Player Classification

[Shougun]

They all shift unfortunately lol. For myself I get most use out of referring to them as:

Casual: Desires low stress, high certainty of success, time consumption may lead to stress and after a certain threshold of time likely would (for example you can make something easy but insanely grindy, this wouldn't be ideal for a casual).
Mid-core: Desires some stress, reasonable certainty of success, time consumption is unlikely to be a sole reason for stress (grinds are more likely to be fine, and the evaluation of whether the content is good or not will only use time as a multiplier to the other opinions).
Hardcore: Desires a lot of stress, sliver of success is okay, "what is time? I will probably schedule my life according to activities in the game".

On exploratory I feel at release it was mid-core, and then temporarily casual, and then to a weird limbo of "what"-core. Because expecting a casual to organize themselves outside of the game (via discords) is pretty unlikely and therefore quite a bit of the content is unachievable. Yet if you did happen to get a lot of people, it's going to be a quick and smooth ride lol.

I prefer the rolling mountain approach to things so it starts at the peak, where logical, and rolls down as new things are added. So, after some time, a new group can take part in the content. There should be a stop at some point, I don't really want to see 1 shot bosses, but for example I believe there should be a moment where you can reasonably solo savage content (starts out hard group focused, mistakes allowed group focus, smaller group, duo, then solo). Criterion (savage) should be duo and then solo-able, etc.