5 ms·
This sounds similar to what happened with WoW, at first things are really hard to obtain, going after the real hardcore gamers and those that want to spend the
by robryan 15y ago
This sounds similar to what happened with WoW, at first things are really hard to obtain, going after the real hardcore gamers and those that want to spend the time to know the economy well, work together well and master professions.
As the game goes on they try more and more to appeal to the casual gamer which either doesn't have the skills or the time to master the game in the same way. Meaning it becomes hard to really differentiate yourself from others playing the game as most of everyone has pretty good items and didn't have to work hard to acquire them.
Even though I have nowhere near enough time to be a hardcore gamer at anything these days, I still don't think I'd really enjoy playing something causally and having it all handed to me.
- yvdriess 15y agoWorld of Warcraft was designed from the beginning with casual in mind. You cannot lose anything and player A is better than B only because A spent more time on the game than B. They introduced bound items and made crafting more of a time-sink than a player-based economy. Years of WoW market dominance has warped the meaning of 'hardcore' somewhat though. I still wouldn't make it a function of how much time is spent on something; it would make Farmville full of 'hardcore gamers'. PS. The above statements are to be taken in context of MMOs with a player-based economy, such as EVE.
- sek 15y agoYou never played Vanilla. Raids were almost impossible for over 90% of the players in the beginning. There are professional WoW players today, who are sponsored. It was designed for hardcore and casual players. With the Addons it got more and more casual friendly. Soulbound items did exactly the opposite, materials were still traded and when it was crafted there was no resell value. That meant the demand stayed high. The economy was also influenced trough expensive mounts and auction taxes. It may be not as complex as EVE, but big because everyone participated in it.
- JanezStupar 15y agoI have and I also played UO and my friends played EQ. Comparing to those two tittles WOW is super tame and casual. Edit: I played EVE too and it is pretty much up there with UO in terms of there being a real possibility of getting a heart attack by playing the game.
- patio11 15y agoIt was the difference between working at Foxconn and working for a Japanese megacorp: sure, there's a casual option among the two, but neither is exactly stress-free. (Bona fides: participated in 3 of the above 4 soulsucking activities.)
- ttt_ 15y ago>> World of Warcraft was designed from the beginning with casual in mind. How are 5h-8h raids designed with casual in mind? Specially considering that any item you just happen to pick-up casually (as in not in raids) is plain garbage next to those and it matters a whole lot in a pvp-oriented game? I disagree completely. WoW is designed from the ground up for addiction.
- yvdriess 15y agoBecause the only thing you risk doing those bullshit molten core raids was time; your own and that of your fellow party members. The whole point I was trying to make is that focusing on being a time sink and addicting is not what makes a game 'hardcore'.
- saraid216 15y agoActually, one of the original distinctions between "casual" and "hardcore" was the amount of time put in. (See Jessica Mulligan's "Developing Online Games" from 2003.)
- drostie 15y agoThere's also a worthwhile case study in the Neopets economy, which as far as I know didn't really adapt in these ways. You could grind on puzzle games for the local currency, but it stopped being about the puzzles and started being about trying to make in-game money. And then, what happened is that non-casual gamers would know all of the shop-inventory respawn times and would camp them, to buy up all of the commodities that the shops contained -- especially medicines and such. They would then resell them for much more money in their own user-defined shops. So it became the exact opposite: at first things were really easy to obtain, and they were mostly going after kids -- casual gamers. But their surge in popularity seemed to create a change in focus towards hardcore gamers eager to camp the spawn points and use multiple accounts to get freebies. At one point I even remember putting all of my money in the stock market just so that I could feed my Neopets with free soup from the in-game welfare department, because getting food was such a nuisance otherwise. There is a deeper question lurking beneath all of this, I feel -- and unfortunately for me it has deep ties with questions of meaning and purpose and thus gets bound up in my religion, which I do not want to talk too much about here. But the question is, "what makes a game worthwhile? why do you keep playing?" My Neopets were not very worthwhile and, since they're immortal, I imagine they've been starving in a cold computer database for the last way-too-many years. I obviously got bored with the grind necessary to take care of them, but why? Why did I complete all of Morrowind and yet found Oblivion impossible to play? What is it in my human quest that I am looking to create in a game, and are games unreal or real or hyper-real or something else? If we don't enjoy "having it all handed to us" but yet we also don't enjoy "working for it", what exactly do we want?