Naxxramas

[oldmandennis]

Presuming appropriately difficult (MC difficulty for MC rewards, BWL difficulty for BWL rewards, etc) content existed, where do you raiders think small group, pvp or mixed-style players should cap out at?
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If the difficulty and time commitment are the same, I have no problems with the rewards being the same.

If they ever actually implement a MC level 5 man instance... better make way for the whaaambulances. It took my group about 6 months to beat Rag, I think that is close to average for new groups (all new raiders). Assuming AQ40 goes down soon, it took about 3 months for even the hardest of hardcore people to defeat.

And time commitment - 8hr to clear, 30 or so runs to get all of your loot. Some resist fights sprinkled in that send you all over looking for gear.

But yeah, I hope they do this - probably for Medivah's tower.

It will be interesting to see what happens to the PvP weapons in particular. NXM will almost certainly have weapons that overshadow the rank 14 ones. Will they just let that state of affairs continue? Will they add new lvl 90 weapons? What happens to all of the ex rank 14 players then, do they have to climb the hill again? Or will people just wake up in the morning to find their HWL greatsword a much better item?

[Warlock]

Part of the problem is how to count the organisational challenge of getting 40 people pulling together. My own guild took about three months to clear MC once we became serious (there was some abortive effort before that with a rapidly changing player mix), mostly spent on the middle bosses - once we gelled as a group the last few bosses went down very quickly. I've heard of MC experienced guilds rerolling on a new server and clearing eight bosses on their first run (and then needing to grind faction to summon Domo).

As an individual player, I found most MC fights easier to execute than typical five-man play - whether tanking, healing, crowd control or DPS there simply wasn't ever the need to multitask that comes when the party has much more limited resources. Raid lead was a lot harder but due to the difficulties of managing such a large group not the complexity of the fights.

I feel that that management/organisational level is basically a one-time cost - once a guild is able to get forty people smoothly following orders, they're not likely to lose that ability and don't need to spend a lot of effort maintaining it. So my balance for 'MC grade 5-man instance' would involve a long and involved keying quest, then relatively straightforward fights inside (though still requiring more from each player than MC does, designed for players in better gear than Strath et al assume and with a lower margin for error).

[MongoJerry]

I think Blizzard, or at least key designers, simply thought everyone would want to move on to raiding, that everyone who finished with Scholo would go to MC as a matter of course. To me releasing five instances in a row for one playstyle without catering to any others seems shortsighted.
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I think that you're missing one piece, which is that the 20-man dungeons are really catered to a group that's halfway between the hardcore raiders and the purely casual player. Blizzard developer comments prior to the release of ZG suggested that they recognized the popularity of UBRS raids and recognized that there was room for dungeons in between UBRS and MC/BWL. Obviously, no, if you are a pure casual player who only logs on for a few hours a week, then ZG will be out of reach. However, if you play more than a few hours a week, it is reasonable that one could get in a semi-casual guild that meets a couple times a week to take on the 20-man dungeons.

I can tell you from the point of view a hardcore raider that ZG and AQ-20 are definitely not directed at me or my guildmates. Sure, some of us run them for a few scraps of loot that might be helpful for PvP or for some spellbooks, but otherwise, none of the loot or the difficulty of the bosses are really geared toward my guildmates.

On the other hand, for a couple of months, I rerolled on Twisting Nether, an RP server, with a few friends, and as our guild was building up there, we weren't big enough or organized enough to go to MC, yet. But, we could field 20-man raids a few times a week, so in our blue and green gear, we took on Zul'Gurub and the 20-man Silithus bosses to build up our gear. They were absolutely perfect for that level of gear and (lack of) organization.

So, yes, while there hasn't been a lot of content added for the purely casual player and while I agree that this is a structural problem in the game, it isn't fair to say that they've added four instances in a row to support one group of players. In truth, they've only added two instances, BWL and AQ40, to support hardcore raiders. ZG and AQ20 were introduced to help a group of people that had no content for them in the game at all -- people who wanted to play the game more than a few hours a week but couldn't play enough to get in hardcore raiding guilds. As far as Naxxramas goes, who knows what's going to be in it? We know that it will have more content for hardcore raiders, but there are indications that there will be some content for other players as well. We'll have to wait and see.

