I am postponing today’s normal RP post in order to focus on an excellent post that Leafshine, of Leafshine: Lust for Flower, posted this morning that serves as a reminder (for all of us) of who a large part of the player base for World of Warcraft is comprised. His post, located here, does an excellent job of pointing out a number of the things that we lose sight of if we do not fit into that same play style.

I believe the issue of difficulty in WoW to be rather misunderstood. Examples that people often cite regarding difficulty tend to talk about grinding reputation or materials for items, or the old forty-man raids, or the fact that epics were tougher to come by… the list goes on. The only valid argument I have truly heard is the same one I have referenced before, and that is the debate on needing some type of crowd control in order to clear an instance instead of mass AoE dps/threat generation/healing.

While I don’t quite agree with the thought that WoW is “just right” as it currently sits, I do think the overall point made in his post is sound. I fall into a different category of player than Leafy (I have five level eighty characters at the moment and play more often than a couple of nights a week), which means I’ll naturally have a different viewpoint on the game simply from my experiences. His post made me think more about how we all perceive things we read by others, and I want to compare my perception to his.

Average content level.

Most people seem to be running T7 content for emblems and T8 content for loot based on watching the LFG channel on my server and seeing the gear people are running around in. With the emblem system the way it currently sits, however, it is tough to tell at a glance if people are getting T9 from emblems by doing the daily heroic and occasional ToC, or if there is truly a significant portion of the player base actually running the T9 content regularly.

Recently our guild was staying “current” with regards to content, having killed all but Yogg-Saron before patch 3.2 hit and opened up the Trials raids. Suddenly we found ourselves without the ability to fill ten mans after getting to the Faction Champions encounter in ToC and hitting a wall for a few weeks, and since have been pretty much stagnant. My characters are still quite well-geared, however, and if I were still playing my Druid or Priest instead of playing my new Horde Paladin I could easily have a full set of Tier 9 without running the current content on at least one, if not both, of them.

On both of those characters, however, I chose to pursue the raid content over the rest of the game’s content, which is what a lot of people seem to forget exists. There is a game in WoW outside of raiding. There are a number of people I know who have no interest in raids and thoroughly enjoy the game’s other offerings just as there are people I know who only go through the “grind” of leveling in order to raid.

The “casual versus hardcore versus dedicated versus blah, blah, blah” debate.

I enjoy being able to log in and run something in an hour of playtime and feel like I have accomplished something. When I raid I expect people to be there to raid and commit themselves for the timeframe of the raid, be it an hour or three, that has been agreed upon. In some circles that makes me casual, in some it makes me hardcore, and in most there would be an agreement that I’m somewhere in between. While I feel like more of the player base fits into this segment, and this is most likely where my perception and Leafy’s perception would diverge most, this is the portion that generally feels as though things are either too easy or too hard.

The difficulties I face normally fall into these basic issues, which make me side with the camp that says WoW isn’t quite at the “just right” stage:

• I’ve always preferred to be in small, close guilds. Currently there are five of us active still out of a guild that once claimed seventeen actives that could run ten man raids easily. I have issues being able to run the content I want to run now.
• The content I can run is either too easy for the group I’m a part of or trying the hard mode would be too difficult (remember, I’m no longer able to run with the same group of people due to having lost a large number of our guild, which means that what I do get to run is mostly random PUGs nowadays).
• I have no real interest in the Trial of the Crusader/Coliseum. Ulduar was fun, and I’m pretty sure I can skip the Trials raids and simply gear up enough in heroics to be able to start in Icecrown when 3.3 hits, predominantly because the gear I have been able to get versus the chance of seeing gear that would be a significant enough upgrade to really try for is, well, nonexistent. I’m not a fan of twenty-five man raids (another post coming on that subject Monday), and the ten man loot isn’t worth me dealing with the frustrations of trying to raid with PUGs.

In short, remember that your play style is not necessarily the predominant play style.

Even among the blogging community there are huge divisions among the types of players out there, and we’re the ones who tend to be the most vocal about the game. What we write is often taken for granted as being the majority view if a larger percentage of those who write seem to agree. Sometimes we even go blind to the fact that there are millions of subscribers and we only see a tiny fraction of those players ourselves. My perception is that WoW is going strong, that a lot of good changes are coming soon, but that the group of players that I fall into are sort of stuck in between “too easy” content and “too hard” content. I do at least realize, though, that the group of players I fall into probably only makes up a small percentage of the total player base.