Well, you can. Casual would mean accessible (in Mil City or queued instance available any time) and relatively unstructured (bring what you like by way of roles). Alerts, really. Thats difficult to implement though, unless you have done form of team builder which does some behind the scenes equalising.
That might fit some people's idea of "casual friendly" yes, but not others. And there's the issue, how do you build something around a word that has so many different definitions. The short answer is you don't, and you wait for people to get more specific.
Figured Casual players are those that don't entirely care about being the best, but having fun in their own way, in their own time. They can do whatever they like, be it endgame, RP, helpin' other players, or just straight chillin'... Casually.
Forums ate my post. To be bad at CO is a helluva feat. To brag about being good(not that you're doing that) is a joke and actually doesn't impress me slightly, as being good at the least challenge superhero MMO is as easy as pushing a key
Exactly. While I can kinda see the casual term in regards to not having enough time to play being justified in certain games like TERA that are heavily grind oriented, the same I cannot see in CO at all.
We've had the same endgame gear for the past uuuh 4-5 years? And the same mod system for the past 6+ years? Whereas games like TERA in the past 4 years had easy a total of 9 endgame gear changes that make CO's power creep curve look like a flat line, and had changes to how gear progression works at least 3 times.
And at the end of the day even with slight mechanic changes introduced in new fights, CO will always be a tab target MMO at the end of the day. Tab target requires very little effort and require very little time to learn
Oh are you talking about people and the time it takes to actually learn the game? In which case sure it's all really in what, 1 or 2 keys? that's a very easy learning curve. But no, time can be an issue in terms of getting gear regardless of the same endgame. I took a 3 year break and am only back for this summer, then another year to two year maybe even more, break for me. I truly don't have time. Even this summer is a very rare exception.
Buffing everything to stupid high levels and nerfing everything to piss poor levels yields the same results, but not the same community reactions.
In reading through the multiple choice answers in the OP's poll I interpret them to signify that the OP is asking what we self-identify as. I doubt that the OP is hoping to get objective semantic definitions of terms from polling game forums. At least I hope they're not.
I'm asking people to give their definition of the word. For example, when someone says "casual friendly content" they are implying that casual has a specific meaning to the degree that content design could be built around it, and I would like to get that meaning. Naturally, the person should self-identify as the definition for casual that they have, if they do consider themselves to be a casual player, because it would be very strange for the case to be otherwise. However, this poll is not only for those who self-identify as casuals, as people who don't identify thusly would also have a definition to give.
This is not a "what kind of casual do you identify as" poll, this is a "what do you believe the qualifications for being a casual are" poll. It goes in with the assumption that the word has a specific meaning to people, with qualifiers that are required for somebody to fall under that meaning in their eyes. I'm sure, of course, that many people use the word and have no real specific meaning in mind - this is already becoming clear in this thread. Those people should probably never ask for "casual friendly" content, since they don't even know what they mean by that and you can't design content for "you know, whatever you want it to mean".
But, if you read the thread, you'd see these qualifiers have been defined. I believe what you want is for someone to come close to your defined(still haven't listed yours, by the way.) qualifier or else they're wrong. And well, that's just not the case. No one's going to agree on your method. They told you, you didn't like it. that's pretty much what this "poll" thread has become.
Want a laid out version?
Content that is time friendly. Content that doesn't require a trinity setup that pretty leads into cookie cutter healer/tank builds(DPS is oddly spared of this, surprisingly.) . Now, this is my opinion, if you dismiss it, then I don't know what to tell you.
Also as an aside, I was apparently wrong. I'm seeing light qualifiers in what defines a hardcore player in my book in burst over the channels i'm involved with in game(people dictating what others should play). Seems I handed out too much credit.
Buffing everything to stupid high levels and nerfing everything to piss poor levels yields the same results, but not the same community reactions.
To me casual is a made up term created by people who are bad at a game in order to attempt to justify and deceive themselves as to why they are bad. Thus why the word casual can apparently mean a lot of things cause each individual uses different excuses as to why they are bad in said game (I don't have enough time to play, I'm not interested, I prefer solo, I only use powers that start with the letter G, etc., etc.)