[Raelynn]

If the difficulty and time commitment are the same, I have no problems with the rewards being the same.
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I've suggested it before (I think earlier in this thread, or possibly in another) that there is a fairly simple way to help fix this problem.

Prior to the raid game, there is a fairly consistant balance between greens, blues, and purples of the same ilevel. When level 60 arrives, the greens and blues stop increasing in ilevel at all, while the epics continue to increase. This is what creates the imbalance in the end game.

The solution? Add in some way for casual players to get equivalent ilevel greens and blues. They won't be equal to the epics (though it's possible that an ilevel 80 green might be better than ilevel 60 epic), but the will keep the progression that was there up to level 60, which will help many problems. The casuals will have some way to advance (assuming that these are given accessibility to casuals) and the pvp gear gap will lessen for people that can't raid.

Unfortunately, this won't really happen until the expansion, and then it might not even be fixed then, as the greens and blues may stop at ilevel 75, like the current ones generally stop at ilevel 65. This would still leave an imbalance as the current top purples are already ilevel 80 or so. Hopefully Blizzard will figure something out to help this imbalance or else these problems will again happen at level 70, with no hope for casuals until the next expansion.

[Raelynn]

I think that you're missing one piece, which is that the 20-man dungeons are really catered to a group that's halfway between the hardcore raiders and the purely casual player.  Blizzard developer comments prior to the release of ZG suggested that they recognized the popularity of UBRS raids and recognized that there was room for dungeons in between UBRS and MC/BWL.  Obviously, no, if you are a pure casual player who only logs on for a few hours a week, then ZG will be out of reach.  However, if you play more than a few hours a week, it is reasonable that one could get in a semi-casual guild that meets a couple times a week to take on the 20-man dungeons.
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Though people seem to think 20-man dungeons were a step between raiders and casuals, they in fact were a step between the 5-10 man and 40-man. Blizzard even stated at one point when people were complaining about the difficulty of parts of ZG that it wasn't meant to be a stepping stone in terms of difficulty and time, but more for just organizing the number of people and coordinating and such.

They are there really for raiders that can't get the numbers, rather than the people that can't put in the time, or for the people that purely don't want to raid.

In my opinion, the only reason that 1.10 wasn't Naxx was that Blizzard actually listened to the people in the forums, went "Oh man they're right. We haven't put in progression for non-raiders since dire maul. They need something". It was an extreme lack of foresight. They plugged raid instances (whether they be 20 or 40 man) into the pipeline, and didn't realize that the other content would be lacking due to this.

[Warlock]

Mongo, please stop referring to non-raiding players as casual. Gaming is my major hobby; I'm serious enough that designers have had to revise games after strategies I developed became popular. I am not a casual gamer. However, despite averaging over forty hours a week of WoW at my peak I am not and will never again be a raider.

[MongoJerry]

Though people seem to think 20-man dungeons were a step between raiders and casuals, they in fact were a step between the 5-10 man and 40-man.  Blizzard even stated at one point when people were complaining about the difficulty of parts of ZG that it wasn't meant to be a stepping stone in terms of difficulty and time, but more for just organizing the number of people and coordinating and such.

They are there really for raiders that can't get the numbers, rather than the people that can't put in the time, or for the people that purely don't want to raid.

That doesn't jive with reality or the developer comments I have read. ZG is quite easy compared to 40-man content. The first four bosses are jokes. The tiger and panther bosses take some coordination, but once you get the hang of them, they're easy. The only difficult boss is Hexxer, which as an optional boss, was designed to be difficult and also drops higher quality items to compensate for that difficulty. Most of the loot in the instance are high quality blue items that are better than 5-10 man instance loot but not as good as MC loot. The epics that do on rare occations drop in the instance are about on par with MC loot. A couple of items were placed in there that were useful for PvP. Everything about the instance screams "stepping stone" to the bigger 40-man dungeons. And as I said, the developer comments I read prior to ZG coming out were that they were looking at how people were running 15-man UBRS runs and wanted to cater to that kind of a crowd.

Mongo, please stop referring to non-raiding players as casual. Gaming is my major hobby; I'm serious enough that designers have had to revise games after strategies I developed became popular. I am not a casual gamer. However, despite averaging over forty hours a week of WoW at my peak I am not and will never again be a raider.

