Casual Gaming vs Non-Casual Gaming

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One of the great appeals of Guild Wars, I've found, is the lack of grind in order to play through the storyline missions.

But what about Luxon/Kurzick Reputation? Sunspear Points? Lightbringer Points? What about EoTN titles?

My position on these is simply that they are mandatory because they exist as a way to lengthen the game without making the map bigger. In a sense, these titles are just more quest trees to play through, and are quite different from the other more pointless titles like Drunkard, which are the TRUE grinds of the game.

But I digress. Casual Gaming. What is it? And especially in Guild Wars?

Well...to me, casual gaming is something I can pick up, play for a bit, then turn off and do something else. Casual gaming does not require a massive investment in time. If I can play the game for maybe...30-40 minutes, get it done, then do something else, then that's designed for casual play. These days im so busy with work and martial arts that I barely have time for all my games.

If you sit down and time it, theres few missions (if any) that exceed the 40 minute mark. If you play through the game without really skipping around, you will have money and materials to buy max level armor (no vanity armors though).

Max level weapons are easy to achieve, and runes are decently priced. Even in the days when Superior absorption was 100k and Monk superior runes were worth a mint (oh the days when a WHITE Chaos Axe was worth a couple hundred ^-^), I never felt pressured or impulsed to spend money on the super high end runes, because I beat the game even with junk equipment...the ultimate definition of casual play.

To me the "main" areas of the game, the storyline in particular is meant for casual play.

So....what about other areas and modes in the game? What areas of the game do not fall into "casual" category?

PVP - Anything beyond RA/TA and AB, I would consider beyond the realm of a casual player. Tombs, er....HA, GvG and such require a LOT of time preparing, since failure rate is very high (theres always going to be more losers than winners...). Setting up, tweaking builds, changing tactics, configuring your voice chat/mic, and dealing with the inevitable rage after losing (and replacing rage quitters, then rebuilding the team) takes a LOT of time and I feel is a turn off for casual players.

Now we come to the cusp.

PvE and Non-casual play. Some are pretty obvious.

DoA/UW/FoW/Urgoz/Deep - These are the "elite" areas. What makes these non-casual is not the levels of the enemies, or the difficulty, but rather the amount of time it takes to beat them. It takes a while. And you can't simply jump in and expect to beat it on your lunch break. You need some preparation, some knowledge and certainly TIME.

Hardmodes: Vanquishing/Missions - Hard mode introduced a second mode, more difficult mode to all areas of the game. While I feel that this isn't really too difficult, nonetheless, I don't see these modes as modes for casual gaming. The failure rates are higher and the time required is also higher.

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So what is my point? Well, I would like for you talk about this. What constitutes casual play for you? What is non-casual play for you?

If you can sit there and C-space for 30 minutes and beat it, thats pretty casual isn't it?

VS

Keeping your eyes open, paying attention to 10 things and watching the timing of your skills and player position so you don't wipe and waste 2 hours of gameplay.

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Now take that, and look towards the future. What kind of gaming do you want from GW2? How does current changes make you feel like Ursan? Or possibilities of 7 heroes? What changes to the game's design and dynamics do you agree/disagree with?

Casual is not mutually exclusive with challenging.

Something that requires 500 hours of gameplay is not casual (titles, looking at you).

A task that requires skill, and possibly thousands of tries, but only 3 minutes per try is casual.

Tetris is an example of that. Anyone can play it. And everyone has a chance of getting to highest level. Yet it's playable in exactly the same way by someone who has 10 minutes at a time, or by someone who plays non-stop for years.

Compare this to titles, which cannot, by very design, be obtained in less than 300 hours of play and nothing but play. Even if ran by bots, they cannot be completed faster.


Bioshock is the big winner of last year. Is it casual or hard-core FPS? It's very twitchy, very hard-core yet clear winner of casual market, and even commended for appealing story and immersive environment.

Casual gaming is when I can lounge around in my underwear and play.

I don't know about the rest of you, but I play for fun.

Yes GW is the place to be for casual gamers and still be successful. But they also need those long and grinding places ("elite areas") for those hardcore gamers whose dedicated to put their time to this game.

I think GW2 should have the same idea of for casual gamers yet reward those who goes even further.

Yes I do agree with your PvP opinion and that casual gamers will have trouble keeping up w/ them. But i cant give any feedback on this because I dont even go there.

I myself is a casual gamer who got my gold through power trading. and my koabd lv4 title through 6 months by doing the hm mish and stuff little by little. I still have vanq and explore to go but i know someday im gonna finish.
It just takes me longer because of my casual play (college, work and friends)

Now for the future...from what I heard they will have balanced some things so you can go solo or w/ a friend or w/ "companions" so I guess its gonna be a different system. I just hope it works

Weird, i know lotsa casual gamers (2-3h per day or weekend only) that got 6-7 chars, they finished all campaigns, got 10+ titles, lotsa nice weapons and 15k sets, and they never complain. They just have to wait for the weekend to go in FoW/UW/etc

Those SS/LB Titles dont require much Grind

SS: You can get Rank 8-9 just by playing the game, rank8 before evn completing normal
LB: Same here, you can handle even HM stuff with h/h with rank 5+
Rep titles: one book is easily done and rewards 30k points, you can max more than one of those in one weekend

You want Kurzick skills? 100000 points is enough to get em

Casual Gaming is when I can play, relax and not have bad luck 80% of the time.

Hang on....that probably means I'm not a Casual Gamer.

QFT

12345678

I've been playing 2d shooters lately actually, being Gradius IV for PS2 and Contra 4 for DS.

