Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitpoint
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To me, a casual is someone who doesn't have the time or motivation to be so heavily committed to a game. To most of the people on this server, "casual" seems to be anyone not in a top raiding guild. I think the use of the words casual and hardcore are ridiculous at this point.
"Casuals" do not want competition? No, players who do not want competition, do not want competition. We have a vast majority of "casuals" in tier 1 guilds. That is, players with families and lives and responsibilities. They choose to spend their EQ time tracking or raiding rather than leveling alts, farming, or doing whatever the people that YOU call "casuals" do.
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You see, to me, that's not a casual. And this comes down to why casual is a difficult term. A casual is a person, in my view, that wants an enjoyable raiding experience independent of the toxic nature that comes with cutthroat competition. I have played in hardcore guilds in a variety of different MMOs in my time, and I came away not enjoying it. It always felt like a job. I wasn't doing it to be a part of a community, or part of a group of tight-knit raiders, I was doing it because it was my job in the guild to pick up pixels.
That's not enough for me. I am a casual because I like a laid back atmosphere, one that is inclusive to more people. I love teaching new players, so much so I wrote a huge damn guide on necromancer soloing for the sole purpose of teaching new players how to necromancer while they level up, learning each new trick as they go. I don't like being in places where the minimum requirement to be in the guild is to be at the top tier of skill, at the top tier of gearing, and all that jank. I like seeing the journey people take from weak, to strong. Hardcore focuses more on getting the results of the kill, rather than the journey to it, and in that way, it encourages you to already be fully prepared to raid, already be fully prepped gear wise. That is why I have always aspired to find casual raiding guilds that can still produce results. They are out there, they do exist. But they are casual, but can produce semi-hardcore results.
I love to teach, I love to interact with people, and I love competition in a non-toxic way. Friendly competition is fine, but that doesn't happen when you have people that are ideologically polarized interacting in the same space, as shown by Haas (2007) in Ideological Origins. Casuals still can enjoy competition, we just see far too much negativity and conflict at the core of hardcore raiding. We want competition that is friendly, among friendly people. That's what raiding has been like for the last two weeks due to the agreement, and it has been, handily, the best couple of weeks I've ever had in EQ.
I feel I work damn hard, not only in my guild, but with a variety of people around the server. I have the goal of one day seeing my Necromancer epic, and not having to buy the parts from an upper tier guild. I want to be able to destroy CT with a group of friends, loot a Slime Blood, turn that shit in, and know that it was awarded to me for my hard work, and I'd like to do that without selling out my principles to an environment I find to be toxic. That would go against my principles, and against my fun. This is a game after all, and fun is kind of what it is about. I am not saying people who like hardcore competition are wrong, just that it isn't the type of atmosphere a person like me wants to play with in a game.
But that's just me. That's my brand of casual. There's many others out there in everyone's mind.