Quote Originally Posted by Krylo View Post

The people that hardcore 'raiders' like to deride as casual are actually the lifeblood. They're the ones who stick around. It's the Raiders who take a break between raid tiers. Look around these very forums, or reddit.

'Hardcore' raiders play seasonally when the game has new hardcore raiding content, and tend to cycle between games or play offline games in between those times.
FFXI had hardcore and midcore "raiders" who played constantly because there was a lot of challenging stuff (and for all kinds of players) to do. Those people lasted a long time, myself included. We do really stick around. I never cycled/jumped to other games or waited for the next "raid tier", everyday there was some challenging content to do. The problem is not even that, the problem is the actual content being uninteresting and the lack of midcore content. Those are the main reasons a lot of statics broke apart during 3.0, not really because it's their usual doing. Savage is too much for midcore people and the rest of the content is too easy for them. Alexander isn't very interesting on its own. Yes, they are taking a break until something better comes along.