More Than Just Raiding

I'm increasingly enthralled by WarcraftPets.com. Lately I've been updating my comment more, and reading others' comments on their latest pet acquisitions and other "casual" dealings in WoW. Its actually quite amazing how many people enjoy this - its quite heartening, actually.
Blizzard spends so much time and effort on these huge, hardcore raids that only a fragment of the WoW population will ever see (although it is a larger percentage now since they made the early WotLK raids more accessible). Its nice to see lately that they seem to be spending just as much time on the more "casual" aspects of WoW - role playing, fishing, solo questing, pet/mount collecting and the like.

In this latest patch alone there were over a dozen new vanity pets and mounts added, as well as cool racial shirts, tabards, banners, weapons and other goodies, most of which are thanks to the Argent Tournament. There were also new goodies added for fishing fiends - new dailies and a new mount to be fished up in Northrend schools. All this stuff will keep me busy into the foreseeable future, yet still at a casual pace. Yesterday I completed the cooking daily, the new fishing daily and all five available Argent Tournament dailies in roughly an hour (although it probably could have been less if I didn't get horrible lag doing one of those dailies in Crystalsong Forest for some reason).

I like this new trend that's been a long time in coming. They've dabbled in heavy casual content since early Burning Crusade, but, in my opinion, are just starting to get the hang of it and get enough stuff added to keep casual players who want to stay away from the "raid or die" attitude busy at level 80.