Up until now a lot, if not most, of the game involves a lot of time investment. Be it farming heroics, honor farming, gold or consumables - most things you like make you spend additional time with things that are way less fun. With the recent patch-notes (source: 4.2 Conquest change - MMO-Champion BlueTracker ) Blizzard announced that they are unhappy with how few time was needed to get gear in arenas.

Be it arenas or raids, I think that a growing part of the WoW-population is in the game since the start and relationships, intense jobs and other obligations make the old hardcore approach of spending constantly a lot of time a concept not made for the future. And no - I am not promoting everyone going casual, but to think of concepts to enable players participating in end-game content without having to spend time on other things in game.

Some ideas would be:

• Reward loot from all bosses for killing the final boss after each boss has been killed three times.
• Keep the S9 conquest point model.
• Drop the materials needed for consumables from trash and bosses within raid instances. Drop considerably more from hardmodes.
• Give out honor for additional arena games, more based on rating.

The idea is to reward excellence and not time investment. Anyone, who wants to do things based on time investment is still free to do so, but someone being able to clear 50% of the hard modes would not have to do additional heroics or farm consumeables. I think this would keep a lot of players around that quit the game due to not being able to spend the time necessary to play the game the way they want it.

Yes, I think of actually less than 2-3 hours a week for arena or 5man dungeons (solo play) and maybe 6-8 for larger group play like rated bgs and raids. This does not include progress / start of season phases , where one wants to play more. But rather the amount of time needed constantly. Actually I enjoyed the half hour I could play in some weeks, doing only arenas and do not really want to invest more. It was a pretty decent modell after having done the honor grind once to never ever having to play more than 5 games a week if I did not want to. This does not mean, that I do not have weeks in which I enjoy playing a lot more. Maybe I'm really playing the wrong game. Seems like no one else is bothered by having to spend a lot of time.

I have two problems with your idea:

1. Excellence is already rewarded.
2. There should be nobody in a guild that currently clears 6/13 hard modes or better that still needs Valor Points unless they're a Druid working on their fourth Tier Set.

If your guild is currently incapable of providing cauldrons for raids, your guild is not one to which we can attribute excellence. If your raiders have to spend more than a couple hours every few months to farm materials for potions, they also are not excellent. You don't even need consumables for any normal mode content in the first place if your raiders are excellent.

Similarly, running heroics constantly for Valor Points is unnecessary unless you're trying to ride the bleeding edge or you're making up for a lack of excellence. Any excellent raiders who take a relaxed approach have long since finished their tier sets, even if they haven't hit any hard modes.

I can't speak to PvP because I don't PvP. You probably have some insights there that I don't because of it. But as it stands excellence is well rewarded in PvE, and any guild struggling in that area can not be said to embody excellence.

I do not raid anymore due to time reasons.

You as an raider, that gets rewarded for excellence, have to kill a boss on hardmode how many times? Ten? Fifteen? Twenty? Is it really fun for you and all your guild to kill these bosses over and over again? The model is still the same - farm all the bosses every week in order to be best prepared for the next tier.

The arena model until patch 4.1 was pretty perfect. You needed 5 wins in order to gain your points for the week but could continue to fight for rating. Fun, if you have the time, if you only find a strong half hour it would probably also work. So the game did not force you to do something. Now the model goes back to "you to spend time for your points", which is a great step back in my opinion. When I wrote about this, Illuwen (see post above) simply replied "Welcome to my world". He is a PVE player.

I have to kill a boss on hard mode as many times as it takes for me to kill the final hard mode boss once. The number of times that takes is smaller the better I am and the better my guild is. Afterwards no more kills are necessary unless my guild is a competitive, bleeding-edge raiding guild.

Basically, the better a guild is at raiding the less time it has to spend raiding. The extra time is spent not raiding, raiding more because it's fun, or trying to be competitive.

Honest question here - what else would you do? A raid group that kills all the bosses once and then disbands for 6 months to wait until the next patch is never going to re-form.

I know that this is unlikely to appease most of you but I wish they would have done more with the Cata zones than they already have. After you get your factions completed, there is no real reason to go back to these places save to farm or hunt for rare spawns. I feel that a lot less people would be quitting if they gave us a reason to go back instead of making Org and SW into big waiting rooms.

