I know this is a very controversial topic and I know I'm going to a lot of heat from this but is my opinion and my opinion only, your opinion may differ but I do ask you to respect my opinion. In my opinion I think subscription-based MMO's do not need to be casual let me explain why. For S-B MMO's to last a very long It need to be hard-core and have a group of dedicated players, nothing against the casual player but they like to flip-flop on game, I do this sometimes as well but for game to last for very long time like World of WarcraftIt and EverQuest needs to have a group of dedicated players, and making the game casual is not going to bring in a group of dedicated players. Now before you say World of Warcraft is casual yes it is now but it already had that group of dedicated players so they can do whatever they want to it in some degree and people would stay, that is not happening to new subscription-based MMO's. Should subscription-based MMO's be hard-core or casual and explain why do you choose one or the other.

it's possible to both ways at the same time but these casuals don't want it becouse it would take time from programmers to input and that sort of takes precious work time from other things.

Non free MMO's cater to all kinds of people, casual as well as the not so casual. Changing that would turn most people away from it if you ask me!

What keeps people playing though will be the game itself, the community and so on...

Flip-Flopping casual players tend to bring in more revenue than the small group of long-term "hardcoe" players.

Also having a smaller market share means less quality end-game content which then scares the "hardcoes" away.

Also games like EQ which favored hardcoe play are dying.

Also payment model has little impact on who will or won't join.

Also I'd go so far to say that sub games scare hard core players away as this late into the market people who know they will dedicate a massive potion of time into a game will be apprehensive about joining a game without going for a free-ish trial first.

Also casual players tend to have more money to spend, and burn through content slower which brings in more money. Hard core players burn through content quickly and are prone to quitting a game in between new content and as a sub model it depends on people sticking with it through lenient months.

HOWEVER

At the end of the day both crowds are important equally. Competitive players are needed for their drive which prolongs the game and also are usually the formative members of most large communities, as well as being the force that typically pushes game content forward. They're also usually on top of balance issues faster than the developers themselves.

I expect them to spread a wide net and to try to provide content that appeals to folks with a variety of playstyles: PvPers, explorers, crafters, folks who enjoy questing, folks who like to RP, folks who like to run dungeons, folks who like to putter while they chat with in-game friends. If you define hardcoe as "engaged" you might have a point. If you define hardcoe as "competitive" not so much. Personally, i've never found such labels very useful.

You're right it is good for games to have a hard-core player base and the casual players. what I mean by Hard core is ,content is Hard and that takes longer to do the content so the game last longer and then you have more dedicated people to do, like vanilla wow in a way.

Well look at it this way; if content if content is hard, then only one group is getting content. The "hardcoe". If content is "casual", then both groups can do it.

I think most content should be available at all skill levels and schedules. Can it take a long time? Sure, of course. But necessarily hard? Requiring lots of consistent scheduling and massive month+ long grinds for very meager rewards? That's bad.

It's a good idea, however, for developers to note the difference between something that takes a long time and something that is too montonous and punishing. The best content is content that is its own reward.

I think the argument is fallacious. How they handle the IP bears greater weight than payment models or gaming play styles. Though there is no ONE thing (Success will come from a myriad of factors...) Treating the IP lovingly is paramount and what will keep the dedicated here and the casuals coming back again and again. The world will be the addiction and they'll always be back for another fix.

And if you truly want to know what the best pay:effort model is for games, it's games that offer good support for:

PvP

RP

Modding

Because those three are a source of tons of emergent game play. Players provide the content. Not to mention that PvP crowds are usually the most "devoted" to a game, and RP crowds are traditionally one of the most long-term players. Modders are just awesome.

Hard core grind games don't really succeed no matter what their target audience is. WoW did not change because they wanted to, they changed their shceme because they saw a lot of people were quitting due to the game being pretty hard and time-intensive. Sure mroe people were joining rather than leaving but that was more indicative of the problem with the MMO market at the time.

Also WoW was touted as the casual alternative to MMO's at the time of its release and it has maintained its position since then. Vanilla WoW was nothing compared to older titles in difficulty. WoW started as casual and succeeded because it was casual.

An MMO also needs many reasons to want to login besides just leveling, finding new and better gear, and PvP. It needs a robust crafting system that keeps the player interested and engaged from the beginning to the top of it and crafted items need to be as good as or better then anything you find in the game. I think ESO has that but until I play it, it is difficult to tell.

An MMO also needs things like housing because that gives the player something they feel like they own in the game world, ownership is key in getting players to want to keep paying and keep logging in.

In Ultima Online the housing was in the games real world and the top guilds had enough houses in one area to make a player town. These towns were destinations on the servers and that was a reason for players to want to continue to pay and play the game, they owned a town and people came to their town as a destination in the game. Lets meet at Ironwood or Avalon, what ever the name of your town was and just saying that name everyone on the server knew exactly where that was.

In Star Trek Online the Fleet/Guild build their Starbase. The Starbase has tier's to its development and each tier unlocks things like a shipyard, ship weapons, ground weapons and these items are the best items in the game so once a Fleet builds their Starbase to tier 5 they have access to the best equipment the game has to offer and the players built it by donating to projects that took them years to complete. This gives their Fleet something they built and a feeling of ownership, and that is something an MMO must have or it won't last.

