perspective of a raider in Classic, not that of a casual.
Deserve’s got nothing to do with it. WoW’s big problem is it assumes, like you do, that everyone is on here to push to endgame and do endgame stuff. That the purpose of the world is to ferry you to that endpoint. That the game should dedicate ever more of its playspace to inclusivity for the raid experience. That’s great for casual raiders, not great for casuals.