Hardcore, easy mode and the XI veteran

[DoctorMog]

Since when does "hard" have to be a timesink or have a punishment associated with it?

A boss fight can't simply be difficult?
A quest can't simply require some strategy?

It's the ridiculous assumptions of what "hardcore" means, that is causing this debate to be stereotyped into the freekin ground.

Content doesn't have to punish players or be a timesink to provide the difficulty we want.

Drop your mental illusion that a challenging encounter requires 200 hours of farming and a team of 400.

It doesn't.

[Kiroh]

Since when does "hard" have to be a timesink or have a punishment associated with it?

A boss fight can't simply be difficult?
A quest can't simply require some strategy?

It's the ridiculous assumptions of what "hardcore" means, that is causing this debate to be stereotyped into the freekin ground.

Content doesn't have to punish players or be a timesink to provide the difficulty we want.

Drop your mental illusion that a challenging encounter requires 200 hours of farming and a team of 400.

It doesn't.

Check any of the threads on this and the majority of self-identified hardcores will disagree with you. Many seem to think long spawn times, forced grouping, and artificially high learning curves are the definitions of hardcore

[DoctorMog]

Check any of the threads on this and the majority of self-identified hardcores will disagree with you. Many seem to think long spawn times, forced grouping, and artificially high learning curves are the definitions of hardcore

Their definition and mine might be different, but my point remains the same.

Hard content does not = long respawns, years of grinding or stupidly low droprates.

[weeble]

yeah i remember getting my peacock charm, was when they went rare/ex. i got everything when they turned rare/ex. i spent a life time trying prior to that and without success, too many rmt and there boot pulls all day. but when they change to rare/ex was perfect no rmt, still took a long time, my peacock took 2months, an when i mean 2months i mean i didn't leave there for 2months outside of events and ran right back. i would try trick the squatters following you for tod mark, by being there 4hrs early leave b4 time, and then hope back cause low and behold they would leave too lol. but 2months later i was rockin my peacock and very happy with it. love it.

[SniperRifle]

Those events were overcome through trial and error by gamers who spent drawn out months learning only the very basic mechanics of the game in an arduous and arbitrary grind intended to do nothing more than to stall players while the development team cooked up something for their players to actually do with their capped characters.



I don't have time to read rest cause I'm off to work but I'll reread it there. I've thought this ^ for a long time but never had sources to back it up. Idk if you do either, technically it's impossible to back it up unless you can get word-of-mouth from the producer "We're just stalling you bitches til we come up w/ a good idea." However, I do believe this too be true. It's the only reasoning behind the abomination that FFXIV was at launch, that they didn't want everyone to be at cap waiting for content because if you can lvl fast then game is ez mode lawl which some people can't shake.

I barely frequent forums anymore cause of all the QQ so I can't tell if this mentality has kept up, but it did at one point and because you made this thread I'm guessing it still has.