Oxymoronic?  Not really.  I’m distinguishing between activities and personalities here.  A casual activity is something you can complete in a relatively short period of time, say under 10 minutes, with minimal conscious effort.  Most games have daily quests and each of those typically encompasses a casual activity – even the group dailies.  A hardcore activity is something that takes a combination of time and effort, where dedication is key.  Running an old raid might not require a lot of time now but it does require thought on some parts.  Running a new raid is certainly a hardcore activity.  Competitive PvP is hardcore too.  Running an auction house business comes up.

When we get to personalities we have the casual player who’s in it for the distraction and time wasting (in a good way).  They might log in here and there, no real big deal if they miss a few days.  Each session is different from the last, with no real disappointment if they didn’t reach their goal.  They play for fun, which is measured by the journey, not the goal.  Hardcore players have set goals and measures to reach them.  Dedicated playtimes are often par for the course and there’s a need to be “the best” at something, even if you’re the best in your small circle.  They also play for fun, but the journey has nothing to do with it, it’s all about the goal.  Here’s a Venn diagram to help explain it.

Most players exist primarily in 1 of the intersections.  I tend to fall into the casual activity, hardcore personality.  I rarely have the time or dedication for strenuous activities but I certainly take value in improvement and reaching my goals.  The inverse, hardcore activity and casual personality are in my opinion, the true gaming minority.  It is really hard to do a hardcore activity with a casual attitude in an MMO setting as the peer pressure can push you out.  Hardcore content usually requires a solid group effort and if you can’t put in what others can, then you get put on the sidelines.  Casual/hardcore raiders exist, but they need fairly strict rules for success and something outside the game to keep them going.

The other side of the coin is those who gel with their personality and activity.  Casual/casual tends to fit into the F2P model, where the journey/process is where the meat is, rather than the goals.  You don’t need to be the best pet trainer, you just need to get more pets.  These players existed in previous MMO models but had extremely limited options up until 5 years ago.  Facebook gaming exploded thanks to this group.  Zynga is failing at an epic pace because other groups, who have much more game development experience, are able to put out quality titles at the same price point now.

Finally, the hardcore/hardcore player.  EvE nullsec players are this group, though they apparently only account for 20% of the playerbase (if that).  Raiding guilds racing for world firsts fit here too.  Rank 1-10 PvP players.  FPS clans.  MLG is tailor made for this group.  For a very long time, this was the only gaming group that was catered too because their needs are simply.  The goal is organic to the game (be the best) so your reward system is simpler.  The obstacles to get there are “balance” in PvP games (which can be easy if it’s only PvP) or “pick 3-5 from this list of 100” for PvE games (a-la DnD) – again, easy.  This is by far the easiest group to please but they are also in the gaming minority today, especially in the MMO front.  EA has said that they won’t ever release a game without an online component again.  If you like the hardcore online stuff, you have way more options than any other player type.

I’m curious where people think they fit into this mix, if at all.

Crappy painting skills aside, here’s a graph explaining my point of view of good MMOs.

A really awesome MMO isn’t about single player experience (TOR comes to mind) and a really good MMO isn’t only about group content (EQ for the most part).  MMOs are awesome when both of those interesect.

Back to EQ for a second.  People are going to clamour that EQ was a great game and in some parts it was.  It did drop subs like a brick once WoW and EQ2 came out though, so there were obviously some issues with it and they mostly surrounded the group aspect.  What EQ did right was find the balance between personal story/responsibility and group content.  Meaningingful consequences to your actions (such as faction gain/loss) affected not only your group’s ability to progress (gated content) but also your ability to progress (say enter a city without being KoS).

WoW Vanilla did this too, to a degree.  It opened up the intersection of the two parties and really rewarded group play while keeping the single player aspect alive.  You could do something meaningful in 30 minutes.  This simply has never been the case in EQ.  WoW today however, focuses much more on the single player aspect.  LFD/LFR are all for the “what about me” generation, with quick rewards.  If you don’t like it, leave ’em and try another one.  Guild levels don’t provide any type of group reward.  Enter any city without a guild and you’ll get 100 invites an hour to a 25 guild.

The success of the next great MMO will be about finding the balance of group content and single player content.  Hopefully the ship can right itself.

Inventory space is a problem in all games.  Either you can only have 2 guns, or 10 slots or 100.  Most F2P games take advantage of this space issue and charge you real money to increase the size.  It’s obviously a balancing issue where the dev needs to have enough space for moderate use while not making it so big that their databases crash from billions of items stored.

When WoW started, you had 5 bag slots with a maximum of 16 per slot.  Banks gave you 32, plus 6 bag slots for a rather large amount of gold.  Today, you can get bags with 26-32 slots, which pretty much doubles the storage that existed previously.  RIFT also offers multiple bag sizes but they’re still in Vanilla mode, so we haven’t seen the explosion, if at all.  EvE has this problem too, but it’s combated by increasing your ship storage size (which is offset by reducing offense/defense).

A possible solution for the themepark crowd is the exchange and trade-up.  Where each WoW expansion typically adds 2-10 new tiers of commodities –  and MoP has added a stupid amount with cooking – you really are stuck with each character holding on to items, then mailing them across to players who can use them.  What I suggest is a shared commodities bag.  When I’m out and about and collect a piece of Turtle meat, who says my Shaman needs it?  Perhaps my Rogue is the cook.  If I was able to put items into an exchange pile, that all characters had access to, I would be saving on space.  Many games do this today in the Action RPG sphere  – D3 and Torchlight 2 shared stashes come to mind.  Heck, WoW and Rift and all of them do it with a Guild Bank already.  People have been forming 2 man guilds for years for the group storage.  By sharing the commodities, I am reducing the individual slot requirement by the number of characters I have.  Win.

The second option is the trade up.  Inscription is a PERFECT example for this.  You need to carry a solid dozen inks, milled from dozens of herbs in order to make glyphs.  The trade up system already exists here where you trade 1 type of ink for another.  This exact same model could be used for other tradeskills and not necessarily on a 1:1 basis.  Maybe 5 gold bars gives me 1 truesilver.

A final solution is the elimination of grey items or, like RIFT, the addition of a “sell all crap” button to the game.  The entire purpose of these items is to bloat bags and to be traded for cash.  If you go the first route, simply change the RNG to give a cash bonus when a grey item should drop.  If you go the latter, I know half my bags would empty in a second.

Increasing bag size is a temporary solution.  The problem is that there is too much stuff that people collect in their travels.