Fine, touche. I don't understand the emotion behind your comment, but I'll respect it. I have already acknowledged multiple times that the game lacks single or small party level capped content, so I don't know what you're looking for from me. My contention for you, however, is that you are picturing the playerbase too simply by calling it "raider" and "non-raider." As I said, in my previous post whose arguments you didn't acknowledge, ZG and AQ20 were not designed directly for hardcore raiding guilds but more for a larger base of players who don't get the opportunity to participate in the 40-man content as much as a hardcore raider would. Lumping ZG and AQ20 with BWL and AQ40 and saying that Blizzard is throwing all their development at the same people doesn't acknowledge the fact that these two sets of instances are really directed at two different player bases.

[ZugzwangZeitgeist]

In my opinion, the only reason that 1.10 wasn't Naxx was that Blizzard actually listened to the people in the forums, went "Oh man they're right.  We haven't put in progression for non-raiders since dire maul.  They need something".  It was an extreme lack of foresight.  They plugged raid instances (whether they be 20 or 40 man) into the pipeline, and didn't realize that the other content would be lacking due to this.
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I don't agree with your premise - compared to raiding, "other content" was not lacking. It's only with the release of AQ only one patch ago that raiding became even remotely as well-supported as smaller instances. The alternative to releasing AQ would have been to give ZG-style guilds no where to move on to, and to give BWL-farming guilds a couple more months of doing nothing and being extremely bored.

I know far more people who had never 5-manned Scholomance or Stratholme as of 1.10 than people who had never done a raid instance. To add yet another five-person dungeon would have been silly, even assuming that Blizzard could find some magical way to innovate a completely new experience that wasn't done to death in the other 5 dungeons.

If the last 90% of patch content was geared towards raiding, that's only because the first 99% of game development was geared towards soloing and small groups.

[Artega]

Mongo, please stop referring to non-raiding players as casual. Gaming is my major hobby; I'm serious enough that designers have had to revise games after strategies I developed became popular. I am not a casual gamer. However, despite averaging over forty hours a week of WoW at my peak I am not and will never again be a raider.
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Likewise, except no one has adopted things I've developed as far as I'm aware :)

Just because we don't doesn't mean we don't have the time to do so. I have enough spare time to be able to attend maybe 80% of raids, but that doesn't mean I'm going to spend that spare time in them. I much prefer the feel of 5-mans (especially tanking them) to the 20-man and 40-man zergs; when someone dies in a 5-man, everyone feels it and everyone immediately notices. When someone dies in a zerg, they're rarely noticed until after the fact, unless they're an important class like a healer or tank, or are an important person, like the raid leader, main assist, puller, etc. It's nice to feel like a person and not a statistic.

[Dozer]

Likewise, except no one has adopted things I've developed as far as I'm aware :)

Just because we don't doesn't mean we don't have the time to do so.  I have enough spare time to be able to attend maybe 80% of raids, but that doesn't mean I'm going to spend that spare time in them.  I much prefer the feel of 5-mans (especially tanking them) to the 20-man and 40-man zergs; when someone dies in a 5-man, everyone feels it and everyone immediately notices.  When someone dies in a zerg, they're rarely noticed until after the fact, unless they're an important class like a healer or tank, or are an important person, like the raid leader, main assist, puller, etc.  It's nice to feel like a person and not a statistic.
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Coming from a Shaman, the undisputed third wheel in 90% of all raids, I definitely don't feel useless and/or like a statistic in a 40man situation. :P Unless of course it's boring on-farm content (MC coughcough).

[Warlock]

That doesn't jive with reality or the developer comments I have read.  ZG is quite easy compared to 40-man content.  The first four bosses are jokes.  The tiger and panther bosses take some coordination, but once you get the hang of them, they're easy.  The only difficult boss is Hexxer, which as an optional boss, was designed to be difficult and also drops higher quality items to compensate for that difficulty.  Most of the loot in the instance are high quality blue items that are better than 5-10 man instance loot but not as good as MC loot.  The epics that do on rare occations drop in the instance are about on par with MC loot.  A couple of items were placed in there that were useful for PvP.  Everything about the instance screams "stepping stone" to the bigger 40-man dungeons.  And as I said, the developer comments I read prior to ZG coming out were that they were looking at how people were running 15-man UBRS runs and wanted to cater to that kind of a crowd.

