To me the hardcore approach is where one needs to , focus one’s attention and mind on the activity, deliberate on actions and tactics constantly, be or develop adept muscle memory for the controls, and generally perform at the chosen game activities as well as the others approaching it similarly, or at least better than the majority of other players.
It’s inherently an “elite” approach to the activity, and it’s at least implicitly competitive, and often is overtly so.
My job is like that, and I don’t find it relaxing or fun. I get that some people do — and I think these are people who enjoy MMO’s as sports. To me it’s clear people who approach a game in this manner will want the difficulty ramped up, so that it separates those who can and will from those who can’t or won’t. Even aside the inter-player competition, they see accomplishment of difficult challenges to be defining of their game experience and how they derive enjoyment from it.
I don’t find that particularly fun; that to me is the definition of work, and it’s a style of activity I won’t generally do except for compensation. A lot of people are like me; we could approach the game the same way the performance-driven player do, but we don’t. Often because we’re simply not performance driven. We’re driven for the experience of it. The game is an ongoing experience for us, and we enjoy experiencing the story set out, the events that transpire, and the simple activities of exploring and fighting and social interaction with other players. We don’t expect the game to demand the level of performance from us that we’re fully capable of; we see it as a voluntary activity that produces fun, not one that demands work. It may be a difficult concept for a long-time hardcore gamer to understand, but we think and approach the game differently. Often those hard core gamers will snicker and deride us as not being up to it, but that says more about the minds of some of the hyper-competitive hard core gamer than it is about the rest of us. We just don’t care about reaching that level of performance in a game. It’s just a game after all. I leave that level of my performance for the workplace. And of course, there are people who can choose to enjoy the game either way.
From a business perspective, as it was said above, an MMO is a for profit operation that depends on a lot of sales and hence, appealing to a wide audience. Neither camp of players can have everything their way in a big, successful MMO — it needs them all as satisfied customers. To me, the key is ensuring that the core game experience has wide appeal, and that there are the more narrow experiences available to others. To my mind, the open world PvE is very casually approachable, the solo story lines a bit less so (I think they need some work yet to make them more solo/casual friendly), and I think the dungeons are definitely catering to the hard core performance players. I tried a few and just quit doing them. They’re not fun. Sure, I could learn the detailed tactics and builds needed to make them run smooth, but to me that’s work, and in my world, I expect to be paid for my work, and frankly, ArenaNet can’t afford my rates.
