Everyone is hardcore... almost

I noticed one thing about WoW and hardcore gaming during the weekend. There are some players that are online almost all the time, at least everytime I login, be it morning, day or night. Naturally, they are hardcore gamers who are tackling (currently farming) the raid content of the game, who couldn't care less about this kind of blog.

But there are very few level capped players who take the game less seriously.

In short form, I think everyone who has played the game to the level cap is hardcore. I have been playing the game for about 2 years and I haven't capped yet. I'm as casual as casual can be, and most likely I will never experience the raiding as it's supposed to be. Most probably I'll resort to the Greedy Goblin way and purchase myself a raid when the time comes to visit the raid dungeons.

There are the old raiders, who have plunged through the Vanilla dungeons, Outlands raiding and are now bored to death with Sarth+3. Then there are the ones, who have started when The Burning Crusade hit the shelves and ran through Karazhan and Mt. Hyjal to the max, killing Kil'Jaeden before moving on to Wrath of the Lich King. And then there are the newcomer achievers, who have started to play when Wrath of the Lich King opened Northrend and DeathKnights for all to use and abuse.

All of these groups are playing the levelling game at speed which tells me at least that the quest are just ran through and next to no interest is put on the stories themselves.

And to me, everyone falling into one or another of these categories is hardcore.

All players who have time to form and upkeep guilds, raiding schedules and preparing for raiding are hardcore: WoW is their hobby or extremely large part of their life.

May sound strange, but I'm happy that I'm not one of them.

But avast!, this extends to all MMO's eventually! As the discussion is raging about "WoW Tourists" trying to bend and evaluate all games -DarkFall in this case- in terms of WoW, one thing comes obvious: in games like EVE Online and DarkFall, which are skill based, the gaming hardcore is the ruling class. We casuals cannot even join a guild before we'd be ganked million times and quit. And if we got into guilds, we wouldn't be able to 'train our skills' up to the standards of the guild, thus making us dispensable.

All this time I really wanted to try the deep end of the pool and subscribe for DarkFall when it opens the doors for the less hardcores to enter. Now I know I do not have time and this game is not for the casuals (in the context I can talk about being casual, that is).

This can be evaluated easily, though. Compare your /played to the time you have been playing in Real Time (tm). How may hours a day that would count to?

My time ingame per day is negligible.

How about yours?