Casual Friday
The following post starts out as specific to a particular MMO. Normally I try to avoid that sort of thing (working on one tends to make you a wee bit gunshy about talking specifics), but in this case, the specific example is World of Warcraft, and pretending that issues brought forth within the most popular MMO on the planet by an order of magnitude have no impact on development discussions is just rather silly.
One of the more interesting arguments on the World of Warcraft forums is that of “Casuals vs. Raiders”. It’s caused so much argument, in fact, that the WoW community managers will often lock posts on the subject, simply because it’s been driven into the ground at this point. To summarize the points:
Casuals: “I bought this game because I wanted a game I could play. I have a life, and don’t have the time to spend 12 hours a day staring at the screen hitting buttons hoping I get a shot at a +12 Krang of Otyugh Slaying. World of Warcraft was perfect for me… until I hit level 60 and had to get into raids to do anything. I hate raids. Fix the game so I can get my Krang of Otyugh Slaying just like everyone else, because I pay for the game too. Thanks!”
Raiders: “omg learn2play nub. OK, that’s out of the way. Seriously, raiding is the end-game of World of Warcraft. It’s the most challenging stuff in the game. It’s hard. It’s supposed to be hard. We beat it anyway, because we’re hard. So beating the most challenging stuff in the game gets you the best stuff. That’s how it’s supposed to work, right? What, you just want stuff from Ragnaros or Nefarion handed to you? What is this, World of Warcraft, or World of Government Cheese?”
I’m reminded of this due to Seth Scheisel’s recent sports piece (no really! it was in the sports section!) where he asked Jeff “Tigole” Kaplan “What are you doing for US lately“. Us being raiders. Seth says it flat out -
Casual players complain that they can’t get rewards comparable to those earned by hard-core raiders, like the Claw of Chromaggus or Mish’undare, Circlet of the Mind Flayer. Raiders like me often respond that casual players just want a handout.
Pause to reflect on a staff writer for the nation’s newspaper of record being able to correctly spell “Chromaggus”, and no doubt without looking it up, either. And they said we’d never amount to anything!
But the money paragraph follows:
Q. Why not just let casual players get rewards comparable to those from raids?
A. It would be almost impossible for us to do, and this is a philosophical decision. We need to put a structure in place for players where they feel that if they do more difficult encounters, they’ll get rewarded for it. As soon as we give more equal rewards across the board, for a lot of players it will diminish the accomplishment of killing something like Nefarian. My favorite times in the development cycle are when there are encounters that are close to being defeated but have not yet been beaten. It really creates a sense of awe among the players that there is something big and truly dangerous in the world. But it would be very disappointing if the items found on Nefarian were the same thing you could get in your nightly Stratholme run.
Well, yes. Regardless of whether you’re a raider outfitted in Tier 3 gear or a level 10 gnome cursing the spam in Westfall, you’d think this would be somewhat obvious. Unless you follow the World of Warcraft forums!
This is no longer the case. In order to compete, or even advance your character, you are forced to schmooze the end guilds undergoing their stupid hazing only to find out that they have plenty of your class. You have to sell your soul to whatever whim the guild comes up with or risk being kicked from the guild.
I have not heard one person on the forums say they want easy epics. This is in fact the worst argument Raiders have against fixing the itemization problem. We want difficult dungeons, long difficult chains so that we too can have accomplishment when we finally get items. This article is a joke and is truly damning on how clueless Blizzard is.
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Did you say you game was “casual” tigole?
YOU ARE A LIAR.
Go raid.
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Read between the lines. He said casuals arent getting Epics. Even your little PR spin cant save you here. Raiders get epics, period.
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I would like to believe the CMs, but us casuals are led to believe that additional patches will address our concerns and NOW we are hearing ,” Well additional armor sets(no mention of weapons, mind you) and the expansion will address our concerns. I don’t want to wait til the expansion for casual friendly content. I don’t want to grind millions of bugs or Furblogs. I want content that will provide me positive advancement with-out relying on 39 other people.
Tigole, in response, posted:
While I understand that a certain audience would rather hear about more ‘casual’ oriented content, I cannot force the hand of a journalist to skew his story. In fact, I think its pretty cool that someone who writes for a newspaper as esteemed as the New York Times shares a common interest with us as World of Warcraft players. Its refreshing to talk to someone from the mainstream press who is intimate with the issues we face as players and developers of this game. It speaks to this community as a whole.
