Since Ion “came into power” WoW has continuously pushed to be more and more casual friendly.
Casual to me has always been a combination of time sink and difficulty played, and I lean more towards time sink.
If you play this game 40 hours a week, you’re not casual. Simply because you don’t engage in difficult content doesn’t matter. You are not a casual gamer if you’re committing so much of your life to the game.
Not everyone can commit that amount of time.
4 Likes
True, “Casual” is just so broad LOL
I do call myself a “Leveler” and/or “Quester”. I’m not a “PvPer” nor “Raider”.
1 Like
No it has not lol with all the timegated grinds and punishing you if you don’t play every week getting behind on so much stuff even in Dragonflight this was present you take a break for a week you’ll be a weeks worth of progress behind everyone else and this stacks cause there isnt no accumulating catch up.
Like tell me how Dragonflight professions were casual friendly exactly? Miss too many weeklies and your eternally behind miss enough and good luck catchin up ever.
1 Like
Time sinks have always been a thing.
So everyone can buy boosts? No thanks. Go play classic if you want leveling like that.
This games endgame has always been about raiding and group content.
1 Like
lol what?
Did we all forget that you literally could not get to level 60 via questing in vanilla? You had to grind mobs for 58-60 and that took forever. Such greatness.
Then you only had two choices for PvE: dungeons or raid.
I distinctly remember spending so much time running the same dungeon for the same piece of gear. And once complete… I was just done. That’s it.
Not a huge fan of alts so it felt quite weird.
Now though… I can steadily increase the power of my main and I’m not “done” so fast. I know people don’t like that feeling though.
2 Likes
Super…sadly for you its a real word and not a feeling so that isn’t right.
2 Likes
… A word can be ‘real’ and be open to wild interpretation. And yes, ‘casual’ is one such word. Words are symbols that represent things and sometimes those things vary 
To resolve this, people just need to be more specific.
It’s like someone walking into a cafe and asking the worker to make them a “great” sandwich. And then that someone gets mad because the worker’s idea of a “great” sandwich has pickles in it but the customer hates pickles.
as much as I hate time gating for basic game content, the actual time sinks that are effectively mandatory have come down substantially over time. i also am in favor of increasing the rewards for busy work resource farming like remix or the current prepatch event.
however, the worst of “mandatory” time sinks, in my opinion, was with MoP dailies.
Dailies were originally something for max level toons to do between raiding and other weekly content. it was also a good source of gold.
with MoP, the dailies became “mandatory” to gain rep to get gear you needed in order to advance in the endgame content.
I recall the circuit of dailies took 2-3 hours per toon. it became nearly impossible to keep up with more than one toon since the dailies circuit was a part time job for just one toon.
1 Like
Better at WoW than they used to be? That’s subjective. DBM/GTFO are prime examples of why it’s subjective, casuals who only do LFR still use these and the best guilds use these. If you were to rip these out while keeping similar mechanics to what they’ve been adding, I’d be willing to bet RWF would take a lot longer and M+ pushing would slow down significantly.
As for making the game harder, why would they try to alienate more players than they already have? That’s a bad business decision that would, most likely, ultimately cost them more than a bad expansion would.
I’m all for hard games, but the MMORPG community has shifted over the years and gone from Hardcore to just Core. Few MMORPG’s have kept the Hardcore aspect and difficulty that you speak of because the playerbase changed. Companies are a businesses first, you go where the money is (majority of your player base).
1 Like
As someone who plays casually, i think wow is very easy to play casually. Panda remix is extremely casual. It wasn’t difficult to get all the mounts, and i got most of the mogs as well, plus i have 6 level 70s from it. I was pretty much just doing the daily dungeon/raid quests.
No thanks for long classic leveling. I prefer the way dragonflight is super casual, and TWW is super alt friendly, another win/ win for casual play.
I agree that the plunderstorm grind for all the rewards was too much and i didn’t finish, even though i generally had fun there with one round per day, but that was all i wanted to do is one round.
1 Like
I played Vanilla when I was 12 years old. I had two max level characters within a years time. Thats accounting for school, my parents not letting me play the game all the time, and homework, etc.
Vanilla was tedious everyone admits that by now. It was not hard.
There was literally a speedrun community that had old vanilla leveling down to like a week and a half if not faster (based on gear optimizations, etc as time went on)
I won’t claim it didn’t take you hundreds of hours to get a non-max level character, but I would hardly make the claim that it took the majority of players.
Raiding and level 60 PvP were thriving on multiple servers all over.
1 Like
Did you say you want casual play, but don’t like time gates??? LOL
Time gates are in place specifically so that casual players can keep up, and no lifers can’t get too far ahead.
LOL
2 Likes
Imagine making this argument for two reasons:
- I never used the word “feeling”
- this is a fundamentally subjective topic
If you’ve convinced yourself that your subjective viewpoint on the matter constitutes the “real world”, you’re far more delusional than the degree to which you’re poorly attempting to claim that I am.
Whatever you wanna insist.
There should be long grinds and there should be quick things. An array. Not everything should be quick, and you shouldn’t be able to get everything in the game without having a lot of time to do so.
Homie, just don’t reply. You’ve got nothing to say 
I know… you wanna turn this into a weird argument of definitions. I always preferred simple dismissal.
The game is falling back into time sinks and grinds rather then skill checks and most can agree that is a step back.
1 Like
Nothing about the skill element in this game has changed. Arguably, the game takes more skill to play now and will do in TWW than it ever has before.
The game has always been a grind and a time sink. It’s an mmorpg. You new here?