What is the definition of a casual?

I feel like a casual masquerading as a raider..
but I play every day. I'm better than some bards, worse than others.. I play for Fun & Friends.

I have been in European high-end raid guilds as one of the most dedicated members on multiple occasions and I was very much one of the more "hardcore" raiders with 90% to 98% raid attendance during most of my tenures, and I have been a raid leader & guild leader in a couple of such guilds.

Pretty confident that I know what I am talking about when I say regular attendance makes or breaks guilds, whether that is raids or other events is materially irrelevant, regularly playing together is the glue that holds guilds together and without it they implode real fast. A lot of the problems with guilds are rooted in a lack of cohesion, loyalty is meaningless if you cannot provide your members with the "opportunities" they seek from their guild.

There is a lot more that Casuals & Hardcore have in common than they have in differences, but showing up regularly is a key differentiator.

I think I feel pretty close to Skuz. I would probably define it as "how much do you prioritize the time"

For me, I only play for raids, but there is very few things I prio over raid time. Even my mom asked "hey is it a raid day?" when she called.

Nailed it.

I call myself a casual because I'm not pushing myself to get my main every single stat or item to be the best possible toon. I prefer to help others than myself when I'm on but I can also be a loner as well. There are no less than 3 upgrades in my bags that are waiting for me to equip/click/finish something but I don't really care. I suppose you can call it an attitude thing. The time i'm on doesn't mean I'm doing anything. Maybe I'm just watching general chat, checking on guildies if they need anything or helping returning players.

You are really into EverQuest but fine with seeing other MMOs.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/casual

occurring without regularity
lacking a high degree of interest or devotion
done without serious intent or commitment

It's useful to define what a casual MMO gamer is. I have some additional questions:

Does Darkpaw acknowledge that casuals exist?

If the answer is affirmative, what percentage of content in expansions is created for casuals?

Is Darkpaw concerned that EQ TLP servers upon launch are not very casual friendly?

This sounds like a loaded question since a TLP at launch is pretty much casual city for one very basic reason - there are a load of players all at the same level to group with who are all very keen to group, actually in much higher numbers than live servers ever saw.

I am sure DPG knows casuals exist, but by judging from the last 5 or so xpacs they aren't focused on the casual players, but more for the serious grouping/raiding players. I hate to bring this up, but WoW, to me, is casual friendly because I don't need to have a group to do storyline content. I can solo my way through the storyline. Now, if I want to move to dungeons, I need a group, and certainly for raiding, but other than those two things, WoW is a soloable, casual game.

But, because of the hardcore raiders, it isn't. Now, before I have to don my flame resistance suit, let me explain. Your hardcore raiders want content that is challenging to them beyond the raids. They mention this in Beta. They want their missions to be a challenge. A lot of hardcore raiders feel like they are wasting their time if content isn't challenging to them beyond raiding. Every year for the past few years I post Absor's explanation that raids are targeted for raiders, and missions for groupers just to remind raiders that group content isn't necessarily tailored to raiders, that their challenge is the raids.

The other thing that makes EQ unfriendly to casual players is the amount of time quests need to take to complete, especially over the past 5 or so expansions. Pick up quest, run to x,y,z zones, kill mobs, pick up items, go hail this guy, then run to another zone to pick up something, run back to guy to talk, run back to original zone to finish up. It is tedious and time consuming. I know raiders that don't even complete group storyline content because it is a pain in the butt and time consuming unless they need to (RZ earring, Cloak of Celine Dion). If a raider won't do group content, what makes you think a "casual" will?

One of the things that "hard core" players will say is, "There is plenty of back content to do!" But once that back content is done, what next? Wait a few level increases to do what is now current content? Where does that leave the casual player? "Create a n00bie and do it all again!" Running through older content may be fun the first time around but gets old after about the second or third time through.

There should be storyline content that is soloable/moloable by casual players. The rewards should be lower, but they should be able to enjoy current content gameplay at their leisure.

Sadly this it the missing piece. Anytime the devs try to add it, though, there is a massive push back from players who think only the raiders or hardcore should be rewarded at all. Even if the content is a scaled down version with a scaled down reward, the raiders will complain they feel required to do it and the target audience for it will complain because they thing the reward they're being giving is not good enough.

Worse though, is then the 'easy' path suddenly veers into content that is of a much higher difficult t complete (i.e. content for casual solo/molo small groups veers into requiring raids).

I know there is an intent to encourage players to play in all sorts of content, but not all are able to either from schedules, capabilties, or even simple desire.

Another issue is who is able to participate in Beta to help with the tuning of the content. Raiders and other hard core players are more likely to be in beta because they have or can make the time to do so (more to have early access than to actually test). Many casual players would have to give up what little play time they have to go and do beta. Plus, actually beta TESTING takes more time/effort than simply playing though players, no matter how dedicated, actually don't do as rigorous testing as actual testers do.

