Quote Originally Posted by Amnmaat View Post
Indeed, the mmorpg community has had a really hard time with these terms.
I'll agree the skilled/unskilled definition of the 2 types of players that exist in mmos. However, people act dumb, they know things like extremes are not meant for the "unskilled," which is the majority of the subscribers.
The problem is that skill is a spectrum not a binary and not all casuals are unskilled and not all hardcore players are skilled.

The Casual/Hardcore descriptions was originally present as a description of how a player participated in content rather than an amount played description. You can play a game casually nearly constantly (like a fair amount of RPers) and you can play a game hardcore for a limited amount of time each week (like many savage raiders and PvPers).

The main problem is that some players do not want to be considered "Hardcore" due to the negative connotations associated with the term (things like "no life," "elitist," etc.) which is how you end up with Hardcore raiders who consider them selves Casuals because they "only" spend 7.5 hours each week reclearing the current raids.

Which in turn is why they should give them something to do first, they're the first kind of people that will let the subscriptions lapse, as they are not that dedicated to the game in the first place.
Subscriptions lapsing happens even with Hardcore players. A fair number of Hardcore raiders actually stop playing after their statics have gotten all the gear they need until the next big Ultimate or Savage raid comes out.

Casual players on the other hand are more likely to actually have stuff they are slowly doing without rushing.