good day.

if you didnt realise this blog wasnt a priority for me, you dont know me.

it isnt, and wont become one, i will however periodically post.

As long as there have been multi-player games there have been hardcore players of those games. This isnt limited to computer/console games but games in general; from games our grandparents played like Chess & Poker to modern equivalent Call of Duty 4 & Quake Live; there are always a small segment of the player base that sit on an echelon of extremism above most others.

A hardcore gamer can take many different shapes and forms, their motivations, drives and skills vary from person to person.

Contrary to popular belief the hardcore segment of any game doesn’t have to be the most highly skilled nor are they necessarily the most competitive; It could be the guy that knows all the rules to the game, The battlefields it’s played on, The odds an event will happen or the precise amounts of damage each weapon would do to an opponent, It could be someone that devotes every spare moment and often more time then he/she should be willing to give up on playing the game and mastering it. The motivation behind this ranges from self-worth to typical competitive spirit, It’s when this excessive enthusiasm gets in the way of their skill development that the players/developers around them start to feel it.

I’ve been part of a few games communities in the past as both a developer and a player and only now do I realise the absurdity of some of the more ‘hardcore’ traits I’ve exhibited, From attempting to play with cheats to enhance ‘my’ skill amongst my peers (If I could tell my pre-teen self how stupid that was I would, with a club) to relentlessly trolling forums and flaming developers of games We’re happy to spend every waking moment playing. There is no way the average person would participate in this sort of behavior normally so why do it here ? Because we believe they are doing their best to make the game the best it can be telling the creators of your favourite receptacle of time how to improve the game they have came up with isn’t necessarily a bad thing, Constructive criticism is something any developer worth their keyboard cherishes, However when you tie into it anonymity (remember the Internet is a place where you’re only as important as the frequency or your posts and the attention they garner) constructive feedback and suggestions easily and in many cases quickly degrades into name calling and bringing into question your opponents maternal lineage.

As a developer how are you supposed to separate the wheat from the chaff ? Early on its not hard If your player-base is small its easy to spot trolls from the insightful players who have at this point spent more time playing your game then you have. But what about when your player base is more then a handful of people? You’re screwed, The signal-to-noise ratio on any communications lines you have available will be saturated with a nasty mix of trolls, memes and plain ignorance. 

What’s important is to look at this from both sides of the coin, Sure they are a noisy mutinous lot but they do or at least at some point loved what you made. While a few of them will actually spend more time in the forums than in-game the majority will be screaming at you because they think its the best way to improve the game. While they are noisy, annoying, and a lot of the time useless feedback wise they will be around long after the rest of the players have gone.

Keep in mind at extremes they will cast their ire back towards the community and you will have a situation where not only can you do nothing right as a developer, neither can any of the players in their midst. Shouts of ‘nub’ ‘gtfo’ and ‘kick him he’s new’ will ring out from the servers they are playing on making new players an impossibility, After all who wants to play a game where everyone is an asshole?

Tough love is something you as a developer can deal with, New players on the other hand can’t.

Solutions for this need to be sorted out early on. Setting up player rankings to keep the new players and experienced separate can also give mixed results; Without experienced players the new players wont be able to learn as quickly then they would have if someone was holding their hand, but by the same token they also wont have someone yelling at them for being new.

Business wise where do the hardcore gamers sit ? they are in an odd position of being the best at the game and by extension probably start fan-sites, forums, leagues, guilds and tell all their friends how amazing this game is. Yet they can also be the most detrimental to its longevity due to the new player problem mentioned above. 

Should they have a say in the further development of a franchise or for that matter a new ip altogether ? Capcom/Blizzard would probably say yes as its due to the hardcore players of the Street Fighter/StarCraft franchises respectively that have kept them alive for 10+ years, (of course im not discounting the ability of both companies to make amazing games.)

Nintendo however seem less concerned with the hardcore market, They have instead carved out a new casual niche for themselves in the wii; a console almost exclusively aimed at the casual market has sold almost 3to1 in comparison to the xbox 360 & ps3, Proving that while not worthless the hardcore is a crowd that if you consider it purely from a business angle, you can take or leave.