Once upon a time in WoW, raiding was A Big Thing(tm). There was no LFR, nothing like Valor Points, and there were only two tiers of raid gear. To get the second tier, you had to upgrade your first tier items via a series of quests. And there was only one kind of raiding: 40-man. The raids were generally big, very difficult by today's standards, and even entering them required infrastructure. You had to run elaborate quests to "attune" to the raid instance, and you simply couldn't go in unless you had. Sometimes, you had to farm items that you used to trigger certain encounters, and you had to do that every week. Survival in some raids (notably Molten Core) required that you had gear crafted using items that only dropped in a different raid (Onyxia, in MC's case).
If this sounds like a deep level of commitment, and you weren't actually playing in Vanilla to witness it, well... Let's just say it was very unfriendly to people who hadn't jumped backwards through the flaming hoops that getting into a decent guild required back then. It was a requirement of hours and hours of time every week. But it was the only way to get that gear, and when you saw a rogue decked out in full Bloodfang gear, you knew that he knew what he was doing.
Raiding has changed, a lot, as has the rest of the game. Blizzard Entertainment decided quite awhile ago that it wasn't in their best interest to pour the tons of time and expertise into creating a knock-em-dead raid instance that was only going to be seen by a tiny fraction of the player population. It's been said that less than 3% of the playerbase actually saw the inside of Naxxramas when it was a 40-man. So Blizz began to change things, to permit more people to actually experience the content. More people than, say, belonged to monolithic guilds with members that treated the game with the intensity of Seal Team 6.
Those people had a name for those of us who were not among their number: casuals. We are the people who do not prioritize raiding as higher than virtually any other activity, who find things both in and out of the game that are just as compelling as killing a raid boss. We are the ones who do not want to spend more than 20 hours a week in the game, devoting most of that activity to preparing for the next run through the current tier. We are not professionals; we are casual about the whole thing.
Blizzard started making it possible to get top-level gear without raiding, and reached the zenith of that concept during Wrath of the Lich King, particular in Tier 9 gear, which is what immediately preceded the last raid of that expansion, Ice Crown Citadel. Back then, you could run heroic 5-mans to collect currency (badges or points) that you could use to buy gear that was just as good as the stuff dropping in the raids. I know firsthand: I was hardcore raiding on my shaman then, but I wanted to have "backup toons" in other classes that I could pull out at need, and I raid-geared a druid and a warrior using nothing but purchased gear. They were every bit as well-geared as the shaman. Complaints from the non-casuals about how Blizz was making it "easy for the casuals" had been knocking around since Burning Crusade, but in Wrath the volume of the howling exploded, and that phrase started to be delivered as an insult in a sneering tone. They decried the "dumbing down" of WoW and the claims that Blizzard was ruining the game filled page after page in the official forums. Blizzard stuck to their concept of maximizing access for players, but they have backed away from the T9 gearing model.
So that's the origin of the phrase. I chose it deliberately, because this blog is going to be about how to be a casual and have fun with it. How to milk it for all it's worth! I'm Casual, man, and proud.
No comments:
Post a Comment