Quote:That would never work out. A casual player would never, ever end up with that much time to start with. Or he would not be a casual player. (Give or take whatever you call and how you define a "casual" player).
There are really a couple of kinds of 'time' here--one is the 'playtime' and one is the amount of 'calendar time'. It seems reasonable for casual players to have some mechanism to upgrade gear at a rate equal to a multiple of the calendar time required for a hardcore players to upgrade gear. Sure, the hardcore player is spending much more playtime to upgrade faster, but the gear gap doesn't spiral out of control.
One method could be 'lockout' questlines where each step requires 3-6 days of calendar time after the completion of the previous step. With sufficiently complex, interesting, and non-grindy quest content, each step in the chain could be like an 'episode' of WoW. That's a win for casual players who might only want a few hours of playtime per week. This effectively becomes a rested system for level-capped characters by allowing them to gain something by not playing.
A system like this would also be a big win for Blizzard because those casual players will pay the same $15/month as hardcore players, but require much less content.