Wednesday, July 12, 2006

Casual Player's Complaints getting Louder

The World of Warcraft forums are full of complaints from players on the lack of new content that can be done without raiding. These threads are mostly ignored by the community managers and are filled with raiders vigorously defending their hard earned DKP. Recently the long standing complaints spilled over into the Weekly Warcraft column published by the Video Game Generation website. The article mainly focuses on the very poor implementation of the dungeon 2 armor set which was intended as content for casual gamers.

It pains me to even say "intended for casual gamers" since this quest line is obviously not for anyone who plays casually. The quest requires an insane amount of practice to get the Stratholm run down within 45 minutes. This sort of speed running and practice seem more like something a hardcore Everquest guild would enjoy. Also the cost is much higher then most casual players can afford. Tobold recently calculated the average cost of a tier 1 epic piece at about 100gp from running Molten Core. Estimates for completing the entire dungeon 2 armor set complete with repair bills are easily twice as high as their tier 1 counterpart.

With such higher costs in money and time on the dungeon 2 armor set its no wonder that it feels like a slap in the face. Yet for some reason requests for the timer being moved up have been ignored and most questions about new casual content are met with URLs to the burning crusade website. While some theorize that the 1.12 PvP overhaul will be exciting for casual players, it still isn't new content. It seems as if Blizzard will be saving that for the expansion and your open wallets.

Weekly WoW Article

Tobold's Response

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