In a game that has players who only do open world content solo, all the way to the top 0.001% RWF raiders who play 16 hours a day and/or stream, what is the typical player and should the majority of the game should be balanced around them?
Is it LFR/random BGs?
Normal/conquest cappers (1000~ rating)?
Heroic/duelist players?
Mythic/glad?
The average player is in a raiding guild, gets AOTC late in every tier, does some M+ and enjoys more than one aspect of the game. maybe some world quests, some crafting, some casual pvp… maybe with his guild… he tries to avoid LFR as those players are too low quality for him but also only does a few bosses in mythic as it’s too hard.
I’ve seen this narrative going around and being repeated that blizzard hates casual players or average players and no one can even agree what that is.
What I will say is that I did a simple questline and got a free legendary from it and saved up some currency from dailies and bought a piece of gear from a vendor that I was then able to transform into a tier piece.
The game is already catered towards casual/average players and anyone who says otherwise has no idea what they are talking about or have ulterior motives.
I think it’s kind of already this way.
IMO the average player usually does a few keys (2-15) and participates usually between LFR-Heroic raid and perhaps some random to 1600 PvP. They can typically expect to perform better regardless of the type of content they do in 9.2 given they can shoot for 4 pce bonus long before the expansion is over. What you’ll see if people shooting for the set first then high ilvl 4 pcs set then optimise the slot. Once this is obtained usually the activity level will die down some until the next weekly event that people on the whole actually care about (herioc reward weekly etc).
Every time I hear people say “the game only caters to the hardcore” I immediately bring up Shards of Domination and the fact that hardcore players HAD to do Torghast to get their legendaries and that tends to shut people up really quickly.
I honestly have no idea where this weird narrative of “Blizzard only caters to the 1%” comes from, especially considering that the so-called 1% Blizzard allegedly caters to has gotten more frustrated with a lot of these things than the casual players have been.
What does this even mean
How do you “balance around” people who buy the latest collector’s edition expansion, shop mount, level an alt or two, queue a few dungeons then quit until the next patch
Er, from which planet do you come? Surely not Azeroth… 
I might sometimes do dungeons on my characters, but not often and I wouldn’t touch raids let alone high level raiding. I don’t think average players are mythic+ people. I haven’t even heard anyone in my guild talking about raiding
Lfr to heroic raider. Normal dungeon to myhtic plus 15. Random pvp to 1800. Somewhere in there.
That’s my guess.
So all the systems introduced in shadowlands affected most of the playerbase in a negative fashion. That’s my thoughts.
Blizzard would do well to make the game way more accessible and less restrictive for these activities.
I’d say they can share focus around all aspects of the game.
I want to see it thrive so keep the MDI keep the RWF keep rated pvp and add some cool new stuff for the others to do. I’d like to see pet battles brought the the phone as a cool battle pet combat game that could take off on its on. Just add more stuff don’t take stuff away.
I think it’s hard to pin down the average player because it’s probably one of those cases where the masses are mostly silent or at least absent from most discourse on GD, r/WoW, etc. The most anybody can really make a guess on is likelihoods, e.g. it’s very unlikely that the average player has cleared every mythic raid tier this expansion.
Probably 1800-2100 in PVP, 1800-2500 IO, or AoTC in whatever content they do. I think most people who focus in one content will at least max gear out of it each season, excluding raiders–I imagine actually farming the raid on mythic is pretty rare.
My conspiracy theory is that it’s them that are pushing this narrative the hardest. Anything that they have to work on outside of their instances is an annoyance they want gone and they are dressing it up as it’s all too much for those poor, helpless, clueless casuals and new players and it’s scaring them all away.
I think that most people have no grasp of what average actually means.
Not the most far fetched theory out there, players super into raiding have been chasing the dream of raidlogging since shortly after raiding became a thing.
That’s a stretch. They’ve never been shy about expressing frustration at doing chores without blaming anyone else.
average player here in terms of playtime.
i hunt old transmogs, farm some mounts, do some LFR and do world content.
and i play for the story
If anyone here says they know, they’re only guessing based on their perceptions.
I think it’s a mistake to try to come up with an “average” or “typical” player profile, given the diversity within the playerbase. Research could be done to attempt to categorize different target demographics in order to provide content to retain the maximum number of players possible, but I don’t think there’s any interest in that on Blizzard’s part.
Average player? I guess that would fall to me then.
I only do lfr since gear doesn’t really matter to me, sure I want to be strong but I don’t care about raiding nearly as much as I used to in vanilla-wrath
Pvp is fun, and I had a blast in it about a week and a half ago, but it was bgs. Not big on Arenas as they get rid of the chaos of bgs and that’s what I enjoyed the most.
Not really into Mythic Raiding, nor M+ but gladiator seems like a good time.
I don’t like open world content as in World Quests, they’re not really my cup of tea and just feel like wasted potential for something more. However, I also don’t like throwing my face at a wall constantly with dungeons as that just gets exceedingly boring. (I really don’t know how people can just do that)
Idk… back in the day I would’ve considered myself a hardcore player, but really I just want to do what I want anymore. Problem is nothing really feels worth throwing time into, that being said there are some activities that are 100% fun to mess around with at times while others just don’t give me any feeling other than “hurr durr lesh beat dees emenie for Kleia” types of things. I think a lot of it is that the game has no real direction other than funneling people into 1 or two activities…and tbh that’s really kind of trash. sigh idk man, I just work here and wish there was good story content not locked behind a boring rep grind that doesn’t matter. Story should never be locked behind anything other than maybe your character level.