So I think its very important not to get up in arms over the fact that the article focused on part of the game that you might not necessarily be interested in. Were definitely committed to supplying content for all audiences of this game . Its not an argument as simple as ‘hardcore versus casual’ — it goes way beyond that.
For the people who seem to be upset, you might find it encouraging that a big focus of patch 1.10 is supplying more content for casual, max-level players. While I cannot promise ‘the ultimate fix’, I can at least hope to show you guys that were working on making things better. I think it also needs to be mentioned, that players need to keep in mind that by railing against content that you dont personally enjoy — whether it be raids, casual content or PvP — it wont improve anything. In fact, its detrimental to our community. As a development team, were going to add content for everyone. Just because we might be adding PvP content in a certain patch, does not mean were forgetting about PvE players. What is helpful to us, is when you identify what you liked and want more of. But leading a crusade against something which other players enjoy nightly is counter-productive to everyone involved.
You mean MMO players resent any development time and effort put into a playstyle they don’t personally engage in? O RLY?
So then, here’s the problem. World of Warcraft is TOO accessible. By that, I mean, it’s possible for someone who hates the MM part of MMOs – other people – to progress through the entire game without ever needing to, well, group. Eventually, in the 50’s, they might start getting pick-up groups for the lower level “end-game” instances or more difficult quest sequences. But the wall between “LFG Stratholme” and “finding a guild that will get me into MC/BWL gear” is abso-freakin-lutely HUGE. And it’s quite obviously a leap of design. It’s a very clear point of departure – once you get to this point, you’re no longer casual. Your character won World of Warcraft. You got level 60. You got the powerup. YOU WON THE GAME.
It’s no coincidence that Blizzard, no doubt driven by their community people (all of whom I really need to FedEx bottles of hooch for taking more bullets than we in other games can ever imagine – email me your preferred flavor plz) put up a page on their website detailing exactly what to do when you, well, win. “Hey, you can… uh… do PVP? Raid? Roll an alt? Play our expansion?” Kind of obvious stuff – unless you have a player base composed mostly of people for whom this is their first MMO, and definitely the first MMO they’ve reached the endgame in. They want more stuff. They want more stuff like they already played.
They absolutely do not want different stuff. They want stuff like they liked. If they wanted that other stuff, they’d have not quit that other MMO they tried for a month. They want more stuff like the old stuff.
And… they ran out of stuff. And Blizzard can’t make enough stuff. And most of the stuff they are making… uh… it’s not that stuff. It’s the other stuff. The high-level raiding stuff that, to keep a tradition in every other MMO alive, wasn’t included with the original game, but was PatchedInLater.
So until the expansion comes later this year, which will deliver a DVD full of MORE STUFF, you have millions – millions of players who are out of stuff. It’s getting pretty ugly. And most of those have no interest in being in the top 25% or 10% or whatever of the pyramid of players that enjoys organizing raids to whack the most powerful foozles. They feel bait and switched. They had a good year or so of stuff. They want more stuff.
But every game eventually runs out of stuff. There’s never enough stuff. What’s left at the end – the endgame – is what the players can come up with to make their own stuff. Be it PVP or high-end complex PVE raiding until their fingers bleed (to quote the nightly conversation at the Casa Del Lum: “In Molten Core again, hon?” “YES.” “Tired of Molten Core?” “YES.“), every game eventually has to figure out how to keep players happy – either in cranking out More Stuff on a regular basis (/wave Everquest) or in keeping people happy in making their own stuff. Thus why PvP is such a common end-game goal for designers – hey, people have an endless appetite for beating each other over the head with sticks.
But if you play WoW, and you got to level 60, and you don’t like raiding, and you don’t like PvP, and you don’t particularly want to level up a new character… well, you’re out of stuff.
And that’s where some people get REALLY ANGRY. Because they have a lot invested into their characters, their friends and the connections between the two, and they REALLY. DO. NOT. LIKE. BEING. TOLD. NO. Queue the hundreds of threads on the WoW forums. All of which boil down, in the end: “More stuff, plz.”
Because, despite the claims by both sides on the forums, the “casuals” don’t really want free government cheese from Nefarion. They want more character development. They want to get to 70, or 80, or 60.0009. They don’t want to feel like they’ve reached the brick wall of character development that, well, they have. They don’t want to completely switch their playstyle to keep developing the character they’ve grown attached to. They don’t want the game to end.
