Guild Wars 2

Like playing an hour everyday? Or every week? Or coming in once a month?

I’m probably hitting 1300 hours, but at least 50% of the time is from grinding away for mats (while the next major % is 45% afk). 5% came from doing everything else GW2 has. It’s not too bad, I think. 65 hours for the real content GW2 has.

This is my first MMORPG, and gw2 stated that you can be totally casual at the beginning, and I find myself to be un-casual, as the game progressed. And I’m seriously reflecting what I’m doing.

It’s the ultimate price, and probably the ultimate achievement. But I think any casual player forking out even 200 hours to just camp jormag or the likes probably can’t be counted as a casual player. The average game probably has a life of 20 hours or something. If there are 20 over lgd weapons out there which take close to 1000 hours of just normal camping events, or 200-300 hours of pure COF money runs, and ANet planning to probably add even more legendary weapons out there in the future, I’m starting to wonder if ANet is every going to allow casual players to ever attain a legendary.

It’s just not possible.

Sight-seeing all the map content, playing slowly at a “casual” pace will never be able to achieve a legendary. I mean, “the casual player” just camping a Jormag event every day, maybe getting an average of 1g in total from the chest (exotic/rares averaging out), and then after a final 1000 days later, he gets a legendary. 1000 hours, just camping the same event over and over again while finishing his daily (30 mins daily + 30 mins jormag event, or any other high level 80s event).

I mean, would it really, really kill ANet if mats are cheaper and more available? If the casual player can get a legendary if they spent 200-300 hours in the game doing some relaxed roaming in the higher level maps, it wouldn’t kill the game. Contrary, I think they might feel keen to create another legendary for their alts (although if they did that, their status will change to “gamer”). If the entire process is changed up a bit, where you do a very long chained event where you get your precursor (20 hours hunt time), the entire process that you finally achieve from getting it, would have been sublime.

Right now, the process is arguably a mocking one, where you dump in thousands of weapons into the mystic toilet, and then running the same money farm dungeons or event at CS, for hundreds of hours.

After the bots have been removed, there wasn’t any real loot gain, BUT a plinx nerf on CS. What…? Didn’t ANet wrote about how they aren’t against players from “farming”? Not only did the DR change, but it was seemingly tightened up, while the devs claimed that the DR is handcrafted. Unless their intention was to drive up crystalline dust to 25 silvers and above, while churning out recipes that uses 250 tier 6 mats…

I’m… cynical. I really am. Sometimes I wonder why games are produced. Is it really for the gamers’ benefit or a company that preys on gamers’ money (Dye drop rate nerfs. Speculation: Gem related?)?

This is what happens when you want to protect your gem store/in game economy at the cost of the sanity of your common player.

It’s really hard to balance. If it were too easy, nobody would need to buy anything, and almost everything would have no value. I would say our current state is still skewed to the opposite where things are just stupidly scarce.

I think it’s more about how you play than how much time you put into a game because there are a lot of outside factors which can affect how much time you have.

In this game I’d say the main different is that casual players are a lot less focused. They’ll get online as and when it’s convenient and do whatever they feel like or happen to come across, they might do a dungeon if a friend or guild member is asking, another night they might be doing map completion or their Personal Story or whatever.

Whereas a harcore player is more focused. They’re more likely to make time for the game and for specific goals, they might run a dungeon every night for a week, doing multiple runs a night, because they’re farming tokens for a specific armor set. Then they’ll move on to a new goal and focus on that until it’s complete.

Personally I’m more of a casual player and I don’t feel like I’m locked out of any of the content. Will it take me longer to get a legendary weapon? Yes of course it will, probably a lot longer, but it’s still possible.

I could say I haven’t made any progress yet because I haven’t done anything to actively work on it in the 8 months I’ve been playing. But actually I’ve got about 33% of map completion done, I’ve got some mystic coins saved up from dailies, I’ve got a few obsidian shards from trading in some spare bauble bubbles, I’m levelling up my crafting professions and I’ve probably done some other stuff I don’t even remember is involved. If/when I do start on a legendary I’ll be a little way in already, and since I’m not in any hurry to do it I won’t be as worried about the time it’s taking.