Like, whenever someone says they are a casual player (generally right after doing something wrong) I can't help but picture that same person being invited by his friends to play a game of Monopoly and losing and going "Well, I lost cause I'm a casual Monopoly player, I only play it for fun cause I don't have much time".
We are all playing for fun.
We all enjoy different things.
We all have limited time.
You are just bad. Deal with it or go see a shrink.
If I suck at something it is because I suck at it, not because I'm a casual. But, I can see why they'd make the excuse. Most casuals do not play very often or much, and due to their relaxed attitude at the game they are playing casually, they do not take to much heed into mechanics and what not, nor do they go out of their way to learn and practice. Thus, because of that, they perform bad. So, in turn, they use their casual play style as an exscuse to their bad play style.
Even a casual can be good at a game. Being casual does not mean you will be bad. But, yeah, that most likely is their though process.
Problem with being *good* varies. Either in endgame, in costuming, in lore wise things or in Role Playing. Anyone can be good at any of these things, anyone can be great. But nobody can be the best at them.
This is very much true. I can perform good enough at cosmics, I just do not like spending what limited time I have doing them. In turn, I've been redisigneding my characters costumes and builds. Which has been fun and is something that I am good at.
Well you see there's a bit of a problem with that. People say that content should be more "casual friendly", but if casual means a bunch of different things, some of which contradict each other, then how could that request ever be fulfilled? This is why I believe it's important for people to be more specific about what they actually mean, rather than throwing out a term and expecting other people to decode what they mean by it. Of course I'm sure there are some people who say "casual friendly" when what they mean is "easier", but they're just too embarrassed to say it because as you say it's "a helluva feat to be bad at this game" so someone asking for easier content would be assumed to have achieved this feat.
Now that, is an entirely different question. To me, casual friendly is something that can be done in a short period of time either solo in in a small group. Yet, doing the activity is rewarding.
In a sense, WoW did that when they introduced Mythic Plus difficulty for dungeons as an alternative way to farm for gear instead of Raids which a person most likely will not get into or can fail and fall apart. Mythic+ dungeons allowed a player to form a small party of five people (as normal for dungeons) and plow through the dungeon in 10 to 30 minutes. A player only needed to do one Mythic+ per week for a certain chest to give them gear 100% of the time. Sure, the chest was claimable only once per week. But, that allowed a casual player that could only play maybe once per week to get gear and continue playing the game. True, in this sense they would still have to learn to play their class/spec and care somewhat about progress.
Another thing they did that was more or less casual friendly was introducing World Quests. These were basically hot spots in the world that had you collecting and/or killing certain things to get a reward. These popped up all the time. And while the gear they rewarded would not get you well gear or anything, it still allowed a person that did not even do Mythic Pluses to get some gear. And it gave everyone something to do all the time. There was no real time gates other than the long times on the WQs themselves. When one expired via time, it would be replaced.
So, WoW has done some stuff that can be used as examples of something done to help casuals feel like they have a reason to play.
As for what CO can do? Well, unless they felt like overhauling EVERY lair and implementing a system similiar to WQs (and not what we already have), they do not have a lot of options.
As for what CO can do? Well, unless they felt like overhauling EVERY lair and implementing a system similiar to WQs (and not what we already have), they do not have a lot of options.
The equivalent is alerts. Though adding a green reward box to bursts might make sense.
To me casual is a made up term created by people who are bad at a game in order to attempt to justify and deceive themselves as to why they are bad.
No, that's incorrect. I saw someone mention World of Tanks earlier. Personally I play World of Warships a lot and it's quite revealing as to what "Casual" players are and what they want to do, because that games offers lots of different play modes. It's mostly Random PvP, or PvP between specific groups or for rankings. In those matches you find lots and lots of bad players. And by "bad" I mean "people who don't know how the game works, even though they've played thousands of games". They don't understand how to aim, or why they get spotted so easily, or how to equip their ship, or their captain. They're not casual - just not very good. But that's OK - people are allowed to be bad at video games.
