Lack of End Game Content

[Zabuza]

Nah, the reality is, you can never sate the entertainment of a hardcore gamer because no matter how much content you throw at them it will never be enough.

It is a plateau when it comes to how much you can invest in content for hardcore gamers in comparison to the profit margin. As it stands now they most likely have the best middle-ground to satisfy the needs of both types of gamers. In SE's head it's worth it if the hardcore community plays on 2 months cycles, taking a break on the 3rd cause that's still 30 every 2 months, if they pay by month, since you can't really do a 3/6 month if you want to take a break, so for SE it's potentially more profitable to have these hardcore gamers pay to play the game every 8 months paying 120 then it be for them to sub for 6 months at a time and pay 156/yr. The lost of money isn't that huge, it's a 36 dollar difference which isn't a big loss. Even if a person only plays on a monthly basis coming back every patch that's still 75/yr which is the cost of an average new game which is still good in their books especially if you can sustain that through a huge playerbase.

If anything, it's also better to not have a huge amount of content for hardcore gamers since the other issue is burn out. If you create to much difficult content and have players play through it aiming to be the first, then by the time they achieve everything they might be to burned out to play the game.

That's odd, because FFXI satisfied my desires back when I was 18 and played 60+ hours a week. Sky, Sea, Einherjar, Limbus, Dynamis, Salvage, Assault, HNMS. Yet somehow, now when I have a full time job and can only devote 20 hours or so a week to this game, I blow through experts/extreme/savage within 2 months. This statement is a cop-out. But I guess a lot of people here don't remember or haven't experienced what the old MMOs were like and think it's just not possible to make enough content to satisfy 'hardcore' players. As is, they can't even satisfy the midcore.