25 August 2009 - 3:14Another casual post, why Blizzard got it wrong in Wrath

Moonky and I were just chilling in some  late night AVs and discussing Cataclysm with regard to the casual/hardcore debate in /g. The discussion led itself to a few interesting points.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that as far as the casual debate was concerned, Blizzard had it right in TBC and Wrath was a step in the wrong direction.

To start this, of course we gotta define casual.

There is this common opinion that casual means someone who doesn’t raid, and hardcore is someone who raids. This seems to follow from the train of thought that says: “If you can afford to spend long blocks of time in the game, you naturally start raiding.”

Except, this is not true – there are a lot of people who devote hours to the game without doing any progression raiding. And I simply cannot say that you are playing a game casually if you log on every day for a couple of hours.

The player I could call casual would be someone who logged on for a few hours every week to do whatever they like. They can’t or aren’t willing to spend more than an hour or so in the game at a time. They aren’t willing to spend time outside of the game reading about how to play the game. They took four or five months just getting to the level cap. They purchased the expansion a month after it hit. They just want to log in, have some fun doing whatever they like, log out.

Due to time constraints, the casual player can’t afford to, or just doesn’t like to, engage in extended group play. Raids are definitely out from their POV. 5-mans are occasional. That leaves them with questing or PVP for character progression. And as we all know, there is a very firm ceiling as far as quested gear is concerned.

This leaves a single option for the truly casual player to progress their character: PVP.

In TBC, this was fine and dandy – PVP gear was readily available. Anyone could put in a few hours of work here and there, and still end up with something to show for it. This is why Blizzard got it right for the “casuals” in TBC. They could queue for a battleground, join up, participate, obtain some good gear without needing to rely on other people, or having to devote large chunks of time at once. Every season, the gear was upped in quality, so there was still something new to strive for, something else that would make you remain competitve.

This changed in Wrath.

Wrath caters more to the “hardcore casual”. The people who log in every day. The people who can afford to spend big blocks of time ingame, but somehow don’t want to or cannot be part of an organized PVE effort. What Wrath did was make raiding easier, so that people did not need to be part of anything organized – it didn’t solve the time problem.

However, it did take away the casual’s real route to gear progression. All the PVP gear is either rated, has a prohibitively high cost for its quality, or requires you to be online at a certain time in a certain place much like raiding. The PVP gear obtained can, with a few exceptions, no longer be used in competitive PvE because of the stat changes and the heavy resilience weighting.

Most importantly, the single greatest slot, weapons, are currently rated, forcing people to participate in the arena metagame and be good at it. Again, your casual doesn’t have the time or the inclination to do that.

If Blizzard really wanted to keep the real casuals playing, Wrath was the wrong direction for that. The casual/hardcore debate in Wrath is meaningless from that point of view, because there is very little in this expansion that actually caters to the casuals. It’s all aimed at the hardcore casual, and it’s succeeding.

Going with that train of thought, was there any need for the stat-dumbing-down that was announced in Blizzcon? The hardcore casual is already willing to spend time outside of the game to improve themselves. I doubt that the change will make a lot of difference for the true casual, who doesn’t have access to that level of play to begin with – the level where decisions such as these would matter.

The change(s) won’t motivate the casuals to take part in raiding, because they lack the one thing Blizzard can’t give them, and that’s time. Sure, they can do a few instances a week, and get a piece of T8,5… in six weeks? Eight? Assuming they persist, which a lot of people won’t, because the length of time needed for the gear is discouraging, especially for a casual who had been playing during TBC.

Add to this the fact that the (very player-created) entry threshold is high for most content, both PVE and PVP. Technically, you might be able to clear every heroic in your fresh level 80 quest greens. In reality, unless you are above the actual entry threshold by a healthy margin, you’ll be refused entry by your PUG. PVP is worse – watch yourself get steamrolled for hours while you collect the some 60,000 honor needed for a single piece of gear.

The casual, in theory, can slowly work towards their goals. However, to gain entry into heroics, they must at least turn to craftables. Gathering the materials or gold takes time. After spending a few weeks gathering those, then you’ll be allowed to go into heroics, and maybe get badges for yet another item, that will take yet longer. The prospect of spending so much IRL time leaves people with two choices: Spend more time ingame, or just stop playing altogether because the motivation is lost. For most casuals who are unable or unwilling to dedicate more to the game, the choice is simple.

To actually cater to the casual – improve the quality of PVP, because that is the only group activity in the game where the player needs to pass no player-created threshold to play within a group, and does not require devoting large blocks of time at once. Bring back the TBC PVP system. Remove rating requirements from all arena gear (”Matches that take five minutes each, ten of them a week, progress towards a piece of high quality gear? Sign me up!”). In short, make PVP a truly viable avenue for the casual to pursue for gear progression.