There's another type of gameplay, though, where you play humans vs bots. The bots aren't very clever. They can aim alright, but they tend to sail in predictable lines and do predictable things. And there's a huge number of people who play that mode. Thousands and thousands of players, playing thousands of games. And they enjoy playing that simpler, easier version of the game. And why not? Those are the Casual players.
To be bad at CO is a helluva feat
CO is an old game with fiddly mechanics. It's not difficult when you work out what it's doing but working out what it's doing can take a while as it is not well documented or particularly intuitive. It also goes out of sync with itself a lot, leading to things like Jon's Cosmic Death Problem: those "Does 500 damage per second if you didn't start blocking two seconds before the attack tell appeared" things so beloved of our mega-bosses.
Yay for World of Warships! I play that also, but, compared to WoT, I am a casual. I found bot controlled Destroyers to be scary, but, still fun and allows a person to get something done...at least, and lower tiers.
But, yeah, I seen players like that in WoT. In WoT, my stats are decent, not high, but, not low. I'm a "green" player (with a win rate of 52% over the course of 23k to 24k battles). For those that do not know. There is a type of scoring system done by a third party (complicated and will not explain how the scoring system works), Red players, commonly called "tomatoes", are bad players (with a win rate of less than 50%), they suck. Green players are more or less average and decent, Blue players are good to a degree, while purple players are the top of the line players that make you think they are hacking.
More often than not, when I see someone complaining about the team being bad, they typically are a red player and they just do not understand how the game works. I had an idiot berate me for taking a defensive position when I was playing my E 50 (German medium tank, tier 9, tiers go from 1 to 10, 10 being the highest and strongest tanks), my E 50 at the time was very much stock in equipment (meaning it had starter gear, which for a E 50, means it has a Tier 6 cannon) and I was up against tier 10s. I had followed this one tier 8 medium and two of our scouts (light tanks) up one flank. I was forced to take a defensive position due to being attacked by three tier 10s. The tier 8 died, and the two scouts fled, the tier 8 started to yell at me for "going so far alone", despite the fact that he went farther ahead of me and the scouts were with me up to the point I got murdered by the tier 10s. The tier 8 was very much a red player.
Another time, I was in a tier 8 tank destroyer that has no armor, was in a tier 10 battle, and someone that went one direction yelled at me and another tank destroyer for not pushing into a certain location. I had actually originally gone the same direction as the guy who yelled at us and had just gotten to a point that I could start contributing to the battle. He was yelling for a while, but, he stopped when I snapped back "You went the other direction and thus have zero rights to complain about a direction you did not go." He actually stopped, not sure if because he realized his mistake or not. But, by the time I had gotten to where I gotten, the battle was already lost. I managed to dish out some damage and kill two targets, but, the enemy just did better. And yes, the guy that was complaining was a red player.
I like to take stock in who is complaining and what their stats are. I've found that basically 9 out of 10 complainers are red players. The better players have basically figured out how the game goes, especially in randoms where there is no real form of cooperation on the teams. Some of the best matches I've been in was when the team worked as one and steamrolled the enemy flat with zero casualities (on both sides, you could tell the team was actually working together instead of using the usual "I'm a hero!" menality).
I don't care if I am the best but I don't want to be the worst, I like content that requires a bit of attention and maybe some planning but I enjoy it more when the stakes are low. I've got plenty of free time but I get bored of grinding pretty quickly and would rather spend my time doing other things.
I consider myself pretty casual, and so to me that is what being casual means.
This game is really about making costumes. Just looks at how many costume pieces we get vs endgame content. Anyone who leaves the tailor to go to Eido, before perfecting their wardrobe is the definition of a filthy casual :P
What is a Casual? A miserable pile of secrets! But enough talk - have at you!
"Science teaches us to expect -- demand -- more than just eerie mysteries. What use is a puzzle that can't be solved? Patience is fine, but I'm not going to stop asking the universe to make sense!"
