WoW vs. EQ1

As an interesting side-line of the discussion on casual vs. hardcore content, people were discussing in the comments on whether three 4-hour raids per week are still casual. Of course there is no fixed line between casual and hardcore, but I wouldn't count anyone who is doing raids on a regular schedule as casual. That is more a question of organization and intent than of number of hours for me, casual playing is not knowing today how many hours you'll play tomorrow.

But I did understand the argument of "we played Everquest, raiding MC seems casual to us". In comparison with EQ1, the whole lot of WoW is casual.

I was thinking exactly the same when I tried to get ghost mushrooms yesterday. There is only one really good place to farm them, the Skull Rock cave in the Hinterlands, and as I found to my chagrin it is heavily camped. The mushrooms spawn slowly, and if there is more than 1 person looking for them, you really don't get very many of them. But I had learned camping and patience in EQ, and just stood still at some strategic point, waiting for the next spawn. While the other people after the same mushrooms jumped around me, turned PvP on when they were of the other faction and tried to get me to duel them (Do I look crazy enough to duel a priest or warlock in a cave full of mobs? I'd just get feared into a bunch of them.), and then often left long before me. It is hard to find anyone standing still for 5 minutes in WoW.

In Everquest even a mid-level quest might have you camp some NPC who spawns only every 8 hours (Dyllin Starshine for the Testament of Vanear), and the camps get longer at the higher levels. In World of Warcraft most players can't wait 10 minutes before getting bored and wandering off. Of course that makes the game much more dynamic, you move a lot more in search of your targets, instead of static camping. That doesn't mean that camping has outlived its usefulness. If you had Everquest as training, standing still for 10 minutes or more in WoW to wait for a respawn can still be a good strategy. And if the other people trying for the same thing as you don't have this EQ-based patience, you can often "outcamp" them.

Observing that the majority of WoW players can't stand still for 10 minutes, not having played the original Everquest, one has to question the design philosophy behind the upcoming Vanguard : Saga of Heroes. Brad McQuaid, who is responsible for both EQ1 and Vanguard, says that Vanguard will bring back the advantages of downtime and slow leveling progress. Bringing out a new shiny MMORPG two years after WoW, when you can expect lots of people having grown bored and looking for a new game, is principally a good idea. But if these people don't have the patience required for an old-style game with lots of downtime and slow rewards, they might be leaving a lot faster than Brad thought. The time the average player stays in a game is *not* proportional to the time it takes to level to the highest level, but proportional to the time it takes him to get bored.