dev1031 You are losing your main playerbase by making things too easy/fast/casual

[Abriael]

all games are basically a time sink (especially any MMO), You play games for fun, and the accomplishment of achievements/ personal goals. So saying something like this game won't be a timesink is kind of silly IMO. ^^

A timesink is an artificial way to *waste* the time of the player, and can be more or less hidden. Time -> Sink = wasted time.

If you are required to spend an extended amount of time camping an NM, waiting for it to pop, that's a timesink, because the game isn't conductive to fun, you're just staring at the screen and wasting your time while you wait for it to happen.

If you have to play all the way through a dungeon for the same amount of time, having to avoid traps, solve riddles, fight challenging and varied bosses and generally having fun, you're still *spending* time, but you're not *wasting* it. Ergo, you're not being subject to a timesink.

Some hardcore gamers are ok with timesinks because they have a ton of time in their hands, and wasting some waiting isn't that bad. Even worse, some advocate it to exclude other people from accessing the same content as they do.

Casuals have more limited time, and this means that they want to spend their limited gaming time *actively* having fun. No matter how hard or challenging that content may be. Dead times are not fun, ergo good game design excludes them.

It's really that simple.

I don't know how many times I've said this but a 21-24 hour NM doesn't mean you sit around for 24 hours. It means it can pop 21 to 24 hours after it's killed so 3 hours max.

Sitting around for 3 hours staring at a screen is still an enormous amount of *wasted* time. Even ONE hour of sitting and staring at a screen is nothing else than an hour of my life that I'll never get back. That's simply bad design.

Honestly there shouldn't be this division between "hardcore" "casual" w/e... There should be content no matter how much time you have to play. The problem is everything thing is easy right now. From leveling to killing NMs. Nothing requires much of any thought at all, just time but far less time than FFXI.

Realism and logic would dictate not to expect elite-level content in a game that still *radically* lacks content that can be enjoyed by everyone. Really challenging content will come when the easy/average content will be in place.
Even more so, realism and logic would dictate that hard/elaborate content can't come before the combat system is final and in place. The more tactical an encounter is, the less generic, the more specific it becomes in regard of fighting mechanics. If you changed combat around AFTER difficul/complex content was added, they would have to redesign the content *again* after the new battle system is implemented.
The development team is hardly in a position to waste development time doing things twice.