Is it possible to keep the Hardcore appeased?

[Seniade]

In the end, it is pretty much impossible to appease the hardcore crowd. Between level design, mechanics and art, it takes longer to develop content than it does to complete it. Even if a game launched with 6 months worth of content at a hardcore pace and still have more content being developed, there will hit a breaking point in which the hardcore players will have caught up to what has been released.

The only ways to try control this is through ramped up difficulty or artificial limitations. With ramping up the difficulty to slow down player progression, the company would be spending money developing content for a tiny percentage of the overall consumer base, which no company in their right mind would do. With artificial limitations (such as the fatigue system at the launch of 1.0, mythology tome caps of arr, or the Japanese midnight wait periods that XI had) you end up potentially angering the customers or even hindering the more casual players. In the end, it's really a no-win situation to try to keep the hardcore crowd appeased.

[Overon]

As long as people can complain , whine , cry , rage , throw fits , and stress a BS Opinion ............They will do it on every issue possible and no Fix or adjustment will ever make them happy........

I would not call them HardCore because they say they want something Harder or more Grindy , at one point or another they were complaining about "How Hard or Grindy" something is till they pasted it , then it becomes "OMG this is too easy" or "Not enough Grind" ........

Real Hardcore Games come in , Max out the game , and leave till new content or never come back because it did not fill their enjoyment for flash and blingbling or Competition .

We all have to understand , Titan will not be hard forever , lots of people are beating it and getting their Relics Finished , and those who can't are buying their cheap win because there are people in this world unable to do anything for themselves ............

[Ri_ri]

MMO = Massively Multiplayer Online game.

By definition, it's meant for the masses. You play 10 hours a day? The mass doesn't, you're screwed. Complain as much as you want, you're still screwed. Try to gather people like you to make you point appear more appreciated? Won't work, you're part of a very small minority. Whatever you try, your playstyle is screwed. Change it and have fun, move along and do something else or be forever displeased with upcoming games.

Actually, the definition is that there are massive amounts of people playing online. It was never meant for the "mass", until recently.

[Teleniel]

I don't consider myself Hardcore, but then I do spent my free time (which is occasionally considerable) online.
I have 2 classes to 50, both of which have completed their Relic (Bard and Warrior), I'm working on Scholar and have at least the titan weapon to level in to.
I have spent a fair bit of time with Gathering Classes, and understand Crafting (although in general the system doesn't appeal to me that much)
I feel that I have Amdapor, Ifrit HM, Garuda HM and Titan HM on farm

The only content I haven't touched yet is Binding Coil. I don't imagine it would take that long for me to learn the concepts unless I tried to go in with 7 other players who hadn't experienced it, hadn't read about it, and didn't want to go look things up and we tried to learn it from scratch. Although because of the way lock-out works we could try until we ran out of $$ to learn this way if we wanted, and then have them on farm (Turn 1-4) in a few weeks time even without it.

I didn't do a lot of Fate Grinding for any one of my classes, I prefered to go with dungeons / combat-leves just because FATEs make me go cross eyed only a slight bit slower than Castrum.

All that being said, yes I think the game is pretty small. I would have been happy if leveling took a little longer, and gear was... more important to being prepared for dungeon content than it currently is.