As part of my bachelor’s thesis, I need input from the WoW community. Often, the words ‘pro’ and ‘casual’ are used to evaluate performance, experience, or similar aspects. But what do these words mean to you? When do you classify someone as ‘pro’ or ‘casual’? And how do communities that identify as either casual or pro differ in their behavior?
I would appreciate it if some of you could fill out the survey. SURVEY LINK
PS. English is not my native language. If you notice any mistakes, please feel free to point them out.
This isn’t going to make me friends but its never stopped me before…
That looks pretty low effort for a thesis / topic of research. I might be having a failure of imagination but I can’t see a “so what” from those questions that makes a bit of difference. “In conclusion subjective concepts mean different things to different people!”
I know its not curing cancer of sorting world peace but do you imagine your prof will look at that and be thrilled?
I’m writing my bachelor thesis in the field of data analysis, and this is just the foundation on which everything else is built. Ultimately, it will focus on community analyses. In order to roughly determine which communities/streamers I will analyze, I need this “insignificant” data.
I’m working very closely with my professor on this topic, so no worries.
I think the definition is pretty clear, “pro” is the abbreviation of “professional”, if you don’t play WoW for a living and/or don’t compete in the highest levels of play (RWF, AWC, etc) then you’re a casul.
Being a casul doesn’t necessarily mean you suck though, and there’s many levels within that definition because 99% of the playerbase aren’t pros, from tmog collectors to heroic raiders everyone is in the same category.
In my experience of supporting undergraduates with their dissertations/theses, it’s rare for undergraduate students to have a genuinely salient research topic - actually identifying those often requires an in-depth awareness of what has and hasn’t been researched on a given sub-topic within your subject area that undergraduate students aren’t likely to have.
Most supervisors will be happy provided the topic has bearing to the subject matter of the degree, and represents a scope and question that is feasible to be researched by an undergraduate student.
It’s really an assessment of a student’s ability to carry out independent research and analysis, with the actual salience of the findings being of secondary importance.
Done the survey, although I think there is 2 terms that you might conflate with each other:
Pro comes from the LoL community mainly, and means professional player. It might be similar to how we use “hardcore” in wow, but in practice they are not the same. Pro is tied to monetary interest in the game, through a competitive event.
Hardcore is a player that has invested a great deal of time and energy into the game, in order to achieve a reward.
Not to dig on you, but the term pro was already applied to players like myself that played CS and Quake in the ESL anno 2000-2001 and earned money doing so, long before LoL or WoW were even ideas…but yes, Pro and Hardcore are definitely often conflated with each other
Though in some cases people that do something profesionally acan be astoundingly unqualified… When I witness that, I have to think back to the schoolyard banter of the early 80s, where some new kid was getting bullied and when he asked them if they were pros they said yes. And he said pro means “pregnant retarded Ostrich”…
Obviously it didn´t end well for him, but in retrospect it´s still kind of hilarious even @ 55 how accurately it sometimes applies
My impression is that the word “casual” is a very relative terminology. “Everyone” uses it from time to time to some extent, about other players or/and about themselves. It is also used as an insult, especially on the forums.
“Casual” is being used to describe anything from someone who is only logging on to do world quests and farm some mounts to someone who gets AOTC + a couple of mythic bosses every raid tier in combination with timing every keystone on +10 (previously +15)
Some uses this word based on the level of content cleared by a player. To me, this is right to some extent, but more importantly id say that level of commitment/ settled schedules plays just as big a role.
A “casual” to me is someone who is not commited to logging in according to some schedule where other players are depending on her or him.
other than that i couldnt care less if im a casual or not, or if others sees me as one.
Most players will be casual when compared to -someone- and non-casual compared to other someone.
