My first gaming experiences with MMO?s were with EQ1 and later DAOC. Though both of these were not of the extreme hardcore nature of typing in your actions and attacks. I still viewed both of them as huge time sinks, and along the lines of what other posters have been calling hardcore. In both of these games I spent countless hours of my day going through the motions and taking the steps necessary to call myself, and to show others that I was hardcore. During this time I was still in college and I had the luxury of time.

However I leap forward to my current situation. I am now a working man, who spends 8 hours a day sitting at a desk doing paper work, as well as another 2 dealing with traffic both ways. Now I am sure that in your mind you are saying to yourself that there is no way that this person can be hardcore. Well my purpose of this post is to prove you wrong. The reason that I am still able to achieve many of the accomplishments that I was able to in those older games is because the time sinks such as horrible travel times and insane respawn timers have been removed. I leveled straight through WoW in barely a week played and less than a month real time. I joined a hardcore guild and raided with them every night till I got a full set of the best gear in the game at the time. I then became bored with aspects such as the horrible pvp and the routine end game instances, thus I switched back to my old DAOC toon which barely held my interest for a month. Thus I have ventured to EQ2 in hopes of finding something I lost when I quit the original; I started on March 9th and am now level 60 with 12 days played. I have a pending invite to one of the top three guilds on the server who are closing in on completing the end game KOS instances.

I love the gaming experience, and thoroughly enjoy seeing people that were level 20 when I was 10 still stuck in their 40?s while I am closing in on finishing my exp grind. Now to me EQ2 is one of the most hardcore MMO?s out right now, though not as hardcore as some would like. I believe that I have gotten what I was hoping for when I started playing, and I have high expectations for the raids that I will soon be enjoying with my new guild. In the theme of the post I will give what I believe constitutes a hardcore player. It is someone who knows what they are doing, and has a vast amount of knowledge in the MMO world. It is someone who strives to be better than the next player and knows what they need to do to achieve that. It isn?t someone who sits in front of their computer logging endless hours playing a game, but instead someone who invests quality hours accomplishing the key parts of a game that will allow them to advance to the next tier, and eventually the top tier.

Because my experiance says that time spent gaming rather than time spent doing mundane ( or non fun tasks within gaming ) is the real differance maker between hardcore and casual gamers, I am hard pressed to agree that a game which dissassociates specific aspects of mundane tasks really constitutes harm on the part of the hardcore gamer or conversely, benefit to the casual gamer.

An example that another poster brought up was traveling. In Guild Wars – providing you have been to the specific city before, you can travel across the world – from one city to another in an instant. That – compared to Everquest (1) where traveling from Qeynos to Freeport could take even an experianced lvl 50 – an hour.

Your argument is that the ” hardcore gamer ” is being harmed ( directly or indirectly ) within Guild Wars because he isn’t required to run that potentially long distance. But if you use my definition ( TIME ) rather than ( Mundane/Boring Tasks ) being the equalizer – you might see that the ability to travel from point a to point b ( ala Guild Wars ) actually harms the casual player much more than it harms the hardcore gamer – while at the same time, allowing the casual gamer to compete alongside or against the hardcore gamer in realms where player skill might be a determining factor in deciding which is a better gamer ( PVP ).

It sounds as if you are stating that those willing to perform mundane tasks for hours on end should be considered hardcore gamers – even when they do not enjoy those tasks -. Similarly – a gamer who doesn’t enjoy those mundane tasks and thus gravitates to games where those mundane tasks do not exist is defined as a casual gamer.

My definition of hardcore vs casual is a bit differant.

As the guild master of a mediumish ( 4+ish years ) old guild, my experiance with gamers would have me believe that the definitive “thing” that seperates the hardcore gamer from the casual gamer is time.

Even when you remove other forms of gaming ( FPS, RTS, SIM and Sinple Player RPGs ) and stick just within the MMO genre – a hardcore gamer might not like the grind of EQ2 or WOW – yet might enjoy the cut throat politics and/or social dynamics of a game like Shadowbane and therefore spend all of his/her time becoming a notorious killer rather than spending all of his/her time getting a pretty looking set of new gear ala WOW/EQ2, whereas a casual gamer – while possibly enjoying the same things as the hardcore gamer – simply will not do it as much. Time again being the determining factor between the two.

