What is the most hardcore playerbase in gaming?

[Kiros]

@rjung

(And I nominate “PlayStation 3 fanboys” for the prize. I can’t believe there are folks who can say “$600 is cheap for everything you’re getting!” with a straight face…)

I could honestly give a damn about current-gen console gaming, but I think the corollary to that is all those Wii fanboys who are looking forward to jumping up and down and waving their magic wand at a TV screen

On topic, the obvious nomination is the frontline guild for whatever MMO is big at a given time. EQ, EQ2, WoW, whatever - they go as far as possible to take all of the “game” out of MMORPGame. Guild requirements of eight hours a day, six+ days a week. Required attendance at specific events while you’re on. Required use of game mods, voice chat, and everything else possible to take away any sense of immersion in a game world. Regimented orders, penalties, and attendance tracking all so that they can be the first to do X event, and the officers can assign the loot to whomever most benefits the collective.

I mean, those guys who set up desks that are basically cockpits have to get some points, but at least that’s a reach towards some sense of realism. This is a reach towards making a game into an army enlistment, which takes a certain amount of hardcore.

[lokij]

@Sailboat

ASL! heh.

I can’t help but recall the moment at which my hardcore blood-and-iron wargame geek career was interrupted by the first epiphany that there was such a thing as too much detail.

I’d eagerly purchased the first few supplements, ignoring vaguely growing trepidation and foot-dragging among our wargame crowd, and set about memorizing rules arcana.

There was a rule for tanks doing “overrun” attacks on infantry squads.

There was a rule for how to assess said tanks’ attack strength, even if some of the weapons were nonfunctional (jammed machine guns). This included a base attack factor for just the hull of an unarmed tank attacking infantry.

There was a rule for bicycle troops.

(Stay with me, it’s coming.)

There was a rule for splitting out an individual scout (one man) from a squad.

There was a proviso for doing the same to bicycles, so you could have a single man on a single bicycle.

There was a rule for what happened if a round deflected off the front of a tank’s hull – including a proviso for the driver being stunned while the tank was moving.

This led to a rule determining a one-hex (one space) random movement of a tank whose driver was stunned by a deflected round.

There were a very few cliff hexes on one or two of the map boards.

(and here we are!)

Thus, using the rules, it was possible to calculate and simulate the military effect of a driverless tank rolling OFF a cliff and performing a hull-only “overrun” attack on a single bicycle scout.

They had that covered, man. It’s in there.

After sharing that realization, I was ultimately never able to get my group’s other players to commit to actually playing, and the supplements still sit on a closet shelf somewhere, after all these years.

My money’s still on the tank.

Sailboat

This all sounds uncomfortably like Warhammer 40K 2nd edition which was probably the most complex tabletop game I ever learned how to play. Just tons and tons of rules plus unending errata.

[Weirddave]

@Sailboat

Thus, using the rules, it was possible to calculate and simulate the military effect of a driverless tank rolling OFF a cliff and performing a hull-only “overrun” attack on a single bicycle scout.

The bike gets squished. Why so many rules to determine that?

[E-Sabbath]

40k? God, no. That’s trivially easy. Squad Leader and ASL are as far beyond that as… chess is beyond checkers. Poker is beyond Go Fish.