Matching Casual and Heavy Players
Online games have a hierarchy to them, or at least that’s what I like to call it. It’s often described using a pyramid, the width of the pyramid being representative of the number of players. At the peak are the hard-cores—the minority of players who completely immerse themselves in the game, playing day and night and often forgetting their biological imperatives. As you work your way down the pyramid, players become increasingly casual. It bears mentioning that this model illustrates the quantity of players only, not quality.
In the first generation of MMORPGs, the pyramids were skinny and tall. In the current generation, while I think the peak should still stay way up there, the slopes projecting down from it should be less extreme.
What I want to make is a theme park where both casuals and hard-cores can exist and play together. That’s the minimum requirement I think a modern MMORPG should fulfill.
I hope you heavy gamers out there will hurry to clear the game’s latest contents. I hope you beat Ifrit before anyone else and get those new weapons. I hope other players will see you and want to do the same. I hope you try and clear the beastman strongholds with less than the maximum number of players. And I hope you post on the forums about all your accomplishments.
I hope you more casual players will enjoy traveling around Eorzea by chocobo and airship with your in-game and real-life friends while working your way up to end-game content like the Ifrit fight. By then, the battle strats will be worked out, and you’ll be able to fight at your own pace. There’s no need to rush.
Both play styles have their place. Should the need arise, we’ll look into adjusting the level of difficulty, or introducing a system that lets you set it yourself.
For any given content, the difference in the amount of time players need to figure it out and get the loot will unavoidably vary.
Hard-core gamers are hard-core gamers because they are always leading the charge. Following close behind their trailblazing are the “mid-cores.” And then there’s the casual gamers making progress at their own pace.
To realize the ideal we have in place, we need a powerful matching system capable of connecting all of these players, whatever their rates of progression might be. We plan to study what other MMORPGs have achieved here, and make it one of our main tasks as we move forward, together with add-ons and the UI.
Speaking of the UI, we are well aware that there are still difficulties with the mouse/keyboard interface. I’m a mouse/keyboard man myself, so believe me when I say I plan to continue making both little and big improvements with global standards in mind.
The ideal we’ve put in place may be a bit up there, but we have every intention of achieving it, and will do everything in our power to do so.