World of Warcraft is one of today’s largest online games, with over 11 million subscribers, each one paying $11 to $15 a month on fees. And yet, the game itself plays like a generic action RPG – You run around, cast spells, and fight the same monsters over and over, with some varying tactics based on whether you get additional creatures attacking you, or if the enemy is resistant to an element. For the most part, you use the same moveset over and over again, repeating a set – For example, a battle in Warcraft can go as such: You run up to an enemy while attacking, cast a beneficial spell which heals you for every swing, then do an offensive move, and then recast the healing spell once it wears off, and then repeat from there – means that for the most part, the game is a monotonous grind of whittling away one monster’s health down to nothing only to go to the next, with the occasional new monster type thrown in.

With such an obvious grind in a game, why does it have so many subscribers?
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