Quote Originally Posted by Melichoir View Post
Like any games, its not gonna be a 50/50 split, but rather youre gonna have a core group of players (top 10% lets say) who are gonna be the hardcore types. Theyre gonna want challenge, and will put money, time, and effort into the game to meet those challenges. Those players, with their accomplishments and prestige does a lot to drive newer players to a game and keep them interested. Particularly if there are rewards involved. In the case of MMOs, having the cooler gear and mounts, the stats, etc, is an incentive for players to pursue savage or other difficult content. If it was merely about keeping casuals happy, then making content that is absurdly easy with grind and RNG skinner box methods like mobile games would be all that is necessary.

Youll notice that MMOs broadly dont do that. Even MOBAs like LoL dont (or didnt) do that. There are skill floors and skill ceilings and the games are designed to be easy to get into, hard to master, and rewarded for that mastery. However, if you make the jump from casual and hardcore to much (particularly if its from dropping the skill floor out and keeping it down), you get jealousy and entitlement from the casual base who argue "We're the majority. Cater to our whims and make that gear available to us even if we dont apply ourselves." While I may be overstating the attitude, the concept is about right. You lose your elite group in an online game, and that is gonna hurt your brand image a lot as being 'too casual', or if you schism the two groups to much, you get hyper toxicity.

Keepng a healthy hardcore base requires that there be skill floors and pushing players to improve by creating reasonable hurdles they have to overcome to progress in the game. This helps eliminate the "You dont pay my sub" mentality by forcing lesser skilled players to improve, discuss, and interact with better players by seeking help and advice. You reduce more skilled players getting annoyed with dealing with less skilled players (as the skill disparity is smaller) as well as their annoyance that there hard work is not being rewarded. Theres more to it than this, of course, but it's a start. Everyone benefits from having a skill floor and reasonable skill progression despite how counter intuitive that sounds.
Isn't that what the game does with with it's content with Savage and Ultimate? Also I don't see why the small hardcore community is more important than the loyal casual/midcore community. I think your way overstating how important the hardcore raiders are to the game, especially as to make them happy you need to make things a lot worse for large chunks of the community. You've not given a good reason why making everything punishing is a good thing. The game does need a smoother jump from day to day content to the endgame stuff but that needs more content adding in the range which I suspect would not go down well with the Hardcore you say is so important as they will likely not be doing it.