I think I should get this off my chest. I am a casual player of World of Warcraft. I have a full-time job, a fiancee, I roleplay with my friends and I sing a bit too. I love videogaming, but it is only one part of my life, so I try to moderate my time spent sat in front of a monitor. I’m not sure whether or not I’ve had a typical World of Warcraft experience, but I do think I fit the typical casual mmo-gamer niche that everyone is talking about. A little history might help here.

I started playing World of Warcraft in November 2006. I spent years levelling my first characters and I had an absolute blast without stepping foot in a dungeon, raid or battleground. I didn’t hit a level cap until Wrath of the Lich King, December 2009 in fact. This is primarily because I didn’t know what I was doing. Because I rarely interacted with other players, as everyone else seemed intent on hitting the level cap as soon as possible, I had time to explore every area and fight every monster. I think one reason I fell in love with Warcraft was the size of the place. I once tried swimming around Kalimdor with a level 25 character. I managed to swim from Darkshore to Azshara before a passing lobster cut me to ribbons, but I didn’t care, it felt awesome to be somewhere new, exciting and off-limits.

While I was a little anxious, the excitement of the new and the relatively small penalty for failure meant that I spent a very long time levelling and exploring and never really got bored. Sadly, even with the new continent, I will never feel that rush of excitement as I come to a new area, even with Cataclysm, as I know too much now for levelling to be truly challenging. It can still be fun, but I’m not excited by it any more.

When I finally hit the level cap in Wrath, I jumped into dungeons, heroics and all that with gusto. I quickly learnt the ropes and became competent enough to stay out of the fire and hit the buttons in the order required to produce adequate damage. I figured out how to gem and enchant gear to maximise my numbers, got into a small guild and started running raid content. While we never troubled with heroics modes, we had a great time hammering our heads against the wall because we did advance, no matter how slowly. I dabbled with healing and tanking, the former more successfully than the latter, and enjoyed myself all the same. I started to read Warcraft sites and forums to make sure I wasn’t doing it all wrong.

I don’t think that in my four years of playing WoW up to the release of Cataclysm I’d experienced true anxiety or boredom. I’d played WoW the way I wanted to play it, had fun and all the time I was trying new and interesting content, I was feeling Flow. Flow is an interesting concept that I think is really important in videogames. It’s the feeling you get when you are neither anxious nor bored but feel challenged and in control of your situation. You might get it when you’re on a perfect-win streak in Tekken or if you’re in the middle of a speed run in Mirror’s Edge; you’re doing something difficult, not impossible, and you’re nailing it. Obviously, Flow is based on your own perception of difficulty and ability, so I wouldn’t claim that any of the content I was doing was difficult at all to the average player.

An interesting side-effect of my research is my increasing awareness of the WoW meta-game – optimisation of gear done via spreadsheet or website, strategy guides and theorycrafting. It was intruding slightly, but because I wasn’t a guild or raid leader and strategies would be talked through during the raid, I never really paid that much mind to it. I could read up on strategies, and frequently did, but it wasn’t strictly speaking necessary for day to day play. You could easily take part in heroic dungeons and battlegrounds without checking Wowhead for example.

The release of Cataclysm changed all that. What makes Cataclysm interesting is the schizophrenic way it caters to casual players in one way, by introducing time saving devices in-game (LFD, Heirlooms, ‘Welfare’ Epics) while upping the meta-game requirements and the amount of time required to complete group content.

The WoW meta-game has become intrusive. Evidence that it is impossible to play the game without strategy guides is the inclusion of them as standard in the form of the dungeon journal. I might agree that heroics and raids should be difficult if it weren’t for the fact that since the release of Cataclysm there is very little content that isn’t heroic dungeon or raid related. In fact if you take away the heroic only dungeons casual level 85’s have a handful of Tol Barad and Firelands daily quests, four non-heroic dungeons and a few non-repeatable questlines to play through.

You might be asking yourself, if you’re so interested in heroic content, why don’t you read up on the tactics and get stuck in? If only it were that simple. There are two points here, firstly, the finding, reading and understanding of the tactics for the heroic bosses in Cataclysm is not trivial. There were 42 bosses at launch with unique tactics for each. As the LFD is random, you had to know all the tactics before queuing or risk not knowing the one you finally end up in. Secondly, the number of bosses in each dungeon on average increased. This with the increased difficulty means that the potential amount of time spent in dungeons also increased significantly. Even if you have read up on the tactics and prepared yourself for a long run, you could find yourself in a group with people who haven’t, increasing the chances that you’ll be in one dungeon all night.

Well, I did read all the guides, made a few notes of my own and spent a good few weeks battering my head against the wall of heroic dungeons. I battled through the gear barrier just in time for 4.2 and the introduction of Zul’Aman and Zul’Gurub, and I don’t think I’ve been quite so disheartened. While the potential number of bosses has decreased, as you can queue for only ZA and ZG, the time requirement in the dungeon is much higher because of the increased difficulty, the lack of preparation by players and the number of bosses. I’ve lost count of the number of times the group has been disbanded because of wipes and the lack of friendliness is really appalling. The first time I stepped into Zul’Aman I didn’t meet the DPS requirements the tank felt necessary to continue ON THE FIRST TRASH PACK! Never mind my gear or experience, I wasn’t good enough. Sheepishly, I left the group…

Now whenever I go into a heroic dungeon I have this gnawing anxiety eating away at me. Even when I’m doing well I have this fear that we won’t finish the run or it will take another hour to clear because someone will die once and they’ll be kicked. People don’t even have to wipe the group to be labelled idiots they just have to screw up a little. Surely it’s quicker to explain a strategy to someone who doesn’t know than to kick and re-queue?

Where once you might pick yourself up and try again, now you’ll be verbally abused and vote-kicked out. When you complete a heroic dungeon now it’s not the positive feeling of flow you’re getting, it’s a feeling of relief.

You’re probably thinking again ‘if you don’t like it, don’t play it, it’s your choice.’ You’re right, of course, I don’t have to get involved with WoW. At the very least I don’t have to take part in any of the heroic content. But I do wonder if the reason WoW subscriber numbers are declining is a combination of the increased difficulty, rise of the meta-game and the negative atmosphere present in dungeons, raids and battlegrounds. There’s a whole lot of negative reinforcement going on at each of these points, forums and blogs are full of trash-talk, braggadocio and flaming, so you can’t help but bump into reasons not to even attempt more challenging content.