MMORPG.com World of Warcraft Correspondent Eric Grucza asks whether Blizzard is now trying too hard to appeal to casual players as opposed to long-time subscribers.

Patch 3.2 is live, and with it the wonderful new 5/10/25 man Heroic and Regular Coliseum has opened its doors to the Northrend's adventurers. Most players at the 80 level mark by now have completed or at least attempted the Regular and Heroic five man mode and for the most part probably completed it after a few tries. Blizzard did away with most of the trash as far as instances go and made a unique trio of boss fights. Each of them comes with its own set of interesting quirks that you are unluckily to find in the other instances in game. They have added a new feature that anyone who participated in the Argent Tournament is already familiar with and that is the jousting section of phase one and phase two on the first boss. The jousting adds an interesting game play element but unfortunately, as with the Argent Tournament, jousting lacks any type of decent control. Every time I participate in this encounter I can only think to myself "Why can these mounts not control like the mount I ride on a daily basis?" Besides this small complaint, the five man version of this instance flows together nicely. You can easily begin an encounter by simply speaking to the NPC in the middle of the room and after a brief monologue the doors are open and the encounter has begun. You are able to take breaks in-between bosses and if the going gets tough you are even able to run out of the instance and reset the boss, not that the run back takes anymore time. As a casual player you may find yourself finding a few hiccups where your group will wipe and need to retry, but after learning the basics, the instance becomes an easy 20-minute a day chore.

Read World of CasualCraft?

The churn of "casuials" pays more of the bills than the long term users. Its a steadfast rule that with a subscription based model:

"You are over charging half your player base, and undercharging the other half".

Simply put, those that only play a little bit here and there, are being over charged, those that spend all day in the game, all week, are being undercharged.

Casuals as you call them, pay the bills as they are the only type that is profitable. The hardcore only provide a small population of the server, but also create the need of others to see others online, and regularity.

The "Hardcore" have not been relevant for quite a while, they are just the loudest.

 You can't buy tier 9 items for badges. Also if you stick to just farming heroics you will get 2 items from tier 8.5 and a couple of other items that are worse than Ulduar 10 drops mostly. There are a couple of nice items for triumph badges but doing just heroics would take you about a month for 1 item(2 for hat). I also doubt a new guild is going to be able to beat the new raid but you are welcome to try.

So...Blizzard barely increased the content available for boring, repetitive grinding?   Whee.  I just can't get excited about daily quests.  Going into a dungeon, clearing it out, and doing it again tomorrow with the exact same mobs and bosses gets old...fast.

I don't see how this is a bad thing. Sure, it doesn't appeal to me, but it obviously does to a lot of other people. I'm not going to bash something just because I don't like it, and I'm sure blizzard isn't going to change it either. We just need to accept it for what it is: A casual MMO. If you don't like that then leave the game. Maybe then, at least, they will notice and change it. Assuming the hardcore audience makes up enough of their profit.

 contrary to what most devs think, it is possible that a long-time-player can still be casual

Everyone i know likes it.

And it is not as easy as the author has indicated.

My guild has tried TOC 10, and the tank is not geared enough to get through all of it. Just the first boss took us a few tries. It is not undoable but it will take a few weeks/months before even a big fraction of the guilds can have it on farm. And don't forget 25 man & hard mode.

If you read MMO-champion, only TWO guilds in the world have cleared hardmode 25 man TOC. That is a total of 50 players out of 11M. I don't think Blizzard has anything to worry about making the game too easy.

If you go to wow-heroes.com, as of NOW, on my server, calestrasz, there are like only 20 guilds who have clear anything in TOC 10, out of >200. None has cleared everything. ONLY 6 guilds have down any TOC 25 boss.

It will be months before even half of the guilds are having any of these in farm.

Originally posted by battleaxe

So...Blizzard barely increased the content available for boring, repetitive grinding?   Whee.  I just can't get excited about daily quests.  Going into a dungeon, clearing it out, and doing it again tomorrow with the exact same mobs and bosses gets old...fast.

