Casual VS. Hardcore Gamers...

[Jetherik]

There is an editorial by Garrett Fuller (http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm?gameId=15&setView=features&loadFeature=314&fp=1024,768,48009437,20051118153738), at MMORPG, on Casual VS Hardcore Gamers.

The biggest problem these and many other players face is what to do when they reach the end game. A lot of casual players argue that there is little to do in the end game of World of Warcarft unless you have time and people to invest in developing your character. These arguments are met by vague answers as to what players can do with their time. Clearly Hardcore players do not want these casual players to have simple access to all the gear and secrets they have learned through hours of playing. Who can blame them? It takes plenty of work to get the best equipment or abilities. Still, the content in World of Warcraft does not necessarily favor the end game casual player.
While he is talking about WoW - he could be talking about EQ. Wednesday Night at Norrath went on for six years of playing EQ. But when we got to 55, we had a very hard time playing because the end game was pretty much raid based, etc. The little that we could do, became very repetitive, and finding people to fill in our group was next to impossible without wasting 75% of the time looking. And, traveling, while not as bad as it was in the beginning, still could take some time. THe WNiN group is now playing CoH every wednesday nights. We find we can get 3-6 missions done in the 2-3 hours that the group plays. In EQ, we would get one thing done. When hardcore players make up maybe 20-25% of your paying crowd, why develop everything for them? Oh yeah, they are also the loudest. Are you hard core or casual? What do you want?

[carneconcarne]

I wish hardcore gamers would quit bitching about stuff like this. To me, it's like saying somebody who paid to get into disneyworld can't ride space mountain because they haven't collected ticket stubbs from all 50 other rides. People pay for content, and have a right to expect it, I think. I hate when a game I buy has lots of cool things to unlock, but I don't have the skill or time to unlock them (Ninja Gaiden Black). I wish extra content just had a code or option to unlock. Of course, none of this helps fix the problem in MMORPGS.

[Dabombpizza]

I don't think this is a question of skill. When the game boils down to a repetative motion that is performed over and over again (instances near end game of WoW), I get extremely bored. I don't think I'm a "hardcore gamer" except for certain games. I'm a game enthusiast, and I don't like lather rinse repeat gameplay, because it's just an excuse for not having gameplay.

If the game was centered more around skill and less around time sinking, I would have no problem practicing my twitch reflexes to kick some ass. But dropping more than an hour in an instance is a waste of my time.

[Serapth]

I wish hardcore gamers would quit bitching about stuff like this. To me, it's like saying somebody who paid to get into disneyworld can't ride space mountain because they haven't collected ticket stubbs from all 50 other rides. People pay for content, and have a right to expect it, I think. I hate when a game I buy has lots of cool things to unlock, but I don't have the skill or time to unlock them (Ninja Gaiden Black). I wish extra content just had a code or option to unlock. Of course, none of this helps fix the problem in MMORPGS.

I have no issue with hard games ( like Ninja Gaiden ) and I definatly dont want codes available cause I cheat like a motherfucker and really end up ruining the game experience for myself! :) What can I say, no self control.

Also, the expression hardcore gamer is very misleading and disappointing... ;)

Anyways, when it comes to MMORPGs I agree 100%. I wasted a few years of my life on Everquest and havent really touched an MMO game since. The attitude at the upper levels is just fucking pathetic. Its online social retard syndrom in effect. Little timmy with his 50/70 vision, 98 lb body and straight A's isnt exactly the most popular kid in school. Yet, when he goes online and becomes Malicor the Magnificent, he is unbeatable. In turn it allows little Timmy, er... Malicor to get his vengance on all those things that happen to him in real life. This breeds the uber-elitist attitude online.

And frankly, MMO games reward people with the most time to put in them. Many of the people that can dedicate all that time are frankly, people with alot of free time on their hands, like timmy described above. Now mix socially rejected people with a status based online system, and what the hell do you expect to happen?

