When I was originally playing World of Warcraft I had nigh unlimited time to waste on grinding my way through tedious instances. These days as a casual gamer, I really appreciate Scarlet Monastery, that mercifully short and well designed instance in Tirisfal Glades, and wish that more of pre-BC content were like that.
The sweet spot for casual WoW content for me is 1.5 to 2 hours. That’s enough time to feel like I’ve had a good fix and about equivalent to the time that a miniseries episode might run on TV, which is a reasonable amount of time for an entertainment fix. My regular Monday night group has 4 hours to play, so if the content we’re bashing at takes 2 hours it means that we can do two major things a week with a short break in between, which is usually enough to gain us two levels and the new abilities that come with them.
Scarlet Monastery is great for casual gamers. The fact that the instance is broken up into a series of mini-instances means that you don’t have to worry about fighting against the clock to get everyone to the end before they have to log off. You can just assess how long things have taken you once you pop out of a section and then work out from there whether you have enough time to do the next bit. Compare this with a dungeon like (shudder) Stratholme, where it was a huge 3-4 hour grind at the best of times, even if you only want to do half the instance, and pulling out before the boss fight at the end is painful since the effort you put into getting up to the point you were at before leaving was at best inefficiently spent and at worst wasted. I avoided it like the plague even back when I had more time because it was so tedious. Even low level instances like Wailing Caverns and Gnomeregan are terrible at getting to the meat of the instance, requiring you to grind your way through hordes of filler to get to the really interesting fights.
In my MMOG gaming, my roleplaying, and my film viewing I’ve really come to appreciate good pacing. I like a well edited experience, that cuts off the fatty bits and gets straight to the real meat of the thing. I remember that I also used to have great patience for endless haggling with NPCs over prices in RPGs and waiting around for my fellow players to get their shit together. These days I want a streamlined experience where we advance the plot, have a really engaging fight, or act out a compelling scene. I prefer haggling with Gregor the blacksmith to be abstracted away to an off screen hand wave. Scarlet Monastery delivers a streamlined instance experience, with multiple interesting boss fights and good loot available with only minimal amounts of trash clearing fights, which given the 3-4 mobs involved in each pull are often interesting in themselves. I wish that the next 20 levels had something equivalent to offer, but I know from experience that it doesn’t.
About two years ago I was playing 4-6 hours or so of World of Warcraft a day. This was in the early days of WoW, when it had just been released and the push was on to be the first guild on each server to field a full team of level 60s, ready to zerg their way through end game content. I’d committed myself to being on the leadership team of my guild again, for the third game in a row, so the pressure was on me to maintain the pace with the fastest power levelers in a hardcore guild of powergamers. I pulled marathon sessions duoing with my guild leader and running instances in the second tier of characters coming through to the end game, because we’d been slow off the mark and refused to grind 24/7.
That play experience for me set the tone for World of Warcraft. Hardcore, guild based play, highly organized and regimented, with a long range strategy for becoming the premier horde guild on the Blackrock server and staying that way. We pulled it off too, until too many players burnt out and politics forced the rest into retirement. I pulled out before that happened though, because my honours year of university was looming and there was no way I was going to sacrifice my academic future in aid of growing my e-peen.
After basically going cold turkey for about a year, I dabbled casually in WoW every now and then, but without a serious guild backing me up I felt like I was swimming with only one arm. Last year though, some old university friends of mine started up their own guild and have been plugging steadily away at the game. I joined them for the initial push, but my interest waned and I was interrupted by travel, so I fell behind.
Recently though, I’ve started up WoW again with my lovely girlfriend Mistress S, questing away in a Druid and Hunter duo and I have to say that WoW is a lot of fun as a casual gamer. Previously I powergamed my way through in a race to the establish the guild at the forefront of the servers serious raiding community. This time around I’m taking the time to smell the mageroyal, read the lore, and potter around lazily. It really is an awesome game, in my opinion the best cooperative game ever made, and suits itself well to many different play styles. Playing with your partner is a particularly rewarding. Mistress S and I rip it up together for a deeply satisfying gaming and bonding experience.
Every now and then though, I think back on my überguild days and miss raging across Southshore with 30 other guild mates, ganking people 20 levels below us until they log on their high level alts for a fight. Happy days. Then I also remember having to adjudicate people arguments over loot, waiting hours for people to turn up to raids, or hours in the queues for raids that are too full. The casual WoW experience may be a watered down version of the hardcore thing, but at least the utterly crap bits are a diluted down to virtual non-existence.