Mongo, please stop referring to non-raiding players as casual. Gaming is my major hobby; I'm serious enough that designers have had to revise games after strategies I developed became popular. I am not a casual gamer. However, despite averaging over forty hours a week of WoW at my peak I am not and will never again be a raider.

Fine, touche. I don't understand the emotion behind your comment, but I'll respect it. I have already acknowledged multiple times that the game lacks single or small party level capped content, so I don't know what you're looking for from me. My contention for you, however, is that you are picturing the playerbase too simply by calling it "raider" and "non-raider." As I said, in my previous post whose arguments you didn't acknowledge, ZG and AQ20 were not designed directly for hardcore raiding guilds but more for a larger base of players who don't get the opportunity to participate in the 40-man content as much as a hardcore raider would. Lumping ZG and AQ20 with BWL and AQ40 and saying that Blizzard is throwing all their development at the same people doesn't acknowledge the fact that these two sets of instances are really directed at two different player bases.
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I didn't respond to your ZG post because I'd basically have been repeating Raelynn - it's there for guilds with the interest but without the numbers to raid. Put another way, because the endgame designers enjoy raiding their first response to complaints about raiding being all there was to do at 60 was to make it easier to raid. After all, they want people to enjoy the content they've put so much time and effort into designing.

I ran ZG a fair bit - the fights are more interesting than MC - but it's on the whole harder than MC while providing inferior loot so it was only ever something we did on off days. I feel Bliz was a little disappointed with the community response as a whole to ZG - 40-man raiders blew through it but weren't hugely interested in the loot (except for a few pieces) and those running Scholo with ten PUG players found the gap in difficulty too big. I imagine ZG and AQ20 will grow in popularity somewhat now that the other instances are appropriately capped.

I do contend that the group that likes 20 man content shares more similarities with the group that likes 40 man content than it does with those that like five man content. Lumping the players=20 and players=40 groups together isn't perfect, but it's easier to write 'raider' and 'non-raider' than 'people that want highly scripted events for large groups that require each member of the group to focus on a single well defined task' and 'those that prefer limited resource fights with close friends that may require multitasking, handling multiple roles, switching responsibilities on the fly and compensating for missing abilities'. The boundary for me (where my compatriots stop being friends and start being resources) is at around six to eight people - the largest number I'd have around to my house at one time for FTF gaming. I can live with ten to twelve, the size of many real world sports teams.

Oh, and thankyou for respecting my PoV and I realise that you've acknowledged the issue exists (unlike, say, Zugzwang). If it helps I have at least as much trouble imagining why anyone would enjoy 40-man play as you do imagining why I dislike it.

[Monkey]

That doesn't jive with reality or the developer comments I have read.  ZG is quite easy compared to 40-man content.  The first four bosses are jokes.  The tiger and panther bosses take some coordination, but once you get the hang of them, they're easy. 
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Mongo's right if he's referring to BWL/AQ as "40-man content". MC is a big problem though, because it isn't a progression in difficulty from ZG or AQ20, but the rewards are a progression in quality. For example, Venoxis is similar in difficulty to Lucifron. Lucifron drops T1 boots and gloves and Venoxis drops blues--who do you want to fight?

WoW's a big game and there are a lot of factors involved here with a common central theme of Progression. The reason that anyone plays any RPG is to progress and develop their character(s). In an MMORPG, people also enjoy progressing and developing an overall group of friends.

Blizzard came to retail with this baseline:
0. Scholo, Strat, BRD (5-man, Tier 0)
0. BRS (10/15 man, Tier 0)
0. Molten Core/Onyxia (40-man, Tier 1 and Tier 2)

And their development pipeline has produced something like this:
1. Dire Maul (5-man, Tier 0+)
2. BWL (40-man, Tier 2)
3. Battlegrounds (Multiple, PvP rewards)
4. ZG (20-man, Tier 0+ and Tier 1), AB (1-20 man, PvP rewards)
5. Silithus (solo, 5-man, Tier 0)
6. AQ (20-man, 40-man, Tier 1+ and Tier 2+)
7. Tier 0.5 (5-man, Tier 0 and Tier 1)

The progression for solo players is barely there; mostly it consists of PvP and various rep grinds. The ilevel ranges from T0-T1.

