[Foodstamp]

DonCorazon,

No biggy. I see the term thrown around quite a bit to explain why people won't use certain features, bugs etc. That is why I pushed the conversation a bit. I think it is interesting that people identify the game style as roleplaying.

Personally I would term it "casual play". By casual play I mean the player plays the game his way. If things do not jive with his way of playing, he is not engaged enough with the game to play outside his playstyle, which means he will quit, or choose to play with people who are willing to play by his rules.

Basically a mindset where the player says "I know this can be countered, but through a lot of tedious work on my part, and I am not in this game for tedious work."

Oftentimes roleplayers fit into the "casual player" mode as well, and I think that is why sometimes people consider them synonymous.

For instance, in an MMORPG I play, when our group ran with 3 priests, we were near invincible. The average group consisted of 2 priests normally. We would get /tells telling us that we were lame because we had three priests in our group, and that it was boring fighting us because they could not do enough damage to get through all the heals. There was nothing in the game to stop us from having 3 priests in our group, but rather than countering an unorthodox group make up, they chose to quit, because the time/thinking investment was beyond what they were willing to commit to.

Fixing bugs is one thing. But in the past I have seen this go beyond fixing bugs. As people get more vocal, some of the more unique aspects of some of the games I have played have been brought in line with what is the norm for the rest of the game, to make the vocal players happy.

There was a pet class in DAOC called an "Animist". Originally the class could summon as many pets as it's mana bar allowed. I used to play one of these characters and I would die more often than I would kill. This class had stationary pets that could only damage an enemy if they were within a certain close range. Animists would hide their pets behind walls so when enemies came through openings, the pets would damage them. The damage was weak, and if the player ran back out the hole in the wall, they would live. But more often than not, the player would freak out and run around in circles and die. Seemed like good strategy to me. But to people who felt beguiled by such tactics, it was cheap and lame. Over the years they were able to persuade the developers to cap the number of pets the player could have, until finally that character went from having as many as he could muster, to 15, and now finally 5. The thing that made the class unique was taken away because people complained enough. Not people in the know, but people who had just started playing, or refused to change their charge forward playstyle.