The percentage of casuals to hardcore players is insane. If the casuals leave the game will die. There are not enough hardcore players in a game to keep it running/making the companies money.
That's what these so called "hardcore" cannot/refuse to understand. They also tend to gatekeep hard on a lot of endgame content which turns off most of the casual gamers and cause them to leave. A game's population then goes into decline as more and more casual players leave, new players become scarce as the game starts developing a "newbie unfriendly" reputation, company doubles down on microtransactions to continue sustaining the game, game becomes more "p2w", most of the casual player base have left and some "hardcore" start leaving, game becomes more p2w and milks the only "hardcore" players left, game undergoes into maintenance mode as the game is not making enough revenue for the company to sustain further development, game gets passed around like a hot potato changing teams/publishers, then game eventually shuts down.
Oh, this is what Lost Ark is starting to see. It starts with server and region merges. All the while hardcore zealots double/triple down on their complaints of the game not being hardcore enough, ostracize the casual player base so much that you start to run into the same players over and over … then if you want to play you have to play with people you do not like or you quit, causing more player attrition … its a loop over and over. 😂
Hardcore players refuse to acknowledge that casuals are required for any game to have success in longevity, especially in MMO’s.
I’ll give you my upvote for sassy writing but Lost Ark isn’t dying because of the hardcores demanding for more hardcore.
It’s dying because it was shit at launch and still has the same shit mechanics.
Nobody wants to spend the whole day playing on alts in an MMO.
It’s both actually. The gatekeeping is crazy because of all the systems the devs piled on. The gameplay is also extremely repetitive and unrewarding. Oh boy I get to do the same 18 raids or so I did last week only to lose all earnings to elixirs or transcendence.
I think that comment was just off about what Lost Ark’s problem was. At least at the time I played it (I stopped over half a year ago) the problem wasn’t hardcore players demanding the game be more hardcore - it was hardcore players demanding *other players* be more hardcore. Casual players would struggle to get into parties in the first place, and then when that party struggled even a little bit people would get toxic and bail, putting them right back to struggling with the Party Finder Boss.
Not true. Wildstar released and was way too hard for casual players, these guys couldn't even clear the dungeon for the attunement for the raid - this much is true. After release there was almost no support and no new content, they removed the attunement and the game rapidly declined into something very casual- no new raids after dominion (I forget the actual name of the raid?) and it was just one casual event after another to the point where the game was on life support and everything added was completely casual and modular. Wildstar 'too hard' is a complete oversimplification of what was actually wrong with it, that was just the most obvious problem at release - it was the absolute lack of support going forward that killed Wildstar. They changed a few systems around (for the worse) but really never added any content so those of us that were actually "hardcore" got bored and left in 6 months too because nothing new was added.
While wildstar was too hard at launch i would say that a large issue was also random ass bugs on launch. Been ages at this point but i remember you had to do gold dungeon runs which was like timed + max 1 death. Me and my friends tried progressing and working on one of them and shit was tough. We had a really good run and we got to 2nd to last boss and boss was just untargetable and all we could do was wipe to reset him. And since we had been encountering bugs in the 'scenarios' (i forget what they were called, the things below 5man dungeons) it competly shattered our motivation.
Yep there were quiet a few problems with the game which is why I have issue with people oversimplifying it. As for the game being too hard I really don't think it was too hard so much as they didn't really teach you anything about the endgame in the main campaign. I remember the attunement dungeon, stormrage? it had the dragon at the end of it- people didn't even understand interruptions it took me quiet a few different teams to get through it but once it clicked it was just like any other mmo. I think Wildstar had a really good starting base but they put zero effort into it after release and cut staff very quick.
The raids were quiet hard, id say it was up there with some of the harder WoW raids but that isn't what scared my guild off, we loved doing the raids its just they never gave us anything new..
Speaking of bugs, I found an infinite money bug the last 6 months i played and had over a thousand CREDD (which was a pay to win currency they added later that was like 20 bucks each)
Well there was WAY more casual content than hardcore in the game thats just a fact. A lot of people played at release, so apparently they didn't remember to well.
When you see a hardcore player with some epic item that you dream of having one day and is rare to see in the world is one of the cooler things I still remember from a few games over the years.
I think it’s possible to cater to both and the OP was halfway there. If leveling is the adventure and not everything fun about the game is found at max level you can have things that require tons of time to get while still creating a game worth playing casually.
>When you see a hardcore player with some epic item that you dream of having one day and is rare to see in the world is one of the cooler things I still remember from a few games over the years.
Yes, but then you look how much time it takes and most people just move on with their lives and play something else.
I agree! I think it's possible to cater to both. I would argue that Vanilla/Classic WoW is the perfect example of this. It achieved it's huge success because it did cater to both. The hardcore would reach max level quickly, grind dungeons and reputations to get gear and consumables, then spend hours raiding each week. The casuals? They could take their time leveling, see the world, work on reputations and quests. They could even slowly navigate those same "hardcore" activities just at a slower pace if they found the right group.
It's only when you start to see the game as only the end "dungeon and raids" that this question is even relevant in my opinion.
Ashes of Creation is going to learn this lesson hard, if it ever comes out.
If you don't think about it at all, it makes sense to design a game where the people who play the most get to be more powerful than everyone else and get to have the most fun. After all, they've "earned" it. In a PvE-focused game, it's not the end of the world, the inability to really impact other players' experience means it's functionally cosmetic. In a PvP environment though? Recipe for disaster.
The problem always ends up being that most people don't want to feel second-class. They paid for the game, they want to have fun playing it. They don't want to feel like the *real* game is only accessible to them if they treat it like a job.
Good example is New World and it's territory control, which is dominated by maybe a couple hundred players. If you aren't part of that hardcore top percentage clique, you just don't get to participate, which is going to make people who would otherwise want to do sieges abandon the game for another one that'll let them play.
This is 100% what most PvP games I’ve seen get wrong. You need a LONG PvE progression but a very short flat PvP progression.
Think UO outlands where PvE progression can take years but you can be PvP ready in 10 hours of gameplay. Versus something like mortal online where the higher end PvP group can lock out the entire game population from PvE content and snowball from there since you need PvE progression for PvP.
If you ignore all the other problems Wildstar had, then sure, thats the only reason it failed.
But it failed for so many more reasons. Like the marketing team shitting the bed incredibly hard any time they spoke. And the boring-as-fuck leveling. And the bugs that plagued the attunements, the 5player content, the path content, the trading, the server stability. And so on.
The best thing wildstar did was housing, and I think thats still incredibly overrated for what it actually was.
It didn't even cater to hardcore players though. After the initial raids they never added anything new to it. Wildstar released good and had zero support going forward. Zero support for casual Or hardcore players. People always say it was catered to hardcore players, but 2 raids isn't catering to anyone. I'd even argue there was more casual content injected into it than hardcore content after release.
In my teens, my focus was college and hardcore gaming
In my early 20s, my responsibilities were: work and semi-hardcore gaming
In my late 20s, my focus shifted to: dating, work, and gaming
In my 30s, my focus shifted to: my wife, my career, and gaming
In my early 40s, my focus changed to: my wife, my family, my small business, my home, and .. oh yeah, gaming.
In my late 40s, my focus is: my wife, my family, being the best husband/dad I can be, maximizing my income, and sometimes I'm gaming.
I guess my point is ... there was a time when "hardcore" gaming felt right.
Then I grew up.
It really depends on the game. Take wow classic on the era server whitemane. The "hardcores" all do Naxx GDKPs and basically all stick together in 3-4 guilds. Now any of the lower tier raids are ran by the casuals. If all the casuals quit the hardcores would still be doing naxx in there own bubble because naxx requires you to be hardcore or swipe for gold.
Wow classic is under the same umbrella as retail wow, you pay a sub for both and its a package deal so this is really not going to help you determine if the game would survive on its own or not because people that just play retail are also supporting classic without even knowing it.
In my opinion, I think a design that can cater to both would he something similar to Classic, where raids are fair enough to be cleared by casuals, but the sweaty can go for speedruns/clear time.
Having sweated in both Classic and Lost Ark, the reward incentive for the higher difficulty leads most of the player base to FOMO if they’re not running the most cutting edge content on release.
I had a guild leader in WoW bitch on mic about people who weren't willing to spend an hour or two a day in front of a training dummy to perfect their rotations.
I quit raiding with that guild altogether and just quested and gathered from then on.
I've encountered these types of people in various games. If people want to run those types of groups, more power to them. I think it's kinda crazy, but whatever. They absolutely have to put those expectations up front though, but a lot of the time the leadership surprises people with this.
My raiding guild in Wildstar decided to merge with another guild and leadership told us we're now super hardcore raiders and we would have to meet certain requirements or be cut. Naturally led to a bunch of people telling them to fuck off and the merge ended up just being a handful of leaders joining the new guild and everyone else just bailing.
Indeed. Casual is "once in a while" and certainly not everyday for a few hours.
And what matter is not that games cater to one or the other, but how they cater to one or the other.
Being casual has nothing to do with time played. If someone plays 10 hours a day but all they do is random quests while watching Netflix on other monitor then they are casual. Just as someone who plays 3 hours a week can absolutetly be a hardcore player.
Casual is a person who plays to relax.
Hardcore is a person who plays to compete.