I do software testing for a living in router products. As much as I want to help with Beta from a more casual PoV, after working a10 hour days in crunchy mode testing with a looming release deadline, what I least want to do is do more testing for free. I have done a couple betas when I was playing EQ2 and even worked hand and hand with a dev on tuning a feature after my comments had been noted (I file some comments similar to how I file bugs at work), but most of the time I want to switch off my brain to some extent and just play for fun.

Launch TLPs are the most casual friendly thing Darkpaw does.

That's a great point for the first 20 levels. The world seems alive because player share the same goals: level advancement. After level 20, EQ's poor classic itemization kicks in and melee classes are at an extreme disadvantage because they are so gear dependent unlike healers and casters.

Since EQ classic is the first thing a new TLP player encounters, I just do not understand why the devs haven't polished the hell out of it in 23 years. We've had a few EQ zones being redone over the years. Mostly hits and some misses (Freeport). Obviously, a MMORPG should be crafted to make the very best first impression on players. If you want to hook players, hook them as early as possible because you only have 15 minutes to impress a player and convince them to keep playing.

In the video game industry, it's a well known strategy to make the newbie levels last because by then the design team has fine honed their skills and is operating on all cycinders. Blizzard has admitted they spent the most amount of WoW dev time on all of the newbie areas. They were polished to perfection.

I suspect that the EQ dev team are primarily focused on cranking out new live expansions. The TLP player experience seems to be an after thought at best. In a perfect world, I would like to see a dedicated dev team for TLP servers and EQ live servers. Right now, it's all hands on deck as one dev revealed a few months ago.

They've tried to without upsetting the players who hate that kind of thing....

Look at all the whines about "Boohoo, you changed the wolves to the new models, change them baaaaaack" - many, but not all, EQ players are a bunch of backward-looking nostalgia freaks who want their game to stay the same, and that's before you get to the P99 rejects who spout off, they whine about a whole lot more than wolf models but the point is the same, they don't want changes and if you got them all into a single room they wouldn't be able to agree on what changes they like & hate anyway even if they were good for the game - and yet, plenty of these same folk cry for a "TLP Expansion".

Yeah that might work on new players, try doing that with players who have 20 years of knowledge of the game & you've got an audience that can be super-picky & downright hostile if your changes didn't involve them & their input at a pretty deep level, something notoriously difficult to do since consensus is so hard to reach with large groups and often results in factions - i.e. some portion loved change x, another hated it, another wanted a completely different thing. etc.

I can't comment on that since I have never been involved in making a game or developing one, let alone one that has been around for 22 years. But I am pretty sure classic was made between 1997 & 1999 and other expansions came afterwards, and after 22 years the entirety of Classic is arguably "newbie levels".

And then there is "Age of Conan" the first 20? levels were incredibly polished, and the rest of the game was rough - they blew most of the budget on the newbie levels & the first wave of players ripped through them in days then cried & whined how poor the game was after level 20 - consistency is a key factor, you can't only polish one area of the game, better to have medocre across all levels than a brilliant end or start game with the rest at below par - it breaks the immersion, it degrades the enjoyment and it makes the game feel like an amateur effort.

And arguably since the longer term players are going to be in high end content for the longest amount of time versus the lower level stuff, the focus should arguably "lean" towards the end levels for quality.

Simple reason, new expansions are one of, if not THE, biggest chunks of revenue generation for EverQuest, they focus on that because it keeps the lights on & people in jobs.

Revamping classic doesn't pay the bills.

Maybe if EQ grows big enough once again after the technical improvements it has been working on (64-bit, new ui engine, dx11 etc) perhaps then they could afford to have a team who focus on TLP, or at least, with the way the team works now, schedule more time for it when they have a bigger team.

Casual = anyone without a functioning box team.
Non casual = anyone with a functioning box team.
Please help me = anyone with a functioning box team, and backup characters incase they need a better group composition for something.

Erm, Really a "casual gamer" is a player who really isn't in to it. Maybe they make a lot of alts and run through the tutorial a lot. Maybe they are off playing on an <shall not be named> somewhere and try to pretend that they were playing the game the way "Brad intended".

An example of a real casual player was a cleric I once grouped with who kept casting pacify on mobs while we were fighting them because his interpretation of the spells description was that it made the creature not hit as hard because "less aggressive"

There's nothing wrong with playing casually.

There's nothing wrong with even admitting that you play casual

There is something very wrong with demanding that the game be made to cater to simple casual play because no one wants to go sit at Orc Hill endlessly killing the same mobs, watching the game, and telling each other knock knock jokes and arguing politics

I'm also pretty sure that guys who have automated crews of f2p character ran by <program not to be named> are a lot more casual than they'd like to admit