And that sentiment is universal to all games. The fact that we’re seeing so much of it expressed in World of Warcraft bespeaks more of its success than its failures.
Fine, newb. How do you propose they fix it then?
The task of the WoW designers – should they choose to accept it, and it’s quite likely they won’t, being that it’s Different and thus Scary – is to move players from a developer-driven character development model to a player-driven character development model.
Whether it’s through PvP (a “cop-out” that many players won’t accept), some form of guild-based PvE advancment that even the smallest guilds can participate in, or something entirely new… maybe a dancing contest! Everyone loves dancing. Really. But the point is that the life cycle of the character has to move beyond the racetrack that the quest lines and character levelling aims the player down. And the only way for further points in the life cycle to self-perpetuate is to enable the players to make, and track their own goals. There are five million WoW players. While there are probably a lot of WoW developers, there most assuredly are not five million of them. Numbers are not on their side.
And yes, this means getting more “world-ly” and less “game-y”. But games end, and worlds don’t. And players who are demanding that their character’s life cycle not end… are demanding more world. Not necessarily more content – but more ways to participate.
But that would require a good deal of thought, and development work. Maybe even an expansion! Never seen those before. But in the meantime, we’re seeing what happens if, in the days of Everquest pre-any-expansions, somehow five million people managed to cram into Lower Guk. Demanding more stuff.
Excellent article.
Your “you need more world than game” comment hits the nail head on. To an old SWG fanatic like myself (a game which was all world and no game), too many of the more modern MMOG designs are all about simple combat systems. I’m tired of the monotony of combat. No, really, I’m not kidding.
WoW needs more depth. And WoW has what SWG never had… a great core combat system to add depth to. Entertainer professions, complex random world events, non-combat quest options, player content tools, a real crafting system and greed game, an ability to modify the world, character design options that are beyond your Diabloesque talents… all of these things are just the beginning of the sort of world building that Wow could take advantage of. I could sit here and list the millions of things that would turn Azeroth into a real world but they DO pay me to work…
I will believe that end-game content has truly been exhausted when we see some lvl 60 stop bitching/ganking/raiding and actually amass the role of a WoW messiah. Hell, it may have already happened, but I am still trying to catch up on Drakedog’s exploits and what all the raid abbreviations stand for. The world in WoW is huge and until I see flocks of identically dressed diciple player-characters trudging through IF or Orgrimmar following some other player-character who’s preaching the destruction of all your epic items and the dissilution of all guilds for the one true guild. I’ll safely feel that the end-game hasn’t been played out and there is just a lack of creativity.
Here’s one more idea, strike up communication outside the server and form an elite WoW crime family. Everyone needs something, so they have a way to get it from the “family” for a price. When the ninja trys to welsh is when the opposite faction strike force makes life *very* difficult outside the cities. You can even wash items through the neutral AH and have a bit of economy to it. Never say the possibilities for development have ended. All you need to do is read about the folks in Habitat on a Commodore 64 to see there are many ways to skin the cat.
I played UO for approx 6 years, before I left my friends there and headed out to EQ2.
I had built a large network of friends in UO and always had something to do, either solo, with a guild or just with some mates, all great fun. Then they released an expansion that took the “skill” away from the game and made “items” the way to go, this pretty much destroyed the game for me, but I stuck at it for quite awhile. When I stopped enjoying myself, I took my subscription to EQ2.
EQ2 was a good game, the only thing that I didn’t enjoy was the community. All anybody wanted wass to join a group, complete a quest, leave group. You were lucky to get a “yes” or “no” answer to any attempts at conversation. I took my character as far as I could before grouping became essential, then heard that some of my old UO mates had started WoW.
Thats where I went next. I work strange hours, starting work at 3am 6 days per week, which really means that I play mostly afternoons. I really enjoyed WoW, the community wasn’t the same as UO, but it was a new game, and communities need to grow. I levelled up my Hunter in WoW to 60, then my wife, son and father in law all bought the game, so I created another character and started to level up with them. I hit 60 with my alternate character, and tried to get into Raids. No joy….not many raids run in the afternoon, I couldn’t even get into a guild, when they heard when I was available. So I started a Horde character, so that I could at least experience a different set of quests. I got to 50 and everything was getting too familiar again, so I started an alt on a RP server, hoping that it would be more fun to actually RP than level up. No Rp’ers on that realm, just the usual type of player (level, level, level). PvP was a waste of time, no real outside world PvP, just Battlegrounds. I don’t want to sit in a queue waiting to play a game that I am already paying for! Then the server problems….same again with the queue. So I cancelled my account, my wife cancelled, my sons cancelled and my father in law cancelled.
