Why do casual players seem entitled to cosmetic items added in game?

[Ardeth]

Both 14 and Wow have the same exact problem of difficulty spikes that aren't ease'd into on the players' behalf and require a leap to get into. While at the same time cultivating a community on the other side of that canyon with people who don't want to waste their time. Understandably so. I 100% get it, but until that gets fixed in either game, you're left with two sides who equally lement each other. One side wonders why the other can't make the leap while the latter assumes elitism and exclusion. I've done savage raids before, and I didn't explode. Granted, I would never do it in a pug if you paid me. We subbed out people every now and then, and it made me want to quit the game, but that's besides the point.

The point is that this mistake will happen perpetually until someone finds a way to build a bridge over the canyon. And as of yet, nobody has. Blizzard gave casuals something else to do to distract them. Soon Occult Cresent will do the same here. You want people to want to do Extremes and up. Willingly so, but it's not something they care to attempt to fix. A game like Elden Ring solves it by being accessible. Your grandma can pick up and play it. And if she puts enough time, in can kill Melaina with her feet. But here it's either sink or swim. And it's far easier to sink.

[AllenThyl]

Both 14 and Wow have the same exact problem of difficulty spikes that aren't ease'd into on the players' behalf and require a leap to get into

Oft repeated, still completely untrue. The game is full of learning opportunities, the player base wastes these opportunities either actively or passively. What's actually happening is that the player base at large has the "a clear is a clear" attitude to the game, which no design can fix. Expert dungeons getting cleared in 20 minutes because people barely use half their kits and sometimes die to mechanics, because it can be cleared in 20 minutes barely using half their kit, so people don't learn. People on hunt trains having dozens of times killed the same mobs with the same mechanics (yes, hunt targets have a few mechanics), still dying to those mechanics. After all, even failing and dying, they get cleared and everyone gets the reward, so people don't learn. Normal raids have a whole script, with dozens of mechanics, but it can be cleared despite several people collecting vuln stacks like candy and dying a dozen times, "a clear is a clear", and so people don't learn. The Critical Engagements in Bozja are fixed script encounters with about 3 mechanics, and yet Red Choctober will wipe whole instances full of 30 ray people, because people never bother to learn, and despite not clearing several times, will still not bother to learn, in the hopes that next time there will be a group of actual players who can drag the rest over the finish line.

This "gap" is because at some point, for an encounter to qualify as "difficult", there have to be consequences for "doing it wrong". Too many vuln stacks? => die to next raid wide. Stood in AoE? => damage down => not reaching dps check and boss enrages. What many people here dream up as "midcore" content, always boils down to EX level content, but tuned for undersized parties, meaning as long as a few core people know what to do and don't mess up, they can drag others over the finish line.

It's a quality issue on the side of the player base who is OK clearing an encounter with 5 deaths, instead of saying "ah, I need to learn this fight and improve so that I can clear it without deaths". And there is nothing that SE can do to fix that. This kind of rubbish attitude is even present in savage, where people think they "mastered" a mechanic because they manage to successfully clear a mechanic 50% of the time, instead of clearance rates of 98+%. A dynamic that is significantly responsible for the Chaotic Alliance Raid being such an utter pain to do. It's the reason m6s is such a massive wall in PF, to the point that it shook me yesterday to see that in week 3 with better gear, people actually manage to deal LESS damage to the adds than in week 1. So yeah, if people want to get better, they have to start doing the work to get better, not constantly making excuses for why they don't use aoe in Expert dungeons or their 2 min abilities.