Quote Originally Posted by Valkyrie_Lenneth View Post
Why does it always seem like the ones complaining the most about "Casualbringers" and "too many casual things" are always the ones who haven't done much of/any of the difficult content in the game.
I haven't seen any clear indication of this trend, but neither would it seem that unreasonable to me.

Consider. If you only play casual content, you're in a place where you're free to optimize, but are not constrained to just the most optimal choices. You're at sort of the "sweet spot" for player flexibility and creativity. You can still experience engaging play without having to live or die by it.

But what happens when gameplay is simplified across the whole? Now you increasingly must participate in higher-stakes or high-stress content in order to reach that same level of potential engagement. For casual -- but necessarily incompetent -- player, that's sort of a worst of both worlds. You get to do things that are inherently less engaging but propelled by the exactness of the content, which is precisely what you tried to avoid in the first place. Your means are now less enjoyable and/or your ends more stressful.

Consider also the shared resource costs here. While a large part of being casual is of course choice, to avoid stressful and/or exacting content, what if they could instead receive content that is a bit more difficult without being more exacting (e.g. scheduled or scripted like Savage fights)? If you could have content that could bring in more engagement on the whole, without sacrificing the parts of gameplay you find fun through a rigorous need for optimization or memorization, would that not be preferable to, say, random "casual" side-content? What ever happened to that whole difficulty range between "casual" and Savage, where it would give casual players -- not something that can just immediately do, but rather -- to progress through without feeling pushed into a separate world of play? Why shouldn't casual players be the ones most concerned about a lack of mid-core content, or side-contents with a fair but varied degree of difficulty available to them? It's their entire sense of building up from A to B, instead of solely doing, without little real sense of achievement, casual content styles A-Z, that would be lost to them when you get features pandered to where you are now rather than where you'd want to go.