Two-week (more or less) thoughts.

[MrHat]

Heh, I know the feeling.  I'm considering lighting up a bud's account and trying out this dual-account thingy I keep hearing about.

[Calantus]

Hmmm, just this weekend I started thinking about cancelling. Over the last week or so, I log in and just have zero motivation. The only character that I seem to enjoy these days is my Draenei Hunter. My Tauren Shaman is 63, my Human Priest is 64, and my NE Druid is 62. And for some reason lately I just dread logging onto them - leveling up is just feeling like work right now. The prettiness of the new zones has worn off and I just find myself staring at my xp bar, seeing how slowly it goes up even at rested xp on all of 'em, and I just think of all the work that needs to be done to get to 70.

Ouch. I reckon you dug yourself a bit of that hole by playing the same zones 3 times over instead of taking one guy through it once and going from there.

[Raging Turtle]

Ouch. I reckon you dug yourself a bit of that hole by playing the same zones 3 times over instead of taking one guy through it once and going from there.

I'm pretty sure that's why I'm burned out as well.  I'm one of those alt-a-holic types and I keep making new characters, getting them to 15-25 or so, and getting bored.  And now I dread doing all the newbie missions *again* before the characters get their interesting abilities.

[Paelos]

It seems to have affected everyone, and I've put my finger on exactly why.

It's the god-damned Karazhan key quest. It's the reiteration of the Onyxia questline all over again, except this time, it's like trying to find everyone keyed people to get into UBRS. It was one of the stupidiest design decisions they've ever made, and if they don't do something about it in the near future, they are going to lose TONS of accounts over it. Here's why.

Let's say you're not in a raiding guild. Let's say you have people who are really quick levelers and have a bunch of time, then you have some in the middle, and some at the bottom. That pretty much defines most regular guilds or alliances. Ok the people at the top blast through, get done, and then have everything out of the five mans they need. They all get keyed and want to do Karazhan, but they don't have the right mix of classes yet. So, they help some others to try to get keys, but they are more casual and are still leveling a lot of alts. So, the top people wait around and get bored or waiting, and they start alting. When the regulars are starting to get ready, they need help getting keys, but it's like Jailbreak all over again. People really don't want to do the same instances they did over and over and over to help new people.

Here's the kicker. With everyone getting there at different times, the top people get pissed off that they are constantly being hassled to help key people, but they can't run things without getting more keys to support standby postions in their raids. When, just like everything else, this could all be solved by having the Karazhan key OPEN THE DAMN DOOR. Why the hell should everyone and their dog have to have a key just to get in the house? Nothing else worked like that except Onyxia, and it was a 40 man short raid.

Top that off with the fact that one of the hardest classes to consistantly find in numbers (priests) happens to be one of the most important in terms of CC in Karazhan, and you set yourself up for a feeling of total malaise amongst your users. It was a really stupid design decision.

[Zetor]

Not to mention that pugging Black Morass (and heck, even Arcatraz can get pretty bad) is the equivalent of stabbing one's eyes out with a rusty spork, repeatedly. It's just like the 45min strat run; yeah, it's ok for a guild group in vent with the right group makeup, but pugging it? kek.


-- Z.

edit: Black Morass is the last step for the Kara questline, for those who don't know

[Phred]

The difference, from what I've seen, is that there is incentive for people to go back and help the slower people along and that is faction. I've met quite a few people who've said they did a lot of black morass runs for slower guild mates to get exalted with the keeper's of time. Not everyone needs it but there are some nice items for a lot of classes on the vendor so that's a bit of an incentive to keep going back. Arc on the other hand, is a pita so most people would rather run Mech or Bot for faction than do Arc again. :(

[Fabricated]

Most of my guildies hate the Shadow Labs more than any other instance. They hated the Black Morass until they got a feel for it, and they've been successfully pugging it since.

[Merusk]

<Kara stuff>

It's much worse than that, though.  On top of all that stuff you hit a point where you have more than 10 keyed people, but not the right mix or what-not to do 2 Kara runs.  People start getting pissy about not going, or being forced to sit out from UBRS 2.0 for a week at a time.  They're sitting on their ass doing nothing, when they see shitty player_816 in 'required class_02' going week after week and they get really pissed.

