Elitists are destroying the game!

Community General Discussion
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Disclaimer: Read the full post before you quote stuff out of context. Also, this post does NOT serve as bait to alienate or offend!

  1. “Casuals” vs. “Elitist”

First I wanted to start off, with what I feel is one of WoW biggest community problem. The “casuals” vs. “elitist” attitude, where players tend to jump on a bandwagon that represents either extreme in philosophies. With classical arguments such as deterministic vs. indeterministic rewards (vendors vs. titan-forging) or raid progression (one difficulty vs. lfr+3). I will go into this in more detail later on.

Elites per definition are “a select group that is superior in terms of ability or qualities to the rest of a group or society.”. So basically everybody who plays WoW in the top end, be it mythic raiding, high keys or glad+ arena. This logically means that these players represent the top end of what WoW has to offer in terms of skill, right? The “creme de la creme” if you will.

A casual on the other hand is “a person who does something irregularly”. By the nature of doing something irregular, you spend less time on it. In WoW, since “casuals” spend less time in-game they achieve less than people who play the game more regularly. I would argue that I am currently more on the casual side of things as I don’t really play more than 6h per week and didn’t play at all from the end of 8.0 to now.

The reason why I felt this distinction is important is that I hear the word elitist thrown around all the time in the forum. However, the word itself really has lost its meaning. It went from “top players”, to “YoU hAvE a DiFfeReNt OpInIoN tHaN mE”. Similar to how the word “casual” is misused to describe bad players.

In my opinion, the existence and coexistence of both of these types of players are pivotal to any large MMO. Although I would say that the labeling of elitist/hardcore and casuals is kind of pointless in itself, since it is quite oversimplistic and generalizing, but that is not the point I am making. Players need to realize that there is nothing achieved by exclusion, as in the end, without casuals there can be no elitists and without elitists, there will be no challenge the audience for truly challenging content is too little. So, why does this matter?

  1. “Elitist are destroying the game”

I often feel like many casuals fear that elitists will come and destroy their game, although WoW is in the most casual unfriendly state it’s ever been. Do you really believe that all the players that leave or pause WoW are hardcore? No, they are not. How do I know this? Because by definition, elitists only make up a small percentage of the player base. You can only be elite in something by beating the average and thus excluding yourself. WoW is casually unfriendly, the difficulty curve is completely out of whack, gear is inflated and absolutely meaningless, rng mechanics reward luck and not dedication. As a casual player, I want my time to be valued, with meaningful rewards that I can work towards, rather than instant gratification. The fact that some world quests reward better gear than lfr is concerning as raids of any form should be content that you need to work towards to earn exclusive and desirable rewards. In a perfect world accessing the raid itself should be a reward, rather than just another way to obtain better rewards.

Also when these so-called “elitists” argue that titan-forging and even lfr should be removed, it does not come from a fear that more players could catch up to them in terms of gear, it comes from a deep concern with the current reward structure in WoW that favors instant gratification opposed to long-lasting fun. As the term “instant” suggests, it is nothing that lasts. There is a reason after all why so many casuals are just playing the game for a short time whenever there is new content and are then jumping off the ship. If the game would be in a healthy state than there would be always high engagement rather than just at patch days or new expansion release dates. This behavior of what I like to call it “patch hopping”, can be clearly seen when looking at google trends, which by no means serve as an absolute statistic, but it represents an overall interest in WoW content which should correlate roughly to player numbers. And honestly patch hopping is completely understandable, why would you stick to a game if you already feel like you have everything unlocked shortly after each patch?

I feel like there are a lot more things you could go into more detail, for example how there are too many raids and dungeon difficulties and RNG in generall, but this has to do. Either way, keep in mind this is my opinion, if you disagree that’s fine, but at least let me know why.

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That’s the only thing I don’t agree with “elitists” if we can call them like that. LFR rewards right now are fine, and it also allows people that can’t commit to raid a way to discover them. Because more than gear there is also lore, fun fights, collectibles and now, the main campaign requires you to do the raid. So it should stay if only for the people wanting to complete the story quests.
They could re-add Tier set for heroic/mythic to give “elitists” and even “normal” folks more incentive to raid at a higher level. And tier sets were fun :blush:

Overall I agree with you.

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elitism definition is “more addons than you”. That’s all.

LFr is way easier than it used to be, with mechanics really dumbed down and errors not punished well enough. As a permanent LFRer ( I refuse to use addons, ever), I know this. I would way more prefer organising things beforehand so that you wont wipe. This has what has lead to dpsers just tunnelling and thus not learning anything and plenty of afkers during fights. The job of LFR is to train you to do some things in the fight, so you can step onwards in raid standards. It doesn’t do that any more.
Ghuun fight, you don’t do pathways, you cant win. Storms fight, you don’t dps shield you don’t win. That’s it. In previous fights, there were wipes if you didn’t cope with this mechanic and that mechanic … it was harder.
Patch hopping isn’t a problem, you will always get transient fly-by-night players and you will always have dedicated no-lifer players.