Its pretty casual, easy to play...but actually beating these games and getting anywhere requires some dedication @_@

Casual play is almost as subjective and personal as grind. In WoW I'm in what's mostly considered a "casual raiding guild," but a lot of people wouldn't call 2-3 nights a week with 3-4 hour playtimes pretty "casual."

It's mostly determined by the effort you have to put into it, and it varies between every player (a good example being what Lyra just posted above, I beat Contra easy ;P )

I dont think so Bryant. I think theres very deliberate design for the types of content to appeal to certain players.

I consider "getting anywhere" to beating the game and unlocking everything.

And the time it takes to beat it is certainly longer than my commute lets me (which throws it out of the casual gaming window), where as Puzzle Fighter, i can do without really worrying about time and turn it off whenever.

Did you unlock all bonus content in Contra 4? (ie: Super C)

Not everyone has the same definition of "fun". I like killing stuff, picking up their loot and buying shiny things with it, plus I love learning how to play new builds. It's my kinda fun.

Another's kinda fun is to do a few quests every night and know he'll have a couple more tomorrow night.

And the third person likes to log on, kill people and getting points for winning.

So the same way, casual and non-casual play is different from everyone. The people who do FoW and DoA on daily basis, whose accounts are worth over 1-2 million gold, think someone who logs on 2-3 hours every WEEK is casual...

... While the GvGer who spends all of his day training and doing some side HA or something probably sees the guy who does FoW and DoA as another casual player.

Well that's my 2g. So far. Edits are probably coming.

Something you enjoy, something challenging enough to keep you wanting more and something you can just drop and say "I'll play it later."

Hard Mode in Ninja Gaiden Sigma is exactly that for me. It's hard enough that I need to keep thinking and moving, but not hard enough that I die in one hit and wonder why I bother.

"Hard mode" is supposed to be challenging and take a chunk of time, but it's what I play when I want to "casually enjoy" Guild Wars. Things also become more casual as they become less difficult, and this is where we start to blur the definition of "casual player."

C4? Me and my friend got kind of bored of it, it was too easy. I was referring more to C3, which is where it's at, yo (next to Metal Slug of course (okay no nothing beats SSBB at this point, sorry homie!)).

Casual varies depending on how much time it takes you to do one specific thing and how much skill you have.

If you have a lot of skill, something harder might be casual to you, but require lots of effort from someone less experienced.

Likewise, if it takes you a long time to prepare for something, or you decide to take a long time to prepare for it anyway, that's not exactly casual. Casual would be more like doing something and seeing where you end up, and then trying it again with any info that you've gained.

I don't want to divert too much from what some of my OP intentions were.

As per Hard Mode, i dont consider that as casual play.

I would consider you a hardcore player who finds hardmode casual. ;p

I farm some hard monsters, with a very high failure rate, but doing so relaxes me and is very casual for me, even though its very difficult. I do not consider this as casual content at the very least.

ill play devil's advocate, as my OP intented, how do you think Ursan /possibility of 7 heroes changes these game dynamics that you have about casual/non-casual.

Well my Ryu Hayabusa IS pretty damn hardcore...

Why are people so obsessed with this idea of "casual gaming" lately?

http://www.entrepreneur.com/technolo...cle190914.html

"Whether played online, downloaded to a gaming console or phone, or purchased for a handheld game system, casual games like Bejeweled, Zuma and Luxor are making their mark on the gaming industry. With rainbow-bright and fast-paced puzzles, word and arcade games, these games are keeping folks busy during lunch breaks, while waiting in interminable lines and after the little ones have fallen asleep.

This $2.25 billion industry is growing 20 percent each year, according to the Casual Games Association (CGA) 2007 Market Report. Each month, more than 200 million people play casual games online. And while "serious" gamers tend to be young men, casual gamers are more evenly split: 48.3 percent are male, and 51.3 percent are female. In fact, according to Craig Holland, founder of game publisher Freeze Tag and marketing director with the CGA, "Women account for 74 percent of the paying casual game players," meaning ladies are the ones who pony up the bucks for downloads.

John Vechey, Brian Fete and Jason Kapalka started PopCap--maker of the ubiquitous Bejeweled--back in 2000 after the trio quit their dotcom jobs. "We knew from our prior work in the space that there was an ever-growing market of people with computers who were interested in games," Kapalka says. "They just couldn't find any besides Solitaire and Minesweeper that they enjoyed in the game marketplace at that time." Over the past year, the Seattle-based company doubled its employees and been highly profitable without ever taking outside funding.

Kapalka says PopCap makes games for people who don't like games and since the field is so new, many potential customers haven't found games they like. "They see some violent game for Xbox and think, 'That's not for me,'" he says. "[But] if we can get a self-professed non-gamer to sit down in front of Bejeweled or Zuma or Peggle for 10 minutes, we can convert half of them right there."

The simplicity of casual games is an attractive quality; there's no steep learning curve and players can use devices they're already familiar with, rather than having to adapt to a new controller.

Dave Walls, who started his game production company Funkitron in 2001, says the try-before-you-buy aspect is also crucial for growth in the industry. "It made it really easy for [non-gamers] to get involved--to see the games, to try out the games," says Walls, who creates games based on licensed board game brands like Scrabble, Blokus and Boggle, as well as poker and trivia games. "People can play the game for an hour, make sure it works, make sure they have fun. And that just makes it easier for them to buy another one.""

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casual gaming is srs bizness

Thats like asking why do people buy a weak piece of crap like the 360. The industry is stuck on pleasing the causal gamer right now....the sheep will follow.

I'm casual, because I say so. I post far more then I play.

On a busy GW week for me I might net 10-15 hours. You have some no lifers on here that play that much in a day/