The progression for 5-man groups has been almost flat in terms of content. That isn't to say that items aren't available, but that it's really been picking up scraps along the way and the ilevel has still remained fairly constant in a range from T0-T1.

The progression for groups larger than 5 has also had problems. For 10 months your option was to (re)run UBRS, to (re)cheese the 5-man instances, or force your group to grow to fit MC. No one makes 25 new friends overnight, so you end up needing a more 'corporate' infrastructure and organization. That's the basis for the shadow endgame, what could be called the 'middle management' endgame. Now that there's finally ZG and AQ, smaller groups can step up and get ilevel gear around T1+.

The progression for full raid groups has been fairly decent (although it has stalled and frustrated raiders in some cases. On my first server, the early MC guilds collapsed while waiting for BWL; their players got bored after 'finishing' WoW). The ilevel now ranges from T1-T2+

As you look across those four groups, consider the average incremental delay in expanding content. If Field Duty represents the first improvement to solo content, that means solo players had to wait a year to step up. Similar delays for 5-man, about half that for small raids, and half again for raiders. In short, it's not the amount of content that I think bothers people (there are equal numbers of 5-man and 40-man endgame instances), it's the time between progressive steps in that content.

[lfd]

MC is a big problem though, because it isn't a progression in difficulty from ZG or AQ20, but the rewards are a progression in quality. For example, Venoxis is similar in difficulty to Lucifron.

I wonder how much of this is with the benefit of hindsight. MC may seem easy now, but back when it was new, people were wiping easily to the first pull of the instance, something that is much less likely to happen in ZG.

If I remember rightly, Maraudon was added after retail; there have also been other areas fleshed out with successive patches (Revantusk village in the hinterlands; Thorium Point in the searing gorge; and a few quests added here and there such as at Steamwheedle Port). This fleshing out of zones is good, but it adds content that should've been there all along. I would really like to see more high-level quests so there is _something_ to do besides grind (instances or mobs) or raid once you hit 60.

In short, it's not the amount of content that I think bothers people (there are equal numbers of 5-man and 40-man endgame instances), it's the time between progressive steps in that content.
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Absolutely. Unfortunately, Blizzard already don't seem to have the time to test what content they are releasing - or they don't have the time to listen to numerous bug reports. The EU test realms may as well not exist for all the attention that is paid to them. Trying to turn content patches out even quicker is just going to lead to even more buggy content.

[oldmandennis]

This is an argument that makes sense now. I'll /sign.

However

MC is a big problem though, because it isn't a progression in difficulty from ZG or AQ20, but the rewards are a progression in quality. For example, Venoxis is similar in difficulty to Lucifron. Lucifron drops T1 boots and gloves and Venoxis drops blues--who do you want to fight?

I think the difficulty is actually in organizing 40 people, getting them all to pay attention, and devising a loot system that will keep them in guild. While technically not in-game skills, it's an important prerequisite to better raids.

[Mavfin]

This is an argument that makes sense now.  I'll /sign.

However
I think the difficulty is actually in organizing 40 people, getting them all to pay attention, and devising a loot system that will keep them in guild.  While technically not in-game skills, it's an important prerequisite to better raids.
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Yes, the cat-herding for 40-man raiding is a lot of work in and of itself.

[ZugzwangZeitgeist]

Coming from a Shaman, the undisputed third wheel in 90% of all raids, I definitely don't feel useless and/or like a statistic in a 40man situation.  :P  Unless of course it's boring on-farm content (MC coughcough).
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In my experience, if we're exploring new content and someone dies in a 20-man, I get worried. Certainly in 20-person Ahn'Qiraj having a player go down early in a boss-fight can be potentially disastrous. Most of the fights I've seen (Moam and Buru) basically require you to have a full roster of 20 people so that you can deal with them before they get out of control. Rajaxx as well is a fight where if people are dying in the early waves of the fight (or hell, if the NPC's are dying), things are going pretty badly.

