Can people define what "HARDCORE" "CASUAL" is???

Hardcore means you play as much as you can and think about the game all the time.

Casual means you play when you feel like it.

I have never, ever, ran across someone who plays EQ 1-2 hours per week on an extended basis. We must run in completely different circles.

Most raid guilds raid 3x per week for 4+ hours per night. Most of those players also grind xp or other loot for 3-4 hours per night. That's a cap of about 28-30 hours per week, so your 25 hour cutoff between hardcore and casual is somewhere in the realm of accurate.

The draw to the hardcore server has to be the desire to truly call yourself "The Best". This bragging on the forums about killing Aten 73 times in era because you're the only guild bothering to do it is beyond pathetic.

Hardcore server: no AoCs...all contested content. Period. Nothing else really matters.

Let's see who really is the best...and if enough folks even care to populate a server.

By DBG definition
"Casuals shouldn't be allowed to fight Nagafen" -- Holly Longdale, 6/30/15
If youve fought naggy youre not a casual.

Naggy who?

The problem is that round about Ragefire/Lockjaw timeframe, the hardcore players discovered that if they all join the same guild, they all get to win. You just have to pick the right horse, and if you choose wrong initially, well that is easily resolved.

Same thing will happen on any future server that has happened on the last five. There will be no competition. There will be one guild, left wondering why no one will challenge them.

Casual is like a one night thing, maybe youre in a bar, you're both a little drunk, maybe a little desperate, one things leads to another ...

Hardcore involves equipment, whips, chains, machinery, and it's usually premeditated, sometimes for profit (if you're really lucky)

The problem is the hardcore left in 2001, what's left is those just posing to be so....

Not all of us. What happened in 2001? I was playing in one of the most hardcore guilds that existed in Everquest in 2001, and I don't recall any mass exodus.

Fat finger typo 2004 when EQ lost a majority of it's userbase

IMO Dead Halfling Society is Hardcore casual.

I agree on this definition.

I disagree. On a scale of 1 being casual 10 being hardcore, I would say that definitition of casual is around a 5, which in all honesty, is probably where the majority of the player base is. Whether DBG caters to the “5” or truly releases a casual server, we will have to wait and see.

If that is a '5' on a scale of 1-10 then what is a '1'? "Plays WoW"? "Favorite game is Fetch (and drools all over the ball)"?

To be fair - that was their thought process 4 years ago, and a lot has changed since then.

Don't directly set a hard limit play time on the casual server. Rather, put a soft limit in place by way of diminishing XP returns after the second hour of play each day.

First two hours could have 125% xp; hour three, 100% xp; hour 4 50% xp; hour 5+ 10% xp.

If any group member has been logged in for 4 hours or more, warn the group each time a mob dies. When any group member hits the 5 hour mark, eliminate all non-coin drops for mobs killed by that group.

Hardcore is when you schedule to play a game.

“Hey man, want to go see new x movie on Tuesday night?”
“Sorry, I can’t have to raid”.

Doesn’t make it bad, plenty of people have hobbies that they schedule (basically anything with teams). But in the video game world you are no longer casually playing when you feel obligated to play because of commitment. It’s not a pickup b-ball game with people at the park (casual), you have now made commitments of when/who you will play with (organized sports league, hardcore).

A true casual server would be well suited for drop in/drop out play.

And most people that are closer to actual “ultra casual”...never look at these forums.

While your comment doesn’t deserve a response as I hardly think I was out of line in my comment, a 1 would be someone that logs in, chats to some people, maybe goes and works on a quest that may or may not be an upgrade for them, looks to maybe get some xp. There are plenty of people that play this game that don’t raid, and I am one of them. I happen to have a lot of time at work to visit the forums. BTW, I am not saying a server should be dedicated to people that are a 1, I am simply saying that the persons definition I would not define as casual. I am just offering my opinion as everyone else, including yourself, is doing as well.

This does not pass even the most cursory analysis.

Most of the generally accepted hardcore guilds on any of these servers may or may not have a schedule. Schedules are more common these days due to instanced raid-lockouts, even hardcore guilds want to maximize that, so most have a schedule for those. But what they all have in common is the bat-phone, usually hooked up to a program that is monitoring spawns in the zone and sending out SMS alerts. They expect you to show up, or you are out. Any time of the day or night. If you appear less than half the time, you're out. The end. They have to, these zones do not run on a fixed schedule and they are the best places for loot (unfortunately).

Schedules are how grown-ups with busy lives and commitments make sure they can get together and do something. They are not hardcore or casual. Casual guilds only do instances, and they do them on a schedule. Some raid just once a week, more commonly it is 3x a week, with a low raid attendance requirement (maybe 30%, so you show up once a week and you're good, and most average over 30 days, so you can not show up for 2 weeks and catch up the 3rd).

Perhaps you can be so casual that you don't want to commit to anything at all, and just want to plug in and play. But that's fundamentally incompatible with a social game unless your definition of casuals means playing with total strangers all the time, and never accomplishing much more than an xp grind in lguk.

Dunno, if I show up to the Y for basketball a couple times a week at 6 AM, because that's when the guys I play with are playing, that doesn't make me a hardcore basketball player. Just because something is scheduled doesn't make it hardcore. Some activities in Everquest can't be done just whenever you feel like showing up. That doesn't make everyone who participates in them hardcore.

Now if your guild had a policy that you must show up to every raid, that would be hardcore. If I played in a basketball league where they would kick me out if I missed practice, yeah, I'm probably pretty hardcore at that point. I don't know of any guild on the TLP's that has that kind of requirement. Even the most hardcore guilds have pretty lenient attendance requirements.

I think a better definition of hardcore is, if you let others determine what you'll be doing when you log in. If you are in a guild that requires you to come to raids when you are online, that's probably the dividing line between casual and hardcore.

That’s more how I see it. Planning to play with the guys at 6am is pretty casual. HAVING to go play with them at 6am or they kick you out is not casual.