Add-in idiot raid-leaders who do things like schedule people, but then swap-in others because "you're not the right class for this boss, and we didn't get far enough to need you yet." and it's a formula for utter shit.

[MrHat]

Most of my guildies hate the Shadow Labs more than any other instance. They hated the Black Morass until they got a feel for it, and they've been successfully pugging it since.

Ya, I hated Black Morass the first 2 times.  Now it's free loot, even w/ pugs. Because of my play time and sporadic class changes, I tend to pug alot.  As long as you take control, it usually ends up ok.  Also I have 2 rules for Pugging.  1: 3 wipes and I'm gone, regardless of how close we get to killing whatever we're fighting.  2: I have absolutely no qualms about kicking team members, if yer a dick, yer gone, if you suck, yer gone, if a guildie wanted in and we haven't started yet, yer gone.

Keeps it simple and quick for someone on my limited play time.

[Zephyr]

<Kara stuff>

It's much worse than that, though.  On top of all that stuff you hit a point where you have more than 10 keyed people, but not the right mix or what-not to do 2 Kara runs.  People start getting pissy about not going, or being forced to sit out from UBRS 2.0 for a week at a time.  They're sitting on their ass doing nothing, when they see shitty player_816 in 'required class_02' going week after week and they get really pissed.

Add-in idiot raid-leaders who do things like schedule people, but then swap-in others because "you're not the right class for this boss, and we didn't get far enough to need you yet." and it's a formula for utter shit.

We are in that spot right now.  Silly me figuring every guild needs an extra healer, but it turns out to be the one thing we have too much of and no one wants to go dps spec.  Also not being part of the officer clique I am cooling my heels in Kara group #2, too bad it hasn't been formed yet.  Nice guys, but I am getting tired of just PUG'ing instances while they work through Kara.

[Zane0]

Multi-day 10-man 'epic' instances are really not very much fun from an organizational / drama perspective. Class balance is so brittle that you run into a veritable dumptruck of problems. It wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't the only thing out there and didn't have part of the key to Serpentshrine.

[Calantus]

I'd just like to say "I told you so" to no-one in particular (or perhaps Blizzard) because I predicted we'd be seeing a massive drama-bomb because lower numbers means stricter requirements, and that smaller raids != casual raiding. There would need to be more changes such as gutting consumables, starting the bar at the MC level as opposed to the Naxx level, and dropping difficult attunements. It seems Blizzard either wasn't going for casual (and the sizedown was for other reasons, say hardware or just making guilds tighter). I read one delicious post on WoW.com or Elitist Jerks where someone said that they had thought there would be a surplus of raiders looking for guilds but surprise surprise it's exactly like before because new guilds formed to fill up the gaps. Oh and guilds still carry shit players because that's how they are structured not because they can get 30 good players and poof all of them  disappear at that magical number and 25-man is going to fix it all soon.

Again, not directed at anyone. I'm just happy/smug to have been right and am remembering the rage I felt trying to convey this to WoW retards on the official site (in my defence I do this because I want to experience rage, like how you might watch a tragic movie to feel sad, or a comedy to feel happy, etc (and the wow boards are all of these)), but don't want to infect them on myself long enough to tell them this directly and I'd have to re-up to do it anyway.

[Ironwood]

Um.  If you say so.

I can still attempt these dungeons with a small group of close friends.

I couldn't do that with MC, Onyxia or Naxx previously.

Am I likely to get owned ?  Possibly.  Does that  matter ?

[Calantus]

I didn't say it mattered. If cutting the field down to 25 (or 10, if you're talking about Kara) makes your guild or group of friends work then that's great. I was specifically talking about the crowd who thought that the change would be all happiness and rainbows and fix all the problems with raiding, when 99% of those problems are not that you need to field 40 people. In other words it wasn't the casualisation that so many on the WoW boards toasted it as.