Most of the difficult raid instances require everyone to be pretty aware of what's going on or they'll either: A) Get killed, or B) Get the raid killed. Usually a combination of both.

I'm actually a huge fan of the 20-person instances in general. They all are very well designed and a lot of fun - better than most of the 40's in my opinion. There's way more weird stuff to explore and do in Zul'Gurub than Blackwing Lair or Molten Core, and you can always get a really strong, competent group without having to stretch and recruit people just for the sake of filling out the raid. They also tend to make much better use of secondary skills like Sap, Polymorph, Entangling Root, Poisons and so on.

I would love it if Blizzard continues the trend of releasing a 20-man instance for every new 40-man, although if Naxxramas is one big instance and not divided into sub-sections, it looks like Naxxramas will be the first unfortunate exception.

[Raelynn]

I don't agree with your premise - compared to raiding, "other content" was not lacking. It's only with the release of AQ only one patch ago that raiding became even remotely as well-supported as smaller instances. The alternative to releasing AQ would have been to give ZG-style guilds no where to move on to, and to give BWL-farming guilds a couple more months of doing nothing and being extremely bored.

I know far more people who had never 5-manned Scholomance or Stratholme as of 1.10 than people who had never done a raid instance. To add yet another five-person dungeon would have been silly, even assuming that Blizzard could find some magical way to innovate a completely new experience that wasn't done to death in the other 5 dungeons.

If the last 90% of patch content was geared towards raiding, that's only because the first 99% of game development was geared towards soloing and small groups.
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The problem to me is not "how much" it's "how long". The raiding wasn't in the game from the start because, of course, the 1-59 game was focused on, and at that level they added the 5-man dungeons. I don't have a problem that raid instances are released, I have a problem that there were going to be 3 raid instances released (in addition to the 6 world raid bosses) coming in between any significant 5-man end-game content. In addition, the solo/5-man stuff they add seems like a bandaid; a half-thought out premise to try and satisfy that group and lower complaints. (Nothing like seeing them say "We realize that we haven't done much for 5-man groups, so we're delaying Naxx and putting in dungeon 2 set). I wouldn't have had quite as much of a problem with the dungeon 2 quests even if they had some variance across classes, but everything's the exact same.

All in all, when you get to a year between major updates for a certain playerbase, people tend to get upset.

[Monkey]

This is an argument that makes sense now.  I'll /sign.

However
I think the difficulty is actually in organizing 40 people, getting them all to pay attention, and devising a loot system that will keep them in guild.  While technically not in-game skills, it's an important prerequisite to better raids.
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Yeah, that's what I call the 'shadow endgame' or 'middle management' endgame in my post. Middle Management because goals and direction are dictated by Blizzard, Guild Masters just get to implement them. I think you might be able to organically grow an organization to run MC where that stuff isn't as important, but there were really no incremental steps for a long time. It was 'Raid or Die' for guilds.

[Skandranon]

Part of the problem, I think, is that Blizzard isn't just trying to serve two sides. There are at least six categories of player, and it's impossible to please them all.

1) True Casuals. For these people, a game's just a game. They don't really have a drive to achieve in the game - they just want something to waste a few hours on for fun. They log on every now and then and play a little and they're fine with it. When they reach 60, they either roll an alt or quit. True casuals don't care that other people have super epic lootz, and they don't care about seeing every last bit of content.

Most people don't hear from true casuals, because they're way too casual to log on to a forum and talk about a game. Blizzard doesn't devote a lot of content to them, either, since nothing is likely to materially change when they choose to quit the game; they'll leave when they're tired of playing. In my experience, there are some, but relatively few, true casuals in WoW.

2) Hardcore Raiders. These are people who are serious about playing and serious about achieving. They can and will do whatever's needed to get the best, beat the best, and be the best. The most driven of them relentlessly push through whatever timesink is added in order to score server firsts and contend for world firsts. It's not even a question for these people whether they'll get to content - they're throwing themselves into its teeth from the get-go, no matter what it is: 5-man, 20-man, 40-man.

