Am I casual?

What is your definition of a casual?

For me, a casual is someone like my husband. He is lucky if he gets to log in at all during the week. Waking up at 4am for work, getting home at around 6pm, eating dinner and chilling with the tv before hitting the hay at 8pm will do that for ya. Sure, we spend some weekends playing nearly all day. But due to his job, he is 'on call' all weekend and at any time he can be called to head out the door. There really is no time for him to do dungeons or raid. He is happy to spend the few hours he gets playing alongside my characters.

But they say people who don't raid or arena are casuals-like it is some sort of bad thing. With most people you are either "hardcore" or "casual". With that choice, I am definitely "casual" because I don't raid or dungeon or mass pvp. But look at that list of my characters in the post below...sometimes I play from the time my kid gets on the bus in the morning until about 5pm when it's time to cook dinner. Some say that would make me "hardcore" due to the time I've put into the game. So which is it?

I've already made myself quite clear how much I prefer soloing, and actually loathe grouping with other people(other than hubby of course). I could spend all day, all of those hours, doing dungeon after dungeon-but I don't want to do that. I've already listed my reasons why I don't raid, and they somewhat apply to doing dungeons as well. Mainly, I just don't want to waste 4 other people's time if I (a) suck or (b) have to leave during the run to get something done. And I will (a) suck, because most assuredly there will be someone in the group who will tell me that I do. Yeah, thanks, I know that and I don't really want to deal with someone else that I don't know telling me that I do.

I guess I'm just confused because I get so angry at all the "hardcore" "elitists" who think the game is being "dumbed down for the stupid horrible casuals". If that were the case then my hubby would be in full epics, right? But that wouldn't make him a better healer, by getting better gear-because it's about the player having skill, NOT the gear. I mean, my druid is in all epics(except for 2 blues) and that obviously doesn't make me a better player. It doesn't even mean that a relative who JUST leveled up to 80 last week and was already going to Naxx in quest greens(on a new server with people he doesn't know) won't even consider asking if I want to hit up some dungeons. It's obviously because I SUCK.

But you see, I'm ok with that. I don't CARE ABOUT THE STUPID PURPLE GEAR! I don't care that 99% of the other players have an average item level of 265 or whatever and I haven't even cracked 200. But does that make me "casual" or just "indifferent"? Well, I suppose it really is both because if you check "indifferent" in the thesaraus, you find "casual" in the list of synonyms. You also find "loner" and "unsociable" as well. That's me.

And please don't tell me to find a different game...obviously I LIKE playing this one-or I wouldn't have so many characters with so much /played time.