I agree. Doing the same thing over and over is the definition of grind.

I am not a hardcore gamer that Raid all the time but I still want a challenge.

And running the same easy dungeons over and over is just boring to me.

It is ok that most of the content is for regular players but it should still be at least 10% really hard and challenging stuff, and I mean boths raiding and dungeons. Also making leveling so easy makes all the old content worthless.

They shouldn't have raised the levelcap at all. That is really the problem. It is the thing that more or less killed EQ, all the old content was just a waste of time there. Wow is getting to the same point faster and faster.

When you make an expansion you must be careful so you don't make all old content obsolete. It changes the whole game.

Games like Wow should also both have room for hardcore and casual players, it use to have that.

Originally posted by nariusseldon

If you read MMO-champion, only TWO guilds in the world have cleared hardmode 25 man TOC. That is a total of 50 players out of 11M.

Does Wow really have 11M players now? Have China opened up the servers again now? I do know they lost a lot of players in Korea.

Otherwise we are talking about something like 6 millions. Still a lot more than anyone else of course but far from 11 millions.

Originally posted by Loke666

Originally posted by battleaxe

So...Blizzard barely increased the content available for boring, repetitive grinding?   Whee.  I just can't get excited about daily quests.  Going into a dungeon, clearing it out, and doing it again tomorrow with the exact same mobs and bosses gets old...fast.

 

I agree. Doing the same thing over and over is the definition of grind.

I am not a hardcore gamer that Raid all the time but I still want a challenge.

And running the same easy dungeons over and over is just boring to me.

It is ok that most of the content is for regular players but it should still be at least 10% really hard and challenging stuff, and I mean boths raiding and dungeons. Also making leveling so easy makes all the old content worthless.

They shouldn't have raised the levelcap at all. That is really the problem. It is the thing that more or less killed EQ, all the old content was just a waste of time there. Wow is getting to the same point faster and faster.

When you make an expansion you must be careful so you don't make all old content obsolete. It changes the whole game.

Games like Wow should also both have room for hardcore and casual players, it use to have that.

I agree with you, with obsoleting the old content, there is no need in the expansions themselves other than the newest. But to be a hardcore gamer and play this game now days, you won't get further than you did if you played casual these days. And that is the greatest problem, that is the reason hardcore gamers are standing up against this. WoW used to give me something to do every day and night, but now days I only need to log in for a minutes and then I'm done, till the next day. So the game is dying for me :(

WoW started casual...where do these people with this BS come from

Originally posted by Gestankfaust

WoW started casual...where do these people with this BS come from

WoW started casual? Really now. And i guess my 12 hour shifts on my computer back in the day finishing up AQ40 and Naxx at the same time was casual. Also, grinding out Highwarlord was casual, suuuurreee. You must have not hit end game back then.

Since when are "casual player" and "long time player" exclusive terms?  I've been a pretty casual player of the game since the day it launched.   You can make any game hard core if you want to, you just need to spend hours and hours  at a time playing.  The good thing about WoW is that you don't need to in order to enjoy yourself and get at least something accomplished.  I don't see any problem with that, there are still things for aspiring professional videogame players to do.

Originally posted by Josexph

Originally posted by Gestankfaust

WoW started casual...where do these people with this BS come from

 

WoW started casual? Really now. And i guess my 12 hour shifts on my computer back in the day finishing up AQ40 and Naxx at the same time was casual. Also, grinding out Highwarlord was casual, suuuurreee. You must have not hit end game back then.

AQ40 and Naxx weren't around when the game started.  I think the point is that the game has always been casual friendly even though there were things for hardcore gamers to do as well.  It was casual because you could level without dedicating your life to it, like you had to in Everquest and other popular games at the time.  Even at the time of AQ40 and Naxx there were still many things for casual players to accomplish.  It was all about how you chose to play.