Besides there’s other cool skins to use in the meantime.

I don’t think legendaries were ever supposed to be a goal meant for casuals. Their implementation is designed solely to keep the more dedicated players with something to do after they’ve blazed through the casual-friendly content.

Well, there really is no way to accurately say what is a casual and what is not. In the end, it is all subjective. However, if you want, try thinking of players who are hard-core. Then think of players who play “normally”. If you try to compare the level of activity both have, subtract that increment from “normals” and you’ll probably have the “casuals”.

I do not find casual or hardcore to be very useful terms as they seem to hold many meanings for people.

For me:
Casual play is what happens when you log on to “just play”. Not long term goal oriented. Short term goals during play may happen. “Just one more skill point and this map is finished.”

Standard play is what happens when you are logging in occasionally to do “something specific” whether running some CoF or WvWing with your Guild. This is the first section that pre-scheduled play happens. Long term goals influence your play choices.

Hardcore play is what happens when most of the time you are logging in you already have pre-scheduled plans. Long term goals dominate your play choices.

That’s probably the best explanation I’ve heard… I suppose that would put me more towards the casual/standard player, in that I often have long term goals like “I want to level this alt to 80” or “I want to max out a crafting skill” but remain flexible enough that I’ll shift my focus to something else if it catches my interest.

Not again… Why is everyone so obsessed with how others chose to play the game? Why is everyone obsessed with deciding what the goals should be for other players? Why should others decide that every player need to be obsessed with getting a legendary when some people, like me, are not worried about that at this time? I’ve played a total of 106 hours and my highest level character is 25. My goal of this game since I decided to buy it was to have fun. I’ve had a 106 hours of fun and even if I never played again I feel have gotten my moneys worth already. That includes a few trips to the gem store because I could buy skins to make my characters look more interesting to me, and a mini.

Show me another form of commercial entertainment where you can get 106 hours for $60. It certainly isn’t movies. A 2 hour movie at a standard theater costs around $10. You would have to watch 53 movies to achieve 106 hours of entertainment. So that would be $530 bucks. That is a roughly 1 movie a week for a year (52.17 weeks in a year). If your goal is to watch 53 movies in half a year go at it. Just because that is your goal it doesn’t have to be mine. I wouldn’t even try to watch 53 movies in 7 years and to my advantage by the time I even watched 20 movies, new movies/content will be out to make that experience more pleasurable.

I’ve wondered this myself. People are shouting the word casual back and forth, having their own defenitions.

To me, a casual player can be an extremely skilled player, or a not-so-good one, but he limits his playtime with other stuff as well.

The casual player might have work and a family. The game is just something he does on his free time to enjoy himself for some hours.

Llyren.3904:

I do not find casual or hardcore to be very useful terms as they seem to hold many meanings for people.

For me:
Casual play is what happens when you log on to “just play”. Not long term goal oriented. Short term goals during play may happen. “Just one more skill point and this map is finished.”

Standard play is what happens when you are logging in occasionally to do “something specific” whether running some CoF or WvWing with your Guild. This is the first section that pre-scheduled play happens. Long term goals influence your play choices.

Hardcore play is what happens when most of the time you are logging in you already have pre-scheduled plans. Long term goals dominate your play choices.

Good definition, because that’s how I see the differences as well.
I casually play, but I put in a lot of hours for it. 3-4 hours each weekday and most of the entire Saturday if possible goes into the game, but I don’t ever have a outline on what I do.

There’s the occasional “I want to finish this Personal Story mission” or I’ve never tried this dungeon, but most of my time is running around helping people and drifting with no real objective.

It infuriates some people on my friends list that they can never synch up what I want to do versus what they are doing right now.

Okay my new goal for the game which includes discussing topics with others in the forums has changed. I’m ending my involvement with ‘casual’ threads (I think there are at least 3 running right now) after this post.

Your opinion related to how I should spend my time enjoying a game is your right and you can spend all day talking about it if you want. However if it isn’t something I agree with or doesn’t match my style for enjoying the game I’ll simply chose not to accept the goals you think are required for me to enjoy the game.

