I think it’s a combination of the two.
Typically casual to me means does do a bit of normal raiding via LFR or maybe once or twice with a guild/pug weekends.
Doesn’t step foot in M10+
Not online daily.
This is reminiscent of a discussion in another topic. Someone put it very well:
You’re basically asking non-raiders who are asking to have meaningful non-raiding content again to raid. That’s not a viable solution.
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I don’t know how much more diverse gear progression can get at this point, I feel that there are enough options but the acquisition of upgrades is very slow. At any rate it’s much better than in Vanilla where gear progression was more or less linear unless you had a friend to kick you some crafted gear, and if you didn’t play the next tier your progression pretty much stopped altogether.
Nah that’d make too much sense.
Plus its too much work for the devs.
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Yes! Lol.
I’m a casual–but I do heroic raids.
You know that most people when they say casual understand that those players aren’t raiding. Literally everyone who claims they’re a casual who’s been arguing for keeping things the way they are are all ATOC players, or near ATOC players. Casuals aren’t anything near the curve. The curve exists because of the casual players!
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This underlying systemic argument’s being fought on a million different fronts lately, I feel like. Who’s a casual, who the systems machinery is designed for, who gets shafted. These are my loose ideas of the flow of things.
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Start with virtual world containing a range of stuff to do, an emergent play design mentality, and a 5% top end that requires large commitments.
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Begin to conceive of world as on-ramp to real game and start intentionally designing to that end. Start selectively demolishing world/community design to better connect players to challenging content (Dungeon Finder).
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Telescope endgame activity downwards into casual space to justify development costs, border of “casual” and “hardcore” now extends well into what was once exclusively hardcore content. The “casual raider” is born, to older raiders’ chagrin. The eternal war for content difficulty tuning propels further telescoping and re-striation of the playerbase. The meta has fewer barriers to dictate gameplay across player types.
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Optimize on-ramp down to essential tutorial content as endgame expands (so people can catch up). Continue to optimize class design for the greater emphasis on end content. Emphasize flexibility, endgame viability, and compatibility with external systems at the expense of identity and player investment. Optimize gear roughly into a single stat that determines character value, but leave generated stat breakdowns so people can feel like they’re figuring out things.
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Realizing you have put the content locusts right outside your doorstep, lean further into repetitive algorithmic content, scaling, and reward structures to keep all parties satisfied. Throw improbable-to-balance systems at the wall, use analytics to see what “sticks”, pretend you’re able to verify fun this way. Dumpster systems rapidly amidst outcry as dynamic balance goals become infeasible.
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Create new end content “pillar” with a progression path for people who get to endgame too fast and don’t wanna do large group content (plus you get those 5-man engagement metrics up!).
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Having given yourself even more automated gear benchmarks to juggle, throw up your hands and hard gate everything so the molten jello of your player cake can still hold its shape long enough to get people to the next system.
Every step of the way has been good intentions. They’ve been talking about trying to retreat back over some of these Rubicons going forward. I dunno if they can. We saw what happened with flying. We see the trouble with Covenants.
The part of the game I enjoy these days (world/community building level experience, class identity, enjoyable class play) has been worn down pretty severely in the course of this. That’s all I really want, in the end. Classic is old content, so I might enjoy it up through Wrath for a while, but really I want something new. I legit don’t want to take other peoples’ stuff away.
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I really like you.
Oh the bear run. My god that was fun. My raid team had a blast doing it!
I have to agree. I’ve never enjoyed my dungeons having a time limit on them.
Not so much. Run a level whatever normal dungeon and people are trying to do creative crap that they “saw in the MDI, guys!” There’s a brisk pace and then there’s wanna-inhale Gingi’s nitro fumes.
Yes.
This is what I think we are now.
The only hard part about Mechagon HM was the one shot on the final boss.
I miss the fact that heroic were relevant till ye end of LK. And a good place for catch up on alts. Now, you can bypass the need to ever do normal or heroic dungeons by doing your covenant quest and using anima to buy upgrades. Will get your ilevel to lfr or low mythic territory. I just want a reason to play the basic group content.
Nope. Never did that.
In fact, I said the opposite.
My comments on raiding were in response to YOU saying that my being a raider at my current level of progression was not normal and was not casual play. I disagree and made my case.
I never said anyone should raid if they don’t want to.
I also said upthread, in response to the original post, that if one wanted to gear up for raids, they had other options besides M+.
You’re just determined to misinterpret me. I’m logging off of the office machine for the day, however, so you can say whatever you like from now on without a reply from me. Go nuts.
But seriously. My dude.
I went with this today just to see what on earth you were after. I wanted to understand why you are so invested in this idea that people who play like I do are somehow totally different than you are and have things that are unavailable to players like you.
You don’t seem to really digest anything I reply with. You just turn it around and make another argumentative, unrelated or unrepresentative statement.
What is it that you want from the game? What is it that you think we’re arguing about here today? You just keep coming at me, and I have tried to respond to figure out what the core issue is. It’s clearly not alternate paths to gear, because like 10 people lined those up for you. It’s clearly not a path to raiding because you’ve said you don’t want to raid.
OP said he wanted dungeons back. I said from the start that we still have dungeons. They never left and you can still get pre-raid BiS gear from them…which I only mention because that’s the gear level dungeons have provided from day one. That’s it. If what you actually want is M+ removed from the game because you don’t like it and two raid difficulties removed because you don’t like raiding and feel that multiple tiers have given ilvl bloat…then say that. Discuss that.
Stop coming at players like me with your assumptions about how we play or what we want. You don’t have to make it personal. Let’s talk about ilvl bloat instead of calling other players names.
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Give us our Dungeons back. Gives us random loot back.
Give us our RPG back.
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Stop pretending like this didn’t exist prior to M+, you’re just be disingenuous.
This was a thing even back in the days where people think dungeons were so incredibly hard that required CC. If the tank didn’t know what they were doing … guess what? You’d end up flamed and kicked because you were wasting peoples time. Wrath, if you didn’t know the optimal route to blow through the dungeon to get your badges as quick as possible … you’d end up kicked.
This isn’t new, all M+ does is actually reward you for going quick beyond not wasting more time than needed to get through a dungeon.
In SL ? I’d be curious what you think this even is.
Everbloom was so long ago and pre-Mythic+ too.
Loot is still very random.
Casual is someone that doesnt play many hours a day. Not being bad.
All of which he achieved is indeed casual.
I’m very much in support of this. I kept trying M+ throughout Legion/BfA and never found myself actually enjoying it.
The affixes are always annoying, doubly so if you’re melee, and the timer just stresses people out and leads to toxicity.
I’d also just settle for heroics not being entirely worthless. The mythic difficulty is just old heroics and I’m honestly still salty about suddenly being forced to drudge through group building again.
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Now THAT…ladies and gentlemen…is how you make a coherent post on this forum.
Well done, Nifelheim, and I agree with a great deal of what you’ve posted here. #3 actually gives me goosebumps a little because it is so spot-on.
I don’t like that we feel it necessary to classify players into camps of casual vs. hardcore. Most of the people who play this game are a combo.