DISCLAIMER: Not all hardcore MMO players are like timmy. Just most ;)

[Atorak]

I wish I could be a hardcore gamer, but unless I forgo everything else in my life, it is impossible. I don't even have kids or a wife, so I can't even imagine what it is like trying to game in that type of situation. Still, a social life and a good job keeps me plenty busy during the week, there is NO WAY I can dedicate the time needed to stay successful in a game like WoW. Hell, it took me over 6 months to get to 40, and even when I got there, the satisfaction I got from buying a horse wasn't worth the time I invested. I've heard the end-game content is awesome, but I DON'T HAVE THE TIME TO GET THERE!!!!! The casual gamer always gets screwed, even in the widely-acclaimed World of Warcraft...


<begin side rant>

Also, I have a problem of losing interest quickly in games. Frankly, I think the cause is still a lack of really interesting plotlines. Sure, graphics have absolutely exploded, but almost at the cost of everything else. Don't get me wrong, a game like Half-Life 2 made me feel like I was in an action-packed AAA movie in the theaters....but where was the story? Shit, I could have wrote it on a notepad in a hour. A game like World of Warcraft has a very detailed background story, but the game took so goddamn long to level (which is NOTHING when compared to other games in the MMO genre!), I would just skip over the quest text so I could complete my next repretative obligation. Plus, I find it hard to relate to a Night Elf, or a Tauren......whatever the hell they are.

So even as a casual gamer, there was nothing interesting enough in a game like WoW to push me over to the realm of hardcore gaming...

Fix that first, developers...then we'll talk.

[Nite_Moogle]

And frankly, MMO games reward people with the most time to put in them.
What sort of hobby or game doesn't cater to someone who puts the most time into it?

[Rakael]

Eventually companies will have to start making MMO's that break the mold. The gaming public can only take so many clones that have the same old tired gameplay. I am frothing at the mouth to get my hands on CoV, and it will only be worse in the month or two until I get our new rigs built. The sad thing is that I know I will be burned out in about two months, if that considering I have already burned out on CoH. The thing is, I have always had a very romantic vision of MMO's. They have so much damned potential that it makes me want to put my head through a wall watching that potential be shat upon with each new "innovative" MMO.

I too am just a game enthusiast like Daombpizza, but could easily fall into the hardcore category in regards to MMOs if a company would just get it right for once.

[OUX]

I wish hardcore gamers would quit bitching about stuff like this. To me, it's like saying somebody who paid to get into disneyworld can't ride space mountain because they haven't collected ticket stubbs from all 50 other rides. People pay for content, and have a right to expect it, I think. I hate when a game I buy has lots of cool things to unlock, but I don't have the skill or time to unlock them (Ninja Gaiden Black). I wish extra content just had a code or option to unlock. Of course, none of this helps fix the problem in MMORPGS.

Thats just silly. Your silly, you silly thing you. People pay for a GAME with the expectation of ENTERTAINMENT the reason they have the unlockable content IS for the hardcore gamer because that is what makes the game fun for them, casual gamers either need to "quit bitching" that they don't get the +5 Vorbal Blade of World Slaying for knuckle childrening for half an hour in a starting area. Either man up or don't but people play to their level of enjoyment and I think a lot of devs do an awesome job of making games that can be beat in 2 days and take months to do everything. Its all about how much time you want to put into it and still get some fun out of it.

[Serapth]

What sort of hobby or game doesn't cater to someone who puts the most time into it?

Ok, let me reword that. They require you to put the effort in to "succeed".

[zorper]

What do you want?

KOTOR III.

[Dabombpizza]

Either man up or don't but people play to their level of enjoyment and I think a lot of devs do an awesome job of making games that can be beat in 2 days and take months to do everything. Its all about how much time you want to put into it and still get some fun out of it.
That is one aspect of the game, which I think is very vital to an MMORPG. You need some quests that are just never ending, but you also need to provide simple activities and goals that can be accomplished in short periods of time. I don't want to be in front of my comp for 4 hours at a time trying to accomplish one thing. That's what drove me insane about CoH and Taskforces. WoW does a very good job at setting up easy to accomplish goals in the beginning with tons of quests, lots of stuff to explore, and a fast leveling up system. But when that peters out and all you have left is instance, instance, instance with a few trade skill stuff (that isn't that worth it since you can buy the crap at the AH), it really sinks the game for me.