[Merusk]

See, that's just it Cal. The requirements AREN'T any stricter.  You can PUG Kara, and people WILL be doing PUG Kara soon enough.  I wasn't kidding when I called it UBRS 2.0.   It's hard right now because of a few things.

 The first problem is the people running it right now are still so focused on the Pre-BC mindset and they haven't broadened their view of classes OR specs at all.   My guild forced all priests to go Holy once again, because "it's a raid instance!1!"  However, dragging 2 holy priests and a resto druid AND a holy pally is fucking overkill on healing, and shit for DPS..  So what'd they do?  "Druids, spec balance/ feral."    

 Fact is, a Shadow Priest can shackle just fine, just use a resto druid as your secondary healer and voila.  But that's too difficult, apparently.

The same shit is happening with Hunters.  We don't do BIG UBER BURST DAMAGE.. but a well-played hunter easily hits their target on DMs.  Instead I'm getting passed-over for a mage who dies in the first 30 seconds because he's a dipshit who - literally - laughs LOLZ DID YOU SEE THAT CRIT right before he's pasted and winds-up doing nobody any good.

Ditto for Locks.  Locks have been told "Spec affliction" but the fights are all so short that their damage output is largely hindered.  So what's happening? They're dropping Locks for mages/ rogues now, and only taking the locks in for specific fights, where a banish or two is needed... err..

The second problem is everyone's jumping headfirst into Kara.  It's a pain in the ass to even try to get a Shattered Halls/ Full Actraz / Steamvault run for the blue set.  Everyone wants to 'rush da purlez' and hit Heroics and Kara.   So what's happening? They're getting pwned in Kara and uberpwned in Heroics.  It's like trying to run MC at 60 in green/ blue quest gear.   Of course you're getting pwned, you're underequipped.   But no, THAT'S not the problem, it's the CLASSES.. "UR USELESS"  "ROLL A WAR/ MAG/ PRIEST, NUB"  >.<

[Calantus]

Heh, sounds like a riot. I almost wish my last guild made it to BC to explode into a bigger ball of flaming hot drama than it did. I'm sure it's much more fun looking in than being in though, I could never stand having to deal with that shit while playing.

I hear the 25 mans are brutal from a few friends and reading boards, with some Naxx completing guilds sitting back and refusing to throw themselves at it anymore until Blizzard does something about it, only an elite few having more than 1-2 bosses to kill, people bitching about potions all over the place, etc.

[Dren]

Ditto for Locks.  Locks have been told "Spec affliction" but the fights are all so short that their damage output is largely hindered.  So what's happening? They're dropping Locks for mages/ rogues now, and only taking the locks in for specific fights, where a banish or two is needed... err..

Really?  Normally, my affliction specc'ed lock uses totally different attacks/methods when dealing with trash as opposed to bosses.  Trash I use my instant damage attacks.  Bosses I use my DOT's.  In either case I come out as one of the leaders of DPS most often.  While never the highest, I certainly get the job done and provide all of those nice utility spells/powers that everyone can benefit from.

As for this conversation, my small guild that never had a chance at Onyxia or Molten Core has been keeping up with the Jones' pretty damn well.  No 25-man yet, but getting close.  We're working on getting everyone keyed for Kara with a few done already.  Why aren't we there already?  Because many of the members like to PvP or at least like those rewards.  They are splitting their time.

Our guild membership is way up, not down.  The expansion has been nothing but good for us and our more casual approach to the game.

[Ironwood]

I didn't say it mattered. If cutting the field down to 25 (or 10, if you're talking about Kara) makes your guild or group of friends work then that's great. I was specifically talking about the crowd who thought that the change would be all happiness and rainbows and fix all the problems with raiding, when 99% of those problems are not that you need to field 40 people. In other words it wasn't the casualisation that so many on the WoW boards toasted it as.

Um again.  I'd be happy to hear what you think the 99% percent of the problems actually were.  And I put it to you that, even if you can, it doesn't matter if you can't actually field the 40 people that's the FIRST 1% of the problem...