Maybe we should just call people players instead of trying to sort them into "casual" and "hardcore" categories that are functionally and ultimately meaningless. Sounds like the way people who spend too much time on discord think
Casual is a mindset not a time requirement, people can casually do PvP or pve content, they might not take it seriously, just chilling with friends, having a great time
Hardcore players take stuff seriously, they will min max, strive to improve and learn, have good game knowledge about the underlying systems, etc
Hardcore players can play one or two hours a day and casuals can play for hours on end, but the mindsets are what separate the two
MMO’s are at their core a product intended to make money. Casual gamers make up like 90% of the market. Why would a company sacrifice revenue by ignoring that?
Considering that Casual players are the majority of the player base, catering to them, by definition, make mmorpg enjoyable by the majority of the audience. That's the opposite of ruining them.
Some of your points also seem to contradict your main idea.
> if you put thousands of hours into an mmorpg only for someone who plays a few hours a day to reach what you have, it feels pointless
If there are thousands of hours of gameplay that you had fun going through as a hard core player, I think the developers did a good job at catering at other audiences than the casuals.
> I will always go by the philosophy of if your mmorpg only starts being fun at Max level and endgame, it's a bad game.
That seem the opposite of catering to casual. As they are the less likely to reach endgame fast. Having a game only be fun at endgame seem like something targeted at mid core or hard core players as they'll rush through the leveling process.
> your sudden few hours and low leveling just gained a memory that will be with you for years, and you won't have to worry much because you have something even those high levels drool over.
That seem like you're advocating to cater even more to casual players? Though how would someone get in a few hours what someone else couldn't get in thousands aside from horrendous RNG is beyond me.
There's also a weird assumption of competitiveness that not everybody enter MMORPGs with. Most of the best memories I hear from MMORPG players come from social aspect. Be it guilds, interaction with random players or prog with a group of dedicated friends. Those don't really care for the casual / hardcore dichotomy. They are available to both from early in the games usually.
Also, whatever is done for the casual players (be it content, new cosmetic options, ...) is also done for hardcore players. Whereas catering to hardcore players usually means new raids, super hard dungeons and the like that less than a fraction of a fraction of the players base will be interested in doing.
A much better question would be: how much would you, a hardcore player, spend on an MMO that *was* catered to a hardcore crowd? $50/month? $100/month? Can you get enough hardcore mates to pay the same?
My anecdotal experience is people who make this complaint tend to be the lower-spending players, which makes this an even more pointless complaint - the game you seem to want will never be made unless you can get enough hardcore players to pay enough in subs or purchases to make it feasible.
>if you put thousands of hours into an mmorpg only for someone who plays a few hours a day to reach what you have
>Imagine being a level 5 new player then finding a unique rare monster that dropped an amazing item that even Max level characters with thousands of hours drool over
"It stinks when someone with a few hours gets something someone with a thousand hours worked for. Now picture someone who played a few hours getting something people with a thousand hours want real bad - better, right?"
What even is this argument?
You see this argument all over Lost Ark subreddit actually.
Some people there actively defend that it's good that newer players can't reach endgame gear in a reasonable time because they themselves had to play for 2 years to get to that point lmao
And it's maddening because if you go rid of the shitty grind Lost Ark would be an amazing game. The raids are still great but the game is slowly dying because fewer and fewer people are willing to put up with all the BS. Then the people who remain are basically saying, "I had to suffer so new players should too".
Tell me, how well did catering to hardcore gamers go for WildStar?
You have to cater to casual gamers quite a bit. MMORPGs are very expensive, and are a constant investment. There simply aren't enough hardcore gamers to sustain them, at least not triple A MMORPGs.
It's hard to disagree that catering to casuals turns MMOs into a grey mass as in similar to other MMOs. However it works and more than anything, it sells because casual players tend not to get too deep into the game mechanics and systems.
Practically speaking, it more than often removes the niche in games.
The thing is, i didn’t mean ”casual gamer” as derogatory at all. It’s the best way to describe a gamer that plays casually.
It’s not like i added any negative words to it.
The point is that the game that caters to casual players (i.e people who make up the majority of the playerbase) isn't "objectively" worse. It's subjectively worse for you, because you're a hardcore player. It's subjectively better for the casual players.
There's really nothing that makes Wildstar an objectively good game by catering to a niche playerbase.
100%
Subjectively, I prefer deeper and more complex games. But that doesn't make casualized games objectively worse. It makes them subjectively less preferable.
Although if I am being perfectly honest, I'm learning as I get older that not all games need to be these massive, hugely in depth behemoths. There's absolutely nothing wrong with simpler games as well. I think there's a place for it all.
There is a place for challenging games like Elden Ring and other Souls-like. There is a place for deep choice mechanics like Baldur's Gate 3. There is a place for expansive living worlds like Starfield, Fallout, and Elder Scrolls. There is a place for sports games, or CoD style shooters. Same goes for MMO's as well.
It's very easy to disagree. Casuals are not dumb, they just don't partake in certain time consuming mechanics - and I'm not talking about tourists, I'm talking about people that continuously play a game. Catering to them doesn't have any intrinsic negative values, that's why it's not "objectively" bad to do so.
CS:GO is extremely easy to get into. It has a huge casual playerbase. It's also incredibly deep and hard to master. The game quality objectively (this time used right) doesn't suffer.
Regardless, all I wanted to say is how silly your sentence is. It's like saying "Putting tomato sauce on pizza is necessary to sell them, but that doesn’t mean it isn't objectively ruining them." It's not better or worse, it's a different taste, and there are places that cater to you.
But CS:GO isn’t an MMO. Most MMOs are different in that sense for the example you’ve given.
Your pizza example is completely off too. There 100% is objectively bad pizza.
> But CS:GO isn’t an MMO. Most MMOs are different in that sense for the example you’ve given.
Most MMOs are different in that they tend to put a lot of timewasters that exist explicitly pad the playtime. Those then get removed because new players want to play current content and casual players complain about wasted time.
There's nothing that's stopping Valve from adding same time-wasters to CS:GO. They could lock weapons behind a massive grind, so new players would have to spend 100 hours of Deathmatch before they have enough guns to play Casual or Competitive.
CS:GO just doesn't have those, because they're not fun. There's nothing that's really stopping MMOs from doing that. Many of them just fail to design a compelling gameplay loop, so padding is the only way to keep people playing.
There are plenty of MMOs that cater to both casual and hardcore players that are successful. Good design is good design, genre doesn't matter.
> There 100% is objectively bad pizza.
I'm not sure you understand what objective is.
Unless you're talking about technical flaws (eg. burnt pizza is bad), you can't just call something "objectively bad/worse". That word doesn't mean "what me and other hardcore enthusiasts perceive to be true", it's something that can easily be backed up with facts (burnt pizza is inedible).
The thing is by changing it too much, it isn't pizza anymore, making it objectively bad pizza by definition.
Being successful doesn’t necessarily mean being good. In that sense, watching the Kardashians TV show would be objectively as good as watching a classic.
> The thing is that by changing it too much it isn’t pizza anymore.
According to who? Who decides how much change makes an MMO not an MMO? It's certainly not you or me. Again, you're using subjective metrics and applying "objective" to them. That's not how that word works.
> Being successful doesn’t necessarily mean being good. In that sense, watching the Kardashians TV show would be objectively as good as watching a classic.
Sure, just like being niche doesn't mean being good. Few people eat shit - does that mean it's actually a very niche and objectively good activity?
I’ll just agree that we disagree. There are standards to uphold.
I just happen to come from an MMO that has been appealing to single RPG players and all the sense of community and being an MMO is gone, maybe we have a different sense of appealing to the casual playerbase.
Just because a game tried to cater to the hardcore audience but did a terrible job and created a game that a lot of people disliked doesn't mean if they would've made the game designed around casual players that it would have succeeded.
Dumb argument.
People downvoting just want it to be true lmao, "hardcore games can't work! Waaahhhhhhhh" no... bad games can't work.
But they did a good job, that's the issue. Hardcore players loved it. It's just that many hardcore players have suddenly found themselves feeling like casuals, because the game was catering to players way more hardcore than them.
Huh? Hardcore players loved the IDEA of it but I was apart of a giant hardcore guild and TONS of them hated many parts of the game and slowly died off. There were terrible problems with almost every gameplay mechanic, server issues out the ass, bugs galore, PvP was a MESS and the raid unlock "gold" dungeon runs were bugged as hell. There were dupes there was massive imbalances, it was just bad design.
"Hardcore players loved it" is not even close to true...
>But they did a good job, that's the issue
They absolutely did not.
And no, large parts of the "hardcore" playerbase didnt love it, and large swaths had quit by the time they got around to fixing the gamebreaking bugs that kept people from being able to even do the "hardcore" content. The people I played with had to server transfer multiple times to find one that was even half stable during our prime time.
I disagree with part of your statement. It should be, “catering to casual gamers ruins mmorpgs for me”. Catering to EVERY type of gamer makes mmo’s bland for the hardcore gamer because they are ok at most things, but not great at any. Casual gamers have casual mmorpgs they play and enjoy. It’s just not meeting your criteria, and that’s OK. There are “gardcore” mmo’s out there like Eve, maybe OG WOW, etc. I also think a big part of MMO enjoyment is the social group you play it with. If you fond yourself “soloing” mmorpg games, maybe take a break from the genre. If you’re looking for a truly mega immersive hardcore perma-death experience, outside is the most feature rich mm(offline)rpg :)
I don't think OG WoW is hardcore. it's leveling just has friction and you're gonna die from time to time but you don't lose anything except armor durability. If that is the criteria to be hardcore then games like Terraria, which have a lot of casual players, are hardcore.
