hardcore or softcore

I was listening to a podcast today and heard more of the hard-core/soft-core debate. I figured I would post my opinion on this. I personally can’t figure out which side of the line I am on so, I will present what I like to consider a neutral point of view.

If your goal is to complete all the content of a game as fast as humanly possible then have fun doing it but, don’t complain when two months after release you don’t have anything left to do. Also, I am not sure where I stand on the achievement thing yet but, I do think it can be a good tool for those who think they have done everything there is to do in the game. In other words, just because you have finished the current highest level raid on heroic doesn't necessarily mean you have “finished” the game. Have you done all the instances in WotLK? Have you done all of them on heroic? Have you done all of the raids on 10-person? Have you done all of them on 25-person? That is just WotLK dungeons. There are also the BC instances and raids. Oh yeah don’t forget there was an entire world before BC that had instances and raids too. So, you’ve done all of the instanced content? Have you done all the quests in all the WotLK zones? Good job. How about the BC zones? Again don’t forget the old world zones. You finished all the quests in all the zones? How is your reputation? Are you exalted with everyone? Great! Have you explored all the zones?

Anyway I think/hope you get the point. There is probably more to do. Some of these things may or may not be things you want to do. The point is that the game has tons of content to do. I assume it was made keeping in mind that different people want to do different things.

The real question is should the developers cater to the top 5% of the players? Should they cater to the rest of the player base? The answer is yes. Without a doubt they should. That being said, I think that a proportional amount of development time should be spent based on the quantity of paying customers that are actually going to get to use/see the product.