Originally posted by Josexph
 

I agree with you, with obsoleting the old content, there is no need in the expansions themselves other than the newest. 

How do you level from 60 to 70 w/o going to Outland? 

Originally posted by Loke666

Originally posted by nariusseldon

If you read MMO-champion, only TWO guilds in the world have cleared hardmode 25 man TOC. That is a total of 50 players out of 11M.

 

Does Wow really have 11M players now? Have China opened up the servers again now? I do know they lost a lot of players in Korea.

Otherwise we are talking about something like 6 millions. Still a lot more than anyone else of course but far from 11 millions.

I heard they just open back up in China. However, even if you don't count China, 50 players out of 6M still makes my point succinctly.

Originally posted by Oyjord

Originally posted by Josexph
 

I agree with you, with obsoleting the old content, there is no need in the expansions themselves other than the newest. 

 

How do you level from 60 to 70 w/o going to Outland? 

Didn't say i don't level there, but do i do any of the dungeons or any of the reps, hell na. And usually when i level i just go to about two zones.

Ok WOW is not perfect but it is still the best MMO out there. MMO = Grind it always has and always will. Creating new content for people every day is just not going to happen.

As far as the Old world in wow is concerned try looking at the next expansion where they are revisiting the old world and changing almost all of it. Which is more than most other MMO's have ever done.

I remember the 8 hours a night raiding and I dont miss those times. You want to talk about a grind. Having to spend 8 plus hours a night in one dungeon is not pleasant memories.

The problem is that hardcore players don't feel "epic" anymore. It used to be a status symbol to carry around that T3 armor, you had achieved something that about 2% of the WoW population achieved (can't find the article, will look it up).

Seriously, 2% of WoW players got to complete AQ40 and Naxx. That's not a whole lot. At all. Even if they only had 2mil subscribers then, that's still a very few.

Thus, the devs are trying to open end-game content up to casual players as well as hardcore players. They're giving you different options to acquire the gear. They want more than a handful of people to experience end-game content, more than a handful to take on Arthas when he arrives.

In my book? Not such a bad idea. Just because someone who wears the armor that I wear, but acquired it in a different fashion, doesn't ruin the game for me. As long as they put in the same amount of work that I do for it. Whether that's grinding dailies and heroics over and over again, or painfully gathering mats to craft something of close-to-equal value... not such a big deal to me.

Now, I don't rate myself as hardcore, I'd say I'm casual. But I do consider myself skilled enough, and my guildmates skilled enough, to make it through everything thus far in a relatively short amount of time, acceptable to us all. 10-mans, that is. 25-mans are another story, which we have had limited success with. Although we all pass the gear checks, as a 25-man group, we're not coordinated enough, and a few of us just don't make the DPS cuts. What does that mean? Obviously Blizzard is doing something right with making 25-man content more difficult than 10-man. Obviously, there is still an amount of prestige to be had if you're wearing that armor, but since it looks almost identical to 10-man armor, and armor acquired through tokens, the hardcore crowd is pitching a fit.

Sad, because I think Blizzard is actually doing the RIGHT thing by offering different ways to different people to play a game, and giving people incentives to get that armor to feel like they are capable of the raids that people SHOULD be playing. Just my two cents.

Personally I love the change. As someone that works 12 hour shifts, I got major raid burn out last year.

After we took down Kael'thas and Lady Vashj and prcoeeded to finish Hyjal/BT, I'd had enough. When wotlk came along I did try to get back into raiding but just could stand it any longer.

Basically up till this last patch unless you loved arenas or raiding 3-4 times a week you were pretty stuffed for obtaining nice shiny's. Now by the end of this month I should have kitted out 1 or 2 alts and a main character with more than a few bits of nice gear.

Blizzard will keep my custom for a few more months at least. Still very concerned about cataclysm though, that could well be too casual even for me!