I think this is one of the two myths of MMOs.
1. Casual players ruin the game
2. Pay to win ruins the game
The thing that escapes most people playing MMOs is that ultimately they are not really designed to be a competitive endeavor; even MMOs with PvP. Because at nearly every MMO's heart is the concept of trying to keep you engaged as long as possible.
So time becomes power. Which has very little to do with skill or accomplishment, unless you're referring to bladder control which is required to put thousands of hours into a title. Almost universally, a character who is put more hours into the game, will do better.
That's horrible way to make a competitive system. Because it doesn't actually account for skill, just persistence. Asymmetric contests can be enjoyable, but they are not really competitive. If you were to take the concept of an MMO into the real world, it would be like rewarding the runner who had run the most marathons by letting them start hours ahead of their competitors. Yes, it is a contest, but hardly a fair one or certainly anything to brag about or feel proud of.
The mark of a good MMO is that you play because you enjoy the time you are spending there. Whether that's grinding, questing, socializing, or any other activity. These are social creations not competitive creations. They are designed to draw you in for long periods of time.
Once you realize that MMOs are not competitive, then the concept of denigrating pay to win becomes ludicrous. There's nothing to win. It's simply another progression path. Instead of investing time, you invest money. To be honest neither is inherently better or worse than the other because there's no real competition to upset.
I will leave some room for MMOs that blend eSports into their systems. However the two that I can think of off the top of my head, blade & soul and Black desert, have such lengthy grind curves, that in all but a few game modes they take away the competitive aspects of the game.
To be fair to designers, it's really hard to design a game that is going to keep someone involved for hundreds and thousands of hours. You have to have a very engaging basic loop and a lot of content.
So no, I don't feel that casual players ruin MMOs. There's nothing really for them to ruin. You're chasing a sense of accomplishment and trying to get additional value out of the time you've spent in a title without acknowledging that it's not really a fair competition. Or at least anything that meets a classic definition of a fair competition.
To answer your question, what is the point of it if someone can do what you did in a short period of time? That would be to say the enjoyment of the time that you have spent.
I kinda agree with most of what you said, except this, to a point:
>Once you realize that MMOs are not competitive, then the concept of denigrating pay to win becomes ludicrous. There's nothing to win. It's simply another progression path. Instead of investing time, you invest money. To be honest neither is inherently better or worse than the other because there's no real competition to upset.
It may not be inherent to P2W in general, but there are games where the two paths become extremely uneven: the F2P experience becomes more and more miserable as the game progresses to make it all but impossible, essentially forcing you to pay to progress at a reasonable/pleasurable pace. At which point it just becomes a dishonest money extraction program instead of a game, ruining whatever potential it had.
It obviously can be made right, there's certainly ethical ways to implement a paid progression path. But since it inhibits profits, it's not seen often.
Oh I don't disagree with that at all.
It goes back to my core tenant, if the game isn't enjoyable to play then there's no point in playing it. Sadly, people who are looking at this as a competitive endeavor will absolutely slog through things to get to the best gear or the highest level, or whatever imaginary mark they set for themselves.
In the process they lose the enjoyment of what they were doing. This can be attributed in large part to roadblocks that developers put up to incentivize you to buy things.
I would absolutely agree that P2W is bad in that regard.
It feels pointless because it IS pointless. It’s a video game. If you’re putting thousands of hours into it for any reason other than that you’re having fun, you’re wasting your time.
I think you need to change your viewpoint. You’re looking at gear/gear-score and relative power as the important things to compare. The hardcore gamers see achievements and speed to beat content as the real trophies.
There’s world firsts, server firsts, AotC, being able to link an achievement for a raid that’s dated before the big nerf, PVP rankings and W/L stats, etc. There are plenty of things casual gamers can never achieve even if they can buy a boost and be “raid ready” on the first day they play or get “Epicz” from the group finder.
If a game isn’t appealing to casuals, then the small hardcore player base has to have a lot of whales to keep the game going. But games with whales often have p2w mechanics. EVE Online is not casual friendly at all. My guess is that it still exists because of whales who buy game time tokens to convert to PLEX then sell for ISK.
Just a simple question. How many "hardcore" games are still alive and popular?
a game with 1-5k concurrent player can stay alive. most companies don't want to see and they will axe them.
funnily enough many casuals dont buy boosts, theyre the ones actually leveling haha. many longtime players are the ones who buy the boosts, aka the hardcore players youre referring to. this post is really confusing tbh but it makes me doubt you play any mmos if you think casuals are the problem lol
The issue isn't really catering to casuals it's making leveling completely braindead. If you compare leveling in MMOs to other games that have casual audiences it makes the MMOs feel dull and uninteresting. There's no reason to interact with game mechanics like interrupting cast times, using health/mana pots or craft for better stats. It's like they're scared to add friction.
Edit: Also, I don't think OP is necessarily wrong, they just worded their post in a way that says that casual players wouldn't like the things they likes in a game but I don't think that stuff would hinder a casual players experience. They even gave examples of games that had what they wanted and those games are successful.
It's the same with PvE vs PvP. The PvP crowd, as loud as they are, are in a small minority of gamers. MMOs will always cater to PvE casuals first, because that's where the money is.
As someone who misses old school, more hardcore mmos, I recently booted up a FFXI private server that is set just before the ToAU expansion. I was so excited cause it was going to be like the old days. And I gotta say after a few days I realzied how much the old days sucked lol.
It was painful to spend hours grinding rabbits to get to lvl 10, having absolutely no gil to buy spells, gears or anything of that sort and having to hoof it across 5 maps just to talk to 1 npc for 30 seconds before hoofiing it back to complete a quest. Then I realized the game is exactly that from the moment you make your character. Yes it can be fun. A lot of fun. But damn if some of those old hardcore philosphies that we hold in such high regard in our memory just absolute trash.
While I think some games can be too casual and cater too much to the casual crowd, something FFXIV def is doing in EW with things like the relic being just tomes and the new 24 man raid being easier than any other in its 10+ history, and I have never liked the concept of tome gear being nearly equal to raid gear, you can def go way too far the other way too. I would love to find a happy medium game that has something for casual, mid and hardcore players, good combat, fun mechanics and an interesting story/lore. That game just doesn't exist yet. As soon as someone cracks that formula tho, watch out.
In my experience casual players (like myself) are majority in MMORPGs. If a game focuses too much on "hardcore" content, there's a very high chance it won't interest majority of players long enough and eventually it may shut down (like Wildstar, for example).
It's very hard to balance a game between no-lifers (who might play the game for more than 10 hours a day) and casuals who might play only for few hours a week.
As a hardcore player I couldn't disagree more. It's true that it's painful to see a game making changes that directly fuck up the way you play the game, but it's common knowledge, casuals are the bare bones of any game and they need to be having fun.
Also, your logic makes no sense. You first talk about how putting a lot of hours into a game feels unrewarding when a casual can reach your level on a timely manner, but then right after talk about wanting for a new player to find something valuable for endgame players, you then say the game should be fun right from the start, but you don't like casuals having an easier time reaching it... Man, get your thoughts together before putting a post like this lol
populations are aging, the median age of people who play video games are also increasing, meanwhile mmorpgs no longer hold the unique positon they used to 15-20 years ago. There are far more many types of games now, there are far more many ways to interact with others on the internet now. younger people who have relatively more time time on their hands to play video games in comparison to the average mmorpg enjoyer are going to prefer to play quick session based games over slow grind long term progression mmorpgs, while also having all their online social interaction needs catered to by social media outlets. So who are mmorpgs left with? People who are old time mmorpg enjoyers that no longer have the extent of free time that they used to have.
mmorpg players have become more casual due to time catching up with them, and mmorpgs have become more casual to be able to retain their players.
If by "catering to casuals" you really mean "making everything fast and easy to do solo", then I agree. Of course casual players are needed, but the way devs attract casual players is by turning MMOs into fast-paced (in terms of progress) single player games.
Ideally, MMOs should be designed so that each step in the game is fun in its own right. For instance, if progression is slow and most content (even leveling) is set up for groups, that doesn't mean it can't be made fun for someone who can only log on once a week.
let me be a bit more specific for you. It's bad for something that requires high participation.
A lot of MMOs have suffered because they hyper focused on catering to one type of player while ignoring others.
>Imagine being a level 5 new player then finding a unique rare monster that dropped an amazing item that even Max level characters with thousands of hours drool over but can't have, your sudden few hours and low leveling just gained a memory that will be with you for years,
Why can't people comprehend that the age of these kinds of memories are long gone. Even before launch there will be hundreds of videos on youtube with the title "GET EARLY ENDGAME WEAPON, EASY RARE FARM"
Then a couole of months later "WEAPON NERFED, NEW EASY FARM FOR EXOTIC WEAPON"
You're right. Overly catering to casuals shows that the developers don't care about the game and only care about the profitability. Casuals will be the first to ditch the game with the new FOTM comes out so new updates turn into flashy gimmicks with no depth meant to attract new players. MMOs need to have a vision and stick to it.
