Hardcore Casual

It seems Tobold was having a rough day Friday. Aside from missing the true point of my post, a few days later Tobold describes a similar situation, only from the ‘raid leech’ perspective rather than an officer’s. As seen here, it seems even his ‘casual’ guild would like to make progress in mini-Naxx, and a few people quit to find more likeminded gamers. (elitists of course, dirty dirty elitists) Not wanting the guild to implode, changes were made by the officers the guild, and people were asked to, you know… come prepared for a raid. How elitist indeed… Not wanting to feel left out of the club, Tobold alters his plans for the game, spends some grind tokens, and gears up just enough to not be excluded. Now if only those ‘raids’ were a bit more ‘accessible’, casual players like Tobold would be able to play how they want, and still see top content. Maybe the next expansion…

The irony of all this is rather thick. First, Tobold plays the one class most raid guilds will tolerate above all else, a priest. Had Tobold leveled his warrior or DK to 80, you can bet those raid spots would be tough to come by and even WotLK raiding would not be so ‘accessible’ to Tobold, but almost all guilds put up with priests. Supply/demand and all that, anyone who has ever raided knows the situation. Yet it seems even his priest was pushing the lowest levels of acceptible contribution, so something had to be done. Luckily WoW has plenty of welfare epics on hand, so rather than having to gear up by playing the game, Tobold was able to spend some of that ‘hard earned’ gold and buy some. How ‘accessible’, and as long as the guild does not ‘rush’ to 25 man Naxx, everything is peachy.

The next amusing bit is the quote from his guild.

A non-defense capped tank, a healer who goes oom after 2 minutes or a DPS who misses half of his attacks are totally useless in a raid and will only cause hard feelings to the team. Why is he/she even in raid ? Why doesn’t the raidleader ask him to leave ? Why isn’t he replaced yet?

Anyone care to guess what that quote looks like in officer chat, or what was going on in officer chat when the bluebie priest was OOM? Or how the members who quit felt about those who showed up for raids unprepared? Someone should put up a mock quote of officers chat…

What Tobold fails to realize from my previous post is that officers don’t hate the ‘serfs’ of a guild. If we did, we would quit and find another guild, happily being a ‘show up’ member and just roll along. The ‘joys’ of running a DKP mod and organizing raiding for everyone are greatly overstated. Officers do what they do because they want the guild to succeed, and in order to do that, you have to stick to the core of your guild. Regardless of how casual or hardcore your guild is, it has its core, and it has its outlying members. Some will want to raid 24/7; some will happily show up to farm whatever content you have finished. It’s the job of the guild leader and officers to make sure the guild is serving its core, and if that means letting some members go, either the ones who are too aggressive, or the ones who are too casual, that’s what you do. Fail to do that, and soon either the core changes, or the guild collapses overall.

The definition of casual is anyone who plays the same amount of time or less than you, and anyone who plays more is hardcore. Even at 40 hours a week, there will be those that are ‘hardcore’ and play 60, and the ‘casuals’ who play 20. Of course if you happen to play 10, that ‘casual’ playing 20 has no life and is way too hardcore. Likewise, accessible just means ‘you play enough to do it’. 5 man instances are wasted content for someone who plays 40 hours, but they are great and ‘accessible’ for someone who plays 10. Likewise, high-end raiding is ‘accessible’ for someone who plays 40, but is considered ‘elitist’ content for someone playing 20. Ultimately it comes down to the design of the game to determine how ‘accessible’ everything should be. If you found pre-WotLK raiding accessible, it’s very likely the current content is not, because of how trivial it is for you. Raiding is about challenging your guild, and without challenge raiding guilds soon find little meaning in the game. The challenge is the enjoyment, and without it, soon it becomes difficult to find reason to log in. If the content of pre-WotLK was too ‘elitist’ for you, WotLK might be just right, and you are now in that sweet spot of challenge/reward. If WotLK is still too demanding, you still view anyone raiding as being elitist, and probably wish Naxx had a 5 man version, so it can be more ‘accessible’ to you.

My current hate for WoW comes from that design change, among others. WoW pre-WotLK served a certain style of raider, and had been for years. With WotLK, that bar was lowered, and very quickly we learned that those participating at the previous level were SOL. One shotting raid bosses is not raiding after all. Those below that level are happy, they have more content, but those above just dropped $45 for the challenge equivalent of 5 mans, and that’s not what WoW was built on.

