There is a strange phenomenon that is true for perhaps not every human being, but the vast majority I’ve met and dealt with over the course of my life. I want you to imagine two restaurants that both serve the same basic kind of food, and for purposes of this example, we’re going to imagine that it’s seafood and that the only kind of seafood you order is fish and chips. Joe’s Seafood Shack gives you a larger portion and has faster service, and the fish and chips are pretty good. They’re all right. Meanwhile, Jane’s Seafood Shanty gives you a smaller portion and takes a lot longer, but the fish and chips are the best. Absolute 10/10. Which restaurant are you going to go to more often if the price is the same?

You might think that Jane has the edge here, but in my experience, Joe’s going to win on this one. Oh, sure, Jane makes a better meal. The inconvenience and speed is ultimately going to make Joe the clear winner despite all of that. People are going to respond more to acceptable quality on a quick and reliable schedule rather than exceptional results that slow everything down to a crawl. And on that note, for this week’s Gachapwned column, let’s examine that third prong of gacha attraction: volume.

Many of us here are MMORPG players, and so we’re all accustomed to the joy of patch day. There is new content here and you get to do it! I am over the moon when I get a new Final Fantasy XIV patch, after all, and that has a very reliable schedule. But it has nothing on, say, the Star Rail patch schedule. It pushes out a new patch every few weeks with a new set of story missions, a couple new events, new character draw events, and so forth. It’s like clockwork.

Are those patches all good? Well… sort of. They’re usually fine. Most of them are on the smaller side and don’t contain a ton of new stuff. Usually there’s one actually interesting event and one event that is transparently going through the motions, and none of the events is exactly a deep experience. (It was fun putting chimeras to work, but not exactly difficult.) They are absolutely acceptable patches.

Which, uh… sure has kept me playing, huh?

This is not exactly unusual in this space, either. When I was playing Granblue Fantasy (which I did, at one time, religiously), every week or so brought some new event – a rerun event with a new round of rewards or a competitive event or a story event or whatever. It was always something. Was a lot of it good or even particularly interesting? Did I really pollute my shorts with delight at the thought of clearing Rise of the Beasts for the dozenth time? No… but it was good enough, and it was something to do. It kept me busy. It drew my attention!

It’s often painted as taking advantage of a fear of missing out, but this design is more accurately predicated on the joy of having something to do. Instead of seasonal events having no meaningful power advancement, the equivalent of seasonal events are always running and giving you a chance to catch up on things you had missed out on. Or letting you do something new. Or even just relaxing and taking advantage of a rerun to just scour a few rewards you might have missed last time. You’re not afraid you’re going to miss out; you get to always have a new distraction.

You might notice that all of this ties into what I talked about last week with content that’s meant to be just good enough to be engaging without ever really taxing you. And that’s intentional. It’s a lot harder to get bored when even something that you find sort of mid-tier is still coming on a reliable pace. Sure, this event blows, but it’s just for another week or so. Clear it for rewards and then forget about it, the next one looks cool. Ooh, this one has birds in it!

Again, this doesn’t mean the content is bad by any stretch of the imagination. Sometimes it’s pretty good and can be a lot of fun. It’s not that Tower of Fantasy is making a point out of having constant updates that are bad; it’s that the designers realize having a constant stream of updates is more valuable than delaying every single update until it’s at its best possible state. That idea has merit. It actually has more merit than I think we as MMORPG players want to entertain.

When I was in high school, I was on a fanfic site, and I was one of the most prolific series writers on that site. There was another writer who was, quite frankly, way better than I was. Her stuff was very carefully edited (by contrast, most of my stories had one quick editing pass and I didn’t try very hard), well-plotted, and intricately written. I was absolutely flying by the seat of my pants, which wouldn’t have been great even if I hadn’t been 14, but I absolutely was. If you asked me which of us was a better writer, I would have said she was, no question.

But I tended to get more readers because I was putting out something new every couple of weeks compared to once every three months.

The reason I call these things prongs is because they are all reinforcing. It’s a lot easier to accept more frequent and steady content when that content is not terribly demanding, and strong character writing can overcome the content in question potentially not lighting you on fire. Mid-tier content with strong characters can matter more than slower and potentially more polished content, especially because more time does not actually make every piece of content measurably better.

Ultimately, all of these pieces combine to make gacha games kinda exactly perfect for a sort of low-impact continual string of entertainment. It’s sometimes really good (to use a recent example, Star Rail’s most recent update has an insanely hype boss fight with a certified hood classic for the theme song), but what’s more important is that there’s always something to do.

And perhaps equally crucially, that something does not require continuous non-stop engagement. I can spend a few hours on Star Rail on a given night, but I can also just spend a couple of minutes of it. But once it becomes a part of my routine, it is harder to make it not part of my routine. It hits just the right notes to slowly, steadily become a part of an enjoyable gaming landscape, one that always feels like it’s good enough to keep playing even if I’m less invested at a given stretch. And since a given stretch doesn’t last all that long, there’s always a refresh close at hand.

But so far we’ve talked about how the monetization scheme is predatory and how people get invested in the mechanics in a good way. Next week, it’s time to look at the darker parts. If we know why people get invested even if they know the monetization is bad, what keeps people invested over time? Here it’s time to talk about something more insidious, and that something is a boatload of progression systems and a never-ending roguelike selection.

• Gachapwned: How gacha MMOs attract players with the secret of volume • Gachapwned: How gacha MMOs attract players with gameplay that’s calculated to be mid • Gachapwned: How gacha MMOs attract players with narrative (even players who know better) • Gachapwned: How gacha mechanics use pity and free content to encourage spending money • Gachapwned: Examining the nature of gacha mechanics as a concept Many MMORPG gamers recoil from the term “gacha” – and for good reasons – but the subgenre is still raking in money from players, and it’s worth a deep-dive. In Gachapwned, MOP senior reporter Eliot Lefebvre tackles the highs and lows of the infamous gacha game genre and how it affects the MMO industry.