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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8642224" data-attributes="member: 18">Ackshulllly!I mean, I agree on D&D and tabletop RPGs - they have to be at least basically enjoyable to keep people playing. Marketing and brand identity can keep them on top even if they're not much more than that, but they need that.I would suggest however you can make a game that is neither playable nor entertaining that keeps millions playing. Not with a tabletop RPG, but there are mobile games which manage to manipulate systems of quasi-addiction, gambling rush, FOMO, and so on to keep millions playing week-on-week even though those people aren't necessarily having any actual fun. MMOs have also sometimes created situations where a game was fun, but then becomes a FOMO-enforced grind, which can keep people playing long past where they last had fun. WoW's population crash in Cataclysm, for example, was because it finally did this so hard, and became so unfun for normal players, that people simply stopped playing.(Specifically if you care, Cataclysm did three things at once - first off, it made an extremely heavy schedule of "Daily" quests basically mandatory - you were expected to log in and do 20-25 quests (I forget) every day. If you did not, you fell behind on stuff you "needed". Depending on which quests were up and how efficient you were that was 45 to 120 minutes right there. Every day. On top of that, the new dungeons were vastly more challenging to do than the previous expansion, expecting heavy, precise, coordinated use of crowd control - something that had been barely relevant for close on three years at that point - and thus causing people a lot of grief, esp. more casual players. Finally, the raids of the previous expansion had been nigh-universally pretty doable, even for average players. Not so Cataclysm - the raids were punishingly hard and guilds like mine found that for the first time, we had to serious look at cutting mediocre players, rather than just actually-bad ones. People who would have been absolutely fine in Wrath. All these together just ground people down, and loads of people just logged off and never logged back on.)</blockquote>

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