How to take it easy without sucking

I started writing this last month sometime, when I was at the very beginning of a weeks-long recruiting slump, and getting tired of arguments in trade chat.  I decided not to post it at the time because I more or less ramble, rant, and and offend absolutely everyone on the planet- myself included.  Why am I posting it now?  Because I have an eight hour recataloging shift at work, nothing prewritten, and it's already noon.  You know where to send the hate mail.

Nobody wants to be called casual.  Guilds that self-style as 'casual' or 'family-friendly' usually end up dumping grounds for terrible players, leeches, and the maturity-challenged.  Like it or not, being casual has become a catch-all excuse for not giving a flying fuck about what's going on around you.  I've watched players go into full-on freak-out mode when someone called them laid-back, relaxed...  So close to the dreaded C word.

Believe it or not, there's a happy middle ground in MMORPGs.  Most of us live somewhere in that grey area.  It's perfectly possible and reasonable to have a job, a life, and a family outside of the game and still push progression, strive for excellence, and succeed.  There are server top-five guilds out there that only raid once a week.

So stop waving around your little I'm A Casual flags every time someone asks you to stop sucking and do your job.  Seriously.  The reason more serious players look down their noses at "casuals" and have basically turned the word into a racial slur is that we're tired of some guy standing in the fire and shouting about everything he's done in the last five years when we ask him to move.  And hearing people cry for handouts because they're 'casual' and can't get it themselves?  Yeah.  Less than appealing.  (I know, right?  I sound like such an elitist hardcore prick.  Only remember yesterday's rant?  Yeah.)

If you're not a serious player, it's okay.

Questing, roleplaying, socializing, being pretty...  It's all part of the game.  Play however you have fun.  We all pay our fifteen dollars, or whatever the sub fee is (unless it's a free to play game, and that's another rant entirely).  We all have to decide what the best use of our sub is.  That said...

Don't try to force your playstyle on everyone else.

This is really just a Best Practices For Life kind of thing, but seriously.  If you don't want to be judged, don't judge.  You are not better or more right than anyone else playing this game.  Pot, kettle right?   You play your game, I will play my game, and we'll all get along.

Make the most of your time.

If you want to be effective and efficient, minimize the amount of time you spend standing around in Orgrimmar bullshitting in trade chat.  Learn to multitask.  If you're DPS queueing for heroics, spend that extra time you're waiting out in the wild farming cash, or stuff for your tradeskills, or running quests.  Unless you need to be in a town to catch a pickup raid or you're listing things on the auction house, don't be there.  If you're wasting a lot of time on stupid shit?  I'm going to be pissy when you start whining about how hard it is to have money and be successful as a casual.

Schedule things.

I'm so tired of hearing how there's not enough time for people to raid or even gear through heroics without massive windows of time every night, or whatever.  MMOs are like any other hobby- if you want to do it, you make time for it.  Block a couple of hours off a few nights of the week for Mommy's Computer Time or something, and massacre some internet space dragons or whatever it is you're killing.  This kind of goes a long with the last one.  Suck it up and start managing your most precious resource.

Your lack of skill has nothing to do with your financial problems.

No really.  You're not standing in fire because your computer sucks and you can't afford another one, you're not bad at PvP because you've got high latency because you're not on fiber, and there is nothing in the cash shop you need to have that is going to make you markedly better or worse at the game than I am.  Stop using things you can't fix as excuses and identify the stuff you CAN fix and work on.  Seriously.  If you know you're lagging, plan ahead.  If your graphics are crap and you can't see effects, you might possibly have picked the wrong hobby because DAMN.  Do you think I'm going to go like...step into an ice hockey game as a goalie with a field hockey stick and no pads?  If I do, I'm sure as hell not going to moan about taking a puck to the face or not being able to stop a shot to save my life.

You want something?  Fucking earn it.

Rewards are based on three things: potential risk, time investment, and skill required for completion.  That time investment factor?  It's a biiiiig factor.  But here's the deal: you can so totally put in enough time to eventually balance the equation.  Contemporary MMO design practically encourages you to take your risk (constant) and skill (not constant, but hopefully always increasing) and add them to a smaller or at least variable time factor to get your reward.  Persistent raid zones, shorter raids, multiple difficulty settings, and pickup raid finder tools are all modern additions to the standard MMO social experience that are meant to give more casual players chance at seeing the formerly 5% content.  SO.  Stop bitching that you can't do things because you're a casual, you can't get the gear to be decent as a casual, you can't compete as a casual.  You can.  The tools are there.  STFU and use them.

And this is why I didn't post this when I first started writing it.  Raw, un-cut Roxirants are bad for your health.  <3

Tomorrow: Roxi's WoW 5.0 Cram Session, and why the class changes are giving her heart palpitations.