I’ve played WoW on and off since vanilla and used to do a lot of raiding. Nowadays I play the game at my own pace and play other things, so I would definitely fall within the casual banner. Dragonflight has been pretty good for casual players like me. I can log in and do a few chill things for rep or get some catch up gear if I do feel like starting to raid again. Flightstones let me feel like I’m working towards something just by playing the game.
I feel like WoW’s bigger problem at the moment is making things better for new players. I’ve gotten quite a few friends into the game recently and the game speed running them through everything means they don’t get a lot of experience with learning the game. And well, the community isn’t exactly kind to new players which makes people reluctant to continue.
Back in the day (I started during Burning Crusade) the game was not casual friendly. While you could solo most open world content (depending on class), it was better to have at least a small group. And dungeons that you’re expected to do at level were impossible without a group. Hell, some open world quests were dang near impossible without a group due to involving Elite enemies which chain pull. You want a horse? You had to stump up I think 100 gold for the horse, and another 100 for learning to ride it. Warlocks had it especially rough. To get the class mount they first had to pay for the riding skill, then do a quest chain which required giving an NPC several hundred, maybe a few thousand, gold all told. And that just got you the ‘slow’ warlock class mount. Nevermind the faction mount, any flying mount (and flying training), and so forth.
Not ashamed to admit, I was PISSED when a patch late in WotLK’s cycle changed it so you could get base riding skill for 10 gold, I think, and the warlock class mount for 10 silver. I had JUST completed the quest chain to get my class mount the day before, signed in, and was about to talk to the trainer to receive it for “free” as a quest reward… then saw it was now a normally trainable class skill.
A large part of why Cataclysm revamped the entire game world the way it did was to make the game newbie and casual friendly. Yet since then it’s gone in the opposite direction? Not surprising.
I want this SOOOOO badly. Dungeons that can be anything the group wants. A raid, a mythic, a solo dungeon, a two man dungeon, etc. Fights are built with group comps in mind. Each boss scales up the difficulty based on how many people are in the group and what difficulty the group runs at.
Perhaps some kind of Torghast type system where you can earn abilities to combat the lack of other specs/classes. With scaling tech the way it is these days, the line between raids and dungeons should be blurred.
If actual casual players are still playing this game they’re getting a real run for their money. Outside instanced content the game is beyond bad. Like a 100 games for 5 dollars bad.
Another issue is, Blizz being too focused on metrics about any content they create. They are so focused on trying to funnel as many people into it as possible.
Contrast that with say something like FF14, they create content and don’t really seem to care if only 1% of the players actually take part in it. But they still support that content.
The game is currently designed for players who want to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on tokens to do Maze +20 instead of Maze +19. If you’re relatively casual (play a number of different games, don’t play any like it’s a sport) they assume you’d just quit and move on anyway, so why bother. They can capture other players with dungeon-number-go-up gameplay.
I don’t think this is working though. I think the game is bleeding players big time. I play all the other big MMOs, and those games have tons of WoW refugees. Mainly, the ones sick of how competitive WoW has gotten.
LFR exists because raiding wasn’t very popular. You can thank LFR for all the raids we’ve gotten over the years. There’s nothing to compromise for, time gating exists to artificially lengthen the content’s longevity.
A compromise would be to break every difficulty into the same wings and release them all at the same time, but I bet if they did that you’d get upset because then you’re affected by this.
Basic elitist response. Meh… Nobody here thinks you’re cool because you’re good at a video game, if you even are.
no one wants me wattaya gonna do