The problem has always been addons doing everything for you rather than you paying attention, which leads to complacency and afkishness during raids. It also leads to blizzard designing raids with them downloaded as an assumption … which causes a widening of the gap between addon users and non addon users … or elitists and casuals, as you call it.

now, all reply and say “omg no its not addons, I only use them to change everything about the game and theyre all just cosmetic blah blah” but you know they aren’t and you couldn’t even imagine playing without em and you couldn’t effectively play the game without em because you have no skills at paying attention, reading a situation or in any way being good at the game.

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This really couldn’t be further from the truth, you can get ilvl of HEROIC RAID loot from World Quests, if that isn’t casual friendly I dunno what is.

M+ and raids are there for that.

I don’t care much about LFR but this has gotta go.

Raids : LFR, Normal, Heroic, Mythic.
Dungeons : Normal, Heroic, Mythic/+

I mean go ahead, try to do heroic or above raids and keep in your head when and what the machanics will be, trust me, players who try to do that won’t go far. Also addons don’t play the game for you, they help to inform you of things, like deadly boss mod, they’re not a bot program that takes control of your character

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I should emphasize the “even”, I just felt like it is something that many people bring up when talking about different philosophies. I actually don’t mind lfr too much. However, imo they should merge lfr and normal together to make progression more linear. Normal and lfr are too close together in terms of difficulty. And the difficulty rise after normal is just too steep. Normal is easy compared to hc and hc is a joke compared to mythic. In a perfect world lfr and normal should be merged and mythic made a little bit easier to make it more accessible for players who wish to participate in it. Idk if that made sense. At least that’s my opinion. But I get where you are coming from and that is fair enough.

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LFR and normal should remain as they are, there’s no reason to merge them, and mythic raids should stay as hard as they are currently, it’s not made for everyone, and shouldn’t be either.

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I actually agree with you, addons are often not accessible for new players and Blizzard should stop designing for players with addons in mind. But the statement that the only difference between top and bottom players are addons not true. The largest difference is mostly knowledge and muscle memory.

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Never have I read this much stupidity. But mythic made easier. Common shut the F up. About content you have no rights to speak about. Mythic is fine, first 8 are all sub 100 pull to sub 40 pull bosses. With jaina being the only 3-600 wipe wall.

Nerf mythic and everyone in a decentish top 400guild insta quits the game.

Mythic is for ppl that wants real hard content. Seeing as hc and nm is DOA doable in m0 gear.

If you arent new to the game. You dont do nm or lfr. Litterally any m guild. Does nm ONCE and then never again. Its fine as it is.

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Thing is, addons just make things easier. And I just didn’t met any mythic raider capable of playing with default UI. That is why they are required.

People think they are good, they are not, that’s why we have weakauras/dbm.

Also default UI is literally garbage. It actually offends my aesthetic feelings, any user interface designer would be offended by it.
Tons of useless information thrown at you everywhere.

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Never seen somebody get so triggered about 6 words. This is great. :slight_smile:

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though the word elite, do meen one of the best or the best in something, be it a game, a sport or what ever, in wow the word Elitist is not use for this, and the reasons for this is.

in wow the word Elitist, is used for people who.

Also a game can survive whitout elitists in it, becuse most true hardcore players are not that at all, Bullying in a game needs to be fround up on, becuse there is no need for it at all, none becomes a better player, becuse someone else tells this person he sucks.

  1. bash others for their gear.
  2. bash anyone who do not do the same dps as them, regardless of what content they are in, heck some even bash people in a heroic dungeon becuse according to them all should do same dps as them, whiout thinking of what item level the other one is.
  3. Elitist also can at some times also ask for horribly stopid item levels, scores for the simpliest thing, and due to this becoming an elitisit player, heck asking for Rio for a M+6 is eigher stopid or the person is elitist.

so to sum it up, in wow an Elitist person is a Bully no matter what others say.

Offcourse the word is miss used in wow, no question about it.

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Highly geared people don’t do the low-requirements content very casuals attempt. So yeah, there’s borderline zero interaction between said “camps”.

In a raid pug, however, if you’re underperforming by a long shot you’re basically burdening other players. So you’ll get replaced in a heartbeat, and that’s called fairness, not elitism

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Asking for the experience is not elitism.

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Came in expecting another trash thread to find out it’s actually pretty logical and an interesting read, thanks a lot OP.

The problem with the current " Casual scene " imo is that you get so many powerups and then are suddenly hit with a wall where you can do nothing about it.