It's a word that gets thrown around a lot, oftentimes to justify content requests, other times as an excuse, and sometimes to point out that someone isn't who you think they are ( or that you aren't who you think they think you are ). It seems at times to be presented as the antithesis of "Elite", but I get the feeling this game has a lot of really casual elites ( that's certainly a title I feel applies to me ). So here's a poll!
Note: The poll is asking "What is Casual" not "What kind of casual are you". You are selecting what you believe are the requirements for being classified as casual rather than hardcore.
Q: What is a casual?
A: Tuffteddy.
Nepht and Dr Deflecto on primus
They all thought I was out of the game....But I'm holding all the lockboxes now..
I'll......FOAM FINGER YOUR BACK!
1,3, 4,5 (yes I know this was a valid choice but I picked the last) due to the reason I like to play when I am able, just like making various characters that mostly don't have viable builds though are still fun for me. Want to make unique characters but find that most of the parts I want to use are locked behind bind on use event vendors (several of the nightmare event pieces for example) and completely have no idea how to properly use the mod system after Cryptic redid the old crafting system and that I generally play solo anyway (plus many of my old friends left the game after they fixed various 'growth' bugs)
I think we can safely say that this poll shows that the word Casual is completely and utterly useless u3u
Such a fascinating social experiment
POWERFRAME REVAMPS, NEW POWERS and BUG FIXES > Recycled Content and Events and even costumes at this point Introvert guy who use CO to make his characters playable and get experimental with Viable FF Theme builds! Running out of Unique FF builds due to the lack of updates and synergies! Playing since 1 February 2011 128 + Characters (21 ATs, 107 FFs) ALTitis for Life!
Comments
That might fit some people's idea of "casual friendly" yes, but not others. And there's the issue, how do you build something around a word that has so many different definitions. The short answer is you don't, and you wait for people to get more specific.
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
Formerly @Seschat pre PWEmerger. @Seschat on the Titan boards.
Supporter of the Titan Project.
Oh are you talking about people and the time it takes to actually learn the game? In which case sure it's all really in what, 1 or 2 keys? that's a very easy learning curve. But no, time can be an issue in terms of getting gear regardless of the same endgame. I took a 3 year break and am only back for this summer, then another year to two year maybe even more, break for me. I truly don't have time. Even this summer is a very rare exception.
42 40s, LTSer.
But, if you read the thread, you'd see these qualifiers have been defined. I believe what you want is for someone to come close to your defined(still haven't listed yours, by the way.) qualifier or else they're wrong. And well, that's just not the case. No one's going to agree on your method. They told you, you didn't like it. that's pretty much what this "poll" thread has become.
Want a laid out version?
Content that is time friendly. Content that doesn't require a trinity setup that pretty leads into cookie cutter healer/tank builds(DPS is oddly spared of this, surprisingly.) . Now, this is my opinion, if you dismiss it, then I don't know what to tell you.
Also as an aside, I was apparently wrong. I'm seeing light qualifiers in what defines a hardcore player in my book in burst over the channels i'm involved with in game(people dictating what others should play). Seems I handed out too much credit.
42 40s, LTSer.
If I suck at something it is because I suck at it, not because I'm a casual. But, I can see why they'd make the excuse. Most casuals do not play very often or much, and due to their relaxed attitude at the game they are playing casually, they do not take to much heed into mechanics and what not, nor do they go out of their way to learn and practice. Thus, because of that, they perform bad. So, in turn, they use their casual play style as an exscuse to their bad play style.
Even a casual can be good at a game. Being casual does not mean you will be bad. But, yeah, that most likely is their though process.
This is very much true. I can perform good enough at cosmics, I just do not like spending what limited time I have doing them. In turn, I've been redisigneding my characters costumes and builds. Which has been fun and is something that I am good at.
And yet, you still told me I should change my answer.
Now that, is an entirely different question. To me, casual friendly is something that can be done in a short period of time either solo in in a small group. Yet, doing the activity is rewarding.