We didn’t want Epics, we just wanted something to do”
“# Raph says on January 30th, 2006 at 5:26 pm:
See, I knew you\’e2\’80\’99d come around to my side eventually.
“
WoW…. How are those SoE MMOs doing these days anyway? Server mergers, trying to make money off selling in-game items, Expansions monthly to maintain some revenue. Yeah, your side sounds great…. really.
So after all that, your final solution, is that the developers need to think up somethign new? “should they choose to accept it, and it\’e2\’80\’99s quite likely they won\’e2\’80\’99t, being that it\’e2\’80\’99s Different and thus Scary ” they need to implement something which you really didnt define,
seriously, rather than giving a classic GM vapor answer, try coming up with a solution…
What, raiding is hard? So hard you deserve epics over everyone else. Raiding is just another grind, getting gear, repeating, getting gear, repeating. You just need to be in one of the guilds that can organise such.
What a stupid blog, doesn’t address the issues at all. Next time think before you write such rubbish.
You fail at reading comprehension. The point was not “raiding is HARD,” the point was “there comes a point when there’s nothing to do BUT raiding and people who don’t want to raid are screwed.“
Well, i’ve retired multiple 50 RR8+ DAoC characters, several 75 Shadowbane characters and just recently 2 60 WoW characters. All 3 were great games, with varying amounts of content and longevity. I don’t really care about being inferior to the hardcore raiders, i don’t mind not having access to all the available content and i’m satisfied if i can develop a unique character that contributes in a PvP environment. Without rambling ToA killed DAoC for me, SB was just kinda broken, and WoW has serious PvP issues:
1. Contrived CTF/College Football PvP is not what i want in a persistant environment. Particularly if i have to wait to play.
2. Raiders can have awesome gear. Cool. They can be better than my character – no prob. But the current power difference between a Tier 2 equipped character and a Tier 0/Blue UBRS/Strat characters is obscene.
3. It’s not that big a world. 5 Million subscribers but how many people do you actually interact with?
I’m trying out EVE at the moment. It also has issues, im a newb there so we’ll see.
To the Dev’s – i don’t mind grinding/levelling/skilling up. It’s part of what i enjoy – developing a character i associate with. But for the love of God, please stop punishing me because i’m married with a child and can’t devote the time catasses can to a game. Let me PvP with my avatar. I don’t have to be the best – i understand that commitment should have reward. But the current process is driving away players who will pay for years (DAoC sub for 2 yrs) if they can compete. Anyway, off to outfit my cruiser with heavy launchers…cheers!
I posted this on the forum, and it was summarily deleted. I figure it can add to the discussion here. Sorry it’s a little off-topic, but In my opinion, Warcraft has other issues screwing up gameplay than just the shift to raiding at the end.
5) Cookie-cutter characters
PVP hints to this: If I have a decent strategy against a mage, it pretty much works again all mages. There aren’t enough ways to customize your character, including both height/weight/faces/equipment (watching nearly all level 60s run around in Orgrimmar in one of three sets of armor is pretty sad), as well as abilities. What if I want a warrior with some frost spells? Why not have it so you can learn all abilities, but if you specialize you can go deeper in that classes abilities? Make it so that anyone can learn to do anything if their willing to sacrifice in other areas. Priests with pets, shapechanging rogues… whatever you want. It would add the unexpected back into PVP – you start fighting that rogue and he nukes you with a frost spell, or a fear, or a hamstring, or shapechanges into a wolf. I.e. What if I don’t want to look and fight like every other warrior on the server?
4) Exposure to numbers
This ruins the immersion of the game more than any other factor I can think of. I don’t want to see a monster and instantly know that it’s level 28, so that combat will be easy. Maybe I should be wandering through the forest and not know if that bear can kill me or not – maybe I should have to fight the stupid thing to find out… you know, have a little mystery, a little uncertainty, a few tense moments.
Is that new dungeon over there dangerous? Well, my party is all level 30-35 and that meeting stone says 25-35, so we’ll be fine. Whew. Or ‘I know I have 96% chance to hit, 14% chance to crit, and I do 112-145 damage per hit every 1.6 seconds.’ Then I fight something and watch white and yellow numbers pop out of his head.