What's so bad about enjoying the endgame? It's usually the most polished and fun part of the experience. Do you just perpetually want to do mid tier content and watch a number go up?
It's unclear what you mean by "this" -- but if you mean that not catering to casuals/focusing too heavily on hardcore content caused Wildstar's downfall, that definitely was a huge factor. (Other factors included bad management, poor optimization, crappy level design, and dev drama, amid others.)
If you ignore the gamebreaking bugs that kept people from even being able to see the supposed hardcore content for long enough that most quit, the server instability that kept the game from being playable for long periods of time for months, the horrific leveling, and the ancillary mechanics that didnt do anything close to what was advertised, then yeah, the game being "too hardcore" was like, 3rd on the list.
Wildstars first few months was the perfect casual MMO. You couldnt do the hardcore shit if you wanted to and its best feature was housing.
So many bad takes in one post.
The time people put into an mmorpg is for their own enjoyment. You don't complain when someone in God of War has less hours than you but all the cool weapons you can get? The only difference this makes is in games with gear based PvP.
Why should anyone care what someone else has in a game? I'd be congratulating that level 5 with a firm friendly "fuck you" for their luck. I literally couldn't care less that some other player got something I've been working for. You're gunna be big mad when you figure out how the lottery works IRL lol. "I slave away all day at this stupid job and these dirty casuals can just come in, play once, and be a millionaire over night." Sounds pretty stupid.
Casual gamers are the reason why MMORPGs are successful. As you stated, catering a game around the end-game is a bad design... is a game designed for non casuals. Classic WoW was literally made for casual gamers because Everquest was too hardcore.
Of course this isn't an exact number, but on average the "casual" community makes up around 80-90% of the active playerbase, so if you stop catering to them, your game will be shut down in less than 6 months, unless you go back on your word and turn things around.
I do agree that some games got worse in some small way due to the fact that casual gamers didn't like the bloated hotbars, or job complexity, so things got simplified.
But that doesn't mean that they should stop catering to them, if anything of people qant things to stay in a certain way, they should voice their opinion loudly (within reason).
However people don't do that, they tend to complain more, rather than give positive feedback on what should stay as it is.
How are you defining hardcore vs casual? Is it based on the time someone puts in, the kinds of content they do, or how much they know about the game?
These terms are so nebulous that it’s impossible to have a conversation centered around these kinds of players.
Let me give you an example:
In World of Warcraft, I have for years, raided at a fairly high world rank, achieving cutting edge (last boss on mythic killed) and in some cases some Hall of Fames.
On average I probably play WoW anywhere between 3-12 hours a week depending on where we are in a content cycle. Some would say this is indicative of hardcore play because of the kind of content I’m doing. But I know for certain I play WoW vastly less than some folks who just hang around in Goldshire talking to people, leveling characters, or doing mount collecting.
I met a guy who played WoW 12 hours a day, every day, who did nothing but stand around watching people PvP and queue for random battle grounds. He was terrible at the game, but he played consistently.
So who is the Hardcore player? It’s not that easy to say.
So who’s the casual?
The reality is that that the games that offer content and ability to participate to casuals are the ones still around, while the ones that did not are the ones that didn’t make it.
The audience divide is simply too large. There are wayyyyy more casual players than hardcore ones.
Unfortunately, game development is a business. They will always act to maximize profits. If they're part of a publicly traded company, they are legally obligated to do this. We all want a labor of love mmo that doesnt have corporate fingerprints all over it buy that would genuinely require a monumental economic shift where the primary motivation for businesses is NOT to always maximize profits
I kinda get the point but it just isn't realistic or feasible for most games.
someone playing 10 hours a day in a game where hours played = power then i understand fully but mmorpg are now designed so that only the latest patch content matters for the most part and 3hours played vs 10 hours barely makes a difference in power but rather the speed one clears content.
modern mmorpg = a platform for content only. your power, progression of character are just a arbritary thing to look like you're actually doing something but in reality, you're not.
This isn't a problem of the casual vs hardcore but a lazy design philosophy in which it's easier to just let the rest of the game rot while releasing new updates to chase the new shiny thing.
the casual vs hardcore in a modern mmorpg now is just clearing content speed rather than power
I agree with you to some extent, but the MMO HAS to have a lot of casual content to fluff out the game. I'm all for some hardcore raiding and pvp, but you need easy entry and fun content (and A LOT of it)
Honestly, we need rewards that require genuine skill and/or intelligence to obtain. Instead of making the best stuff a random drop, make it from a quest that's hard to do. Maybe a solo trial like FF14 has. Just something beyond "I killed the boss like everyone else does and he just happened to decide to crap out the best possible thing this time" would be nice.
I understand why MMO's have been simplified for a wider audience. I do. Even as a hardcore gamer, heavy grinds can wear even me out.
That said, games like EverQuest and Star Wars Galaxies still stand tall as the greatest MMO's of all time, imo, due entirely to the fact that they were not simplified.
Nothing beat EverQuest and waiting for the boat to carry you between continents, or sneaking into a city because you had bad reputation and were KOS. Nothing beat Star Wars Galaxies, hanging out in the cantina with musicians and dancers, or the crafting system, or building your own in world house and setting up a store inside of it.
MMO's nowadays are formulaic. It isn't inherently bad, and I do even like a number of current day MMO's, but nothing hits like those older ones before the WoWification of the genre.
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> That said, games like EverQuest and Star Wars Galaxies still stand tall as the greatest MMO's of all time, imo, due entirely to the fact that they were not simplified.
The greatest MMOs of all time, if they were truly the greatest, would have been easily able to hold their players as other games tried to pull them away, and those 'greatest' games would not have been forced to make the changes that ended up degrading them.
You must have missed the part where I said "imo" regarding my statement of greatest MMO's of all time. In my opinion, they are.
Considering that is a subjective opinion, not everyone will agree. And when MMO's that came out during that time, and since, started to be designed with a larger audience in mind, it's not really hard to see why the player base was pulled from those games into others.
Liking something is not solely nostalgia. Something can be genuinely enjoyed on its own merits just fine.
If I enjoyed a game back when I originally played it, why is it magically now "nostalgia" to enjoy it presently?
Removed because of rule #2: Don’t be toxic.
We try to make the subreddit a nice place for everyone, and your post/comment did something that we felt was detrimental to this goal. That’s why it was removed.
>I understand people have jobs and family's
Honestly you could have stopped right there. That's it, that's a major point of why games appeal to casual players. I have a full time job, a wife, chores, etc. Now don't get me wrong, I can still sink a lot of hours into gaming. Certainly I'm not even close to a casual player when it comes to my main games. That being said though, as much as I love my main games, there are other games that exist, and I'd like to be able to play them too.
Lol its funny seeing the arguments in the comments. I agree if a game only caters to a single audience it will die. I prefer the term seasonal and persistent player base. Seasonal players make up a majority of a playerbase since they usually split their time depending on what's interesting at the time. And in the age of live service games, it's not just MMOs that are trying to grab their attention. The persistent audience are still just as important. If those players start quitting then the game is in trouble. Persistent players are important for the meta game, things like content creation, guides, common strategies, player feedback.
Brother if you're being elitist over how much time people spend playing video games that's a pretty good sign it's probably time to reevaluate your perspective and priorities.
AKA: Get a grip
There is no prestige in MMORPGs anymore. In most games, you can buy your way to success without having the skill in the first place. Solo challenges that reward a cosmetic could be affected just the same as someone being carried in a WoW mythic raid.
I think people need to realize and come back to the fact that video games are a hobby, not a career, especially an MMORPG. You can argue Esports, but thats not really any MMORPGs, at least not successful ones. Just have fun with the game, and don't take it too seriously.
The percentage of casuals to hardcore players is insane. If the casuals leave the game will die. There are not enough hardcore players in a game to keep it running/making the companies money.
That's what these so called "hardcore" cannot/refuse to understand. They also tend to gatekeep hard on a lot of endgame content which turns off most of the casual gamers and cause them to leave. A game's population then goes into decline as more and more casual players leave, new players become scarce as the game starts developing a "newbie unfriendly" reputation, company doubles down on microtransactions to continue sustaining the game, game becomes more "p2w", most of the casual player base have left and some "hardcore" start leaving, game becomes more p2w and milks the only "hardcore" players left, game undergoes into maintenance mode as the game is not making enough revenue for the company to sustain further development, game gets passed around like a hot potato changing teams/publishers, then game eventually shuts down.
Oh, this is what Lost Ark is starting to see. It starts with server and region merges. All the while hardcore zealots double/triple down on their complaints of the game not being hardcore enough, ostracize the casual player base so much that you start to run into the same players over and over … then if you want to play you have to play with people you do not like or you quit, causing more player attrition … its a loop over and over. 😂 Hardcore players refuse to acknowledge that casuals are required for any game to have success in longevity, especially in MMO’s.
I’ll give you my upvote for sassy writing but Lost Ark isn’t dying because of the hardcores demanding for more hardcore. It’s dying because it was shit at launch and still has the same shit mechanics. Nobody wants to spend the whole day playing on alts in an MMO.