[Calantus]

Unless we're talking 5-mans it matters because the logistics are not so different when talking 25mans and 40mans that the change would enable a lot of people that could not complete those things before. People who have a readymade group of 25ish are rare, hence the 99% pulled out of my ass percentage. The actual specifics I'll do in the morning since it's 4am here. Well, middayish today I guess would be more accurate a timeframe really.

[AcidCat]

Ouch. I reckon you dug yourself a bit of that hole by playing the same zones 3 times over instead of taking one guy through it once and going from there.

You're right, that is definitely part of it. I think the other part is I've been playing for two plus years and the game has just ... become too much a routine habit of my life. My wife could hardly believe it when I told her I cancelled.  :-D

[Paelos]

Heh, sounds like a riot. I almost wish my last guild made it to BC to explode into a bigger ball of flaming hot drama than it did. I'm sure it's much more fun looking in than being in though, I could never stand having to deal with that shit while playing.

I hear the 25 mans are brutal from a few friends and reading boards, with some Naxx completing guilds sitting back and refusing to throw themselves at it anymore until Blizzard does something about it, only an elite few having more than 1-2 bosses to kill, people bitching about potions all over the place, etc.

There are up's and downs. Karazhan is shitty for the reasons I've mentioned before. The key quest is convoluted and ridiculous, and the rewards need to be reworked. As for the 25 man raids, I LOVE LOVE LOVE the rostering for those as a leader. Filling 40 mans with retards was an exercise in frustration every week. I'd have 25 solid folks and 15 idiots. Now, I just have 25 solid folks and a few standbys.

However, the developers made the 25 mans insanely hard. You can tell they were pissed that guilds whomped Naxx so fast, so they set up impossible barriers in the next iteration. I have the best gear you can get out of 5 mans or can buy off the AH for a warrior, which essentially equals about what you would have in stats of full Tier 3 or better in some cases, and I still get whomped hardcore for 5k average by Mulgar in Gruul's Lair with 9k spike damage. And that's not even Gruul himself. It's beyond overkill compared to what we had to do in Onyxia.

[Fabricated]

My horseshit theory on why the 25-mans are so ball bustingly hard is that Blizzard is attempting to cockblock people from the higher-tier 25-man raids so they can polish them further. Shit, the instant some of the uberhardcore guilds started breaking into Serpentshrine there was a patch to "polish" the bosses there. I imagine Gruul/Magi will be made less face destroying after a big content patch. I came to the sad realization that the raids past Karazhan really aren't for casuals due to the Triple XXXtreme difficulty and consumable drain. Also, the fact that Blizzard has absolutely no reason to add any more 5/10 man content.

Karazhan I dunno on. I'm not even 70 yet. Me and all the other officers are wondering if enough of our regular players are actually good enough to do it since getting more than one of our...less talented players in a guild run usually results in wipe city.

[Righ]

But no, THAT'S not the problem, it's the CLASSES.. "UR USELESS"  "ROLL A WAR/ MAG/ PRIEST, NUB"  >.<

That's been my experience. After a couple of weeks of being brought in only when there is a shortage of people or for particular bosses believed to be ranged DPS-centric, I got bored. When I logged in after a week or so of not bothering to, I got whines about not having been there... for the occasional bosses they could have used me for or for potion making. I'm pretty much not interested in playing a hunter at any point in the future, but my guild has decided to put hurdles in the way of changing classes, so thats that.

[Morfiend]

My guild is doing pretty damn good in Karazhan. We have cleared the entire thing except Nightbane, just got the quest to summon him finished last week. From what other guilds on our server are telling us, we are going through at a very fast pace.

We are pretty small guild as raiding goes, being built of friends from different guilds over the life of wow. I think we have a total of 28 level 70s, including casuals like Hat, so hitting the 25 mans has been hard. We are having the problem of more raiders than spots now, so what we have done to try and be fair is bring our "best" guys on the new encounters, and constantly sub in and out other people for bosses we have the strategy down for. This is working ok for now, but I think a lot of people are getting itchy for more raid time.

[Morfiend]

My horseshit theory on why the 25-mans are so ball bustingly hard is that Blizzard is attempting to cockblock people from the higher-tier 25-man raids so they can polish them further.

