Over the past three weeks of the Gachapwned column, we’ve talked about the three main prongs that keep people invested in gacha games in the longer term – and how all three of them are mutually reinforcing. In fact, if you stopped there, you might wind up taking away the idea that gacha games are simply a predatory monetization scheme wrapped up in a pretty solid approach to content. Like, there are worse things than having a constant stream of decent enough content with good character writing, right?

But obviously, that’s not the end of the story because you need to have a reason to keep doing that decent enough content, for one thing. How can you incentivize people to forever run these things? Well, in part, by providing them with a non-stop stream of randomness and ornate progression systems that are forever reliant upon that randomness. And here we start hitting on the part where these games get their hooks in for the longer term.

Let me explain how Honkai Star Rail handles gearing. Every single character has six relic slots: head, hands, body, feet, planar orb, and planar ornament. These relics go from level 0 to level 15, and four of them have a randomized primary stat. They all feature four randomized secondary stats, and every three levels a random one of those secondary stats gets a bonus. Each relic also belongs to a set of relics, and characters benefit from having two or four pieces of a given relic set.

That means for every character in your party, you need to get the right items at the maximum rarity, the right primary stats, the right secondary stats, and the right level-ups for those secondary stats. And there are crafting systems in the game to ensure you get the right primaries and secondaries, but those are limited, and it’s important to remember that the game’s endgame content expects you to have two parties geared up as a bare minimum. This is the sort of chore that is going to last basically forever.

Oh, and for the record, that’s just one of the four separate progression systems for individual characters, not counting the Eidolon system. In other words, even once you get the character you want, you have a long road ahead of you for making them perform at the desired level.

Star Rail is just one example, yes, but it is a demonstrative example. None of this is accidental. I mentioned before that these games thrive in part by moving most of the planning to be outside of the gameplay and focus instead on arranging skills and other progression systems, but it’s important to note that these skills and progression systems are usually both ornate and highly reliant upon players sinking loads of time into it. This is not an accidental system but a deliberate one of creating multiple overlapping progress mechanics, all of which require players to engage and most of which are not terribly well explained.

You might be thinking at this point that these mechanics are something that the designers intend for you to buy your way around, but you would actually be wrong. A lot of these progression systems are literally things you can’t buy your way past. Everyone is hit by the exact same progress mechanic and the endless wall of randomness, and while you can generally get pretty big advantages by splurging on things, you are stymied by this stuff. And there is, in fact, a good reason for that.

Why is that? Well, in order to understand that, we have to understand a key component of roguelikes. In some ways, gacha games and gacha mechanics in general exist specifically as a sort of jacked-up form of roguelike. While it’s external rather than internal (you aren’t finding a specific kind of weapon as a random drop; you’re drawing and getting a random character), both involve your first directions being determined by luck instead of intent.

In a game like World of Warcraft, you choose your race and class from a list. You know what you are playing right away because you get to decide “I want to be a male Worgen Monk” and then that’s what you get. Further aspects of specialization are also decided by you. The progress you make is determined by you.

By contrast, in a roguelike game, you do make some initial choices, but from that point onward, you are at the mercy of randomness. By contrast, you might choose to be a male Worgen Monk, but then you get an incredibly good two-handed weapon that you need to build around. You get a potion that boosts your stats but also changes your gender, and then you get a powerful wizard’s robe that you also want to build around, and before you know it the character you meant to make isn’t what you wound up with.

Gacha games run, in part, on this logic. You do not choose who your first good characters that randomly show up are going to be, but you do have control over how much effort you put into these characters. Your first good character informs what you are struggling to acquire. Yes, it’s all the same category of grinding, but it is broadly self-directed grinding.

This is also where the whole process starts getting kinda insidious. The array of progression systems are put into place so that it is going to take you a very, very long time to be done from whatever moment you get started. Even if you start when the game launches, you’ll need a fair chunk of time. But you also feel as if you are in control of that, even though the monetization scheme is built around not being in control.

After all, you choose when to use your free draws and your pity rolls to get what you want. And you’re choosing who to build around. And all of this is a series of choices you’re making, and because you are constantly in need of a new set of things to grind, you’re more likely to find a new character you like and want to pull on, but they’re coming just fast enough that you can’t always get all of them and maybe you should just drop a little money on this and…

There you go.

So long as it’s harder to be done, you keep playing longer. So long as you keep playing longer, you spend more and more time on trying to keep reaching as close a point as you can. The road to fixation is not built upon people randomly deciding one day that they’d like to join a character lottery with a 10% chance of getting the hot guy on the banner ad; it’s built on a thousand steps along the way and a chain of escalating progression that keeps you forever in the loop.

It is a system built upon dozens of different progression mechanics all working hand-in-hand to keep you locked in place. And a lot of those systems are fun. You are having fun. The whole point is that the predatory elements are there, but they’re not the primary way you engage with the game or that your friends engage with the game. It’s simply much easier to convince a lot of people to spend a little to even out draws than a few people to spend all the money.

And it’s why the next column is important to write: Next time we’re diving back down to the darker side, and that means that we have to discuss something that’s very important to be aware of. Just like bigger, traditional MMORPGs, these games can shut down. And when they do… there’s a cost you might not think about.

• Gachapwned: How gacha MMOs drown us in progression and randomness • 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.