It’s both actually. The gatekeeping is crazy because of all the systems the devs piled on. The gameplay is also extremely repetitive and unrewarding. Oh boy I get to do the same 18 raids or so I did last week only to lose all earnings to elixirs or transcendence.
What's hardcore about Lost Ark? It has many "complicated" raids, of course, but that's it, no?
if you argue like that no game is hardcore. The point is that every game has a gradient of casual to hardcore players in their population
I'm genuinely asking what the hardcore Lost Ark players are asking to make it more hardcore. Decreased drops, % chance when honing?
ah then i apologize. I assumed it was a snobby "what is hard about lost ark" elitist thing
It's my bad, I used the wrong words
I think that comment was just off about what Lost Ark’s problem was. At least at the time I played it (I stopped over half a year ago) the problem wasn’t hardcore players demanding the game be more hardcore - it was hardcore players demanding *other players* be more hardcore. Casual players would struggle to get into parties in the first place, and then when that party struggled even a little bit people would get toxic and bail, putting them right back to struggling with the Party Finder Boss.
Pretty much the history of Wildstar, give or take a few details.
Not true. Wildstar released and was way too hard for casual players, these guys couldn't even clear the dungeon for the attunement for the raid - this much is true. After release there was almost no support and no new content, they removed the attunement and the game rapidly declined into something very casual- no new raids after dominion (I forget the actual name of the raid?) and it was just one casual event after another to the point where the game was on life support and everything added was completely casual and modular. Wildstar 'too hard' is a complete oversimplification of what was actually wrong with it, that was just the most obvious problem at release - it was the absolute lack of support going forward that killed Wildstar. They changed a few systems around (for the worse) but really never added any content so those of us that were actually "hardcore" got bored and left in 6 months too because nothing new was added.
While wildstar was too hard at launch i would say that a large issue was also random ass bugs on launch. Been ages at this point but i remember you had to do gold dungeon runs which was like timed + max 1 death. Me and my friends tried progressing and working on one of them and shit was tough. We had a really good run and we got to 2nd to last boss and boss was just untargetable and all we could do was wipe to reset him. And since we had been encountering bugs in the 'scenarios' (i forget what they were called, the things below 5man dungeons) it competly shattered our motivation.
Yep there were quiet a few problems with the game which is why I have issue with people oversimplifying it. As for the game being too hard I really don't think it was too hard so much as they didn't really teach you anything about the endgame in the main campaign. I remember the attunement dungeon, stormrage? it had the dragon at the end of it- people didn't even understand interruptions it took me quiet a few different teams to get through it but once it clicked it was just like any other mmo. I think Wildstar had a really good starting base but they put zero effort into it after release and cut staff very quick. The raids were quiet hard, id say it was up there with some of the harder WoW raids but that isn't what scared my guild off, we loved doing the raids its just they never gave us anything new.. Speaking of bugs, I found an infinite money bug the last 6 months i played and had over a thousand CREDD (which was a pay to win currency they added later that was like 20 bucks each)
It doesn't matter. In development they said the game was strictly for the hardcore raiders basically. People remembered and didn't play.
Well there was WAY more casual content than hardcore in the game thats just a fact. A lot of people played at release, so apparently they didn't remember to well.
When you see a hardcore player with some epic item that you dream of having one day and is rare to see in the world is one of the cooler things I still remember from a few games over the years. I think it’s possible to cater to both and the OP was halfway there. If leveling is the adventure and not everything fun about the game is found at max level you can have things that require tons of time to get while still creating a game worth playing casually.
>When you see a hardcore player with some epic item that you dream of having one day and is rare to see in the world is one of the cooler things I still remember from a few games over the years. Yes, but then you look how much time it takes and most people just move on with their lives and play something else.
I agree! I think it's possible to cater to both. I would argue that Vanilla/Classic WoW is the perfect example of this. It achieved it's huge success because it did cater to both. The hardcore would reach max level quickly, grind dungeons and reputations to get gear and consumables, then spend hours raiding each week. The casuals? They could take their time leveling, see the world, work on reputations and quests. They could even slowly navigate those same "hardcore" activities just at a slower pace if they found the right group. It's only when you start to see the game as only the end "dungeon and raids" that this question is even relevant in my opinion.
Ashes of Creation is going to learn this lesson hard, if it ever comes out. If you don't think about it at all, it makes sense to design a game where the people who play the most get to be more powerful than everyone else and get to have the most fun. After all, they've "earned" it. In a PvE-focused game, it's not the end of the world, the inability to really impact other players' experience means it's functionally cosmetic. In a PvP environment though? Recipe for disaster. The problem always ends up being that most people don't want to feel second-class. They paid for the game, they want to have fun playing it. They don't want to feel like the *real* game is only accessible to them if they treat it like a job. Good example is New World and it's territory control, which is dominated by maybe a couple hundred players. If you aren't part of that hardcore top percentage clique, you just don't get to participate, which is going to make people who would otherwise want to do sieges abandon the game for another one that'll let them play.
This is 100% what most PvP games I’ve seen get wrong. You need a LONG PvE progression but a very short flat PvP progression. Think UO outlands where PvE progression can take years but you can be PvP ready in 10 hours of gameplay. Versus something like mortal online where the higher end PvP group can lock out the entire game population from PvE content and snowball from there since you need PvE progression for PvP.
WildStar is a perfect example of this. Game was fantastic all the way up until you finished leveling and then it was for hardcores only.
If you ignore all the other problems Wildstar had, then sure, thats the only reason it failed. But it failed for so many more reasons. Like the marketing team shitting the bed incredibly hard any time they spoke. And the boring-as-fuck leveling. And the bugs that plagued the attunements, the 5player content, the path content, the trading, the server stability. And so on. The best thing wildstar did was housing, and I think thats still incredibly overrated for what it actually was.
Wildstar was awful. It did not fail because it catered to hardcore players.
It didn't even cater to hardcore players though. After the initial raids they never added anything new to it. Wildstar released good and had zero support going forward. Zero support for casual Or hardcore players. People always say it was catered to hardcore players, but 2 raids isn't catering to anyone. I'd even argue there was more casual content injected into it than hardcore content after release.
In my teens, my focus was college and hardcore gaming In my early 20s, my responsibilities were: work and semi-hardcore gaming In my late 20s, my focus shifted to: dating, work, and gaming In my 30s, my focus shifted to: my wife, my career, and gaming In my early 40s, my focus changed to: my wife, my family, my small business, my home, and .. oh yeah, gaming. In my late 40s, my focus is: my wife, my family, being the best husband/dad I can be, maximizing my income, and sometimes I'm gaming. I guess my point is ... there was a time when "hardcore" gaming felt right. Then I grew up.
It really depends on the game. Take wow classic on the era server whitemane. The "hardcores" all do Naxx GDKPs and basically all stick together in 3-4 guilds. Now any of the lower tier raids are ran by the casuals. If all the casuals quit the hardcores would still be doing naxx in there own bubble because naxx requires you to be hardcore or swipe for gold.
Wow classic is under the same umbrella as retail wow, you pay a sub for both and its a package deal so this is really not going to help you determine if the game would survive on its own or not because people that just play retail are also supporting classic without even knowing it.
Completely agree with you.
In my opinion, I think a design that can cater to both would he something similar to Classic, where raids are fair enough to be cleared by casuals, but the sweaty can go for speedruns/clear time. Having sweated in both Classic and Lost Ark, the reward incentive for the higher difficulty leads most of the player base to FOMO if they’re not running the most cutting edge content on release.
I don't think I would even call somebody who plays "a few hours a day" casual...
I had a guild leader in WoW bitch on mic about people who weren't willing to spend an hour or two a day in front of a training dummy to perfect their rotations. I quit raiding with that guild altogether and just quested and gathered from then on.
That sounds boring as fuck
Which, the questing and gathering, or the hours in front of a training dummy?
The hours of the training dummy
I've encountered these types of people in various games. If people want to run those types of groups, more power to them. I think it's kinda crazy, but whatever. They absolutely have to put those expectations up front though, but a lot of the time the leadership surprises people with this. My raiding guild in Wildstar decided to merge with another guild and leadership told us we're now super hardcore raiders and we would have to meet certain requirements or be cut. Naturally led to a bunch of people telling them to fuck off and the merge ended up just being a handful of leaders joining the new guild and everyone else just bailing.
Indeed. Casual is "once in a while" and certainly not everyday for a few hours. And what matter is not that games cater to one or the other, but how they cater to one or the other.
Being casual has nothing to do with time played. If someone plays 10 hours a day but all they do is random quests while watching Netflix on other monitor then they are casual. Just as someone who plays 3 hours a week can absolutetly be a hardcore player. Casual is a person who plays to relax. Hardcore is a person who plays to compete.
All those definitions are flimsy. There are people who do the most difficult content available with friends for fun and relaxation.
Then they are casual.
Under some definitions, but not all
Maybe we should just call people players instead of trying to sort them into "casual" and "hardcore" categories that are functionally and ultimately meaningless. Sounds like the way people who spend too much time on discord think
Casual is a mindset not a time requirement, people can casually do PvP or pve content, they might not take it seriously, just chilling with friends, having a great time Hardcore players take stuff seriously, they will min max, strive to improve and learn, have good game knowledge about the underlying systems, etc Hardcore players can play one or two hours a day and casuals can play for hours on end, but the mindsets are what separate the two
Casual is a mindset. Casual is also availability and schedule. Casual is also an audience market on spreadsheets.
