Hard content strips away the emotion, except maybe annoyance.
I remember back in WoTLK i raided with an absolutely terrible guild. But we were terrible together. I was a turbo casual. Horrible at the game. Every single boss was a cause for celebration, screeching on the mic with happiness etc for us lucking through a boss. I’ve not felt that way about any modern content. Relief for timing a key maybe? To be free of the bad player holding me hostage lol? The content just isn’t the same, players are better and the landscape has changed.
Hard content just doesn’t allow this and neither do serious players. Casuals should stick to easy content and stop being entitled about it. Enjoy and celebrate the things they can do. That being said, i don’t think the current casual content is suitable.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’ve heard that in TBC the casuals were all only playing Karazhan, and the lower tier raids, while only the gigachads were doing Black Temple, so this separation was even more extreme than now originally. This enforces again I think that it has 100% to do with how we are able to approach this game extremely analytically and efficiently. Taking the tools to do this away from us could maybe help a lot.
My entire point in this whole convo is that you don’t get casuals by “casualizing”. The barriers to entry need to be low though.
Did you try this game?? It is the game that even open world in it is really hard, I played second expansion zone and was mindblown. In wow you can just one-shot everything.
We can nitpick lots of posts on wow forums… ah wait… they getting removed all the time
well gear was harder to get, you could absolutely raid an earlier tier and it be worthwhile. Now we are spoonfed gear. To pander to casuals. Mythic 0 gives epics. Once upon a time an epic was epic.
Unfortunately the modern audience has a 10 second attention span so blizzard has to give instant gratification.
The same reason this game is infested with people too lazy to get good at the game. The free loot has invited even worse players in to the game, so the gap between serious and casual is a vast chasm.
In classic you either put in the time or it’s tough luck. Enjoy your blue gear
This is not true though. Escape on Tarkov, Oblivion Remastered, Monster Hunter Wilds, Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, classic wow (!), and Online Chess is very popular in 2025, and they are all slow-paced. Even League of Legends is slow paced. One game takes 30 minutes. This narrative doesn’t exist outside the fantasies and dreams of business managers that wanna sell us lootboxes desperately.
Palworld came out last year, gigantic success, very slow. Minecraft is an all-time success. Breath of the wild is a slow adventure and extremely popular. No, I think this idea that we all want instant gratification is a myth and a narrative
all of these games give instant gratification moment by moment. You can get joy from tarkov from shooting someone, looting something cool. This can happen instantly. Same in oblivion with loot. same in all the rest tbh. The games are long but the gratification comes very quickly.
The loot in wow isn’t gratifying. Who cares if you get epic number 50. My bags are full of them. Until they restore the…prestige of gear this is how it will be. There’s nothing like working for a month to get an item you painstakingly farmed materials for etc. But modern gamers have goldfish attention span.
Not more than in classic wow or tbc for sure. Way less in the case of KCD 2 and Tarkov
No, it’s really all narrative. Book sales are also still high overall in general. People may watch tiktok, but that it decreases their attention span is a narrative. If it did for sure, it wouldn’t be legal.
Look, I’m 25 and I’m typing long essays and paragraphs in the wow Forum, where I’m focused for very long.
No I think it’s a wrong narrative that modern audiences need instant gratification to enjoy a videogame
Maybe Blizzard has this idea too, but I think Blizzard is wrong. Showering us with epics is not needed. I think humans don’t value things if they are in excess. If they shower us with epics, we won’t care about epics. If epics are rare, epics are way more valuable. Isn’t it common sense?
Im sorry but using classic era as a comparion is really a big mistake.
With classic release even the most casual guilds managed to clear up to naxx, even the guild where i played that was super casual in TBC We had 2 people with Atiesh (the warlock buff was a must have for caster in T4 and T5).
Classic era population is this low because people also want progression or something next to aim for (big example for me is doing WoD and Legion again).
I think the correct sample would be to study the datas from classic 2019 till the end of Wotlk classic and anniversary servers.
Cataclysm despite being on paper a Wotlk 2.0 it tanked hard, especially by the increase difficoulty from tier 10 to 11.
Plus the classic audience have this fetish of the “fresh start” where everyone is on the same level, is insane in their mind to play on a server that remained stalle for 4 years.
it will be Interesting to see how numbers will evolve when anniversary TBC comes, in this years of classic whe had SoM and SoD to satisfy the “Vanilla hunger” and from SoM player population proved that the classic audience is not interested in harder content.
Let’s not pretend that back in the day many killed heroic LK or yogg alone in the darkness.
Take off your rose tinted glasses, wotlk is overrated at best and Classic proved it.
Wow, you managed to hit spot on with me. I do not have the mental energy to spend on progressive raiding at this point in my life, because my RL grinds my brain out with all it’s requirements. At the same time I am very entertained by progressive raiding, so LFR or normal mode isn’t an option. It doesn’t offer a high enough difficulty, so I get no feel of the raids. I also have a toddler who didn’t learn to sleep through the evenings until this year, sonraiding or dungeons wasn’t possible for almost 3 years anyways. This toddler exist because of WoW though. I met her father in the Eternal Palace(correct name?) during BFA. A mage on my new raid team. None of us are currently raiding.
Mythic+ was fun too, but it caused both drama(who gets to go), and I always had issues that I coldn’t do any until after 20.30 because of my kids, so if people were already chaining them I would often had to wait it out or not get in that night. During early SL I just gave up, because I refuse to PuG(social anxiety). My life also changed a lot at that point.
Well, I guess ppl on my server back then must have been exceptionally skilled, because that’s what I did. Only fountain check to see whether ppl used the right sockets. Yeah, I said puggable up to the last two bosses - Sindra and LK were usually left alone, but else I always did it with 25 man. Might have been normal, not HC, I think my guild did hc; but still means what’s considered hc content today could easily be pugged due to easy mechanics, while one doesn’t even get invited anymore into a hc pug today if you can’t kill bosses in your sleep.
My point still stands. WotLK had way easier mechanics. God, and I miss the tournament - best raid ever; one boss after the other, no useless trash. Clearable in Naxx gear, btw. Could you clear a current raid today in gear from the content two patches ago? No. Those were the days.
It’s not just you, it’s pretty much everyone who doesn’t do it. The majority of people do not say “Ok, I am logging in WoW now, noone bother me for the next X hours even if someone died”. We have real life stuff that we have to tend to. And that’s why we can’t commit to “closing” 2 evenings every week for raiding. We can barely even find 20 minutes without any interruption for a M+ run, moreso as a parent with a toddler.
It’s not about not having our lives set up, it’s that we have set up our lives to give priority to real life over virtual life.