Look at all that stuff you could do in Outland. Shartuul, Terokk, so forth. They were designed to let casual players have some epics but nowadays there is no need for those things exist. And I used to do these things before raiding because it was fun. I could just be whining, a lot of you will say I should go play a single-player RPG, but I miss the feeling of exploring.

Time and effort usualy translate into good results in pretty much anything, it's only natural for the same thing to happen in WoW. Excellence however, can and is rewarded in the game:
- There are 13/13 Heroic guilds that raided 8-12 hours a week during progress.
- Any decently progressed guild can provide flasks, food and repairs for it's members while still making money.
- PvP gear, if you are good, has always been (and still is) very easy to acquire.

Not only that but compared to other MMOs or even compered to how the game was at launch, time sinks in WoW are pretty casual friendly and not all that time consuming. So I guess I have trouble seeing where all this supposed time investment is.

First of all, most guilds, including Elitist Jerks, are not 13/13 yet. Don't see the point of excellence reduced to the very best. I think most of would agree that EJ is a pretty decent guild.

The argument of having to have constant things to do does not really work, because it gets old faster and faster. This model of having constantly new and exciting content is flawed. Even if Blizzard pushed raids like Ulduar every six weeks - things would get old. Even TV shows that run over decades have seasons, they have breaks. If you force players to spend constantly time in the game, it ages a lot faster. Computer games are still pretty young as format and we certainly have not found all working ones.

One thing that can be said for sure is that a growing part of the community is reaching a point, where their weekly routine cannot fit in a regular WoW schedule. Players that were gladiators or killed Kel'Thuzad before patch 2.0 would not want to start doing solo quests or battlegrounds but cannot realistically keep up with the pace. I think a modell that lets players participate in the endgame based on skill and not time investment would allow these players to stick around. A game that forces them to log in for hours every week will make them leave.

I'm in a similar situation to Hildegard. I stopped raiding last year due to real life (note my zero RS kills). However, I do not share the same view. MMORPGs are supposed to be a bit grindy, this buys Blizzard time to develop content and other things but there's another element to it that hasn't been stated.

Namely that it is a social game and those grindy parts of it help that social part out immensely. Every one of us has spent hours online just gabbing away as we grind something (Raids/BGs/Rep/etc). Take away the grind and now it's just MSN. I'd rather grind and talk than just talk. Besides, the grind gives us something to talk/complain about, it's the equivalent of, "How about this weather?"

WoW has been out a long time. A High School or College student is more likely to have large quantities of free time than someone in the workforce. By now even someone mid-High School could have graduated, progressed to College, earned a four-year degree and progressed into the workforce. Factor in marriage and children, too. Many of the initial adopters have had their life circumstances change, often causing a reduction in hours available to play. This is neither good, nor bad, simply a fact.

Blizzard's earnings from WoW are based mostly on monthly subscription. Designing WoW in such a fashion to maximize subscriptions is in their best interest. Blizzard's ideal design is a game you could play 24/7 if you desire, but are still content if you can only play a couple hours a week. The greater still permits the lesser - only permitting a couple hours play a week is not in their interest.

Those who happen to have vast amounts of free time can participate in various grinds (PvP, Arena, Raiding, Dungeons, Reputation, and Achievements to name a few). Those with less time can pick and choose their activities.

Don't have time to run dungeons, farm mats, and raid? Fair enough, you're a busy person, but don't expect Blizzard to change WoW or remove game options. Instead think about changing how you organize your game time (Blizzard has added many features to make this possible). You and friends/acquaintances have enough time to farm or raid in a week, but not both? Then organize around it. Farm on odd weeks, raid on even weeks. Or farm day 1, raid day 2. Not enough time to clear? Extend raid over as many weeks as necessary to clear, then release lock and start over.

Or run Dungeons for X weeks, then progress into multi-week lockout Raids. Got a vacation day and going to play 3 extra hours this week? Run a dungeon, do some dailies, get ahead on farming, kill some nasty Alliance/Horde - enjoy your extra time.

Build your WoW experience around your schedule and free time - it's highly configurable. Changing WoW to meet lesser requirements would only penalize those who happen to have the greater time available.

Just because you have time constraints does not mean the game needs to have them built in and enforced. Put it this way: suddenly you gain millions of dollars/euros/currency-of-your-choice, are set for life, and retire. You have enough extra time to meet all your social obligations with time to spare. You choose to put some of this time back into WoW, do you want to be restricted and unable to do more?