Or, I can pick up a sword and instantly know that it does 2% more damage than my current one, and enhances strength. I can glance at the item’s color alone and know that it’s a blue, so it will have one extra stat on it over a green. It destroys the mystery, rareness and aura around magic in general when everything everyone wears by level 12 is magic, and that priest in the group has been playing for three hours and can now resurrect the dead a’la the Son of God.
Dunno, maybe I should have to take an item to a seer for identifying, and even then not know its full power. Add some cursed or bad items to the game, items with some story/history/quest behind them, add some *variety* instead of a table of randomly generated ‘of the monkey’ and ‘of the eagle’ gear. Make it so that with some luck (not grinding/raiding), you can own something nobody on the server has, with abilities nobody else can do. Again – let us personalize ourselves. Maybe I *want* a cursed sword that gives me +50 strength but reduces my movement rate to a crawl.
3) Repetitive quests, no real progression
There’s a few good ones stuffed away in corners but they’re few and far between. My rogue had what… two or three class quests? I mean stealth should be a no-brainer: at high levels you’re a perfect assassin – march his ass into Stormwind to poison a high level beaurocrat in his sleep.
Instead 95% of quests are ‘Fetch me seven foozles’, ‘Kill 12 knobgoblins’, and the occasional ‘Retrieve me magic artifact #456′. It makes the geographic progression in the game a little underwhelming when I know after I finish this batch of quests, I’ll get to go to a new area with a different color scheme and spend a few hours having to exterminate every species of bear/boar and insect there. And the kicker – everything will be 10% harder, negating all the ‘progress’ I made in the last area, and making combat in this new area identical to the last (see point #1). In fact, barring ‘the numbers are going up’, there is no real progression of any sort. I mean come on – nothing you do affects the world in any way whatsoever. Your quest, level 1 or level 60, gives you a shiny new sword and a pat on the back – the world will reset itself in 5 minutes so the next character can kill Baron Von Menace Captain and get his very own shiny sword +2. This leads into:
2) Character development based entirely on loot, instead of story
This falls 100% on Blizzard’s shoulders – they deliberately chose to go the Diablo method of progress through ’shiny sword +2′. This leads to characters ignoring quest descriptions and scrolling down to see what they have to kill and comparing the reward to their current equipment. It bears repeating: 100% of this game is ‘make the numbers go up’.
I don’t want to see the reward for a quest, it should be random. I’m of the opinion all drops should be random as well. You shouldn’t be able to farm dungeons for equipment. It would make people adventure for fun again instead of farming the same monster 50 times for that 2% drop. Do a dungeon once, then move on because loot is random anyway.
This decision has had far-reaching effect on other areas of the game, such as rampant itemization. PVP is now based on equipment instead of skill… (FYI: that sucks) Just once it would be nice to outsmart someone in PVP with some cleverly though-out tactics, and game doesn’t allow for it. And no, ‘gang up on someone’ isn’t a clever tactic.
Progression: Why can’t I rent out a store in Stormwind, buy herbs and sell potions all day? Why can’t I sign up for military duty at 2g a day, wander around Stormwind killing any horde that try to sneak in and kill the auctioneers? Why can’t I hire someone to build me a stone tower in the middle of Feralas, fill it with traps so I can train young apprentice mages, maybe even research/create new spells? Why can’t I buy a boat and ferry people from Booty Bat to Ratchet for 25 silver and fight off pirates, sea monsters and storms? Or run an inn… or a stable… or dye clothing… or you get the idea.
These ‘revolve the game around equipment’ decisions were crippling, but still pale in comparison to the main flaw in my humble opinion:
1) Repetitive combat
Let’s face it, most of what you do in this game is slaughter things, and 99% of the fights go exactly the same way. With my mage, level 10 and level 60: fireball, fireball, fireblast, frost nova, repeat. With my rogue: ambush, sinister strike, sinister strike, eviserate repeat. With my priest: mind blast, shadow word: pain, smite, repeat. You get the idea. You don’t get cool new abilities after level 20 or so, only higher numbers on existing abilities. Raiding at level 60 is hitting the same three buttons over and over again for 4-6 hours. That’s not gameplay, it’s pavlovian reward conditioning.