Given that, I better jump in game now. All I have done so far today was a little crafting. I guess my enjoyment of the game will be ruined if I don’t at least do my daily, finish my monthly, finish a map, level up 5 times, get the best gear possible for my new level, and make 10 gold today.

Speaking of monthly though, I think there is a very good reason they give players a month to do it. /points at self

ArchonWing.9480:

This is what happens when you want to protect your gem store/in game economy at the cost of the sanity of your common player.

It’s really hard to balance. If it were too easy, nobody would need to buy anything, and almost everything would have no value. I would say our current state is still skewed to the opposite where things are just stupidly scarce.

I’d have to agree completely. The inflation in this game is horrendous. 6 months ago the items that were the highest/most sought after by the general public were 2-3 gold, 3 months ago they were 5-6 gold, now those same items go for 9-11 gold and people still think there’s nothing wrong.

Casual is this. " It’s extremely important that we stay true to our philosophy that you should be able to play Guild Wars 2 the way you want to play the game in order to reach the most powerful rewards." there is no choice right now. Either you have to do dungeons or you have to do WvW, open world is a destroyed dream they told us would occur with new permaDEs biweekly and new metas almost monthly, I remember that estimation just before launch. I remember reading that they’d retro laurels, I remember that we see changes in our home zone based off of things we had done in the open world, I remember reading how it didn’t matter what style of player we were we had equal chances at everything. All that changed in November.

I used to get rares and exotics from open world chests without magic find gear. That’s how the loot should be, and that’s my proof they changed the loot in November because after they put DR and made the adjustments suddenly all any of them would drop is greens and below even when guarded by champions. It’s really not equal anymore, because explorers can’t receive the same rewards. People can make fun and they can troll, but they can’t take away the experience I had when I first started playing this game and they can’t deny that the game is highly lopsided when it comes to rewards and content.

I think Tigirius has a pretty close answer for me. Casual players can play the game however they want, be it spending time in WvW (afaik only lgd weapons needs the badges) or just random roaming around everywhere in the GW2 world, and still get the reward. They do it relaxed and unconcerned, not caring about how the other hardcore players who do the most profiting routes 8 hours a day.

Ok how about this. When you are asked a question with a vague term. “Are you hardcore or casual?” You answer with another vague term. “yeah! I’m level blue chupacabra hardcore, but square pineapple casual. Baby cakes!” Then you do the secret handshake and whisper. “its all semantics”. Walk away

Casuals have very little goals and play the game for the game, Hardcores are goal orientated and are generally very competitive.

To me it has very little to do with time played…

For me it is : Not playing on a regular basis.

For most of the “casuals” posting here it is : I want everything to be easier and tbh I actually just don’t want to do anything at all but since I paid full price I should have access to everything.

The very best definition I’ve come across is

“Casual” is when you’re in for the journey.
“Hardcore” is when you’re in for the destination.

Casual means putting real life over videogames. While that should be pretty evident and without explanation, it does warrant a few words.

Between a job, partner, friends and sports, videogames arguably have the least important position. Job and partner are almost required to have a meaningful life. Friends and sports keep you healthy in mind and body. So while videogames could be the #1 hobby, it still takes the backseat when those other things come up.

Last weekend my first nephew was born. I didn’t play for 3 days, didn’t even think of playing. Some times, I’m playing when my girlfriend needs me and I’ll just quit regardless of people I’m playing with.

For younger people this is different, but for me, casual means having a healthy attitude towards videogames.

I’m not beyond taking a week off once a year, just to waste it on videogames. That’s fun, it’s enjoyable. I love it. On the other hand, I’m not doing that every week of the year like I did back when I was 16yo.

Reikou.7068:

The very best definition I’ve come across is

“Casual” is when you’re in for the journey.
“Hardcore” is when you’re in for the destination.

And you could easily change casual with GW2 and Hardcore with generic MMO#12.
(don’t get me wrong I don’t think GW2 is a casual-only game at all)
I love traveling through all the maps again with new characters, not caring about the level or the money I accuire, just enjoying the beautiful enviroment, the spontaneous events and those pretty cool jumping puzzles you stumble upon once in a while.

Some players insist that an MMO be their second life over the course of months or years. They log in every chance they get. Legendaries are for them. The rest of us just have to be content with the rest of the game.