It’s all your fault! you casual player you!!!!

Well once again I find my self (well my play style at least) at the forefront of why World of Warcraft now sucks! Am I a hacker? Nope, Do I spend my days finding way to expolit game glitches to gain an advantage in PvP? Nope not me. So what is my great heinous crime that I am committing to destroy World of Warcraft as we know it? That’s right I am a “casual player” one of those people who does not play for hours on end (any more), who does not raid (I used to back in the dizzle of Molten Core) and who has the audacity (it seems) to pay the same subscription fee as every one else and expect to be treated better than nothing but a cash cow to fund Raid and pvp development!

For those that do not know a “Casual player” is someone who logins in to World of Warcraft, completes a few quests, does some dailies, maybe a dungeon or two or even dabbles in a little pvp before login out happy that they have spoke to a few friends, had some fun and earned a few more points/gold towards some goal they have set themselves. Does not sound like a very evil person does it? Well read the official forums sometimes and you’d would have thought the casual players have dedicated their lives to destroying the Hardcore players world!

Over the last few week there has been a few posts in different forums that have caught my eye which are pertinent to the subject at hand. One from the official forum once again consisted of thinly veiled bash at casua by raising the invalid point of “Welfare Epics”. The perception of welfare epics is that players get them for doing nothing (thus welfare) the fact that you have to complete heroic dungeons to eventually earn the points to buy these epics seems to skip them by. Prompting the OP to called heroics “nothing special” and “getting VP for doing “next to nothing”

Typical opinion of someone who has developed a sense of inflated ego after getting an epic of two from a raid! What made the post stand out was when asked “what threat are these people who earn these epics to you?” the reply “no threat I just think it’s annoying that these people get something for nothing” and “Epics should be for raiders only!”. Now I’ve played World of Warcraft since the start and back in those days when someone was wearing parts/all of the tier raid sets you noticed, even during The Burning Crusade you could see that people was wearing raid sets. These days with some many people playing so many things to do, capital cities so crowded NO ONE NOTICES!

I think that is the crux of the issue, these people want to be special, they want to stand out,  they want to sit on some flashy mount and have “noobs” stare and drool at them and that does not simply happen these days. I think this then sends them a little emo and the end result is a forum post asking Blizzard to deny epics to casuals.

The second post that caught my attention was on http://www.tankspot.com, under the comments section under the latest episode of Legendary they discussed Blizzard’s choice to put Valour Points back into Tier 11 raids after recently removing them. This lead to a tankspotter to comment and say the reason that Blizzard have done this is to “cater for the casual” WTF ? if your raiding you are competing for Tier 12 raid gear, VP will buy Tier 11 what’s the problem?. All these people have forgotten one very important thing, No reward, no reason to play! Blizzard learnt this lesson the hard way with PvP back during Original World of Warcraft. Blizzard made some changes to the pvp system the net result was that if you won a BG you got Honour if you lost you got nothing. The end result was that NO ONE went in to BG’s that their faction lost regularly. On my server WSG and AB was Horde dominated and AV was Alliance, so Horde only queued for WSG & AB and the Alliance only queued for AV queue times went up and no one did BG’s until Blizzard hot fixed it so that you at least got token honour for losing.

So in conclusion.

Gamers are an odd breed we all like to get upgrades and game currency for winning and we also want something for losing! You don’t get rewarded in a real life when you sports team loses but in general their is a long term goal in real life sport e.g. winning the league but in computer games you want the rewards quicker or we get bored and will move off to so something else. So if by rewarding casual players with “welfare epics” or reward VP from T11 raid they do it for a reason and that reason is to drip feed people rewards to keep them playing. If we don’t play, we don’t pay, if we don’t pay then there is less funds being put into the game, less funds mean less development or and increase in monthly subs. So I pretty sure that it’s better to give the casual something for playing than to drive them from the game just to keep a minority in game happy!