You Hardcore guys are crazy!

[Kevin]

Hardcore is a different beast all together, it's true. Although I've always seen these loose your characters modes as a colossal waste of time. There's too much left to random chance. It doesn't matter how good you are if the server lags for half a second and you die to fire chains or some bullshit in Hell or whatever. Fifty hours gone? No thanks.

If you are a player that only gets entertainment out of Inferno difficulty (or Hell or Nightmare) then sure, some of those hours are "gone" because you were only trudging through them to get to a place where you find entertainment value. The 50 hours is only "gone" if you put no or much less value on those hours. If you got no entertainment out of those 50 hours then sure they are gone, but for me that seems crazy, I'd have to get a lot out of the later hours of play to make up for getting nothing or very little out of the earlier hours.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying there is anything out of whack with that point of view. I've got non hardcore characters too, and they are getting more playing time because they provide a different type of entertainment value. But my value per hour in games tends to go down as the game progression slows down and the grinding takes over, not up.

Since each person gets value out of different things they value certain modes more than others. Having every skill unlocked and being able to change around specs and see the different interactions might be something that provides a lot of entertainment for someone, and yeah hardcore would not be a good choice, because they could lose high value options after gaining them. Some people get more value out of the leveling process than others, in which case hardcore can provide more value because once they hit 60 they are likely to stop playing that toon anyway.

Hardcore players tend to get a lot of value out of clearly seeing that they were able to meet the challenges, play without any major mistakes, etc. Yes you can get the same from non hardcore, but the certainty that if you die, it's over, adds extra thrill for some people, so they get more entertainment return in that hour of play time. Some people that just adds stress and lowers the value. Some it doesn't add or detract anything.

My interest in hardcore is dropping in part because I was getting a lot of value out of succeeding at content I had never seen before, since I was doing my first play through in hardcore. Well now that I've done that, I'm getting a bit less value. Since I also value being able to just toy around with various skill combinations, and the chance of failing with something I'm just monkeying with causing permanent death isn't appealing, I'm leveling a SC toon. But leveling in SC is somewhat less entertaining than it is in HC. Which means I fully get "wasted" hours.

Hopefully that wall clears up why most HC players don't ever feel a death wasted or lost anything for them. They were getting value from all the time up to that point and not really trying to reach a point where they could get significantly more value per time spent. It's not for everyone, and it's not better. It's just different.

This is also why HC players tend to not twink as much either, in part because removing the challenge in those earlier levels removes some or even much of the value they get from playing. Of course that isn't true for everyone and there certainly can be more value at higher levels for some HC players so getting there quicker, matters.