Midcore is NOT a Difficulty setting - It's an Investment!

[Voryn]

Your definition doesn’t seem understandable to me because you’re often saying “THIS is what content needs to be midcore” yet you’re mostly listing things that also apply to someone doing Extreme or Savage in party finder and going at their own pace.

content that offers degrees of challenge, allowing players to invest time without requiring a rigid commitment

You go as far as you want, and in PF your level of commitment is completely up to you. My first time raiding was Asphodelos in party finder and I only did P1S and P2S

solo or with friends

Hop on either together or by yourself as long as the weekly loot lockout is considered. As was my case when doing PF

Varied challenges

The one depends on how you define things, although seems to me like it’s a condition that’s met each tier as the devs try to differentiate each raid (to varying degrees of success imo, although I feel Dawntrail’s raids are really varied design-wise)

Rewarding players’ time, not just their skill level

Aren’t you gradually making your way through progging a raid if you’re less skilled, but just at a slower rate? You may not have the “number go up” that something like Eureka gives you butas you have raid sessions you get closer to clearing and will feel yourself getting more comfortable on your chosen job. And then the victory comes once you get to the end and are playing cleanly enough

While you don’t need to form static groups, many players create Discord communities to loosely organize, guide others, and navigate challenging encounters like a rite of passage

People are at least doing this in NA, I’ve joined multiple discords of people who PF together over these last few months just by joining prog parties for fun to practice playing healer.

[Exploratory zone] systems allow players to set their own pace and build toward high-stakes content over time, creating a sense of progression.

Hop on whenever you want and go at the pace that works for you. And unless the devs screw up, savage tiers are roughly in ascending difficulty

The thing I’m most interested is when you say how midcore is special:

It needs to engage both casual and hardcore players by rewarding time and effort, not through sheer difficulty.

Is your time and effort not rewarded by gradually learning an encounter and then clearing it?

I think you should clarify what you mean about skill, difficulty, and feeling overwhelmed, because it seems like that’s the main thing that differentiates midcore and hardcore to you. Otherwise, so many aspects of your definition can be applied to Extreme and Savage content and then raiders like me are just gonna ask “but isn’t Extreme and Savage midcore?”