The constant pursuit of the ultra casual by Blizzard makes financial sense, as long as those ultra casuals remain interested, but it’s never a good idea to piss on your core user base in order to chase after greener pastures. Blizzard gained its reputation, the same reputation that catapulted WoW into the pop hit it is now, by catering to their core and remaining loyal, be it free Diablo 2 patches years after release, or continued mod support for Warcraft 3. At what point do you make your game so ‘accessible’ it no longer supports the core that made you who you are today? At what point do you become that successful indie band that went pop, only to see pop culture reject you after one hit single?

In somewhat of an odd coincidence, the day Tobold posts about mini-Naxx is also around the time the topic of raiding was brought up in our vent. We were discussing what made raiding fun for us back in vanilla WoW, and if we could ever go back to WoW raiding (quick answer, no, we are all set with candyland). This got me thinking about what raiding is, and at what point does an instanced dungeon become a raid?

I never considered Upper Black Rock Spire a raid. It was a 15 man instance, but back then a 15 man was small compared to a 40 man raid, and UBRS was rather short compared to MC or BWL. But if you released UBRS today, it would very likely be considered ultra hardcore content.

For one, it requires a key to enter, one that back in the day meant you had to run LBRS multiple times and get a bit lucky with gem drops. You also had to have one member of the guild build the key, and then that member would need to open UBRS for the rest. The instance itself starts off easy, but the final encounter is far tougher than anything before it. It’s also a gear check fight, as no amount of skill can overcome the initial burst of damage from the encounter, or certain unstoppable attacks.

The reason I never considered UBRS a raid was because you either beat it or failed, but you never really ‘worked’ at it. The place was simple enough that success or failure came down to classes, gear, and basic game knowhow. You never switched classes for certain bosses, changed up group makeup, or switched gear. In, out, repeat, that was UBRS for me.

In direct contrast, raiding was a constant challenge at the time. From getting the first two giants in MC down, to the first boss, to finally downing Rag, each night there was a goal, and future raids depended on our success that night. If we failed to clear up to point x, it meant less time working on whatever current encounter gave us trouble. Learning to speed clear trash was important, as a raid could only go for so long, and you only had 7 days before the whole place reset. When we finally had MC on farm, it was balancing that farming with learning BWL, and again once we had BWL on farm and we were working on AQ40 and later Nax. If you had a solid group logged in that night, you went and tackled tougher content. If the B team showed up, you knocked out ‘lesser’ content like MC or BWL to try to gear people up.

Raiding, and being a raid leader, went far beyond watching a youtube video of Curse and managing a DKP mod. If the guild failed to make sufficient progress, members would start to tire, log on less, and your guild goes down the spiral until you collapse. Getting a server first meant a lot of e-fame on that server, and the pool of potential recruits always increased. You had to keep the emo druids away from the razor, feed the lootwhore all-stars enough to keep them happy, pat the healers on the head to make them feel loved, and all the other random crap that you get in /tell. Officer chat was one long bitch list about how our members are a bunch of babies, and what we would do for just a few people who could focus for longer than 10 minutes. At the time, it was a lot of fun, in that odd “I hate you” kind of way. The constant challenge of making progress compared to the rest of the server is what fueled us.

I’m guessing very little of that happens now, with how much more ‘accessible’ raiding is in WotLK. When you down a boss the first night, with fresh 80s, I can’t help but wonder if that’s even considered a raid. That’s the kind of result you get from an instance, not a raid. In an instance you go in, learn the one or two tricks a boss has, and then beat him on the 2^nd or 3^rd attempt. In a raid, you reach the boss, learn his first phase or trick, and then spend a night or two learning to deal with it. Hopefully by the end of the week, you have each step down, have the people to follow the steps, enough gear to overcome the gear check, and down the boss. It’s far slower, but ultimately more rewarding. Effort/reward and all that, right?

The first clear of MC was a big deal, as was BWL, AQ40, and especially the original Nax. Everyone who raided back then knew about the Four Horsemen fight, knew which guilds were struggling on the fight, and waited to see who would finally overcome it. Aside from mini-Nax being beaten in 3 days, what significance does it have? Clearly it did not take very long, or have any true ‘weed-out’ encounters like Vael was in BWL, or the Twin Emps were in AQ40.

Which returns me to the original question, at which point does an instanced dungeon become a raid? It’s not the number of people, since now a 10 man in considered a raid, and the actual number varies from 10-25. It’s not difficulty, since mini-Nax is reportedly easier than some of the heroic 5 mans in WotLK. It’s not the epic gear the bosses drop, since WotLK ‘shattered’ that definition. So what is raiding now in WoW, or does the definition not even matter, as long as the content is ‘accessible’ to everyone with 1-2 hours a week?