In a sense, WoW did that when they introduced Mythic Plus difficulty for dungeons as an alternative way to farm for gear instead of Raids which a person most likely will not get into or can fail and fall apart. Mythic+ dungeons allowed a player to form a small party of five people (as normal for dungeons) and plow through the dungeon in 10 to 30 minutes. A player only needed to do one Mythic+ per week for a certain chest to give them gear 100% of the time. Sure, the chest was claimable only once per week. But, that allowed a casual player that could only play maybe once per week to get gear and continue playing the game. True, in this sense they would still have to learn to play their class/spec and care somewhat about progress.
Another thing they did that was more or less casual friendly was introducing World Quests. These were basically hot spots in the world that had you collecting and/or killing certain things to get a reward. These popped up all the time. And while the gear they rewarded would not get you well gear or anything, it still allowed a person that did not even do Mythic Pluses to get some gear. And it gave everyone something to do all the time. There was no real time gates other than the long times on the WQs themselves. When one expired via time, it would be replaced.
So, WoW has done some stuff that can be used as examples of something done to help casuals feel like they have a reason to play.
As for what CO can do? Well, unless they felt like overhauling EVERY lair and implementing a system similiar to WQs (and not what we already have), they do not have a lot of options.
Epic Stronghold
Block timing explained
Yay for World of Warships! I play that also, but, compared to WoT, I am a casual. I found bot controlled Destroyers to be scary, but, still fun and allows a person to get something done...at least, and lower tiers.
But, yeah, I seen players like that in WoT. In WoT, my stats are decent, not high, but, not low. I'm a "green" player (with a win rate of 52% over the course of 23k to 24k battles). For those that do not know. There is a type of scoring system done by a third party (complicated and will not explain how the scoring system works), Red players, commonly called "tomatoes", are bad players (with a win rate of less than 50%), they suck. Green players are more or less average and decent, Blue players are good to a degree, while purple players are the top of the line players that make you think they are hacking.
More often than not, when I see someone complaining about the team being bad, they typically are a red player and they just do not understand how the game works. I had an idiot berate me for taking a defensive position when I was playing my E 50 (German medium tank, tier 9, tiers go from 1 to 10, 10 being the highest and strongest tanks), my E 50 at the time was very much stock in equipment (meaning it had starter gear, which for a E 50, means it has a Tier 6 cannon) and I was up against tier 10s. I had followed this one tier 8 medium and two of our scouts (light tanks) up one flank. I was forced to take a defensive position due to being attacked by three tier 10s. The tier 8 died, and the two scouts fled, the tier 8 started to yell at me for "going so far alone", despite the fact that he went farther ahead of me and the scouts were with me up to the point I got murdered by the tier 10s. The tier 8 was very much a red player.
Another time, I was in a tier 8 tank destroyer that has no armor, was in a tier 10 battle, and someone that went one direction yelled at me and another tank destroyer for not pushing into a certain location. I had actually originally gone the same direction as the guy who yelled at us and had just gotten to a point that I could start contributing to the battle. He was yelling for a while, but, he stopped when I snapped back "You went the other direction and thus have zero rights to complain about a direction you did not go." He actually stopped, not sure if because he realized his mistake or not. But, by the time I had gotten to where I gotten, the battle was already lost. I managed to dish out some damage and kill two targets, but, the enemy just did better. And yes, the guy that was complaining was a red player.
I like to take stock in who is complaining and what their stats are. I've found that basically 9 out of 10 complainers are red players. The better players have basically figured out how the game goes, especially in randoms where there is no real form of cooperation on the teams. Some of the best matches I've been in was when the team worked as one and steamrolled the enemy flat with zero casualities (on both sides, you could tell the team was actually working together instead of using the usual "I'm a hero!" menality).
I consider myself pretty casual, and so to me that is what being casual means.
- David Brin, "Those Eyes"
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/thread
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
Q: What is a casual?
A: Tuffteddy.
Nepht and Dr Deflecto on primus
They all thought I was out of the game....But I'm holding all the lockboxes now..
I'll......FOAM FINGER YOUR BACK!
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
> I think we can safely say that this poll shows that the word Casual is completely and utterly useless u3u
Just like casuals \o/
What a great and informative poll. You should do more like this