Hardcore Casual Gaming and the MMO Experience

Title's still in the works.

So this week has been hell, and I'm not even through it yet. I have one of those jobs where you get lulled into a false sense of idleness, where you joke about getting paid to sit and read webcomics, and eventually start to really question why you came into work today, before suddenly all deadlines converge into one massive, inconceivable cluster#$@! (known as the Day of Reckoning) and you can't remember the last time you were able to sleep without quivering in terror-induced stress.

That may be overdramatizing it a bit - I'm still a little out of it today.

What does this have to do with WoW, you ask? Well, if you're an avid player like myself, the better question would be what doesn't this have to do with WoW? All that time I've been spending these last few weeks working long hours, staying up later than is healthy to finish projects and cranking my massive brain trying to find to solutions to all my company's problems is time that I'm not raiding, farming and theorycrafting. It's a travesty, I tell you.

So it just figures that right in the heat of the moment (tellin' me what your heart meant...) Blizzard goes and kicks off the craziest world event evar. Zombies, plagues, invading floating fortresses of DOOM (which surely can only be taken down one way), and of course, phat lootz.

And I don't have time to get any of it.

I could go into a whole diatribe about Blizzard's treatment of casual gamers vs. the hardcore never-leave-the-basement community, but there's so many sides to both arguments that I imagine the world event would be over before I even finished the post. But I don't believe the WoW community is so black and white as to say that players either spend every waking moment on Azeroth, or log in once a weekend. Most people, like myself, find the game to be one of their primary hobbies - the source of all activity that takes up "leisure time". And for a lot of people, myself included, the actual scheduling of that leisure time isn't always set in stone.

So it's kinda aggravating when something totally sweet happens outside of that schedule.

So what's a player to do when free time is limited and you want to get the most out of your WoW experience, now so very much enriched for a limited time only?

Prioritize.

I may not be able to play all the time, but damnit, I can figure out exactly what I'm going to do as soon as I get the chance. And naturally, something that's around for a specific time only would take a pretty high ranking, but when you look at the current state of the game, pretty much everything has a time limit right now.

- Scourge Invasion Activities
- Hallow's End (less than a week! D:)
- Badge loot
- The sweet sweet taste of being well-geared, before it all comes to a crashing halt.
- Battleground insanity

I can go on. My point is, for those of us who have to budget our time, this world event comes bittersweet. I'm impressed with Blizzard's groundbreaking efforts in MMO storytelling and overall immersion into the new content. I'm a little pissed off that I'm barely going to have a chance to see it.