Battlefield Intelligence: How Casual is Too Casual?

As Cam has already written about in his article Grinding: Caught in the Gears of the MMORPG, MMOs are not always friendly to casual gamers.  Most rewards in the game come as a result of significant time investment by the player.  This isn’t inherently a bad thing.  Players may gripe and complain from time to time about the time it takes to earn enough points to purchase various rewards, but they would be equally unhappy if every one could get them without any effort.  MMOs are nothing but an online penis waving contest at their most base level, so it is very important for players to be able to assert that, yes, their e-penis is in fact much, much larger than yours.  From a developer standpoint, the grind is great.  Since the majority of their revenue is generated by subscription fees, a reward that takes a 3 month grind will always be preferable to a reward that only requires a 1 month grind.

World of Warcraft has been the most casual-gamer friendly MMO around since its inception.  It’s easy to get into, it has gorgeous graphics, it has a compelling story; the greatest complaint you could have about it is that it turns casual gamers into non-casual gamers because they simply don’t want to stop playing it.  The top levels of WoW have always been reserved for the hardcore, however.  Raids require significant chunks of time multiple nights per week for most guilds, and for a long time this was the only way to get the best epic items.  Blizzard has tried to remedy this several times as they continue to try to make their game more friendly to casual gamers.  After the introduction of Arenas, epic items from previous seasons could be purchased using honor points earned in Battlegrounds, home of the dreaded “casual gamer.”  Raiders immediately raised their voices against these “welfare epics” for casual players.  In their eyes, players who logged on 2 nights a week to be terrible in Alterac Valley didn’t deserve to have items of equal value to the items being worn by the best raiders in the game.

To an extent, these players had a valid complaint.  But from the standpoint of the casual gamer, the growing gear imbalance made having fun in the limited ways a casual gamer can play WoW even more difficult.  Hardcore raiders like to PvP too, and no casual in quest blues is going to be able to compete with someone in a full tier set and the best weapons available.  Blizzard had to step in and give the casuals a crutch.  WoW became the most popular MMO in gaming history because so many casual gamers enjoyed it, and as much as the hardcore players hate to hear it, they are far less important to Blizzard than the casuals are.  As such, things that threaten the game experience of casual players have to be remedied, even if that steps on the toes of some of the hardcore players.

The release of patch 3.2 recently did even more to cater to the casual player.  First, the Argent Colisseum introduced a new 5-man dungeon that featured all 200 item level epics as rewards, equal to 10-man Naxxramas quality.  Unlike Naxxramas however, this instance has no lockout making it far easier to acquire the gear a player wants.  The heroic version of this dungeon features rewards with an item level of 219, the same quality as 10-man Ulduar, again with a significantly reduced lockout timer.  To make matters worse, all of the original WotLK heroic dungeons had their badge drops changed to Conquest Badges allowing the purchase of 25-man Ulduar quality items.  Griping from hardcore players reached all new heights.  In fact, the badge and changes were entirely necessary.  Trial of the Crusader is the third distinct tier of raid gear in the expansion, and any new players or rerolled alts would have an impossible time trying to get into raids to gear up just so they can have good enough gear to raid the newest content.  The badge change allows casual and new players to gear up in content that is appropriate to their current gear level.  And hardcore raiders shouldn’t be too upset because they will still be in gear that is one tier above what players can achieve without raiding.

The inclusion of “welfare epics” for casual players has been a good change in every instance, despite what some of the more hardcore players may want to believe.  However, with the announcement of the Cataclysm expansion, Blizzard has taken things too far towards the casual side of gaming.  I’ll provide a quote here from the official Cataclysm FAQ located at http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/cataclysm/faq/:

We are always looking for ways to improve how player stats work. Our long-term plan is to simplify statistics and provide a more clear understanding of their effects on healing and damage dealing. For example, Spell Power will no longer be its own statistic, and Intellect will provide its benefits instead. We also plan to make Spirit the definitive mana-regeneration statistic, in which case we would remove the mana-per-5-seconds stat from gear. Confusing stats like defense and armor penetration will likely go away. Of course, existing items will be updated to reflect these changes.

These changes should be separeted into two types of change.  Changing the way Intellect and Spirit affect players is a good change.  Intellect not being tied to Spell Power has been a thorn in the side of casters for fully 4 years and has caused them to scale poorly compared to melee classes in PvP especially.  The consolidation of Spirit and MP5 likewise is a good change because it allows gear to be itemized better for multiple classes, provided individual classes have their mechanics tweaked to make sure Spirit remains an important stat.  Now to the bad changes.  The removal of defense and armor penetration, along with any others that get the chop, is a terrible move on the part of blizzard.  Blizzard’s stated reason for the simplification of the stat system is that they want players to be able to look at a piece of gear and know for sure whether it is an upgrade or not.  This is a mistake for 2 reasons.

First, this goes against what Blizzard has said regarding itemization for the entire current expansion.  They have continually said that they want gear choices to be an individual decision and that players shouldn’t just take whatever piece drops in a higher level raid.  Most players accepted this logic and adapted to it.  Warriors in specific have elaborate spreadsheets to do calculations which show how changing certain stats affect a player’s theoretical dps, and I am sure that most classes had some way of doing the same.  When Ulduar was released it was apparent that many pieces of gear were sidegrades at best and that some were clearly better.  Those that were sidegrades we relied on our spreadsheets to model the dps difference for each piece and chose which was better.  This resulted in keeping some tier 7.5 gear over tier 8 or 8.5 pieces.  We were doing exactly what Blizzard wanted and most players were fine with this.

Second, defense and armor penetration are NOT confusing stats.  Even a player who is not familiar with class mechanic math or the gear spreadsheets can read the tooltip of the stat and see its benefit.  Any player who wants to tank can log on to the official World of Warcraft forums and read in their class forums that tanks need 540 defense to effectively tank a raid boss.  This information is not difficult to discover even for the most casual of players.  Armor Pen is a slightly different case because it is calculated in very convoluted ways.  But Armor Pen benefits can be boiled down to one single fact: armor pen always gets better as you get more of it.  If you have some Armor Pen, having more is better.  Players should be able to know whether they are getting benefit from Armor Pen or not.  If their class does a significant portion of their damage through magic or other non-physical means, they won’t get as much benefit from it.  If players aren’t aware of that, that isn’t a case of Armor Pen being a confusing stat it is a case of a player not understanding how their class works.

The simple fact is, even without understanding what the best possible upgrade is for their class, players can play effectively in the current itemization just by choosing the item with a higher level.  Their performance would likely not be good enough for the best guilds, but players in the best guilds would know how  to pick the best gear already.  Simply collecting a full set of tier gear and the highest dps weapons you can find (for melee) will provide acceptable dps for a raid.  The raids are already tuned to that level of difficulty because Blizzard specifically wanted to encourage participation by casual players.  This change to itemization is completely unnecessary.  The Intellect and Spirit changes are good, and other stats like Strength and Agility probably could stand to be refined as well.  The removal of secondary stats like Defense and Armor Pen however is unnecessary and bad for the game.  This is a case of Blizzard trying too hard to cater to casual players instead of encouraging those players to be more active in learning about the game.  Blizzard has made WoW friendly to casual gamers in many good ways, such as “welfare epics” and the current badge changes, but I just cannot say anything good about this planned change to gear itemization.

What do you guys think about the current and planned changes to make the game more casual-gamer friendly?  Is Blizzard going too far?  Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

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