There’s a reason people call this ‘farming’. It’s exactly what it feels like. You go into your backyard into a pen of pigs and whack one on the head until it dies, then you move on the next one. It sucks, and you’re going to be doing it hundreds… of thousands… of times. You’re not going to be ambushed by a group of bandits that have been following your footsteps for a mile, netted, drug across the desert and sold into slavery . You’re not going to be poisoned by that spider and drug up a tree and cocooned. You’re not going be fighting a griffon and have it take to the sky and swoop down on you. Every human, insect, bear, blob and dragon will stand there toe-to-toe and hack away until it’s dead, occasionally fleeing at low health. You can glance at its level, and know exactly how combat will go.
Did the developers ever play Baldur’s Gate, Planescape:Torment or maybe Fallout? The open-ended sandbox-style gameplay of Grand Theft Auto? Then I remember – this is Blizzard, the people that brought you Diablo’s stripped down, low-fat RPG-lite gameplay. Screw story, grind to make those numbers go up. Then, go to the next area where everything is 10% harder. An RPG for the Ritalin generation.
Alternative combat: I’m thinking something more like this:
‘Your rogue drops from a rooftop as the woodsman returns home to the edge of town from a hard day’s work, poisoning him instantly but not before he screams out for help. Three armored guards charge up the road at the noise just in time to see your warrior friend pulling the woodsman’s body inside. You slam the door shut, and push a table up against it. The guards start hacking through the door and force their way inside just as the mage in your party lights up a fireball, catching half the house on fire in the process, and attracting the attention of the rest of the town. You toss a bomb in the corner and jump out the window as the sparks from the rooftop ignite the house next to it…’
Ah well, cheesy example but whatever. I realize too that Blizzard won’t/can’t change some of these issues, because in a lot of ways, making the game more fun equals less addicting, which would cut into their revenue. Yay capitalism.
Most of your points are good, but I have to disagree on 4 and 3.
On 4, hiding the numbers is a bad thing. City of Heroes hides the numbers for, well, everything and as a result, it has created two classes of players: the ones who have the numbers anyway, and the ones who are stumbling around in the dark. Guess which one has the advantage because they can make informed decisions?
3 is one of those ideas that sounds good in theory but causes problems in practice. It is, after all, content that can be done only once per server, and anybody who misses the boat on that is screwed forever. If Baron Von Menace Captain is slain forever when you take him out, that means nobody else can ever get to do it. I am assuming that taking out Baron Von Menace Captain does not cause his flunky Baron Von Sinister Captain to take his place thus creating an identical encounter but with a different paint job; that would seem to defeat the point you were making but it is a compromise between “first come, ONLY SERVED” and “that made as much difference as farting into the wind.”
Excellent text!
I am out of stuff too, and I’d like to say “casual gamers” might be actually much more serious about things concerning the world than those Raid-people.
Mostly, the casuals have the great RP events, the casuals used to speak in-character and just don’t rely on abbreviations for every stupid single thing. (I hate seeing LFG, PLZ, WTB and shit like that all the time… do the NPCs talk like that, no! And does it hurt, no! Would it be more fun, if people would actually learn to enjoy just a well written conversation between two people/characters instead of questing 26789hrs for their tier3 linecloth bandana of elite pwning). I was hoping that WoW would put more emphasis on the immersion into the world, and focus more on roleplaying – and Blizzard has given us such a wonderfully crafted playground… but most people (raiders on top) are just too ignorant to realize that. They work hard for the most uninteresting and boring aspect of the whole game, something they could have in all the other mmo-games as well.
In general, casuals might not be the greatest players or have the best equipment, but they are the ones we see on the streets of Orgrimmar or Ironforge, they are the ones we pick up in the wilderness for random grouping and quest solving, and they are the ones that bring flavor to the game – because they still have other goals than getting THE ITEM… instead they just spend a day at the inn, swapping warstories with other visitors – that is fun and creative!
The raid-lads are constantly away in Molten Core or on any other quite boring quest… they don’t add anything to the game, and we never really see them either. All we get is “sorry, mc”
And I seriously wonder what will happen once they all have their equipment? What will they do then? Then they will come back for the stuff the casuals want, and realize there is none… instead it’s all about 20.000 raid instances and super-\’c3\’bcber-imba loot that they already have. Well done…
I quit WoW just because of this matter, all my friends were blinded by items galore. While I was venturing around, enjoying the world – they are slaves to their guild and at the whim of the item roll at each MC attempt. I was free, and had a great time…
May your blade never dull…
I’m not casual, but I don’t like raiding much.
Right now, I’m raiding because it’s the only viable means of character progression.