My theory on this is that they are trying a new way of making people do progress. If you look at the gear coming out of Karazhan, it is berely better than the blue stuff from level 70 5 mans. This new form of forced progression keeps the gear gap relitivly low, but also stops skilled players from passing up a bunch of the midrange raid content. So now instead of forcing people to run raids over and over to get great gear, and then throwing gear check bosses in the next instance, they are just requiring that you get keyed but beating lower instances first.

[Phred]

Most of my guildies hate the Shadow Labs more than any other instance. They hated the Black Morass until they got a feel for it, and they've been successfully pugging it since.

The only thing I hate about Black Morass are the damn script bugs. Through no fault of your own mob waves will spawn later and later than blam, boss spawns while you are still clearing a portal. Other times I've done it where the whole thing was on fast forward. Not even a second  to drink between waves. If' they'd fix that crap I'd like it a lot better.

[Ironwood]

No, it's the dragonlings that do the evade bug that annoys the fuck out of me.  The instance going perfectly and 'fuck' you're done.

[Phred]

The second problem is everyone's jumping headfirst into Kara.  It's a pain in the ass to even try to get a Shattered Halls/ Full Actraz / Steamvault run for the blue set.  Everyone wants to 'rush da purlez' and hit Heroics and Kara.   So what's happening? They're getting pwned in Kara and uberpwned in Heroics.  It's like trying to run MC at 60 in green/ blue quest gear.   Of course you're getting pwned, you're underequipped.   But no, THAT'S not the problem, it's the CLASSES.. "UR USELESS"  "ROLL A WAR/ MAG/ PRIEST, NUB"  >.<

Big problem is the crappy risk/reward on the heroics. Who wants to do a much harder version of the same dungeon for the same damn loot that dropped in the easy version. Kara is actually easier for the upgrades than most of the heroics and the heroics don't have a clear upgrade purpose for Kara. If there was loot in the heroics you needed to be able to do Kara I bet more people would be doing them.

[Calantus]

I was going to go more indepth about why raids are not casual and why the fact that they were 40man is the smallest problem of all of them, but I'll do the quick (note: quick != short) version instead because I lost a lot of care factor over the day.

The lockout period is the first reason. A normal instance simply exists, it's always there and you lose nothing by not going there for a week. A lockout creates a situation where every guild has X potential loot from every lockout instance every week, and those potential items become in effect a kind of resource. If you don't farm that instance during the lockout you've lost those potential items, which means that you really have to farm it every week. Whenever a raiding guild misses out on an instance for the week everyone would immediately talk about the opportunities missed. This creates a situation where people become obligated, either officially via mandatory attendance or unofficially through peer pressure or self guilt, to show up to instance runs even when they might have other things they could be doing or are simply not wanting to play WoW. The lockout also means that you can't have too many raiders or people miss out every week. This creates a situation where guilds have to juggle between too many and too few players, which makes it harder to just recruit big so as to lessen the tension on your raiders. And even if your guild is big, if you don't attend a raid you miss out for a week, so if you enjoy raiding it really puts you on the spot when you're feeling tired or have something else you'd like to do.

The popular looting systems that come about because of lockouts and random drops also create a situation where raiders feel obligated to attend as many raids as possible. If an item you want can only drop once per week and has a 10% chance you could very well only ever see it once, or maybe even twice over your whole time of raiding that instance. You will also be competing with everyone else who wants the drop too. If you miss a raid that one raid could be when the item drops and you'll have missed your chance. DKP makes this worse in that not only do you have to attend the raids that offer the drop, but every other raid as well so as to be in a position to recieve the item in question should it drop.

That's just discussing the pressure it puts on a raider who can attend. A lot of people cannot ever raid simply because they cannot devote huge blocks of time to play the game for whatever reason. The lockout is again mostly responsible for this. When someone ducks out of a 5man it's a PITA but getting a replacement is doable because you have the whole server to choose from. When doing a lockout instance you have to immediately cut out everyone who is in a guild (or regular PUG) that does the instance. Then, everybody who is left is very unlikely to have any real knowledge of the instance or of raiding in general so unless you want to teach them as you go they're not going to be much help either. That leaves the people in your guild, which is generally kept at a size where you don't have too many people left on the sidelines every week because otherwise they get left out of the encounter for the whole week. This means that you can't just be subbing people out over the course of the clear, and so you need most everyone to be there the whole time, which excludes a lot of players.