People hear from hardcore raiders a lot. Just like with other kinds of hardcore players, hardcore raiders don't just play the game, they talk about it. On forums, they discuss, run complex mathematical analyses, and dissect every working of the game. Blizzard designs 40-man instances for this group: past MC, 40 mans are complex encounters requiring complex strategy and good execution. Hardcore raiders eat it up: they love the feeling of achievement and the rewards of achieving. And this is exactly what they want: extremely challenging and extremely rewarding 40-man content. BWL and AQ40 are directed at this group. There are more hardcore raiders in WoW than most think, but they still represent a small minority of the playing population.

3) Hardcore Non-Raiders. These are people who are just as serious about the game as hardcore raiders - perhaps even more so. What differentiates them is that for their own individual reasons, these players don't want to raid. Sometimes after actually raiding, people who think they're non-raiders find out it's not so bad after all, but for the most part, these are people for whom the entire dynamic of raiding just doesn't work. Hardcore non-raiders are the people most apt to talk lovingly of 5-man groups and decry the "zerg"-ness of raiding.

Non-raiders they might be, but they are also hardcore players, and so they are often seen on forums as well. In fact, the most acrimonious forum arguments are between hardcore raiders and non-raiders, if only because they're both very serious about the game and both totally incapable of really understanding the other's position; raiders just don't get why people can't raid, and non-raiders can't see how anyone could possibly bring themselves to do it. Hardcore non-raiders want more 5-man dungeons, what they consider to be the apex of group play. Dire Maul was a release for hardcore non-raiders: to a certain point, the Dungeon 2 set content is, as well. Hardcore non-raiders are emphatically not interested in anything that takes more than ten people. Like hardcore raiders, there are relatively few of these players.

4) Hardcore Limited - Time. These players are hardcore. Or would be, at any rate: they want to do great things and at least have something like the achievement drive of raiders. Their problem is that they rarely have more than an hour straight to sit at a computer. If they had the time, they'd raid. Or 20-man. Or 5-man. They'd do more than they are doing, but they just can't.

You don't hear a lot from these guys on the forums (they don't have much time for those, either). In general, they just want something they can work at in bits and pieces in the short snatches of time they have. Even five-man instances often consume more time than these people have available; they want something you can work on for an hour here, an hour there, which ends up in something worth achieving. The Cenarion Circle Field Duty quests are aimed squarely at this group - a lot of tedious questing, but you can slowly grind progress toward it without having to sit for three hours in one session. These players prefer solo content because of the time it takes to make groups, but don't necessarily mind grouping as long as it's quick. This kind of player is just not interested in additional group/instanced content at all - what they want is soloability and minimal demands on time and all the characteristics that were part of leveling up to 60. A lot of players fall into this category.

5) Hardcore Limited - Numbers. These players are also hardcore. Their problem isn't time, or that they don't want to raid. Their problem is that they can't hit that magic 40-man number and for any number of reasons, aren't going to take steps to get there. It might be a group of RL friends, for example, who aren't going to expand their group by recruiting people over the Internet who they don't know. They want to raid, but no way, no how are they getting to 40 people.

These people talk a lot, too, and are often confused with hardcore non-raiders because they, likewise, could not care less about 40-mans. However, numbers-limited hardcore players quite happily go to ZG and AQ20. To them, this is "accessible" raid content; 20 people tends to be just about right for these kinds of players. These are the people Blizzard has aimed 20-man instances at: sure, hardcore raiders run them too, but that's because hardcore raiders do *everything*. The point of ZG and AQ20 is to assist these groups of number-limited hardcores into something more challenging and more rewarding, and for the most part it succeeds. These people are happy with more 5, 10, and 20 man instances. I would say a large chunk of the playing population falls into this category.

6) Hardcore PvPers. These players turn their noses up at any challenge that isn't another player, however easy or hard that might be. By definition they're hardcore. Their concerns are primarily around the broken honor system - which everyone has already concluded is a terrible thing that needs to go. The reason I'm mentioning them, however, is because despite the fact that PvP is their game, PvE affects them, through better gear and spell ranks and so forth. These players thus have a vested interest in making sure new gear doesn't help that much in PvP. Any solution which may satisfy any of the above groups is going to annoy the PvPers.

Those are just the six I've seen. There are probably more: my point, however, is that it's never been just hardcore and casual.

[Warlock]

Good post. Preferred playstyle is unrelated to how seriously each player takes the game.