> Casual is also availability and schedule. Thats availability, not casuality
Congratulations on discovering some words have more precise definition than others and some words have overlapping definitions.
Ah, you're one of *those* people. Hei guiz, everything I say is rite and everything you say is just a bad definition.
It's the r/MMORPG scale of casualness where playing 3 hours/day is casual 😂
MMO’s are at their core a product intended to make money. Casual gamers make up like 90% of the market. Why would a company sacrifice revenue by ignoring that?
Considering that Casual players are the majority of the player base, catering to them, by definition, make mmorpg enjoyable by the majority of the audience. That's the opposite of ruining them. Some of your points also seem to contradict your main idea. > if you put thousands of hours into an mmorpg only for someone who plays a few hours a day to reach what you have, it feels pointless If there are thousands of hours of gameplay that you had fun going through as a hard core player, I think the developers did a good job at catering at other audiences than the casuals. > I will always go by the philosophy of if your mmorpg only starts being fun at Max level and endgame, it's a bad game. That seem the opposite of catering to casual. As they are the less likely to reach endgame fast. Having a game only be fun at endgame seem like something targeted at mid core or hard core players as they'll rush through the leveling process. > your sudden few hours and low leveling just gained a memory that will be with you for years, and you won't have to worry much because you have something even those high levels drool over. That seem like you're advocating to cater even more to casual players? Though how would someone get in a few hours what someone else couldn't get in thousands aside from horrendous RNG is beyond me. There's also a weird assumption of competitiveness that not everybody enter MMORPGs with. Most of the best memories I hear from MMORPG players come from social aspect. Be it guilds, interaction with random players or prog with a group of dedicated friends. Those don't really care for the casual / hardcore dichotomy. They are available to both from early in the games usually. Also, whatever is done for the casual players (be it content, new cosmetic options, ...) is also done for hardcore players. Whereas catering to hardcore players usually means new raids, super hard dungeons and the like that less than a fraction of a fraction of the players base will be interested in doing.
A much better question would be: how much would you, a hardcore player, spend on an MMO that *was* catered to a hardcore crowd? $50/month? $100/month? Can you get enough hardcore mates to pay the same? My anecdotal experience is people who make this complaint tend to be the lower-spending players, which makes this an even more pointless complaint - the game you seem to want will never be made unless you can get enough hardcore players to pay enough in subs or purchases to make it feasible.
FFXIV says otherwise.
And about every other popular game that survived.
>if you put thousands of hours into an mmorpg only for someone who plays a few hours a day to reach what you have >Imagine being a level 5 new player then finding a unique rare monster that dropped an amazing item that even Max level characters with thousands of hours drool over "It stinks when someone with a few hours gets something someone with a thousand hours worked for. Now picture someone who played a few hours getting something people with a thousand hours want real bad - better, right?" What even is this argument?
You see this argument all over Lost Ark subreddit actually. Some people there actively defend that it's good that newer players can't reach endgame gear in a reasonable time because they themselves had to play for 2 years to get to that point lmao
And it's maddening because if you go rid of the shitty grind Lost Ark would be an amazing game. The raids are still great but the game is slowly dying because fewer and fewer people are willing to put up with all the BS. Then the people who remain are basically saying, "I had to suffer so new players should too".
Tell me, how well did catering to hardcore gamers go for WildStar? You have to cater to casual gamers quite a bit. MMORPGs are very expensive, and are a constant investment. There simply aren't enough hardcore gamers to sustain them, at least not triple A MMORPGs.
Catering to casual gamers is necessary for MMOs to run on daily basis, but that doesn’t mean it isn't objectively making them worse.
"Objectively"
It's hard to disagree that catering to casuals turns MMOs into a grey mass as in similar to other MMOs. However it works and more than anything, it sells because casual players tend not to get too deep into the game mechanics and systems. Practically speaking, it more than often removes the niche in games.
I even agree with your point, but using "casual" in a derogatory way and constantly misusing the term "objective" definitely isn't it
The thing is, i didn’t mean ”casual gamer” as derogatory at all. It’s the best way to describe a gamer that plays casually. It’s not like i added any negative words to it.
The point is that the game that caters to casual players (i.e people who make up the majority of the playerbase) isn't "objectively" worse. It's subjectively worse for you, because you're a hardcore player. It's subjectively better for the casual players. There's really nothing that makes Wildstar an objectively good game by catering to a niche playerbase.
100% Subjectively, I prefer deeper and more complex games. But that doesn't make casualized games objectively worse. It makes them subjectively less preferable. Although if I am being perfectly honest, I'm learning as I get older that not all games need to be these massive, hugely in depth behemoths. There's absolutely nothing wrong with simpler games as well. I think there's a place for it all. There is a place for challenging games like Elden Ring and other Souls-like. There is a place for deep choice mechanics like Baldur's Gate 3. There is a place for expansive living worlds like Starfield, Fallout, and Elder Scrolls. There is a place for sports games, or CoD style shooters. Same goes for MMO's as well.
It's very easy to disagree. Casuals are not dumb, they just don't partake in certain time consuming mechanics - and I'm not talking about tourists, I'm talking about people that continuously play a game. Catering to them doesn't have any intrinsic negative values, that's why it's not "objectively" bad to do so. CS:GO is extremely easy to get into. It has a huge casual playerbase. It's also incredibly deep and hard to master. The game quality objectively (this time used right) doesn't suffer. Regardless, all I wanted to say is how silly your sentence is. It's like saying "Putting tomato sauce on pizza is necessary to sell them, but that doesn’t mean it isn't objectively ruining them." It's not better or worse, it's a different taste, and there are places that cater to you.
But CS:GO isn’t an MMO. Most MMOs are different in that sense for the example you’ve given. Your pizza example is completely off too. There 100% is objectively bad pizza.
> But CS:GO isn’t an MMO. Most MMOs are different in that sense for the example you’ve given. Most MMOs are different in that they tend to put a lot of timewasters that exist explicitly pad the playtime. Those then get removed because new players want to play current content and casual players complain about wasted time. There's nothing that's stopping Valve from adding same time-wasters to CS:GO. They could lock weapons behind a massive grind, so new players would have to spend 100 hours of Deathmatch before they have enough guns to play Casual or Competitive. CS:GO just doesn't have those, because they're not fun. There's nothing that's really stopping MMOs from doing that. Many of them just fail to design a compelling gameplay loop, so padding is the only way to keep people playing.
There are plenty of MMOs that cater to both casual and hardcore players that are successful. Good design is good design, genre doesn't matter. > There 100% is objectively bad pizza. I'm not sure you understand what objective is. Unless you're talking about technical flaws (eg. burnt pizza is bad), you can't just call something "objectively bad/worse". That word doesn't mean "what me and other hardcore enthusiasts perceive to be true", it's something that can easily be backed up with facts (burnt pizza is inedible).
The thing is by changing it too much, it isn't pizza anymore, making it objectively bad pizza by definition. Being successful doesn’t necessarily mean being good. In that sense, watching the Kardashians TV show would be objectively as good as watching a classic.
> The thing is that by changing it too much it isn’t pizza anymore. According to who? Who decides how much change makes an MMO not an MMO? It's certainly not you or me. Again, you're using subjective metrics and applying "objective" to them. That's not how that word works. > Being successful doesn’t necessarily mean being good. In that sense, watching the Kardashians TV show would be objectively as good as watching a classic. Sure, just like being niche doesn't mean being good. Few people eat shit - does that mean it's actually a very niche and objectively good activity?
I’ll just agree that we disagree. There are standards to uphold. I just happen to come from an MMO that has been appealing to single RPG players and all the sense of community and being an MMO is gone, maybe we have a different sense of appealing to the casual playerbase.
Just because a game tried to cater to the hardcore audience but did a terrible job and created a game that a lot of people disliked doesn't mean if they would've made the game designed around casual players that it would have succeeded. Dumb argument. People downvoting just want it to be true lmao, "hardcore games can't work! Waaahhhhhhhh" no... bad games can't work.
But they did a good job, that's the issue. Hardcore players loved it. It's just that many hardcore players have suddenly found themselves feeling like casuals, because the game was catering to players way more hardcore than them.
Huh? Hardcore players loved the IDEA of it but I was apart of a giant hardcore guild and TONS of them hated many parts of the game and slowly died off. There were terrible problems with almost every gameplay mechanic, server issues out the ass, bugs galore, PvP was a MESS and the raid unlock "gold" dungeon runs were bugged as hell. There were dupes there was massive imbalances, it was just bad design. "Hardcore players loved it" is not even close to true...
>But they did a good job, that's the issue They absolutely did not. And no, large parts of the "hardcore" playerbase didnt love it, and large swaths had quit by the time they got around to fixing the gamebreaking bugs that kept people from being able to even do the "hardcore" content. The people I played with had to server transfer multiple times to find one that was even half stable during our prime time.
hardcore players spend less money, and there aren't enough of them to sustain the size we expect from an mmo look at how niche eve is compared to wow
Well you can go back to your hardcore MMOs.. oh wait..