The size is of course a factor, but I would say the size kicks in at around 15-20, as opposed to some number between 25 and 40. 25 is still a lot of people to schedule around and get into the instance ready to pull. This means 2 things. First it means that instance runs are a lot longer than they otherwise need to be, making it even harder to devote time for a full run. Secondly it means that you can't simply go for an hour and call it a day. All the logistics and organisation involved, as well as player preperation, travel time, and time spent waiting for late arrivals means that you need to invest X amount of time for the run to be worth the effort. That is the main reason that guilds do 4-6 hour blocks, not because the content requires it or because they're catasses, but because doing 7 days of 1-2 hour blocks is just not worth it.

Then there's consumables. It's been put better by tonnes of people elsewhere but I'll repeat it here. Consumables right before BC were worth more than a tier's worth of upgrades in raw power. Right now, with the shallow tiers BC has, consumables are several tiers worth of power. This means that either Blizzard needs to tune fights without consumables and see every hardcore guild pot up and thrash every encounter they put out within hours, or tune with consumables taken into account and require people pot up. This means that raiders are required to spend X hours mindlessly farming to support their raiding, which already takes up too many hours a week for most casuals.

Everyone and their mother was saying that 25man raids would enable them to only field their core of good raiders and kick their filler to the curb. This is flawed thinking because it doesn't take into account why guilds have filler in the first place. Some guilds are made up of X amount of friends from previous games or RL or other online communities, and if X is ~20-40 then those guilds are going to benefit, but those guilds are a minority. Most guilds are made up within the game for the game, and so have no set number of core players that are going to be super resistant to quitting the guild. 40 man guilds typically had 25-30 "core" players because that is obviously the rough % of core players you get via the normal recruitment methods. Filler gets in because you need to fill a spot fast and so can't get too picky or you miss out on raiding for a week or 2 (which is bad), and while many guilds just say they will kick crappy players out they tend to stay either because replacements are hard to find, the leadership can't bring themselves to kick them, or the crap players make friends that will be pissed if they're kicked. If you took a 1L container of air you'd have roughly 0.2L of oxygen (oxygen is ~20% of air). If you then used a 0.2L container of air, if wouldn't be full of oxygen, you'd have 0.04L of oxygen. So why did people think that having a 25man guild would leave them with all core players, and not ~15 core players? Because they were wrong. Raiding will still be dragging X amount of shitty players along for the ride regardless of size unless guilds change their policies.

Other people thought that because raids would be cut down to 25 it would make recruiting easier, but that would never happen because the reason you have X guilds is because that's how many guilds the server can support at 40man. The number of guilds a server can support goes up with the 25 man requirement. Those raiders who are now out of the 40 man guilds or who would have gone into 40man guilds are not going to sit around with their thumbs up their asses waiting to get a spot. Guilds get started all the time but die due to lack of numbers, with more numbers those guilds succeed and lower the number of free raiders to choose from. So recruiting is always going to be hard unless you're a superstar guild. Always.

All those factors lead to why raiding is not casual friendly and why raiding is "hard" in a variety of ways. Cutting down to 25 makes for less logistics hassles for officers (made hard again by Kara and leveling, but I digress), and can make for a tighter guild. It can also enable the very few groups of 20-40 friends that exist in WoW but need to bring along a bunch of outsiders in order to raid 40mans. It also makes it so that there is less stress on the servers IIRC some comments made by Blizzard around the announcement of the change. But that's all it changes. It doesn't mean you don't have to farm for pots. It doesn't mean you can jump in and raid for an hour and then go pick up the kids from soccor practice or w/e. It doesn't mean you can only raid once a week and not miss out. In short, it's not all rainbows and sunshine and a great victory for casuals.


