Casual vs Hardcore

[Dzian]

Where is the line between casual and hardcore?
2 hours a day? 4? 8? 12?
At which point does someone become hardcore?
Is it even time related?

To be honest I read the op and all I can think of is a little boy whining "SE I have no life, no job, no love. Give me something in this game to make me feel special"
Does that make me sound like an ass? Probably. But I don't really care.

Au contraire.

Good players simply want content that justifies them being a good player, or being in a good linkshell. FFXI accomplished this. BLM's and RDM's solo'ed NMs in sky and sea where entire linkshells would sometimes wipe. Linkshells defined themselves by killing (or even monopolizing) mobs others could not even get to 98% before the wipe. There were reasons to be a good player, not just a hardcore player, and many of the very best players were full time students or worked 50 hours a week. The most accomplished BLM on my server had to leave for weeks at a time because he was in the Coast Guard.

This whole notion of "hardcore" versus "casual" is annoying. It's a dumb WoW term (or wherever it came from!) and has no place, IMO, in a Final Fantasy community. Good or bad. Which are you? We want SE to give us the content to find out.

This! The Good, The Bad & The Average. I've seen "Hardcore" players die stupidly on PLD cos they get caught by a group of frogs and can't get away from them. the thought of popping Tempered Will would easily save their ass but no. and countless other derps.

For the FFXI community, we all know how hard was to get Ultimas or Omegas gear

The OP mentions Ultima / Omega. Homan / Nashira gear as being hardcore.
From what I remember Limbus was an hour at most with a 3 day lock out. I was 5/5 nashira and played about as casully as I do 14. Yet the op classes limbus as hard core content. Many considered Einherjar elite content and that was 30 minutes dead. There were no time extentions. 30 mins only again with a 3 day lock out. Again I cleared it several times. Elite Einherjar title and all. still I was a "casual" player.

This whole mindset of must play 24/7 to get anything is crap. Rewards should be reliant on skill not time spent trying and limbus / einherjar are 2 great examples of how skill does not mean doing the same stuff 12 hours a day.

I find it amusing though that the OP uses what many casual players would describe as the perfect content system and want to see more of (limbus) is the very same thing he considers hardcore.

ITT: People who think that they're better than others because they play a video game more.

I couldn't agree more.

So yeah where is the line between casual and hardcore?
How many hours a day must I play to gain the "Auto Elite Skills" trait?
Does playing 4 hours a day majically make me a better tank than playing 3?
Is there a secret buff that enhances my defence or dps by a multiplier of time played?
If that's the case no wonder ul'dah is always full of afkers

The thing to do for endgame is to do a lot of what XI did for endgame. XI didn't do everything through horrendous drop rates; it did it through multiple levels of challenge. Let's see a linkshell of casuals go after PW.

Even ZNM I'd consider fairly casual. You could run out farm your zeni in your spare time and if one night you've got a few friends online you could go kill the mob and start working on the next one. When you hit the higher tier mobs maybe schedule em for a weekend or something. It was very much something you could do at any pace you wanted.