Casual verses Hardcore Raiding

After the announcement that Death & Taxes was disbanding, an internal discussion was started on the Crux forums on having fun, which is especially important in a semi-casual guild such as our own.

As with all topics, it wandered a bit, but one point that arose was getting more enjoyment from using alternate characters, or "alts", more often. The suggestion revolved around the "cleared" content that we no longer run, or run when we run out of things to do (either due to clearing everything, or not having the raid composition to attempt anything more than what we have cleared already). For us this is anything up to, and including, Serpentshrine and Tempest Keep.

The quoted text below is my reply on the subject.
The interesting thing here is how we define Casual and Hardcore raiding.

Casual raiding would be the few hours a night, few hours a week bunch. There are varying talent specs, gearing and playing styles. These guilds usually form around a core of friends/family that like playing the game together.

Hardcore raiding on the other hand can go from 15-20 hours a week purely raiding (with many more hours on farming consumables). Players will optimise everything as much as possible, and go for every little extra buff they can.

As for examples of these, there aren't really any well known Casual guilds (at least as far as I know anyway). Hardcore raiders on the other hand, have a number of examples. I would have to say that the purest form of this could be found in SK Gaming. They're on the "bleeding edge" of progression, partly because they spend many many hours learning fights.

The question is, how do you define whether a guild is "hardcore" or "casual", and what happens to those in-between? Is progression based purely on which of the two categories the guild falls into, or are there other factors to be considered?

The bell curve example I mentioned earlier is apt for looking at guilds this way. There will be the extremes, that are almost purely hardcore, and there will be a few very casual raiding guilds as well (I'm only looking at raiding guilds, as the inclusion of all guilds would see a classic bell curve be skewed heavily towards the casual end). Most of us fit somewhere in the middle.

Deus ex Crux would fall in the upper quarter of guilds, based on progression, yet I would say we fall into more of a 50/50 mix of the raiding extremes. While we do raid upwards of 20 hours a week, we also have a slightly larger roster than most (roughly 46 active members) and we also have a social/alt guild, Crux. There has been a recent "man pants" crusade by one of our DPS officers in order to improve our raiding, but on the whole it's mostly a personal choice as to how you gear/raid (obviously, turning up in bad gear with a bad spec will probably see you sitting out).

In comparison, Elitist Jerks are definitely more of a progression guild, especially in light of the recent M'uru kill, but do not appear to be as hardcore as most would expect for raiding at that level (at least as far as I can tell anyway). The offshoot guild Serious Casual, of which Nite_Moogle talks about in his blog postp, could be considered in a similar light. Both are made of skilled players, but there is a high social aspect to them as well.

Should we use the words "Hardcore" and "Casual" to define raiding these days? I don't think we should, but whether we stop or not is another matter entirely.

I guess after all this, the important thing to note is that whatever raiding level you are at, it is important to have a goal, whether it is to kill the next boss before "those other guys", to see new content, or just to have a bit of fun.