A Hardcore Embarkation: Time
Over the next few months, I’m slowly going to be investigating what “hardcore” really is. For a little background, and for this post to make sense, read my original post. The first thing I want to do before even attempting to find what motivates players to become “hardcore” is: how are players hardcore? What are they willing to do to reach their goals? The first, and most obvious, is time.
Some players are willing to put in an incredible amount of time to reach their goals in an MMO (or any other game, for that matter). When someone refers to another player as “hardcore,” they often mean that the player they’re referring to plays the game for significantly more time than they do.
Hardcore is relative; me saying someone is hardcore could mean they play 20 hours of an MMO a week, while another person saying someone is hardcore could mean they play 60 hours of an MMO a week. That relatively is an issue we can try to resolve later (by looking for averages against which to measure someone’s level of hardcore).
I believe that someone can be hardcore in the area of time no matter how good they are at a game. They might dawdle around and chat the vast majority of the time they are logged in, but if they are logged in for appreciably more than the average amount of time, they are Time-Hardcore. This claim alone is a bit of a deviation from the standard hardcore reference; if you refer to a socialite player as hardcore in a group of raiders, you’ll be strung up and left for dead. But, even a non-achiever can be Time-Hardcore if only they dedicate a significant amount of time to the game.
If anyone has numbers for how much time the average WoW player spends per week, I would love to know. World of Warcraft is likely going to be the reference for much of this analysis, because WoW is our common MMO language.
To summarize:
Time-Hardcore
A player who dedicates a significant amount of time to playing a game is Time-Hardcore, regardless of the motivation or result.
In a few weeks (after the lovely upcoming Christmas vacation), we’ll look more at other ways players can be hardcore, such as with skill or knowledge.
I’m sure Nick Yee’s Deadalus Project likely has a lot of info you would find useful.
Grr..
Why “Grr?”
You could probably get some good WOW numbers from xfire. Though only thing is that it’s a small subset of the overall community.
Getting to the subject though, hardcore like you said, is relative. Usually hardcore is time spent and achievements made. You’re also probably pretty good at whatever you’re doing too. You can be hardcore with little time played currently, however at one point you were “Time-Hardcore” to get to the point of where you’re at.
There are also terms out there now like Casual-Hardcore. Which is basically someone with the mentality of a hardcore player but doesn’t have the time to achieve in a game in a quicker fashion but is it the same skill level.
“World of Warcraft is likely going to be the reference for much of this analysis, because WoW is our common MMO language.”
Try to occaisionally use another MMO language, I don’t speak WoW and have no intention of learning it.
JuJutsu: Sorry, but it’s the common language. I talk about lots of stuff other than WoW, but when trying to talk about something as “general MMO” as possible, it would be stupid to talk about it in non-WoW terms, unless it can be easily generalized further. If/when there is a more popular MMO than WoW, that will become the common language. Until then, that’s it. That said, most MMOs can be understood when speaking in the common language, even if some of it uses WoW as its basis.
Some of those numbers might be available through Gamer DNA (http://www.gamerdna.com/) as well Ryan.
I think Nick Yee’s estimates may be the best reference. 22.7 hours per week. Now. That’s average. So, average isn’t hardcore. Where would you draw the line of someone being hardcore 5, 10, 15 more hours per week?
Yee’s numbers also take into account people who had and account but didn’t play at all. And, also, it included gold farmers who made it their life’s work to play WoW all the time. Does that skew the average hours a “typical” gamer would play?
Ideally, the average would be taken from a legitimate cross-section of players who are actually playing. No gold farmers, no people who have subscriptions and don’t play. That said, 20 hours is probably a decent spot to call “average,” and is the number I would have used in the absence of data.
As to what number makes someone hardcore or softcore (which is legitimately the opposite of hardcore, despite always eliciting the wrong images), that should be easy to figure out given the wealth of information on statistical measurements.
I’d suggest we use either 25% or 60% deviation to define hardcore. If we go with 25%, then playing more than 25 hours a week means you are Time-Hardcore, though only mildly so.
We’ll probably want to express degrees a bit more intelligently to something like:
Time-Low-Outlier: 0 hours per week
Time-Super-Softcore: 0 to 5 hours per week
Time-Softcore: 10 hours per week
Time-Below-Average: 10 to 15 hours per week
Time-Average: 15 to 25 hours per week
Time-Above-Average: 25 to 30 hours per week
Time-Hardcore: 30 to 35 hours per week
Time-Super-Hardcore: 35 hours or more per week
Time-High-Outlier: 40 hours or more per week
In other words… 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100% deviation each demand some sort of terminology to distinguish degrees. I set “hardcore” at 50% or more hours higher than average in my example there.
