At this point in the game, "rushing" is not a valid argument.

[Dochas]

Casual is being used as a VERY broad term.

Casual, today, means any of these things:
- You play 2-24 hours a week
- You LITERALLY stop to smell the roses or watch the sunsets ingame(someone in this very thread said that, too)
- You are terrible at the game
- You have no desire to better yourself
- You hate PvP
- You want everything handed to you easily
- You don't like to do dungeons or end game content
- You don't devote your life to the game

A casual is any of the above. This isn't about who is casual and who is not. All those people can be considered casuals, and they ARE considered casuals. Texhnolyze IS a casual. That's certainly not hardcore.

Casual gets used far to often, but it also has to be taken in context. When talking about leveling, generally casual is amount of time spent playing, since being good or bad at the game doesn't really effect easy quests or fate grinding, nor does half the other stuff on your list. 40 hours a week is a job, 40 hours a week of playing a game is not casual, no matter what other ways you want to describe casual.

I consider myself casual even though the only things that apply to me is I don't devote my life to the game and I don't have as much play time as past MMOs where I have done hardcore raiding. I CAN play for 8-10 hours straight, I just don't usually get the time. Instead I usually have about 2-3 days a week of 2-3 hours and maybe 1 day a week of 4-5 hours.

That said, I have managed to get a 50, although that was just this weekend. I spent a lot of time cross leveling. My lowest class is 10, all my crafting classes are over 15, my gathering classes are all mid 20s. Even though I have a desire to improve my character and enjoy things like dungeons, I still have not felt the need to zerg endgame with one class and then whine about lack of content (though I have been tempted to whine about dungeon queues -_-). Now that I have a 50, I am having trouble deciding what to do, not because I'm out of content, but because I want to do so much. I want to level at least 3 other combat classes to 50, though probably more, and I'm trying to decide the order. I want to level most of the crafting classes to 50, probably all, and again, I have to figure out the order, and I want to cap my gathering classes. Other popular games like WoW didn't have 8 billion raids at launch. There was 1 real raid and 1 single boss raid and you had to run the same dungeons over and over for your set pieces or a good weapon that may not drop. Here there are a few dungeons to grind for tokens so you are guaranteed to get what you want (just no lucky first run drops) and you got HM primals (single boss raids) plus a real raid. First patch is adding another.

They made leveling fairly easy, because many people don't like it. You have the choice to rush one up and feel bored, but this is decent launch content with more on the way.