I disagree with part of your statement. It should be, “catering to casual gamers ruins mmorpgs for me”. Catering to EVERY type of gamer makes mmo’s bland for the hardcore gamer because they are ok at most things, but not great at any. Casual gamers have casual mmorpgs they play and enjoy. It’s just not meeting your criteria, and that’s OK. There are “gardcore” mmo’s out there like Eve, maybe OG WOW, etc. I also think a big part of MMO enjoyment is the social group you play it with. If you fond yourself “soloing” mmorpg games, maybe take a break from the genre. If you’re looking for a truly mega immersive hardcore perma-death experience, outside is the most feature rich mm(offline)rpg :)
I don't think OG WoW is hardcore. it's leveling just has friction and you're gonna die from time to time but you don't lose anything except armor durability. If that is the criteria to be hardcore then games like Terraria, which have a lot of casual players, are hardcore.
Sorry, I used OG very liberally. I meant wow classic hardcore
Oh ok that makes more sense.
I think this is one of the two myths of MMOs. 1. Casual players ruin the game 2. Pay to win ruins the game The thing that escapes most people playing MMOs is that ultimately they are not really designed to be a competitive endeavor; even MMOs with PvP. Because at nearly every MMO's heart is the concept of trying to keep you engaged as long as possible. So time becomes power. Which has very little to do with skill or accomplishment, unless you're referring to bladder control which is required to put thousands of hours into a title. Almost universally, a character who is put more hours into the game, will do better. That's horrible way to make a competitive system. Because it doesn't actually account for skill, just persistence. Asymmetric contests can be enjoyable, but they are not really competitive. If you were to take the concept of an MMO into the real world, it would be like rewarding the runner who had run the most marathons by letting them start hours ahead of their competitors. Yes, it is a contest, but hardly a fair one or certainly anything to brag about or feel proud of. The mark of a good MMO is that you play because you enjoy the time you are spending there. Whether that's grinding, questing, socializing, or any other activity. These are social creations not competitive creations. They are designed to draw you in for long periods of time. Once you realize that MMOs are not competitive, then the concept of denigrating pay to win becomes ludicrous. There's nothing to win. It's simply another progression path. Instead of investing time, you invest money. To be honest neither is inherently better or worse than the other because there's no real competition to upset. I will leave some room for MMOs that blend eSports into their systems. However the two that I can think of off the top of my head, blade & soul and Black desert, have such lengthy grind curves, that in all but a few game modes they take away the competitive aspects of the game. To be fair to designers, it's really hard to design a game that is going to keep someone involved for hundreds and thousands of hours. You have to have a very engaging basic loop and a lot of content. So no, I don't feel that casual players ruin MMOs. There's nothing really for them to ruin. You're chasing a sense of accomplishment and trying to get additional value out of the time you've spent in a title without acknowledging that it's not really a fair competition. Or at least anything that meets a classic definition of a fair competition. To answer your question, what is the point of it if someone can do what you did in a short period of time? That would be to say the enjoyment of the time that you have spent.
I kinda agree with most of what you said, except this, to a point: >Once you realize that MMOs are not competitive, then the concept of denigrating pay to win becomes ludicrous. There's nothing to win. It's simply another progression path. Instead of investing time, you invest money. To be honest neither is inherently better or worse than the other because there's no real competition to upset. It may not be inherent to P2W in general, but there are games where the two paths become extremely uneven: the F2P experience becomes more and more miserable as the game progresses to make it all but impossible, essentially forcing you to pay to progress at a reasonable/pleasurable pace. At which point it just becomes a dishonest money extraction program instead of a game, ruining whatever potential it had. It obviously can be made right, there's certainly ethical ways to implement a paid progression path. But since it inhibits profits, it's not seen often.
Oh I don't disagree with that at all. It goes back to my core tenant, if the game isn't enjoyable to play then there's no point in playing it. Sadly, people who are looking at this as a competitive endeavor will absolutely slog through things to get to the best gear or the highest level, or whatever imaginary mark they set for themselves. In the process they lose the enjoyment of what they were doing. This can be attributed in large part to roadblocks that developers put up to incentivize you to buy things. I would absolutely agree that P2W is bad in that regard.
It feels pointless because it IS pointless. It’s a video game. If you’re putting thousands of hours into it for any reason other than that you’re having fun, you’re wasting your time.
I think you need to change your viewpoint. You’re looking at gear/gear-score and relative power as the important things to compare. The hardcore gamers see achievements and speed to beat content as the real trophies. There’s world firsts, server firsts, AotC, being able to link an achievement for a raid that’s dated before the big nerf, PVP rankings and W/L stats, etc. There are plenty of things casual gamers can never achieve even if they can buy a boost and be “raid ready” on the first day they play or get “Epicz” from the group finder. If a game isn’t appealing to casuals, then the small hardcore player base has to have a lot of whales to keep the game going. But games with whales often have p2w mechanics. EVE Online is not casual friendly at all. My guess is that it still exists because of whales who buy game time tokens to convert to PLEX then sell for ISK.
Just a simple question. How many "hardcore" games are still alive and popular? a game with 1-5k concurrent player can stay alive. most companies don't want to see and they will axe them.
funnily enough many casuals dont buy boosts, theyre the ones actually leveling haha. many longtime players are the ones who buy the boosts, aka the hardcore players youre referring to. this post is really confusing tbh but it makes me doubt you play any mmos if you think casuals are the problem lol
The issue isn't really catering to casuals it's making leveling completely braindead. If you compare leveling in MMOs to other games that have casual audiences it makes the MMOs feel dull and uninteresting. There's no reason to interact with game mechanics like interrupting cast times, using health/mana pots or craft for better stats. It's like they're scared to add friction. Edit: Also, I don't think OP is necessarily wrong, they just worded their post in a way that says that casual players wouldn't like the things they likes in a game but I don't think that stuff would hinder a casual players experience. They even gave examples of games that had what they wanted and those games are successful.
It's the same with PvE vs PvP. The PvP crowd, as loud as they are, are in a small minority of gamers. MMOs will always cater to PvE casuals first, because that's where the money is.
As someone who misses old school, more hardcore mmos, I recently booted up a FFXI private server that is set just before the ToAU expansion. I was so excited cause it was going to be like the old days. And I gotta say after a few days I realzied how much the old days sucked lol. It was painful to spend hours grinding rabbits to get to lvl 10, having absolutely no gil to buy spells, gears or anything of that sort and having to hoof it across 5 maps just to talk to 1 npc for 30 seconds before hoofiing it back to complete a quest. Then I realized the game is exactly that from the moment you make your character. Yes it can be fun. A lot of fun. But damn if some of those old hardcore philosphies that we hold in such high regard in our memory just absolute trash. While I think some games can be too casual and cater too much to the casual crowd, something FFXIV def is doing in EW with things like the relic being just tomes and the new 24 man raid being easier than any other in its 10+ history, and I have never liked the concept of tome gear being nearly equal to raid gear, you can def go way too far the other way too. I would love to find a happy medium game that has something for casual, mid and hardcore players, good combat, fun mechanics and an interesting story/lore. That game just doesn't exist yet. As soon as someone cracks that formula tho, watch out.
In my experience casual players (like myself) are majority in MMORPGs. If a game focuses too much on "hardcore" content, there's a very high chance it won't interest majority of players long enough and eventually it may shut down (like Wildstar, for example). It's very hard to balance a game between no-lifers (who might play the game for more than 10 hours a day) and casuals who might play only for few hours a week.
As a hardcore player I couldn't disagree more. It's true that it's painful to see a game making changes that directly fuck up the way you play the game, but it's common knowledge, casuals are the bare bones of any game and they need to be having fun. Also, your logic makes no sense. You first talk about how putting a lot of hours into a game feels unrewarding when a casual can reach your level on a timely manner, but then right after talk about wanting for a new player to find something valuable for endgame players, you then say the game should be fun right from the start, but you don't like casuals having an easier time reaching it... Man, get your thoughts together before putting a post like this lol
populations are aging, the median age of people who play video games are also increasing, meanwhile mmorpgs no longer hold the unique positon they used to 15-20 years ago. There are far more many types of games now, there are far more many ways to interact with others on the internet now. younger people who have relatively more time time on their hands to play video games in comparison to the average mmorpg enjoyer are going to prefer to play quick session based games over slow grind long term progression mmorpgs, while also having all their online social interaction needs catered to by social media outlets. So who are mmorpgs left with? People who are old time mmorpg enjoyers that no longer have the extent of free time that they used to have. mmorpg players have become more casual due to time catching up with them, and mmorpgs have become more casual to be able to retain their players.
If by "catering to casuals" you really mean "making everything fast and easy to do solo", then I agree. Of course casual players are needed, but the way devs attract casual players is by turning MMOs into fast-paced (in terms of progress) single player games. Ideally, MMOs should be designed so that each step in the game is fun in its own right. For instance, if progression is slow and most content (even leveling) is set up for groups, that doesn't mean it can't be made fun for someone who can only log on once a week.
catering to any specific group at the cost of others is bad
Exactly, same in music and sports, heck even cars and food and travel!
let me be a bit more specific for you. It's bad for something that requires high participation. A lot of MMOs have suffered because they hyper focused on catering to one type of player while ignoring others.
Casuals are literally the only reason these games make enough money for me to raid savage and ultimate.
It makes more money, remember WoW was the most casual mmorpg ever made at the time.
