Don’t. Just because people can’t think critically after reading… …
You’re son was referring to the challenge of older WoW vs newer WoW.
Too many people assume casual = easy mode; challenge = difficulty.
So lets clarify: It’s casual vs committed. Quick vs Grindy, Easy vs Hard. Challenge, is the summation of those things. Casual and Easy is low challenge, Casual and Hard is medium challenge, Committed and Hard is hard challenge [aka: hardcore!], etc.
Casual is a question of commitment - schedule and consistency. Wow was never “casual” in vanilla, and it certainly wasn’t difficult. WoW in Vanilla presented a different challenge: endurance. Becuase WoW was: Committed, Grindy, Easy.
And let me be clear: You could casually play in vanilla – there was so much leveling/open world content you really never needed to step into an instance to play, and you could go at your own pace. You could be as committed or uncommitted as you liked. But you’d never get the PVP set, nor the raid sets – you never had the best gear or anywhere near as good – never see the end game content – unless you were committed, and did the grindy things.
The expectation today, is that you should be able to get all that. Blizzard, has made changes over the years that have fostered that idea… but its rarely , truly, been the case. Where they take out grindy, they added time gates. Its fast to do the content, but they have to artificially slow you down… etc.
When Blizzard made the changes, they addressed accessibility: It was shifting from Grindy content that took ages to do, to quick content that had to be gated. Instant ports to dungeons, group find tools, LFR… etc: all to make it less of a grind to find groups and get to content.
But, Blizzard also changed the difficulty, inadvertently. [And this is where they messed up]. They took what was, already an easy game, and made it even easier. How? By removing the the grindy aspects, and over streamlining, they removed the requisite … learning path. Which forced the community into creating the quick easy “meta” guides.
That is: redesigning the game in a more streamlined, accessible, less grindy manner: opened the gates for “optimal” choices, that could be implemented quickly on your character. So the guides began to flow.
As a result of the now masses of more optimized players, the old “easy” content became ridiculously easy. Where before only a few people were capable of 80% efficiency, now nearly everyone was.
In response, Cataclysm. This is where Blizzard made the full transition to Casual-ish, Quick, Hard[er] content. Mechanics on boss fights multiplied, they focused on the players as individuals and not the group as a whole. They made fights more difficult by inserting Personal Responsibility into the encounters.
Since that final change: Blizzard has been trying to bounce between options trying to manage the challenge of the game. They seem unwilling to reintroduce the grindy aspect, and so the only option is to fiddle with casual/committed and easy/hard.
All of the arguments are about that: how people like to be challenged. Some people are sprinters and want to be the fastest. Others are marathon runners who look for the endurance. But one things is for sure: You cant have sprinters and marathon runners running the same race.
that person quits? I don’t normally say people should quit because everyone likes something but if you want the whole game to end then apparently you like nothing and you should quit.