[bean19]

Make dynamic content that spawns mobs appropriate to your group size like CoH does, OR make the base difficulty low enough for a single group to defeat, but allow raid groups to earn extra points by meeting challenges like "Kill Onyxia in under 5 minutes" or whatever.

Then the content isn't restricted to just the hardcore gamers, but the hardcore gamers would still be able to seek the uber loot that they use to distinguish themselves in the online world.

[XenonCJ]

What sort of hobby or game doesn't cater to someone who puts the most time into it?Well it's more of an issue of balance... The ratio of raw time invested into the game vs. talent...

After 100 days played, a crappy player with the most "bling bling" purple\orange gear can beat a talented player with only 20 days played and mosty "green" gear...

With the understanding that if both players had the same gear, talented player would win every time.

[Roc Ingersol]

I'm a hard core casual myself.
I play alot, but I can't stand having to play alot, all at once. Too many people, too much administrative bs, too much organizational downtime.
Add in the RNG-based loot progression, the inevitable DKP, the drama, the minimization of individual contribution in large groups, etc - and it just isn't Fun(tm) anymore. Not for me.

I'm not opposed to 'putting in the time'. I'm opposed to only being able to put in the time in 4 hour blocks with 39 of my closest friends.

I'm opposed to having no idea what I'll be getting for putting in my time, without looking at a spoiler site; compare blind random drops to seeing quest rewards in the 1-60 game. Why aren't there quest lines to get raid loot? Why not let me know what the reward is before I put the time in?

I'm opposed to having no idea how close or far I am from my objective; compare quest progress tracking 1-60 to having no clue whether an epic you want will ever drop from a raid target when you're there. Why isn't there a quest to give me my tierX loot, so that I can know I'm 4 runs away from getting loot? Why base it off the RNG, so one guy gets his on the first run and someone else never even sees it drop, let alone wins a roll for it?

WoW's end-game causes so much griping, because the 1-60 game proves, emphatically, that you can do better than all that bullshit. And then shortly after you ding 60, it all ends. Why? wtf?

Why isn't there anything worthwhile I can work toward an hour or two at a time in WoW after I hit 60? Why can't I see what the faction rewards are before I grind for months to get to them? Why can't I make discrete progress toward my goal each and every session? Why in the hell does PvP have seperate rewards are seperated by faction grinds, and each one only offers certain item slots? Why can I raid 1 dungeon for a full set of gear, but no battleground rewards will result in a full set?

wth?

[NeuroMan42]

I am Hardcore if I really get totally absorbed into the game and story in a game world. Now with WOW I am a mix of Casual/Hardcore. Sometimes I will play and entire day sometimes not. Now with WOW, I personally could care less for the items and the RAID/PVP stuff.

[Citizen Philip]

I believe there SHOULD be two ways of doing things: repetition (victory through attrition: ie. hardcore) and investment (victory through smaller challenges).

A proto-example is: gaining reputation with a faction, as seen in Zul'Gurub and the Battlegrounds: You may win or lose, but you gain reputation that ultimately unlocks gear. Hardcore will grind it faster, but a casual player can chip away at it.

I wanted to see a victory through investment sceheme for WoW PvP where you spend contribution on unlocking different set pieces and tiers, and ultimately on epic pieces (ie. one piece at a time), but instead it's a TOTAL victory through attrition.

Very disapponting.

[angelofrage]

It's a tough one to call. In WoW i hit lvl 40 in 4 weeks with 8 days of gameplay, the majority of me playing is solo. The only times i group are with my RL friends, either for them to help me or me to help them. As another poster said, i'd consider myself to have no problem fitting time in for the game, even though i have a social life and full time job, yet i find the idea of waiting around for massive groups of people to be a waste of my time when i do play. Almost every new patch from Blizzard has a new 20 or 40 main raid dungeon, why can't they introduce some 5 man high level dungeons, that way people with less time and the skill to complete such tough challenges would benefit, yet the "hardcore" would still get their fix from the large raids.

I however feel in a minority alot of the time, either you are a casual player, taking months to raise levels, and quite happy to go along and do the standard quests or you are the hardcore, Endgame Guilds wanting huge world size events to do over and over only to get epic gear to make you more efficient at running the next 40 man raid. I feel Blizzard is lacking support for anything inbetween.