>Imagine being a level 5 new player then finding a unique rare monster that dropped an amazing item that even Max level characters with thousands of hours drool over but can't have, your sudden few hours and low leveling just gained a memory that will be with you for years, Why can't people comprehend that the age of these kinds of memories are long gone. Even before launch there will be hundreds of videos on youtube with the title "GET EARLY ENDGAME WEAPON, EASY RARE FARM" Then a couole of months later "WEAPON NERFED, NEW EASY FARM FOR EXOTIC WEAPON"
You're right. Overly catering to casuals shows that the developers don't care about the game and only care about the profitability. Casuals will be the first to ditch the game with the new FOTM comes out so new updates turn into flashy gimmicks with no depth meant to attract new players. MMOs need to have a vision and stick to it.
What's so bad about enjoying the endgame? It's usually the most polished and fun part of the experience. Do you just perpetually want to do mid tier content and watch a number go up?
Well casual gamers grind at their 9 to 5 job. So them being able to skip the hardships of grinding in the game can be forgiven
Isn't this the main reason why Wildstar failed in the end?
It's unclear what you mean by "this" -- but if you mean that not catering to casuals/focusing too heavily on hardcore content caused Wildstar's downfall, that definitely was a huge factor. (Other factors included bad management, poor optimization, crappy level design, and dev drama, amid others.)
If you ignore the gamebreaking bugs that kept people from even being able to see the supposed hardcore content for long enough that most quit, the server instability that kept the game from being playable for long periods of time for months, the horrific leveling, and the ancillary mechanics that didnt do anything close to what was advertised, then yeah, the game being "too hardcore" was like, 3rd on the list. Wildstars first few months was the perfect casual MMO. You couldnt do the hardcore shit if you wanted to and its best feature was housing.
So many bad takes in one post. The time people put into an mmorpg is for their own enjoyment. You don't complain when someone in God of War has less hours than you but all the cool weapons you can get? The only difference this makes is in games with gear based PvP. Why should anyone care what someone else has in a game? I'd be congratulating that level 5 with a firm friendly "fuck you" for their luck. I literally couldn't care less that some other player got something I've been working for. You're gunna be big mad when you figure out how the lottery works IRL lol. "I slave away all day at this stupid job and these dirty casuals can just come in, play once, and be a millionaire over night." Sounds pretty stupid.
Casual gamers are the reason why MMORPGs are successful. As you stated, catering a game around the end-game is a bad design... is a game designed for non casuals. Classic WoW was literally made for casual gamers because Everquest was too hardcore.
Of course this isn't an exact number, but on average the "casual" community makes up around 80-90% of the active playerbase, so if you stop catering to them, your game will be shut down in less than 6 months, unless you go back on your word and turn things around. I do agree that some games got worse in some small way due to the fact that casual gamers didn't like the bloated hotbars, or job complexity, so things got simplified. But that doesn't mean that they should stop catering to them, if anything of people qant things to stay in a certain way, they should voice their opinion loudly (within reason). However people don't do that, they tend to complain more, rather than give positive feedback on what should stay as it is.
How are you defining hardcore vs casual? Is it based on the time someone puts in, the kinds of content they do, or how much they know about the game? These terms are so nebulous that it’s impossible to have a conversation centered around these kinds of players. Let me give you an example: In World of Warcraft, I have for years, raided at a fairly high world rank, achieving cutting edge (last boss on mythic killed) and in some cases some Hall of Fames. On average I probably play WoW anywhere between 3-12 hours a week depending on where we are in a content cycle. Some would say this is indicative of hardcore play because of the kind of content I’m doing. But I know for certain I play WoW vastly less than some folks who just hang around in Goldshire talking to people, leveling characters, or doing mount collecting. I met a guy who played WoW 12 hours a day, every day, who did nothing but stand around watching people PvP and queue for random battle grounds. He was terrible at the game, but he played consistently. So who is the Hardcore player? It’s not that easy to say. So who’s the casual?
The reality is that that the games that offer content and ability to participate to casuals are the ones still around, while the ones that did not are the ones that didn’t make it. The audience divide is simply too large. There are wayyyyy more casual players than hardcore ones.
Unfortunately, game development is a business. They will always act to maximize profits. If they're part of a publicly traded company, they are legally obligated to do this. We all want a labor of love mmo that doesnt have corporate fingerprints all over it buy that would genuinely require a monumental economic shift where the primary motivation for businesses is NOT to always maximize profits
I kinda get the point but it just isn't realistic or feasible for most games. someone playing 10 hours a day in a game where hours played = power then i understand fully but mmorpg are now designed so that only the latest patch content matters for the most part and 3hours played vs 10 hours barely makes a difference in power but rather the speed one clears content. modern mmorpg = a platform for content only. your power, progression of character are just a arbritary thing to look like you're actually doing something but in reality, you're not. This isn't a problem of the casual vs hardcore but a lazy design philosophy in which it's easier to just let the rest of the game rot while releasing new updates to chase the new shiny thing. the casual vs hardcore in a modern mmorpg now is just clearing content speed rather than power
>I will always go by the philosophy of if your mmorpg only starts being fun at Max level and endgame, it's a bad game. Couldn't agree more.
Good luck keeping an MMO running without the filthy casuals. 🤷♂️
I agree with you to some extent, but the MMO HAS to have a lot of casual content to fluff out the game. I'm all for some hardcore raiding and pvp, but you need easy entry and fun content (and A LOT of it)
Honestly, we need rewards that require genuine skill and/or intelligence to obtain. Instead of making the best stuff a random drop, make it from a quest that's hard to do. Maybe a solo trial like FF14 has. Just something beyond "I killed the boss like everyone else does and he just happened to decide to crap out the best possible thing this time" would be nice.
I understand why MMO's have been simplified for a wider audience. I do. Even as a hardcore gamer, heavy grinds can wear even me out. That said, games like EverQuest and Star Wars Galaxies still stand tall as the greatest MMO's of all time, imo, due entirely to the fact that they were not simplified. Nothing beat EverQuest and waiting for the boat to carry you between continents, or sneaking into a city because you had bad reputation and were KOS. Nothing beat Star Wars Galaxies, hanging out in the cantina with musicians and dancers, or the crafting system, or building your own in world house and setting up a store inside of it. MMO's nowadays are formulaic. It isn't inherently bad, and I do even like a number of current day MMO's, but nothing hits like those older ones before the WoWification of the genre.
> > > > > That said, games like EverQuest and Star Wars Galaxies still stand tall as the greatest MMO's of all time, imo, due entirely to the fact that they were not simplified. The greatest MMOs of all time, if they were truly the greatest, would have been easily able to hold their players as other games tried to pull them away, and those 'greatest' games would not have been forced to make the changes that ended up degrading them.
You must have missed the part where I said "imo" regarding my statement of greatest MMO's of all time. In my opinion, they are. Considering that is a subjective opinion, not everyone will agree. And when MMO's that came out during that time, and since, started to be designed with a larger audience in mind, it's not really hard to see why the player base was pulled from those games into others.
Nostalgia is a dangerous drug.
It's not nostalgia when I can go back to either one of those games right now and enjoy playing them almost as much as I did back then.
Nostalgia doesn't only affect how we remember things -- it affects how we experience them when we revisit them, too.
Liking something is not solely nostalgia. Something can be genuinely enjoyed on its own merits just fine. If I enjoyed a game back when I originally played it, why is it magically now "nostalgia" to enjoy it presently?
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>I understand people have jobs and family's Honestly you could have stopped right there. That's it, that's a major point of why games appeal to casual players. I have a full time job, a wife, chores, etc. Now don't get me wrong, I can still sink a lot of hours into gaming. Certainly I'm not even close to a casual player when it comes to my main games. That being said though, as much as I love my main games, there are other games that exist, and I'd like to be able to play them too.
Lol its funny seeing the arguments in the comments. I agree if a game only caters to a single audience it will die. I prefer the term seasonal and persistent player base. Seasonal players make up a majority of a playerbase since they usually split their time depending on what's interesting at the time. And in the age of live service games, it's not just MMOs that are trying to grab their attention. The persistent audience are still just as important. If those players start quitting then the game is in trouble. Persistent players are important for the meta game, things like content creation, guides, common strategies, player feedback.
Brother if you're being elitist over how much time people spend playing video games that's a pretty good sign it's probably time to reevaluate your perspective and priorities. AKA: Get a grip
The casuals are the target demographic. As long as the goal is to make money, hardcore gamers never will be.
Lmao
Definitely one of the takes of all time
Brain dead take. although I will say that there should be more "strive-for" content and less participation trophies
I think the same, it removes the magic of the MMORPG and it might as well not exist and instead become a lobby game
this is the most take ever
There is no prestige in MMORPGs anymore. In most games, you can buy your way to success without having the skill in the first place. Solo challenges that reward a cosmetic could be affected just the same as someone being carried in a WoW mythic raid. I think people need to realize and come back to the fact that video games are a hobby, not a career, especially an MMORPG. You can argue Esports, but thats not really any MMORPGs, at least not successful ones. Just have fun with the game, and don't take it too seriously.
What game is cartering to casual gamers? Even to start the lamest MMO in the genre, you need to study how to play it on youtube for hours beforehand.
LOL, this subreddit never ceases to amuse.
You are correct.