Casual/Hardcore Revisted: Segregated Servers

I've been known to mill around the forum pages of Penny Arcade. I'll admit, the posters over there have some serious skills at tearing down ideas. All they need is a whiff of weakness and the onslaught is on. On this particular occasion, I cross-posted my blog entry on Casual and Hardcore Gamers, sparking a somewhat convoluted and sidetrack prone debate. One suggestion, offered by a poster named "Zombiemambo" suggested the idea of separate servers for casual and hardcore gamers. I'll admit, I was intrigued and couldn't help but blog...

The idea of completely segregating the playing factions is a unique one, and I initially couldn't figure out a mechanism by which it would be effective. If you decrease the difficulty of the casual server, but retain the entirety of the content, then hardcore players would have little incentive to continue on their hardcore servers except for their unadulterated love of the grind. Thus the point of the server would be defeated, or, at the very least, everyone would have exactly the same maximumly leveled and geared player, making the game somewhat boring.

Of course, you could potentially include additional content on the hardcore servers, and offer experience bonuses on the casual servers. Unfortuantely, this decision would raise serious outrcries from the casual community that has not paid for a full game but has only received part of the benefit.

My suggestion is to limit the players' time. A casual user will determine how many hours of play they will average per week. They will then join a server that targets this hourly rate. For example, a person with a serious time crunch would only have time for 5 hours a week, and so he would sign up for a server that restricts play to 5 hours a week. Of course, to make up for this limited play, the server would feature hyper-accelarated experience gains and lower party size/time requirments to complete segments of large dungeons. Players with more time available would select servers with higher time limits but lower experience acceleration.

There would need to be adjustments, such as allowing extended play for holidays, but this system might allow players with low time commitments to access the entirety of their favorite game's content in a slightly truncated form. There might be some frustration for players who select that wrong server and are forced to curtail their play before they would prefer on certain weeks, which might raise the possibility of alternate timing methods or bonuses such as "time banks" or "rollover hours." (anytime minutes for everyone!)

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