I’m worried that doing means not only less fun now (because doing nothing but pressing healing touch Rank 5 every 3.5 seconds is neither interesting or challenging) but also less fun if and when the next tier of small group content is added (because my gear will trivialise it).
Blizzard has shown that they are capable of designing small group content that gives raid quality rewards without anyone complaining that the items are trivial to obtain – for instance the priest and hunter epic quests.
I want to see new small group content as hard as and as well rewarded as MC – same item quality, same item variety, same upgrades per week, somewhat lower in upgrades per manhour to allow for the organisational overhead of raiding. Then the same for BWL and AQ.
Among other things, this would let people move between streams – raiders could do small group content without trivialising it, a raid guilds that is down a couple of people one week could recruit replacements without weakening the group. Why lock people into only raid or only small group when it’s possible to design for both?
I think you’ve missed some of the point that casuals are making. And people like myself, who put a lot of time into the game but are not part of a large guild. And that is not “more stuff like I liked”. Or rather, not necessarily quest content. If Bliz put up instances that maxed at 5 man that were just as stupidly hard as BWL, or at least MC, most casuals and small-guilders would be deliriously happy. That’s the point. I play on a PvP server because I like PvP. But, because I don’t have access to the real end-game, I have almost no chance to compete with the guys that do have access to them. I cannot gear up, no matter how much gold I farm or how hard I play.
Admission into an end-game guild is a lot like a job. Which I already have. It’s not necessarily a problem with the guild, although some of them are pretty hard to take in terms of being full of themselves. It’s a problem with the level of organization that is required to set up that kind of enterprise. These are gamers – they have lives, or at least bedtimes. It’s a bit like herding goldfish.
By creating uber 5 or 10 man instances, the hardcore raiders would have to work just as hard as we do to get the gear, which would be desirable. And, even we, the organizationally-impaired, would have a chance at leveling the playing field in PvP with the hard-core raiders (or the less challenged
).
Or, simple put everybody in the same set of armor/weapons upon entry into the BG. That way the raiders can keep going for incredible godlike gear, but would still have to prove some skill in PvP.
I’m glad to see that someone out there really sees and can summarize the argument casuals have been presenting. It’s not about the gear, it’s not about being jealous of raiders, it’s not about a wanting to dumb the game down. “I don’t want to raid, I can’t compete in PvP unless I get some raid quality gear, or I don’t want to PvP at all, but I still want to advance my character.” It’s not an unreasonable perpective. You CAN’T get to 5.5M subscribers unless you have a significant number of “casuals”.
That said, I think that WoW could take a page from CoH regarding their “training” the lv1-59 characters to solo. There are two reasons why there isn’t a lot of grouping from lv1-59:
1) Finding others to work with is difficult. CoH has a superb group finder. It’s REALLY easy to find other players of various classes and levels that are also looking to group. WoW’s basic system for doing that is to spam chat channels in heavily populated areas, an inefficient and annoying way of looking for a fellow adventurer.
2) XP for grouping kinda sucks. CoH gives a noticable bonus for grouping. You still get less per arrest / kill than you would if you soloed the bad guy, but it’s noticibly more to work in groups of 4+ than it is to solo. With WoW, I spent an hour working my way through the Dead Mines, a 5 man instance. We were all the appropriate level for the zone and we (well, those of us that hadn’t done it before) did find it fun and challenging. I got some decent loot, but the XP was a let down. I could have done better soloing even and +1 mobs than I did in the mine. Other posts up the chain have made allusions to this too: the XP is better if you solo.
The two above problems foster soloist habits in the game, especially among people who haven’t played an MMO previously and haven’t learned ways to “get around” the limitations of the game to get at what you more experienced players want: to hook up with a bunch of bad ass warriors and kick ass
CB
I’d just like to take one minute to point something out. Everybody keeps comparing WOW to UO and EQ… the FIRST wow expansion is STILL in development people! How many of you out there that played those mmos for so long would have done so if their respective developers quit updating and patching when those games were as old as WOW is now? i could go on for quite some time about things id like to see implimented, removed, or fixed in WOW right now, but again WOW is still just a pup in MMO terms.
another relevant thing I’d like to comment on is that people that complain that questing gives bad experience in groups are missing the entire point of grouping, and probably the entire point of MMORPGs. if you group and breeze through something, don’t disband and post online how lame grouping is. Get out there and find somthing that IS hard for your group. if you insist on going solo, save yourself $15 a month and get a playstation.
