Why the love for the hardcore player?

[Riggswolfe]

1. They comprise your core customers. Having one customer for six months is healthier for the game than two that play three months each (assuming everything else is similar).

This I disagree with. Most hardcore players I've ever met burn their way through content within a couple of months, bitch for a month, then leave. Hardcore players give more early cash to the game (multiple boxes etc) but casual gamers give more longterm revenue.

[Phred]

Unfortunately for every personal example, there's an equally valid counter example. The last 2 guilds I've been in in EQ had a significant number of people in them that had been playing since Kunark or before (4 years). Both were hard core guilds.

Without actual data mined from games like EQ and Daoc, neither your post or mine proves anything.

[Xilren's Twin]

Unfortunately for every personal example, there's an equally valid counter example. The last 2 guilds I've been in in EQ had a significant number of people in them that had been playing since Kunark or before (4 years). Both were hard core guilds.

Without actual data mined from games like EQ and Daoc, neither your post or mine proves anything.

As much as I'd also like to see such data, I suspect it would be somewhat of a self fulfilling prophecy.  The majority of today's mmorpgs are structured in such a way that really only appeal to the "hardcore".  By and large they are not "casual friendly" , i.e they are not designed to be conducive to keeping around players who can only log in 10 hours a week.  So, if we are using todays game data, we would have to be very selective in terms of what metrics you would look for.

I would be interested to see something like average length of subscription based on several levels of hours played per week (i.e. 1-10,10-20,20+) over the first year only of a title, and even that would be have to be analyzed carefully lest you pull invalid conclusions.

I am also very interested to see how CoH's subscription numbers pan out over time b/c it is far more casual friendly than any game I've played.  Between the sidekicking, mission structure geared to your play session (i.e. whether you are solo or grouped the missions are appropriate strength), and ability to play in short spurts (I can actuallly DO something in 20-30 minutes), it's right up my alley in terms of time to play. Yet that same ability also makes it frightfully easy for hardcore powergamers to max out in just a few weeks.  So, will those people stick around beyond the first month or two?  Does cryptic even want them to? (I ask b/c they may recognize the futility of trying to provide enough new content to outrace that segment of the players, so focus on the average player rather than the leading edge; to wit, a content patch aimed in month 2-3 rather than at the end of month 1).  The game is a perfect fit for me, but let's face it, most people on these boards have already stopped playing (and I suspect most have more playtime than I do in a given week anyway).  The real question is, what is most of CoH's player base; hardcore or non?  To this point the addittedly broad server load icons have continued to be yellow on most and red on 1 during nights at prime time.

Oddly, the game I felt was most casual friendly prior to CoH was Shadowbane, but with a caveat.  Leveling in SB was not terribly time consuming, so even not having a tons of hours to play, you could pvp and not be dead weigh.  The kicker was the gold farming; feeling like you had to play X time per week just to earn enough gold to pay your guild taxes (which any guild who wanted to upkeep a city had to do) was not only casual unfriendly, it was never ending.  Having to continually farm gold from SB's non exciting pve eventually made it casual unfriendly for me.

Xilren

[Arnold]

"On March 6, 2004, a 31-year-old Legend of Mir II addict literally dropped dead after playing the game non-stop for 20 hours in a Chengdu internet café.

That's pretty weak.  I've worked in manual labor before and have had a day or two that has come close to 20 hours.  I've spent more than 24 hours at work in an IT position when shit hit the fan.  There must have been something wrong with this guy other than his gaming obsession.

Hell, I'm sure I pulled plenty of ~20 hour sessions on weekends during the height of my UO playing.

[Arnold]

The most casual MMORPG I've played has been UO, before Pub 16.  Maxing out a character wasn't too difficult and after that, you could do whatever you wanted.  There was a period of years where I logged on whenever I felt like it, for as long as I desired, and just went out and played.  Sure, I occasionally had to go make some gold, but my playtime was far greater.

Then they made pub 16 and the power srcolls =(  and then they made AOS and now I don'y play anymore.

[Soukyan]

"On March 6, 2004, a 31-year-old Legend of Mir II addict literally dropped dead after playing the game non-stop for 20 hours in a Chengdu internet café.

That's pretty weak.  I've worked in manual labor before and have had a day or two that has come close to 20 hours.  I've spent more than 24 hours at work in an IT position when shit hit the fan.  There must have been something wrong with this guy other than his gaming obsession.

Hell, I'm sure I pulled plenty of ~20 hour sessions on weekends during the height of my UO playing.

I thought so, too. I've pulled back to back to back 20 hour days in IT before and amazingly, I'm still alive. But it does say he was an addict so who knows how many 20 hour days he had pulled prior to that day. And as you said, he probably had health problems of some sort that contributed. However, a lot of health problems arise from addictions (or rather substance abuse). I don't know that you could classify addiction to Legend of Mir II as substance abuse, but perhaps poor eating habits caused by playing the game for so long at a stretch led to malnutrition. Or maybe poor blood circulation caused a clot to get stuck in his head. Any number of things.

[Djamonja]

The question as to why the devs were spending time on the Jedi revamp and the new system for unlocking Jedi over the next two publishes was addressed by the devs (Specifically JustG, AKA Gary Gattis the Senior Producer) in this way:

They felt that hologrinding was hurting the game enough that they needed to change the system as soon as possible. But before they could change the system for becoming a Jedi, they first needed to change the actual implementation of Jedi in SWG which they did not feel was satisfactory (correctly).

The larger picture is that, of course, Jedi are something that attracts many people to a Star Wars game. The new system caters to a lot more than "hardcores" in that you can become partly Force Sensitive, or pick up just a few Force Discipline skills and mix them with normal skills. The Jedi Knight Trials/PvP/FRS system which is more oriented towards hardcore types is just one aspect of the revamp -- not a minor aspect, but also not the main focus of the two Jedi related publishes.