Nicely done. I'm in the group Hardcore: "The College Student".

Interesting question. I play 5 to 6 hours a day, between work, wife, beer, eating, beer. I'd consider myself casual, I never hit the SP Cap.

Pretty much.

Casual: "Weekend Warrior" - 8 to 24 hour a week gamer (typically on their weekend, when they don't have anything better to do).
Casual: "The Hobbyist" - 4 to 12 hour a week gamer.
Casual: "The Occasional" - ??? hours a week (Dust 514? Yeah I'm in that beta. No, I haven't played any matches yet this week.)

Hardcore: "The College Student" - 20 to 30 hour a week gamer (whenver they can fit it in and they don't have anything better to do)
Hardcore: "The Professional" - 40 hours a week gamer.
Hardcore: "The No Lifer" - 80 hours a week gamer

Here's my opinion. It's all about the mindset.

Casual: Play to have fun. If it's not fun anymore, stop playing. Winning is nice, personal/corp stats are nice, but not the primary focus of the casual player. Most people in almost every game fall into this category.

Hardcore: Win at all costs. Win for personal stats, win for corp stats, win every metric you can think of. A side effect of this is that they're typically more driven to play more so that's what happens. You can still be hardcore and only play 5 hours/week, it's all in how you play and where your focus is when you do play.

Casual: A player that does not care about about winning or losing, he is just there to have a good time.

Competitive/ hardcore player: A player who wants to win at all costs.

Ok, let me get ready for this, it's going to be a big one!


LOLLL!!!!!!! 5-7hrs a week and you consider yourself a HC player!?!? I play that nearly every 2days and even i don't consider myself "HC", and people think i'm the troll....................

Nah - I am casual but when I play I still like to compete and I still hate loosing.

In my younger mmo days I was certainly hardcore - I was logged into my game 24/7 and was active 16-18 hours, and that included at work... (which is bad btw). I would camp for up to 24 hours for a boss spawn. I kept this up for three years in one game - ******* Korean grinder stole my life. Following that I played Eve and the SWG to the same extent.

I think I have balance now and I play 3-4 hours a day, more on weekends.

enhanced matchmaking my arse, will it scan and read every players skills and possible permutations for every possible possition that player might play and pit them against an equal and opposite team? NO you **** off then dont try.

Your Wife allows that much........beer?

you lucky Sod!

To my knowledge CCP has released no details regarding the mechanics of how this system will function. As such I'm avoiding assumptions as much as possible, but it seems like at minimum it would require an assessment of total skill points earned, and likely W/L ratio as well.

To reiterate however, there are no details released on this system.
A system is indeed planned however and as such should not simply be ignored.
Pretending an aspect of the game does not/will never exist only leads to bad balance feedback and less useful beta testing.

Cross

ps ~ even an advanced system really shouldn't scan every possible permutation of skill build, making sure players have generally the same level of development to work with is great, trying to hand hold them into not needing to learn anything about the game/not being able to make any mistakes? That's just bad game design as far as I can see.

tell that to me when there 2 fully skilled fully kitted tanks on the other team and zero av on mine GG CCP. if your going to make such an unique game follow it through ffs.

ccp have so far used the packaged respawn mechanics, the ones where epic take the **** out of developers that buy the engine/kit by spawning people in the opposite base, at least till they work it out. my next logical guess is that they use the crap matchmaking too.

and enhanced matchmaking (still a work in progress currently).

For game balance what is the proper number of hours per week for Dust 514 to balance around?
With the intent of balance being;
A) Providing a rewarding play experience for a diverse group of playstyles
B) Not having "casual" gamers be totally outpaced to the point of losing a reason for playing.

3-4 hours a day isn't hardcore?

So, if a guy told you he played softball EVERYDAY from 5pm until dusk, you wouldn't think he was a hardcore softball player?

How about a guy that gets up and works out at the gym every day from 4 am to 8 am? He's not "hardcore" into working out?

You guys are so funny.

I guess if I hadn't got the experience of a true no lifer (of which I am less than proud) I might have thought it was hardcore - but no 3-4 hours isn't hardcore. After work if I wasn't gaming I would probably just watch TV for 3-4 hours and I assume you wouldn't consider that hardcore ?

Gaming is not exactly physical so I do not think you can equate it to going to the gym.

7 hours a week is definitely casual. Not sure where to draw the line between casual, semi-casual, and hardcore though

Good list, I fall into the weekend warrior.

I think mindset has to be in conjunction with time spent playing though. When I'm playing, I'm all about the win. Also Dust is the only game I'm playing right now. I don't have a ton of time to play so when I find a game that I like I devote all my gaming time to it.

I think I have the hardcore mindset but I don't have the time available to be considered hard core. Does that make me casual?

I would steer away from absolute numbers and suggest that a percentage of free time would be a more accurate measure of gameplay dedication.

If a person has a job, family and other obligations he may have only a few free hours a week. If he devotes all of those to a game I would argue he is "Hardcore".

That's why the term "Hardcore" is next to useless for this purpose.


I also believe that the casual/hardcore debate is a red herring.

As as been pointed out multiple times, once you max out a given role's skills you are the equal of any other player in that role regardless of total SP.

It's really all about limiting how soon anyone can top out every skill. CCP doesn't want that to happen for seven years, so it becomes a simple calculation. Subtract seven years of passive SP gain from the total SP count of all skills projected to be in place at that time and divide by (52 x7) and you arrive at your weekly cap.

They have you arguing amongst yourselves with the casual vs hardcore distraction.


Edited my arithmetic

Do you have a second to grab us skill details from the market for our debate then? Total cost of maxing a x1 skill & a total of how many skills are x1, x2, etc... would give me something to do while I'm not working at work.