Guest post: who can be counted as a casual MMO gamer? (part 2)

Liam Harper concludes his exploration of casual players in MMOs. Check out part one here.

While the majority of the first part of this post seemingly been me defending Blizzard (I’m quite often a huge critic of theirs, if you follow me on Twitter you will know that), however there are some things that have really irritated me.

• Cross Realm Zones - The idea was a noble idea, but in reality it’s killed the enjoyment of low level zones for me. They feel too crowded, the competition for mobs too severe. I’ve felt myself bubbling up on quite a few occasions when I have to wait for a quest mob to spawn because it has just been killed by someone on another server. I feel like an old grandad running out of his front door and saying “GET OFF MY LAWN!”
  

• Items behind gated content that is behind gated content. - Whilst this doesn’t bother me, I do agree with people’s grievances about it. For example you have to do dailies with one faction to unlock another faction, to get access to the gear for that faction. You then need to make sure that you have the correct reputation AND valor points to get the item you require. They’ve hidden things behind too many gates and that needs looking at. I’m not against some gating, but having 3-4 levels to go through before finally get there feels a bit too much.
  

• Rep grinding too slow - This again is to do with dailies, but one of the things that put me off the whole daily grind is that you’d sometimes hand in a quest and get 138 reputation. 138?!? Was there really any point? There’s an argument going around that tabards should be reintroduced, and I agree with this. You should have to do dailies until you reach honored and then have the option to either equip a tabard and run heroic dungeons or carry doing the dailies. I don’t see a problem with this.

And finally

I saw a great tweet the other day from Velidra that said:
 
“Dear everyone. If you have already got 9x raid ready characters and are burning out, I'm not going to have much sympathy”

This is so true that I can’t even begin to describe. You’ll be surprised how many people post and say “I’ve got to level 90 in 3.5 hours, I reach exalted with everyone since the 15th of last month. I’M BORED”

Well to be honest. That is your fault. If you don’t pace yourself then you only have yourself to blame!

- Liam Harper

Follow Liam on Twitter @Guillin