Just be patient. If you’re out of stuff to do with your 60, roll an alt. If you have a 60 of each class, try a new profession. Try RP servers. (i thought RP servers were “t3h G4y” till i gave it a shot. It adds to the depth of the game when your character is more than a panel of stats and gear) Try 5 man raids with all the same class. Try seeing how fast you can clear an instance, then try beating that time. If you can honestly say “been there, done that and did it all twice on 3 different servers” try a 12-step program and just chill till the expansion comes out.
Finally, as far as the plight of the casual WOW gamer, there always gonna be boned for the same reason any casual hobbyist gets boned. Casual hunter is never gonna have that hunting lodge in the rockies. Weekend-only boxer is never gonna be world champ. One practice every other week band is never going on world tour. This is the same reason casual WOW players don’t get the top tier gear and I dont think its justified to say that blizz is neglecting them. To you, casual gamer, i say this; “If you want onyxias head it’s right there… on the biting, fire breathing end of the huge angry dragon. go get it!”
Stat caps, stat caps, stat caps, stat caps. They’re probably the single most important balancing feature of DAOC PvP, and also the one feature that WoW totally failed to copy.
With stat caps set at a reasonable level, say at the level of the best crafted blues, their endgame would be much more sustainable, because PVP would be open to a much larger class of players.
I have 4 characters – rogue. preist. warlock. warrior – I rushed my rogue to 60 to get to end game content with my freinds, but I love being a lowbie. Smaller more intimate groups of close friends gaming our tails off. Some of those I game with have real lives and only one character. They are willing to wait for end game but shouldn’t be excluded because they will never have time to dedicate themselves to guild life.
There has to be a balance. I think there should be a way for the casual players to get end game content – items comparable to but not the epix in end game 40 man raids. Similar – but different. I have often been impressed with people who can solo content that I need 4 others to do.
There SHOULD be rewards for that kind of skill, and no penalty for not having the time to cultivate 39 friends to do end game dungeons. I am a social creature and have over 39 friends and do end game content – have epix – but the point is the casual player should not be handed anything – and I don’t think that is what the casual player is asking for. . .
Players just want the ability to do what they have always done. . . use a smaller group or solo something challenging and get comparable rewards for it. Epix help in PVP and PVE – its wrong I think to have us hardcore gamers kitted out to the exclusion of those who want to compete but can’t do to being completely blocked due to game dynamics and real life constraints.
I don’t think its wrong to want comparable epix for doing 5 – 10 man raids – with even longer, harder or solo chains to get them. That is not catering – its just playstyle. Its not easier to 5-man versus a raid. We all know a raid goes faster – and its a hell of a lot easier to get a player balance in a raid than in a 5 man!!
So give the casual player a break guys – I don’t consider myself hardcore but I do have a lot more play time than most – which gives me a decided advantage over even the hardcore players. Should my time be restricted so that I don’t level, or honor past you guys because I have that privelege? No. But neither should the casual player be penalized if he is willing to persevere and play more days with a chain of shorter instances to get similar content from the game, content that we more hardcore gamers get in one go of MC.
What interesting to me about most in MMORPG’s is that they feel the total need to become the most powerful. Everyone wants to become stronger and stronger as time goes on. If they can’t get stronger, they lose interest.
As it is no one can continue to get stronger and stronger. Some decide to live the raiding life and get some of the better stuff, but eventually many of these fizzle out because they are ‘done’ with the game.
I think Bliz should give people the options of 5, 10, 20, and 40 man raids. They could just adjust drops rates so that a 5 man takes 8 times as long to get whatever gear you want than a 40 man. This would make somewhat of a balance between groups of 5 and 10 and guilds with hundreds running 40 man raids every night.
Eventually, we all have to realize that there is an end. Eventually, you will have the best stuff to only realize that you still aren’t the best.
Enjoy yourself while you play and when it feels like work – do something else for your own sake.
Wow…, I must admit I ended up in this place totally accidentally. I have read the original blog and some folllowing it and can only come up with thie conclusion. What person in their right mind takes up all this time to write, and the rest of you to respond to, about this nonsense. Its a GAME, go out and be productive instead of worrying if your ogre can beat the other guys wizard or some shit. Now look what you did, I’M responding to this shit now. Grow up people, and get a real hobbby. I build cars, you should try building something too. Iron over and out.
Or they could make raiding more accessible to the casual player….
…naw, that wouldn’t work. WoW clearly needs to get more “world-y” and less “game-y”, otherwise it is doomed to failure.