If you had to find out whether somebody is a hardcore MMORPG player by looking at one single fact, you should look at whether he uses voice chat or not. The correlation between "being hardcore" and "using voice chat" is pretty solid, all the uber guilds use it, and nearly no casual players ever even tried.
Voice chat correlates to hardcore by two ways: dedication and effect. It requires some dedication to set up a voice chat server, and have all the guild members buy the necessary hardware and install the necessary software. But as this investment has a huge payback in terms of MMORPG effectiveness, it is well worth it for the hardcore players, for who effectiveness is important.
I know my guild isn't hardcore, and isn't even a real raiding guild, because we don't use any voice chat at all. So while for example on Friday we did a Molten Core run which wasn't bad, killing Lucifron, Magmadar, and Gehennas, due to lack of voice chat that feat took us over 5 hours. As we killed both Magmadar and Gehennas on the first attempt, I'd say that we didn't use much more time in the actual boss fight than other guilds. But getting people organized between each fight, even on the way through the trash mobs, without voice chat takes forever. Distributing loot can also take quite some time when you discuss by typing. Two of my D&D friends are in a hardcore guild with voice chat, and killing the first 3 bosses of MC takes them less than 2 hours.
A quarter of a century ago (oh my god!), when I was a teenager with his first ZX81 computer and a dislike of writing things with a pen, I took classes in typewriting. I still got a nice diploma stating that at the end of that class I was able to type 170 letters per minute, error-free, on a mechanical typewriter, without looking at my fingers. By now, with years and years of computer practice, I type probably even faster than that. But I'm well aware that very few other people around me ever formally learned how to type. That makes chat by typing in a hectic situation pretty impractical. By the time the priest types "Help! I'm being attacked", he is already dead. The fact that while typing chat you can't use your keyboard to enter game commands doesn't help. Voice chat is much more efficient, because you can use your mouse and keyboard with your hands while speaking. And whatever the group size, 5 to 40, improved communication leads to better results, less delay, and less deaths due to misunderstandings.
One reason I don't do PvP in World of Warcraft is voice chat. If you are in a group, pickup or even guild without voice chat, and you are paired against a guild using voice chat, the difference in efficency is so huge as to make the whole exercise pointless. Some people see that the people that repeatedly beat them wear epic gear and think that they got beat by the better equipment. But in fact the other side has both better gear and a much better PvP success rate because of voice chat.
Unfortunately voice chat isn't for everybody. I personally dislike wearing headphones, I can't stand prolonged pressure on my ears. And speaking in voice chat is quite annoying to whoever is living with you. My wife absolutely hated it when I tried it. And you can just imagine the casual player dad who can only play after bringing his children to bed doesn't want to wake them up by shouting "Heal me, heal me!" into a microphone. If my guild ever introduces voice chat, I would just let it run over the loudspeakers, as pure listener, and not talk. But even that, having one or two guys in a raid give orders, and the rest listening, would increase our efficiency a lot.
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