[MusicToEat]

I guess I'm what you'd call a hardcore player, though I don't usually refer to myself as one. I raid MC/BWL 4 nights a week with my guild. I don't do it to get "uber item #312". I do it because I like conquering new challenges. I like figuring out how to beat what the designers have created. The loot is just a means to an end. It took us well over a month to progress through and beat Rags, but it was one of my greatest gaming moments the night we droped him. Not because of the loot he droped, we didn't even check him for 5 mins because we were too busy celebrating, but because all our hard work paid off. and that I did it with "39 of my closest friends". It makes all those single player victories pale in comparison.

I suppose they could make these high end instances easier, but what would be the point then? Run in push a button for 30 mins and get your loot? Like some kind of vending machine? Where's the fun in that. I know the random drops can be frustrating, but that's why you don't do PUGs, just do guild runs and use DKP. A fair system will make sure each member gets gear equally and once a guildie has it, it's one less person you need to compete with for it.

[Serapth]

I guess I'm what you'd call a hardcore player, though I don't usually refer to myself as one. I raid MC/BWL 4 nights a week with my guild. I don't do it to get "uber item #312". I do it because I like conquering new challenges. I like figuring out how to beat what the designers have created. The loot is just a means to an end. It took us well over a month to progress through and beat Rags, but it was one of my greatest gaming moments the night we droped him. Not because of the loot he droped, we didn't even check him for 5 mins because we were too busy celebrating, but because all our hard work paid off. and that I did it with "39 of my closest friends". It makes all those single player victories pale in comparison.

I suppose they could make these high end instances easier, but what would be the point then? Run in push a button for 30 mins and get your loot? Like some kind of vending machine? Where's the fun in that. I know the random drops can be frustrating, but that's why you don't do PUGs, just do guild runs and use DKP. A fair system will make sure each member gets gear equally and once a guildie has it, it's one less person you need to compete with for it.

Wow, online games must have changed alot since my EQ days. I remember the first time we beat Hate... and this was with a pretty tight guild. There was about 15 seconds of celebration, then 20 minutes fighting over who would get what loot, followed by an hour of drudgery while we rez'ed and teleported all the people home.

[Speed_D]

Why can't I see what the faction rewards are before I grind for months to get to them?
They do show that now on the newer stuff (see: vendor at Arathi Basin). But for some odd reason they haven't retroactively added that change to the other vendors (Warsong Gulch, Argent Dawn, etc).

Why can't I make discrete progress toward my goal each and every session?
I don't know what you mean, but you can see how much experience you need to the next level. Also as of the last patch, you can see how much reputation you need for the next tier, and points of reputation gained are now listed in your combat log.

Why in the hell does PvP have seperate rewards are seperated by faction grinds, and each one only offers certain item slots? Why can I raid 1 dungeon for a full set of gear, but no battleground rewards will result in a full set?
The battleground reputation rewards are extras. The main pvp rewards come from your ladder ranking, and you can get full sets of those.

I play in a raiding guild but a lot of them are friends I've known in real life for a long time. I don't have that much time to participate in the big raid instances so pvp is a great way for me to keep up. Even the blue pvp gear is quite good and I never feel like I'm a liability the few raids that I attend.

Anyhow each to their own :)

[MusicToEat]

Wow, online games must have changed alot since my EQ days. I remember the first time we beat Hate... and this was with a pretty tight guild. There was about 15 seconds of celebration, then 20 minutes fighting over who would get what loot, followed by an hour of drudgery while we rez'ed and teleported all the people home.


Loot whores don't last very long in our guild. If there's an argument over loot it's because everyone's trying to pass it to each other. Once you get these instances down, loot drops like candy. It's not as stingy as EQ was. Each boss drops 3-4 epics. There's really no reason/need to be a greedy asshat.

[Mason]

A hallmark of bad game design is a narrow difficulty range, which can either be set low (and the hardcore players can blow through the content with ease) or set high (and the casual players don't have a chance of participating), but which isn't broad enough to encompass them both.

RPGs of all stripes have major problems with this, since so much of one's success isn't based on how well one plays, but rather how much time a person has put in prior to this play session. Smart games get around this by letting one invest time into making a broader character (like GW), which isn't necessarily numerically superior but who has more options when it comes to strategy.