An MMO needs lots of mini games. Games within the game that provide rewards and are so involved that players will want to login just for that mini game. Again in Star Trek Online they have a duty officer mini game. This makes it seem like your Starship actually has a crew of hundreds or even thousands, and you set these duty officers on missions which in turn earns you rewards even when you are not logged in and playing they carry on with the orders you gave them.

An MMO needs all of these things or it will not last long. I am not saying ESO has to be exactly like what I have described, but Zenimax needs to understand that to keep people interested in their game they need LOTS of things to do.

Another thing to consider is that probably around ~50% of this game's target audience are those that are coming from the traditional Elder Scrolls' experience. Those people are already apprehensive of the perceived obnoxiousness and immaturity that accompanies hardcoe MMOs, whether that's a fair judgment or not. (And let's be honest; it is.)

There you have it....bottom line is it's still a business.

Well, true, but I don't want people taking this out of context. I just want to state this since you only quoted that bit.

When a game tends to focus on a single market, it experiences...err, well, something like "diminishing returns". Why? Because each group of players bring in their own advantages for the game, gaming experience, and developers. The more of a group of players you get, the less valuable the advantages that group provides tend to be. So keeping it in balance and appealing to most markets is in fact the preferable business model.

The problem that lies in that, however, is a community which is almost permanently divided.

So it kind of svcks.

I think you can keep a lot of players who dont concider themseles pro players or elite guilds if you offer gameplay that is deep in other ways. ritch deep lore gets skimmed past by a lot of hardcoe players on their way to maximized templates. Deep crafting might get ignored by hardcoe raiders only interested in rare drop items. I think a lot of hardcoe gamers lock into a part of the game o try and be best at that one thing, but regular joes might just be spreading themselves around all the systems to enjoy a fuller experiance.

if you go too far to the hardcoe you end up with half a game like darkfall. it needs to be deep but broad for different people to play different ways. Casual gamers have pkenty of money and are a good long term bet because a lot of us are simply hardcoes from a decade ago stilll gaming but more sustainably now.

^This nails it.

Minigames are something I rarely see in AAA titles, which is really disappointing, at least done in the way I like it. There's things like PvP arenas/battlegrounds that are about the only things I can think of that can be labeled worthwhile/meaningful minigames in such titles. ESO of course shouldn't do either of those, so I'm hoping for less ranked/competitive PvP minigames that doesn't detract from Cyrodiil.

In a game like Runescape which has a plethora of meaningful, challenging, and enjoyable minigames ended keeping me around mostly for those minigames. They don't have to be combat oriented ones either to be enjoyable either. I'm really hoping something like dark anchors becomes a minigame in the sense that you can find them out in the world, group together and have a challenge along the way, and you can work towards/get meaningful rewards in the process all of which build towards the fact that you're encouraged to come back again and again, not once or twice and never again.

ESO needs at least a couple distractions to keep people playing like in-game chess, horse/guar racing with betting, an arena (think Oblivion, not WoW style arena where people can put in small bets and watch fights and two people can duke it out). Having a solid PvP system + endgame PvE honestly isn't what the game should entirely be focusing on; it should be a large portion of it yes, but those two things can't keep a large playerbase around for a long time, you need things like housing, crafting, and minigames to keep things going. I really hope ESO is able to nail this part, after release hopefully, and before content is burned through.

I find it pretty depressing that more games didn't take away three things from Runescape:

Minigames

Skills

Quests

Yeah, I agree with that. There was a large variety of minigames in that game, and a lot of the quests were a lot longer than a traditional MMO one. The only thing is that the skills became REALLY grind-based once you had got them to a high level.

True, I mainly liked that how interdependant skills were, that they were part of the main game rather than it being combat-centric which is very rare I think from an MMO perspective.

I hear ya...I wanted to go into greater detail but I'm at work and typing long dissertations on an iPad svcks.

Fair enough hope you didn't mind the post too much

I would add one more to that: the item system. Maybe the item system minus the rares/stupidly insane OP armor/prayer/weapons at the endgame.

Overall though, the item system always had you wanting to work more for money, each item had meaning and value, was familiar, and could be used in a variety of ways. In AAA MMOs, you get a piece of armor and later outgrow and forget about it. In RS you could sell it once you've upgraded, alch it, use it for PvP as budget armor in case you lost it, give it to a friend etc. In most MMOs you can't give that piece of armor to someone else, and usually you don't get much out of it after you're done. I'll admit the ones that incorporate old armor into a crafting system sometimes do a good job of making items meaningful.

But yeah, the skill system kept you playing, and working to achieve something other than just a level, it looks like ESO is kind of doing that, but in a way that has less of the flaws RS' skill system had, but arguably less of a reward. The non-cb side was fantastic as well.

The quests omgggg yes the quests, they were funny, engaging, great stories, meaningful, took more than 10 minutes to complete, changed the world around you, gave you special rewards. There were so many good things that went into the quest system, it's really depressing how often new MMOs forget the limitless ways you can make a game work.

This would depend on taste more so than it would being a great feature RS had that other games should incorporate, but less of a focus on being the max level. You could get into the fun minigames and quests without being max level. You didn't have to be max level to participate in the insanely difficult and risky boss fights, you didn't have to be max level to kill a max level etc. There was always the incentive to try and power up, but it was skill based and not hp/damage based too much to mean lower levels could still be meaningful. In Cyrodiil they're kind of doing that, as they're boosting everyone to level 50 (even though they're obviously not the same), so I'm really happy.

I apologize for all the writing, see my sig I'm a helpless wall of text writer.