What Would Matt Do

Yeah, those chaps in those crazy raid guilds are organized, no question. But if you’re online for hours on hours and not organized, that doesn’t automatically make you a casual player. Heck, you might even a roleplayer *shudder*. Why do I bring this up?

Because one Azeroth Interrupted’s Robin Torres has weighed in on casual vs. hardcore players:

There is a big rivalry between the casual player and the raider. Raiders don’t want casuals in their guilds, raids and often groups because of their lack of experience. And casuals are contemptuous of the time raiders seem to spend in order to get as far as they’ve gone. The two biggest accusations made by casuals toward raiders:

1. You are in the minority
2. You don’t have a life

I don’t know if there is a big rivalry between hardcore and casual players…I don’t read WoW forums (because I value my sanity more than that). But assuming there is, and I wouldn’t be surprised…and what does that have to do with this article? Nothing.

See, Robin kinda misses the point. The players she describes in her article are all hardcore players… The players she describes as casual players, are hardcore lite at best. Why? Because they are raiding. If you’re raiding in WoW, or pretty much any MMO, you are in the minority AND you aren’t a casual player.

Now I have nothing wrong with Mrs. Torres wanting to stick up for the hardcore. Sure, they are a much maligned group and full of roses and sweet things. And they often don’t have the time to defend themselves, what with all of the time they spend playing the game… but this article misdefines casual and hardcore players and that bothers me.

I don’t think she does it on purpose. I think it’s just hard to see what a casual player is like when you’re not one yourself. Anyone who plays a game for 20 hours per week can’t really be described as casual. Sure, you may not be as organized as the big time raid guys and you probably don’t take it as seriously, but still, you’re spending 80 hours a month, 960 hours a year playing a game. That’s not the definition of a casual player.

None of this is a problem in my mind. Play the game how ever you want and so on. Have a great time. But, don’t throw me in as a 20 hour per week player when I define myself as a casual player. I have a whole mess of other things that cut into my gaming time and they leave me MAYBE 5-10 hours a week to play games. Maybe. And even when I did play WoW, was I spending every moment of that playing WoW? No. It’s just a different mindset and a different life with different time constraints.

But you know how many months I subscribed to and played WoW? Over a year at least. I loved being able to sit down with my wife and play the game for say an hour or two, depending upon the timing and life.

And that’s why I take contention with this statement:

The merits of the first argument aside (we outnumber you so we’re right nyah nyah), I would like to address why Blizzard ignores it. If it is true that only 10% of the players see the endgame content — and that is arguable since we probably still have a year before the expansion which is a lot of time for people to get there — then that is 900,000 people. Everquest at its peak had 550,000 active subscribers and that is the game that made everyone else want to make MMOs to get in on the money. To neglect 900,000 paying customers, no matter what the percentage, is just stupid. And what about all of the people who want to get to the endgame content eventually? Neglecting the high end content makes the game less exciting for everyone. This is why they are spending development time on things like Archimonde as well as more easily accessible content.

Lets just assume that 10% number is right, though I have no way to know that since Blizzard tells us nothing. But, assuming that’s right, lets take a look at it from there… so that’s 900k users that are using the end game content. Ok, lets checkout the last expansion… They released whole new lands for casual players, to go from 1 – 20 or so. New races, new classes (oh wait), and some new things like jewelcrafting. Ok, interesting. I bought the expansion, had a good time resubbing for a few months. But what did those players, the 10%, that have leveled characters beyond 59th and did raids and the like? They got 10 new levels, whole lands, a pile of new raids, flying mounts, etc. And the same stuff casual players got. That doesn’t sound like ignoring the hardcore at all. As a matter of fact, it sounds like they got the lions share to me. Well, how about the recently announced expansion? It’s all hardcore all the time. Adds ten more levels (which seems like a huge mistake to me), adds a class you can unlock after doing some 80th level quest, etc. Nice. For those other players…that make up 10% of the total population.

So, to make a long story short (too late!), this article doesn’t talk about casual players at all and defends players that spend way to much time defending themselves already AND that Blizzard already caters to. Interesting.

What Would Matt Do: To be fair to Robin, this article isn’t that big of a deal to me except defining casual the way she does. Fix that and we’re golden.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 14th, 2007 at 1:25 pm and is filed under Drivel, Gaming, Links, MMO, PC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.