Games like WoW are always going to have a problem with this, though. Blizzard was careful to initially keep the hardcore-only equipment only slightly better than the more accessible gear, but as time has passed reward-inflation keeps making that gap larger and larger.

The most sensible way to address this, which would be to include plenty of casual-accessible rewards along with every content push that raises the high-end. This means that over time the casual-accessible stuff will start to become more powerful than the older high-end stuff, thus invalidating the older content. If you can do some quests in an expansion and get stuff that's better than old rare raid gear, there's no point on doing those raids.

So, it kind of paints a game into a corner. Either make the hardcore rewards fairly pathetic for the amount of effort involved in getting them, exile the non-hardcore players as sub-human scum, or keep raising the casual rewards in such a way that invalidates a lot of the game's prior content. All of those are pretty bad.

Far better, in my opinion, to have a skill/stat/equipment system that lets you specialize in interesting ways, without really changing the overall potential for your character.

Also, WoW has a lot of artificial barriers to casual players. It lacks a global LFG system, where you could also flag yourself for given instances. No idea if they changed the meeting stones into something useful or not, but they don't cut it for this. Also, the travel time makes it quite hard to get a group together. Hardcore guilds have no problems, they can announce a raid days in advance and people can get there at the right time. But if you're trying to get random players into your group for an instance, they could be anywhere in the world, and as much as 15 or more minutes away. That's 15 minutes in which your other groupmates can get bored or get disconnected.

Blizzard recently relaxed this insistance on making travel a bitch with the battlegrounds, but they're way too slow in figuring out when to violate spacial continuity to make the game more fun.

[swiftdraw]

From another thread:
there's no 'hardcore' anything, there's just fans, fanatics, and freaks, period. what's 'hardcore' about playing ANY game over and over and over?? that's just being a fan, and in some cases a fanatic, and in many cases, just a freak...

That pretty much sums up my thinking on the issue. Thank you drakkarim.

[derjester]

What is with this sense of entitlement? Just because you play a game doesn't mean you deserve to have it completed. Try beating the original Ghosts and Goblins for NES. There's no save point so you have to dedicate several hours if you want to beat it. It's incredibly difficult.
MMO's are meant ot be never ending. If they had an end you'd lose subscriptions everyday. If you make everything accessible to everyone, where's the accomplishment? And why are you entitled to anything? I fail to understand the casual vs. harcore dynamic. Someone dedicates a lot of time to a game and gets incredibly uber stuff. Someone plays casually, they get decent gear for the time they've spent. Will someone casually complete any game? Any multiplayer game?
As far as claiming WoW is impossible to do "unless you are a do nothign loser." It's actually fairly easy to be organized and get things done. One of my roommates, who is also a coworker raids 4 nights a week. His guild has downed Nefarion consistently for the past month. He gets more dates than I do so he's not a do nothing "lamer."
I've never cleared Molten Core because I'm causal. Though I'm finding more and more that the encounters intrigue me. I don't deserve uber loot because I'm not an uber player. Simple as that.

[Roc Ingersol]

They do show that now on the newer stuff (see: vendor at Arathi Basin).
Yeah, some factions. Not all.
Why'd that take so long? Why aren't the old ones fixed?

I don't know what you mean, but you can see how much experience you need to the next level.
I'm talking about the end game. XP doesn't matter. Say I want a drop from MC. How many times do I have to run the dungeon to get it?
No-one can say. RNG says it could be next time, could be never. Overall it might be 20% drop rate off a given mob, but that doesn't mean 5 runs will do it.

The battleground reputation rewards are extras. The main pvp rewards come from your ladder ranking, and you can get full sets of those.
Bwuwhahahahahaha.
The pvp rank rewards are not even close to comparable to raid loot given the time investment. Furthermore, no casual player is ever going to break into double-digit ranks, no matter how long they play - simply because they don't play enough per week. The pvp rank rewards are a sick joke.

I like the game. I really do. But the end game is seriously weak.
The 1-60 game proves that you can do better. But then at 60 they shrugged their shoulders and pushed out vanilla EQ.

[Serapth]

WOW ( pun not intended ).

