Can’t say I agree. If it were that simple, then there would be no need to add new content ever. People would just keep spinning the hamster wheel and be perfectly happy.

To be fair, I imagine there are players like that, but I don’t really believe they’re the majority.

If game design were as simple as your words imply, there wouldn’t be tons of books on it. :wink:

It doesn’t just boil down to a handful of discrete, mutually exclusive choices from which you have to pick one. Hell, just to decide how you use RNG in your game is a whole spectrum, not just “100% deterministic drop” and “put the drop behind an RNG and forget about it”. Those are just the extremes, and game designers who pick those are: 1) designing one of the least important aspects of the gameplay, 2) pressed for time/resources and have to compromise (hopefully temporarily), or 3) lazy.

That’s something we can agree on. Good game design is hard.

I wish I was that optimistic. We’ve seen Funcom do drastic changes completely unbidden and wreck things. The latest example is the inventory revamp dumpster fire, but it’s by no means the only one. They have quite a track record.