I do worry for upcoming games that specifically target the hardcore market, though. Part of the draw, at least for me, was that I was much more of a badass than many other players in these games. I was hardcore, so I was willing to do what it took to prove how uber I was. Casual gamers aren’t going to play hardcore games, so it doesn’t motivate me to play the hardcore game since I’ll be run-of-the-mill there (everyone else who plays is hardcore too). Then again, maybe this will promote more competition.

Great points, Spyte. I personally dislike any barriers to gameplay just as much as the next guy, if not more. This has only be amplified by recent more casual games and all of the convenient features they include. The only hardcore game I would play at this point would be one that is hardcore because of what goes on in the game. That is, political struggle, territorial control, city building, etc. would attract me. Games that have slow progression and are unnecessarily complicated to play scare me off.

Xeon, I agree with everything except that the return to difficult gameplay would attract those lost in the storm. Difficult gameplay is bad (gameplay loosely defined as how you interact with the game world via its interface, how you fight, etc.). Tedium is not fun to me anymore, even though it was at one point because I knew I could advance further than the more casual players.

Also… “Those two combined have taken the wind out of many hardcore players, as the reason they are playing no longer exists (to be better than everyone else).”

Yes, but games that are created specifically for hardcore players won’t have casual players in them, so hardcore players won’t be better than everyone else. Hardcore gamers that aren’t better than most others will likely get disillusioned and quit, and those that stuck around would be “average” overall and might see that as something that sucks.

However, with games like WoW, there are no “hardcore” secrets anymore. It’s fairly easy for everyone to follow quests, get equipment, etc. Sure there are still the raid masters with ultra-gear that casual players don’t have, but that’s about it.
In addition, WoW/DDO/etc have taken away the populations of the older hardcore MMO’s such as EQ/EQII/etc so that only other hardcore players are still playing them.

Those two combined have taken the wind out of many hardcore players, as the reason they are playing no longer exists (to be better than everyone else).

However, I think that Vanguard, with it’s return to difficult gameplay, may be the new MMO for those lost in the storm. Of course, only time will tell…

I’d never lower myself like this in any other game but the MMOG market is just so damn stale right now.

If the game has features to make achieving relatively ordinary tasks easy(eg. finding a group; travelling from one end of a zone to the other end of another zone; crafting a basic item that can be sold for profit etc.) then all players benefit, whether hardcore or casual.

I don’t regard it as “hardcore” simply to dump a load of time into a game in order to achieve the tasks that are prerequisites to the contextually “real” achievements of your character. That isnt hardcore. Its just anti-immersive.

Anyone can stand outside Mos Eisley killing baby lizards for hours on end in SWG and slowly but surely rack up the skill points. That aint hardcore – thats just a sign of too much time and a lack of imagination of how to make the most of the VW concerned.

Designers should deal with making the gameworld an easier place to operate in and then entertain players with a ton of content. This is exactly what the designers of EQ2 have done. The content in that game is gigantic.

The “hardcore” players then have the option of travelling to the remotest dungeons or raiding for exclusive items. Very casual players can log in, go do some solo killing in one of the overland zones or maybe group and then log off. The way that hardcore gamers play changes. Instead of taking an age to get anything done at all, they can take an age getting something done. That doesnt stop them being hardcore. Time is still required. And it needs to be used intelligently.

And – this is important on this point – there is no magic box which flags a player as “hardcore” or not. Some players might be hardcore levellers. Others are hardcore crafters. Others hardcore raiders. Or a combination of the foregoing. And they go hardcore for different reasons.

I have one toon who is a level 30 crafter bu only level 14 adventurer in EQ2 – Does that make me a hardcore crafter? No. My main is a lvl 61 adventurer. The idea that there are 2 games going on in the same world is wrong for 2 reasons. First, it can be said that there are 5,000 seperate games going on in a world, with one for each player. Each player’s game is created by them based on their ambitions within the virtual world concerned.

This fits with Richard Bartle’s breakdown of players into 4 categories: Explorer, Achiever, Killer or Socialiser (I did that from memory – apologies to Dr Bartle if its inaccurate). There is ample room for hardcore play in each of those categories, but the hardcore socialisers, who love running a big guild, are not competing with the hard core explorers who want to scrawl their tag on the bottom of the deepest dungeon. Every player has their own objectives and thus their own game.

Or there is just one game. Everyone (should) play by the same rules and the toons run in the same virtual world.

Apologies for such a long post (and gratz if you stayed with it to the end!). But the OP and the responses have been really interesting. Like Erik, I’m hoping to learn some stuff from this exchange.