This thread has me wondering if there shouldn't be a matching "The growing entitlement issues of the hardcores".

I mean, I get it. You spent more time in-game this week than I'll probably spend this month. You rearranged your schedule to meet with your guildmates. You passed on hanging out with your other friends because it's the only time your guild can get together. You waited, possibly for hours, as you got the gang together and prepared for the latest dungeon, fight, whatever. You want something to show for it.

Do you know what I want? Really, the only thing I want out of this game (or any other MMO out there)? I want to play with my friends.

Except that MMOs are usually really, really bad at this. They segregate, and separate, based almost entirely on time spent in-game, and force newcomers to level for 50, maybe 60 hours in which they're literally nothing but dead weight to their friends before they can actually play with their friends. Making new friends at low and middling levels is often hard, as well, because differing play schedules and play amounts will just force the players apart again, until they all meet up again in "the endgame".

Which is a real shame, because you'd think that such vast, persistent worlds where it's so easy to meet new people and spend so much of your life would be the kings of social gaming. But instead they're completely taken over by people who think that if you haven't suffered through your 50-60 hours of solitary "lolnoob" grinding, then you don't deserve to even stand in their presence. And meanwhile "social gaming" is itself defined by stupid flash games on Facebook. Isn't this backwards?

But here's the rub: Even with systems like FFXI's level linking (though that certainly helped a lot!), you just can't bring those titans of the endgame back into the "lolnoob" content. In the end, it's always "been there, done that, got the <insert rare epic drop here>." Even the best friends only have so much patience for PL'ing their buddies up from nothing.

Hardcore players are worried that they won't be able to make me utterly irrelevant with their vast investments of time. I'm worried I'll be utterly irrelevant to my friends because I can't make such investments. Which of us is wrong? Or is there some way of reconciling the two?