Now if you were talking about the solo content or 5mans or Kara then there's no question those things were needed and a great addition (questionable for kara due to the lockout and long nature of it all), but I was never talking about those, and really they've always been there, just neglected for a long time.

Also, before anybody comments, Ironwood (foolishly :P) asked and I like to hear the sound of my own keyboard so there. I also didn't do my usual read-over of this because it's frankly just too long so don't be too picky if my grammar sucks balls or something.

[Righ]

I also didn't do my usual read-over of this because it's frankly just too long so don't be too picky if my grammar sucks balls or something.

TLDR'd your own post? Cunning.

[Azazel]

The same shit is happening with Hunters.  We don't do BIG UBER BURST DAMAGE.. but a well-played hunter easily hits their target on DMs.  Instead I'm getting passed-over for a mage who dies in the first 30 seconds because he's a dipshit who - literally - laughs LOLZ DID YOU SEE THAT CRIT right before he's pasted and winds-up doing nobody any good.

I may be misinterpreting your post, but didn't you just leave a guild full of fuckwits? These guys you're describing don't seem all that great either...

Also, nice ass.

[AcidCat]

I was going to go more indepth about why raids are not casual

In depth indeed. The simple reasons that raids are not casual:  Casual players do not schedule their lives according to a guild's raid schedule, and casual players *usually* either cannot or will not be locked at their PC for the 3+ hours each raid requires.

Really I think it comes down to the simple fact that raiding requires you to be more serious about the game than most casual gamers are willing or able to be. Sure there are casual guilds that may throw together a raid once in a while in blackrock spire or something, but that's not really what we're talking about.

[Paelos]

I was going to go more indepth about why raids are not casual

In depth indeed. The simple reasons that raids are not casual:  Casual players do not schedule their lives according to a guild's raid schedule, and casual players *usually* either cannot or will not be locked at their PC for the 3+ hours each raid requires.

Really I think it comes down to the simple fact that raiding requires you to be more serious about the game than most casual gamers are willing or able to be. Sure there are casual guilds that may throw together a raid once in a while in blackrock spire or something, but that's not really what we're talking about.

I think you hit the nail on the head as far as why casuals won't raid. They can't or don't want to schedule their lives around a game. That's pretty much it for the root cause since the rest of the reasons just feed from that main point. As far as seriousness goes, I think there's a lot of middle ground where both groups meet up. However, the hardcore outliers are usually the reference points when people talk about raiders and casuals in that regard, which is a shame.

[rk47]

Heheh I'm kinda confused with the 'casual' guild I joined last month on my Draenei Shammy. After hitting 70, I'm getting mixed messages from 2 end of the guild.
1. I cant' believe a part of them wanted to raid MC. And still planned to raid it tomorrow as well as helping those who are not attuned. Considering one of the warrior getting owned so hard by Steamvault Bog Lords,I guess he probably wanted something lighter but still retain that massive epic instance feel lol. The reasoning they gave was 'we need to train to raid together as a guild' 

2. There's another 4-5 guildies that did their own runs which I hang around with since I know the priest IRL. We kept running rep runs whatever is there, one hunter left the guild after hearing we're gonna raid MC. Basically they can't wait for the guild to start Karazan, and are already keyed up and pushing me to do the same. Mage, Druid Tank, Warlock, Holy Priest, Hunter. sometimes I didn't get invite cause Elem shammies don't get a single form of CC  but that's fine than running MC imo.

Me? I'm just working on my Leatherworking to get Netherstrike set. Then I might drop Skin for Tailoring to make Spell Dmg Threads with Scryer rep recipe etc. Basically farming clefthooves for the Thick Leathers now Grindy shit. Made a full tanking leather set for the Druid on the process at least. 368 / 375 LW 

[Dren]

If a guild tells you where you will be playing and when you will be playing, it isn't a casual guild.

I belonged to the same type of guild for exactly 2 weeks.  As soon as they "hinted" to me I needed to attend more raids, I quit.

Sorry, I play when I can and how I like.  If that keeps me from the uberest equipment in the game, so be it.