Casual players get to play the game and enjoy it, however they get strong very fast, and naturally as you get stronger you wanna move to the next level and that’s where the " Elitist vs Casuals " problem happens.

Because casuals got their power levels inflated with gear, gear that invalidates a good chunk of content they naturally won’t bother with said content.

By the invalidated content I mostly mean LFR, Normal, and any M+ below +10.

You can be playing happily for a period of 2-5 weeks, gaining power and enjoying the world only to find your self at 390-405 ilvl or so and want to progress.

The obvious next step is to go to lfr or start trying their hands at M+, when they do they find that the content is insanely trivial and has no rewards at all!

Moving from LFR to normal, in normal group’s you’ll find groups that vastly overgear the content and want to ZERG through it, the players joining will probably not get any kind of benefit from these groups as they are filled with massively overgeared players to the point where you can almost afk your way through the whole thing, players won’t need to do actual tactics as bosses just die to fast and a lot of the tactics are brute forced through, that’s why we get complaints about bosses like mekkatorque because they are technical bosses also known as pug killers.

Players will notice that normal raids reward no gear as they already have better gear and will logically want to move to the next step, heroic.

Herioc raids are vastly harder than normal ones, there is brute forcing but you still need to know your way through here, and since there was no incentive to learn before as you either overgeared things or just skipped them players are hit with a wall erected by other players with is the AoTC achievement.

Casual players can’t learn because they can’t join, and they can’t progress because they aren’t let in, players erected this wall because they can’t be bothered with players who don’t know what to do, and the obvious solution of make your own raid isn’t really obvious because like I said, they are casual players that probably know nothing about raid leading and making a raid will probably have people leave.

This creates frustration and causes said casuals to just stop playing, complain about elitists or just go back to their usual activities of world quests and doing world solo content.

The same goes for M+, everything is easy and can be brute forced up until +10, which then players have erected a wall of R.io because they can’t be bothered with others who don’t know what to do but like I said there is no incentive to do anything below +10 because players vastly overgear that, and because they haven’t learned how to do M+ properly they can’t join +10s and they can’t learn M+ properly because they can’t experience it at +10 leading to the old argument of :-

  1. Looking for a fresh employee to a job
  2. Must have experience
  3. How do you get an experience if you are not given a chance in the first place?
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what you written is nice in theory but its also completly wrong.

people who are applying to your mythic +10 and hc raids are not casuals you think.

average casual would be to afraid to apply to mythic 0 and normal raids i n fear of toxicity and elitest people.

those who apply , join and “suck” are no others but mythic raiders on their 10th alts on which they barely can play .

but hey since they progressed it on main they firmly belive they are god’s gift to humanity and should be taken anywhere

casuals are perfeckly happy where they are now -aka doing world content,mythic 0 , crafting , WF and lfr.

and about part of “casuals dont learn” - well thats because they dont want to learn - because unlike you they dont treat wow as 2nd job.

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We kind of should stop using subjective words like casual… I see myself as casual but I think people should be pretty happy when I would apply to their +10.

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not if they ask for sencible experience, but asking for things that is not relevant to the content, like curve for a normal raid, or 1000 rio score for a M+6 things like that can be considered elitist.

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It kind of depends on what you define as casual.

A casual can be like you said someone someone perfectly happy with World content mythic 0, crafting, WF and lfr.

But then just like you said

How would they know of said toxicity and elitism if they didn’t try to progress above and beyond what they are doing.

For me when I defined casuals I meant the cutoff between M+10 / AoTC players and non M+10/AoTC players in general.

I do however agree with Psjohly

I used casual to refer to a general term, but maybe it’s my fault as I can’t seem to think of another way to refer to said players.

Raiders get a lot of applications from players who don’t have AoTC, even on their mains and are usually met with the argument of how can I get get AoTC if you don’t let me in, that’s why I find your argument about mythic raiders on alts wrong.

Wow is far from a 2nd job to me, I don’t play that much unless it’s a holiday or im taking a break / day off, but when I do I spam a lot because I quite do enjoy the game, that doesn’t make it my 2nd job, it’s a hobby and a fun activity, you can like football and play football a lot but that doesn’t make it your second job.

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this is not realy true, you can be casual player and even clear mythic raids, if you so want to, heck I raid twice a week, sometimes i am not even online for a few days, and I have still cleared BoD heroic, (not on this char), so casual doesnt automaticly meen someone who do not want to do things.

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I agree lfr and normal should be merged. Normal raids are pretty pointless except for maybe week 1 of release because of the crazy bfa loot system. Enter via solo queue or in a private group.

You are right about addons but the default ui is awful. After all these years there’s very little change you can make to the look and the information is so hard to follow especially with the piles of passive buffs we have these days. I love being able to redo my ui when I get burnout, one of my favourite parts of the game.