What is Midcore? Why does it matter?

[LittleImp]

I almost think we should just ditch the terminology altogether; There's enough discourse on these forums to demonstrate that casual/midcore/hardcore are not only subjective, but also regularly change definitions respective to the scope of what is being discussed.

For example, all three terms (Casual, midcore, hardcore) can be invoked to describe different levels of savage+ raiding groups, and tend to be based on time commitment, skill-level and ambition. Yet, when we're talking about the full scope of the game, the terms are almost always applied instead based on what types of content someone is interested in. This creates a lot of confusion, willful and otherwise, wherein people aren't operating with shared definitions of the terms they're mutually using.

I've started to just say things like "We need more content like X" or "Content like X but with the difficulty of Y" because the subjectivity around 'midcore' is too confusing in many cases.

[Berkin]

I almost think we should just ditch the terminology altogether; There's enough discourse on these forums to demonstrate that casual/midcore/hardcore are not only subjective, but also regularly change definitions respective to the scope of what is being discussed.

The one thing that's not subjective is the significant gap between current Ex's and the hardest content before it, which would be normal raids and alliance raids. It's a substantial increase not only in mechanical difficulty, but in time commitment and personal responsibility as well.

There's really no other gap as large as this one if you were to lay out the content as stepping stones:

Guildhest(lmao) - Dungeon - Trial - Alliance/Normal Raids - *void* - Extreme trials/Early Savage - Late Savage - Old Ultimates - DSR/TOP

A few things to note:

-Having easier Extremes helps a little bit but as soon as we're getting into asinine body checks like Golbez it's really not much different than early savage.
-Had they done Criterion correctly it would serve as a better bridge just like Bozja/Eureka stuff did, but as it is it's just another Savage.
-DD would probably also work as a bridge difficulty wise if it wasn't for the huge time commitment and personal responsibility.
-You could also argue that over gearing Ex's and early savage fills that gap but not only does that feel silly it also means we're still getting no """midcore""" content on odd patches, only on even patches due to new gear.

I don't think it's a hard problem to solve though, with Exploratory content and an actual middle ground in Criterion being the obvious solutions.

[Shurrikhan]

For example, all three terms (Casual, midcore, hardcore) can be invoked to describe different levels of savage+ raiding groups, and tend to be based on time commitment, skill-level and ambition. Yet, when we're talking about the full scope of the game, the terms are almost always applied instead based on what types of content someone is interested in. This creates a lot of confusion, willful and otherwise, wherein people aren't operating with shared definitions of the terms they're mutually using.

I'm not sure why that'd be considered especially problematic, let alone unique. The same occurs with most words covering spans of a given spectrum. Their referents are contextual and half the time signal things tangential to those spectrums anyways.

"I play Savage casually" makes plenty of sense, even if we can also say "I prefer casual content" and understand that any but perhaps the very easiest of Savage fights are probably not intended referents (especially if on-patch).