true, but addictive gameplay isn't necessarily rewarding. That's the critical difference I was trying to emphasize.
You know, I've always been confused by this: if a game is using random chance to require probabilistic hours/days of effort in order to find some drop, my first response to finding that out is not "grinding for the drop", but rather "hacking the game to give myself that thing." (First thing that comes to mind: the Sword of Kings in Earthbound.)
In such cases, the only thing standing in my way of the goal is mindless—and totally automatable—repetition. I could write a bot to grind a Sword of Kings for me. Heck, I could download someone else's bot they already wrote. So what's the difference between downloading+running such a bot, and just editing the game in a save-game editor to give myself the sword? Same amount of effort. Same reward. Either way I'm not really "playing the game." But either way, I get to skip the part of the game that isn't fun, and get back to doing something that is fun.
The only place where I feel that this approach doesn't apply, is when the game isn't using HWRNG randomness, but rather deterministic seed-based randomness, like Minecraft or many modern roguelikes. If the resources I want are only available down on the 90th floor of the dungeon in this seed—and that's a deterministic fact-of-life of the seed—then that's just the scenario I signed up to play, and I'll accept it. But, of course, with such systems, I get to "choose my luck" by looking for a generous or mean seed someone else discovered during their own playthrough (or using a bot to scan for such seeds.)
I don't think I was nearly as smart as you but Maplestory was actually my first introduction to computing.
The game was really grindy and required you to just use your mana (I was a mage), and then sit to recover it, and then go back to killing stuff. It seems like they didn't do server side checks so I actually learned how to use a memory editor and just save the mana field which made it so that it didn't go down.
Of course, the problem with this is that it morally questionable since it gives you an unfair advantage and gets you banned.
But these games don’t work like this. When you’re trying to find a rare drop, there’s nothing giving you the feeling that you’re getting any “closer” to it. You just have to throw days of blind dice rolls for no reward at the game, before it’ll turn around and give you the reward once. Variable-schedule rewards shouldn’t actually work at that sparse a frequency. People who get easily addicted to things don’t usually find themselves grinding for rare drops.
The people who do do this kind of grinding are people with big reserves of determination. And I don’t really get what they get out of it.
On the other hand I spent little time grinding and have little desire to play the game a second time on harder difficulty.
Almost bought Diablo for my Switch this year and recalled how much of it is just clicking.
That said, the amount you have to pay to get a large collection in Hearthstone is staggering, if you drop $80 every few months for the next expansion you still only have a few of the epic and legendary cards.
There's people who've put 10,000 hours into Diablo 2, for example, a game that is incredibly repetitive at the highest level - they play for the chance of that one great random drop.
Microtransaction games generally trade money or time, and then put barriers up on the time, or increase it vastly. The difference is when it feels like you're being asked for money it turns it exploitive, rather than being asked to spend 100 hours waiting for a yellow item to drop (that being more akin to "skill" and "investment").
Players want their reward fix. Microtransaction games are frequently like a watered-down drug. Just like social media, I don't think that just because people use them means they're a good thing - its junk food for the mind.