Are these times relegated to only playing one game? If someone plays more then one MMO (or any combination of games) are they still considered hardcore if they spend more then 30 hours per week playing?
Or, like I’m more likely to do, play one game 30+ hours per week for 2-6 months and then swap to a different game.
@NaruBrian Nice. That was like drinking a 12-pak, but with none of the ill effects. LOL.
@Ryan – That sounds good to me. I was pegging hardcore right around 35 hours based on the levels at which some of my friends play. 3 hours a night 5 days a week (15 hours) and 8 hours on both Saturday and Sunday (16 hours) (Total = 31 hours). I was just bringing up the farmers and non-players for sake of discussion…but getting rid of them probably doesn’t change the numbers much, like you’ve shown. I like the sliding scale.
Hardcore is the player running a 300 man corporation on the break of war in a region that is unsecure from loss.
Hardcore is losing everything you worked for in the past month to a 5-man squad of space pirates.
Hardcore knows that no matter how many people say it on the forums; you know this setup owns face because of experience not what others say.
Hardcore is sitting in an area for 4 hours before striking at just the right moment when the victim’s friends head back to base.
Hardcore IS NOT spending time in a game with no loss. Hardcore is risk vs. reward. Find the risk; find the definition of hardcore.
Littlehorn: Yes. But, those are different types of hardcore. Time-Hardcore is one type, and what you’re describing is a different type (or types, really). What I’m trying to do is find those types. Time, Skill, Depth, etc.
I’d think anything that constitutes another “job” is fair to say hard core. In the strictest terms, 40 hours a week. Though, who among us with “40 hour a week” professions just work 40 hours?
More or less, back in my EQ2 days my time was roughly 60 hours a week involved with the game. That wasn’t necessarily playing. I had rosters, loot, recruitment and several other duties to attend. This including pestering you.
Now, I still log on quite a bit, but no longer consider myself “hardcore.” I probably play 30-40 hours a week though. I suppose this is about economies of scale.
Regardless, I think your number are fine.
You may also want to consider commitment hardcore. This overlaps with other types like time, knowledge, and skill. But some raiders play less than 15 hours a week. However, 12 of those hours are scheduled and attended on time with very few absences week to week just like a job, a class, or soccer practice would be. It may not be as apparent to other players, but to those outside the world (IRL) there is a noticeable difference between somebody who plays 40 hours a week but only plays during free time(casual) and somebody who plays 15 hours a week but tries to schedule other things in their life around their raid times.
Ryan Shwayder: There can only be one type of hardcore and that’s just HARDCORE. That’s what I’m trying to state!
The Daedalus Project gives the average playing time for WoW players as 22.7 hours per week, with a standard deviation of 14.1. What you’re really interested in here is the standard deviation, which tells you how wide the “spread” is around the mean. Here, one standard deviation above the mean would be 36.8 hours, so those 40+ hour players may be more common than you think.
EVE isn’t a game so you can’t count that as hardcore-anything.
yay! they deleted my comment! hah there u have it!
Your numbers/ break-outs seem reasonable to a first-order, but not to overly complicate things, I think the definition of hardcore-Time is varies depending upon a expansion/ content patch cycle. A “Time-Super-Hardcore” player will typically dedicate significantly more time immediately after an expansion/ patch, with that time dropping off once the “end” has been reached. On the other end, a “Time-Softcore” player might also increase their play rate, perhaps on a similar percentage basis, but it’ll be far fewer absolute hours.
From what I’ve witnessed, mid-to-higher-end guilds will swing more between classifications. My guild went from the low-20s (Time-Average) during late-BC to low 40s now (Time-High-Outlier) – a swing of 5 classifications, ultimately settling on Time-Above-Average. Some high-high end guilds took months off at the end of BC. On the other extreme, some of my casual friends maybe dipped into the Time-Super-Softcore in late-BC and now they’re probably Time-Below-Average with WOLK out – at most 3 (more ilkely 2) classification swings.
In the end I don’t have any sort of better classification/ break-out to offer which is easy to measure. I think this is just something to be aware of/ consider before drawing too many conclusions from other people’s data or if you’re considering a survey of your own. (Note I haven’t seen any of The Daedalus Project’s work, I’d expect they’ve looked into this at some point as it sounds like they’ve done a lot of work in this area.)
Vald
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[...] introduction. Then, I discussed one way in which players can be hardcore: dedicating significant Time to a game. Other than time, what are players willing to do to reach the goals they set for [...]