"Are daily quests leaving casuals behind?"

[Vitandus]

My answer - yes. I an either gring Nemhain, or have fun playing on alts with friends. You'd think Blizzard would encourage the latter since more friends means more revenue... but no.

Drysc laid out the the philosophy of the daily quests pretty clearly pretty early on: They were meant primarily so that the casual player, the one who can only play a few hours every day, could log on, take a daily, and make some real progress towards a tangible goal with good loot at the end. But is that really how things have gone down?

Instead of being a few reputation grinds that could be tackled slowly but surely, Dailies have spread to all corners of the game. Sure, you have your Skettis, your Ogri'la, and your Netherwing Ledge now. But you also have cooking dailies. And dungeon dailies. And PvP dailies. Soon, you'll also have Shattered Sun Offensive dailies and even more PvP dailies! It's already been said by many that dailies feel like a job after a while, and if that's true, patch 2.4 looks like it's going to add quite a bit of overtime.

Seriously, look at that last paragraph again. For a casual mechanic, that's actually a pretty huge list, isn't it? What's even better is that with the daily quest limit raised to 25, you'll be able to do almost all of them every day. Imagine that, 25 quests, every single day. You'll have to rush between Shadowmoon Valley (Only if you have your epic flying mount, and there's been enough debate over whether anyone truly casual can raise 5000 gold), Blade's Edge Mountains, Nagrand, and the Netherstorm, and then head to Azeroth to take care of the Sunwell Isle dailies, not to mention to your favorite capital city to take care of whichever battleground is up for conquering today, and then to whichever two dungeons are needed for the dailies. The battlegrounds can take up another half hour or more depending on the battleground, and the dungeons a good couple hours each, even more if you have to search for a PuG, or fail to win or finish them once you've started.

A good read to be had: http://www.wowinsider.com/2008/02/12/are-daily-quests-leaving-casuals-behind/

[wildcard]

The dailies, I believe, help the casual player as much as the hardcore.  They're phenominal ways to make bucketloads of gold once you hit 70 and they're all confined to their indivudual areas.  Questing can have you trapesing all over Netherstorm or SMV.  And with the amount of L70 BoEs becoming available in patch 2.4, all that extra gold will be a good way to eventually afford decent epics if you don't have the time or inclination to hardcore raid.