Hardcore... How would you define it?

[Tzain]

I was there when mmo players started to use the term "hardcore". Time for a Cool Story Bro!

It was 1998 and I was heavily playing Everquest. For those of you unfamiliar with Everquest raiding, it was a ton of players crawling their way through an exceptionally long dungeon to get at a very hard boss that had a low chance to drop an item. The average timeframe on most of these things measured in several hours...and that was if you didn't wipe.

Some players, like myself, were willing to spend the hours upon hours needed to drag a group into the depths of these hell holes. I cant even tell you how many raids I led to get Clerics their Epic Weapon. The players that were willing and able to do this, on weekdays, and sometimes 2 -3 times in a row were not common. The term "hardcore raiders" started to make the rounds. I can actually remember one of the first times someone said it to me, it was a descriptive value. "You've run this twice today already?! that's some Hardcore stuff right there".

Eventually the term was applied to anyone who was running the really high level raids that required massive time investment.

That's what the term Hardcore describes. Time investment per day. A casual player might hop on and play an mmo for an hour, maybe an hour and a half (length of an average movie). A hardcore player is going for 3, 4, 5 hours on a weekday and possibly doesn't sleep on a weekend preferring an excess of redbull and caffeine to pick up the slack.

Hardcore DOES NOT indicate anything to do with Skill or Experience. It does not make you superior to anyone or anything, it only describes how much time you spend playing the game in a single sitting.

So if you log in, run the hardest content in the entire game, and then log out until tomorrow when you plan to do it again? You my friend are actually CASUAL. The guy who runs all the roulettes + does a little RP + some crafting for shiggles and runs some dungeons on an alt? That's the HARDCORE one.

[Ryios]

So if you log in, run the hardest content in the entire game, and then log out until tomorrow when you plan to do it again? You my friend are actually CASUAL. The guy who runs all the roulettes + does a little RP + some crafting for shiggles and runs some dungeons on an alt? That's the HARDCORE one.

Not in FFXIV, SE Forces everyone to be casual by that definition because you can only get one primal weapon a week and can only run bcb once. So if you clear bcb in 50 minutes, then knock out the 3 primals in 30 minutes, and run CT in 60, and High Level Duty Finder to cap, bam your done for the week. There is no reason to run stuff except to help people past that point, or farm accessories on primals. If you have all the said accessories on all your jobs theres nothing to do, thus have been forced to be casual because you can't rerun bcb.

For a game to support true hardcore play, it needs to have content that is so Epically hard, that it requires massive time dumps. Everything in this game can be cleared in a night in 2 hours.

For us, we still have turn 5, but once it goes down, it will go down faster the next week. And then we'll clear it all in one night.

[Tzain]

Not in FFXIV, SE Forces everyone to be casual by that definition because you can only get one primal weapon a week and can only run bcb once. So if you clear bcb in 50 minutes, then knock out the 3 primals in 30 minutes, and run CT in 60, and High Level Duty Finder to cap, bam your done for the week. There is no reason to run stuff except to help people past that point, or farm accessories on primals. If you have all the said accessories on all your jobs theres nothing to do, thus have been forced to be casual because you can't rerun bcb.

For a game to support true hardcore play, it needs to have content that is so Epically hard, that it requires massive time dumps. Everything in this game can be cleared in a night in 2 hours.

For us, we still have turn 5, but once it goes down, it will go down faster the next week. And then we'll clear it all in one night.

TRUE. Developers do not particularly like Hardcore players when it comes to progress. They tend to screw up the timelines as they are on the outside of the averages that the developers used to build their models. Things like "myth caps" are designed to control their progress. HOWEVER this does nothing to stop their Hardcore tendencies as they will likely just move onto some other activity in the game. In your given model, The Casual player will stop after completing the content you described. They will log out or pace themselves to take a week to complete what they aim to complete. If that same player was hardcore, they'd find additional things to do. To put it overly simply, The casual player logs out when they are done with their current task. The hardcore finds another task.

By the way, I remember having this conversation with some people and the guy who backed up my description is a professional game developer for AAA titles, he even added that when developers discuss the term "hardcore", they are talking about time spent in one sitting.

FYI, Groups that work together to take the hardest current content in the game as soon as it's released have an all together different term applied to them. It varies depending on the crowd, but the most commonly used ones I've heard are "Bleeding Edge", "Progression", and (my personal favorite) "Vanguard". Seriously, Vanguard just sounds badass.

[Ryios]

By the way, I remember having this conversation with some people and the guy who backed up my description is a professional game developer for AAA titles, he even added that when developers discuss the term "hardcore", they are talking about time spent in one sitting.

Agreed, but some people are hybrids, like myself. I am hardcore when I can be, and casual when I have to be. I'm not 17 anymore, I can't play 30 hours straight and not have a job. I have a mortgage to pay and deadlines to meet on projects. But whenever time presents itself I burn it all on video games. Mostly because I enjoy too. So I'm a hybrid, and end up with a schedule of when I play. So monday-thursday it's basically 9pm to midnight or 2 am, but fri night all out play fest 10+ hours if posisble until I am to tired to see straight.

As for other stuff to do.... We leveled new characters with classes we don't have on our mains and run BCB twice, I'm still working on mine, but others in my static already have a 2nd static rolling.