Im frankly amazed how conversations about MMORPG's turn into a WoW specific conversation this quickly, Wow must really be the success people say it is. ( Again, havent played, EQ burned me out on these types of games ).


Way.... sorta... off topic, but is anyone playing SWG's since the update? Now it actually sounds kinda appealing to me. How is it since the changes?

[T-Dub]

To me this is a PvE vs. PvP problem. With any sort of PvE/single player game it's all about content. Who gets to the end of Prince of Persia and decides to repeat the last couple levels over and over again? Nobody. It's all about new content for PvE. Now how many people play the same de_dust map over and over again? Everybody. It's all about the dynamic challenge of playing against other humans.

I will probably never get bored with WoW endgame because of the PvP battlegrounds. I haven't gotten there yet but my warlock has been stuck at lvl 44 for a couple weeks now because I can't get enough of the BG's :)

[Speed_D]

The pvp rank rewards are not even close to comparable to raid loot given the time investment.
They are better, for their intended use: pvp.

I'm mid-range, rank-wise -- rank 8? I think, which gives me access to 4 of the 6 blue armor items. I wear the pvp gear in preference to almost anything from Molten Core when I'm fighting other players because it is better suited to that task. I play evenings after work, not every day. Might hit 4 or 5 battlegrounds which is about 2 hours of play. If you consider that a lot of time investment, well -- I can tell you that people in high end raiding guilds put in far more.

Now contrast that with a "hardcore" (fanatic / freak) raider:

Molten Core takes maybe ~6 hours IF your guild is really good at it. It's a 40 person instance, so you WILL have more people than loot on a single raid. Add to that the fact that all the loot is class-specific, so items may go to waste if there's no one that can use it. I hear complaints about that a lot - where there are like 8 priests on a given raid and 3 warlocks, but the item randomizer does not favor based on # of people. So the priests get screwed and the warlocks end up getting doubles of items they don't want. Which means you need to raid *many* times to have a shot at a handful of items, let alone a set.

And sorry for hijacking this into a WoW discussion :p

[Draft]

Yeah, some factions. Not all.
Why'd that take so long? Why aren't the old ones fixed?


I'm talking about the end game. XP doesn't matter. Say I want a drop from MC. How many times do I have to run the dungeon to get it?
No-one can say. RNG says it could be next time, could be never. Overall it might be 20% drop rate off a given mob, but that doesn't mean 5 runs will do it.


Bwuwhahahahahaha.
The pvp rank rewards are not even close to comparable to raid loot given the time investment. Furthermore, no casual player is ever going to break into double-digit ranks, no matter how long they play - simply because they don't play enough per week. The pvp rank rewards are a sick joke.

I like the game. I really do. But the end game is seriously weak.
The 1-60 game proves that you can do better. But then at 60 they shrugged their shoulders and pushed out vanilla EQ.
You are correct to say that the time investment involved with getting high warlord stuff is disgusting. Much worse than any sort of PVE time sink. You need to be doing a good 3-4 hours of hard pvp a day to even think of getting the epic weapons.

But I disagree that they aren't comparable. The high warlord gear is some of the best in the game.

As to the raiding end game, I really enjoy it. Bringing down those epic bosses is really hard, for my guild and I, at least, and when we beat a new one it's thrilling in a way single player games can't match. We just beat Ragnaros a month or so ago, and now we're really excited to get into Blackwing Lair.

But we also have a lot of fun in Zul'Gurrub, which I think is a great "casual hardcore" dungeon. A good group can clear the main part of the dungeon in 3 hours, which is not an extraordinarily long amount of time to play a videogame. And, in my opinion, it offers as tactical and exciting an experience as any fight in the molten core. Jin'do, one of the "optional" bosses, if my favorite fight in the game. Period. He is hard and then some and it's a real kick to smack him up.

I can't wait for 1.9 and the two new instances.

[ezra]

I do believe that I love kittens!

[Rirath]

I wish hardcore gamers would quit bitching about stuff like this. To me, it's like saying somebody who paid to get into disneyworld can't ride space mountain because they haven't collected ticket stubbs from all 50 other rides. People pay for content, and have a right to expect it, I think.

Funny, that's exactly what I wish "casual" gamers would quit complaining about.

What is with this sense of entitlement? Just because you play a game doesn't mean you deserve to have it completed. Try beating the original Ghosts and Goblins for NES. There's no save point so you have to dedicate several hours if you want to beat it. It's incredibly difficult.

If you make everything accessible to everyone, where's the accomplishment? And why are you entitled to anything? I fail to understand the casual vs. harcore dynamic.

Exactly, thank you.

[doyama]

Im a fairly casual gamer. I loved WoW but now I'm a bit jaded by it. I think once you hit like 55 there really isnt a place for someone like me who can maybe spend 3-4 hours a night.

I'm not saying there shouldn't be places like MC and big 15-20-40 group raid dungeons. But at the same time, they need to introduce smaller stuff as well. Aside from Dire Maul they really haven't released much content in this regard.

Thus the problem for casual gamers in the 55-60 range is that there are no places you can access. We don't want stuff you can get in MC, that's not very fair or reasonable. But at least give us something we can do. The magic for us was that you always had small managable pices of things that you could do in spurts to achieve something. They did a great job of that from 1-55 but then it seemed to get lost in this huge high-level content stuff for the hard core people.

[Jetherik]

Im a fairly casual gamer. I loved WoW but now I'm a bit jaded by it. I think once you hit like 55 there really isnt a place for someone like me who can maybe spend 3-4 hours a night.

I'm not saying there shouldn't be places like MC and big 15-20-40 group raid dungeons. But at the same time, they need to introduce smaller stuff as well. Aside from Dire Maul they really haven't released much content in this regard.


This is/was my biggest complaint about EQ. I don't mind that I will never go on a 40 member guild raid for 8 hours. What I mind is that there is nothing for me to do except a very narrow range of items. The Hard Core gamers will do the small missions as well as the big, so why not do both? I keep saying I will play WoW, but once I went cold turkey, I have a hard time finding the magic again with it. Knowing that the higher I get, the less I can do, just really stinks.

[biscuitbutt81]

Once your guild has mastered BWL and MC, you can complete everything in a very very short amount of time (My guild can beat MC in 3-4 hours and BWL in 4-5; we only raid 2 nights a week now).

Of course, learning all of that takes a good chunk of time. EHehehehe.

And downing a lot of these bosses for the first time can be so incredibly satisfying. When my guild finally killed Vael (took us way way too long, because we were having issues with our warriors), I was so elated and proud (it was probably my best gaming moment ever).

[Roc Ingersol]

Dude, 3-4 hours and 4-5 hours are not a very, very short amount of time.
3 hours is a moderate amount. particularly when you're talking about wow.
I'm mid-range, rank-wise -- rank 8? I think, which gives me access to 4 of the 6 blue armor items
Think you'll ever see the full blue set if you play 4-5 hours a week?
It's decent stuff if you get it. But pvp'ers put more time into getting it than raiders do. It's slightly more casual-friendly, which is why pvp always gets thrown up as 'something you can do if you don't like raiding'
but you'll keep putting in time and putting in time, and you'll be spinning your wheels.

But I disagree that they aren't comparable.
Given the time investment.
If you can get there, the epic pvp gear is pretty great. If you can get there.
If you can finish a blue set, it's not bad either. But it'll take more time to finish the blue pvp set than a blue pve set.

And i should sure as hell hope pvp blues are generally better for pvp.
that's no justification for it taking longer to get.

[Draft]

Given the time investment.
If you can get there, the epic pvp gear is pretty great. If you can get there.
If you can finish a blue set, it's not bad either. But it'll take more time to finish the blue pvp set than a blue pve set.

And i should sure as hell hope pvp blues are generally better for pvp.
that's no justification for it taking longer to get.It's better than "pretty great" man.

[Adewade]

So are MMOs one of the products that break the typical 80/20 business model (that 80% of your product goes to 20% of your customers)? Or is it just that, while that's accurate, the pricing system doesn't match?

[mister_slim]

I do believe that I love kittens!
Man, don't be so controversial. You might get hurt.

[biscuitbutt81]

I dunno, 3-4 and 4-5 hours doesn't seem too bad to me, but I'm still in college, so, I suppose, things are a bit different for me.