It is the Slow Lie.
It starts out in a typical situation like this, let's take an MMO, for instance. You're level one, you suck. You struggle to do anything. Your character power is below the content difficulty line, and you wonder why everything is so hard.
But, you put some time into the game. Your character gains power. Things get easier! You start to watch your character get more powerful, and fights become easier. You are motivated to play more because you see that first point, just ahead, where you can start to blow things out. Oh, this is going to be good.
The next thing that happens is you blow out the content difficulty. You feel like a god. Your character is the master of every challenge, and your power is unparalleled. You are having fun. You feel great. You love this game. Your character power is high, and you are on this artificial high of having that fantasy fulfilled and you feel like a sword-swinging and spell-slinging hero of the land.
But then something happens. Things get difficult. You keep playing because you THINK this is just another phase, just another plateau to overcome and you will persevere and your character power will be even greater than before. Right? But it never will. You drop below the line. The game design theory of the Slow Lie will never allow for it. You are entering the triangle of pain, and the great paywall lies ahead. Some players enjoy playing in the triangle of pain, but it only gets worse.
Your character power drops steadily. You need groups to do things. You need more effort and better tactics to get by. Some players like this phase, because they feel they are "mastering" the game by being an "expert" but that too, is a lie. Even their character power will drop. Every "power player" strategy will be relegated to how you are expected to play. Larger groups and raids will be needed as character power drops to where even five people cannot overcome a challenge.
You find yourself saying "I need help!"
And they got you.
Well, that is where the great paywall lies. If you pay, your character power will go up. If you don't, you will either stop here or suffer even further. You see this design in pen-and-paper roleplaying games with splat books that seemingly give you great power that blows out the original classes of the game. It's not that these classes are overpowered, its that the original classes in the game were never designed to get beyond the paywall at level X, and the designers are forcing you to buy this book just to play at higher levels.
The paywall can be a "pay a monthly fee to play beyond level X" in MMOs. You had incredible fun up to level X, and you are tricked into paying thinking your power will return to the pre-paywall era. But it never will. They got you, your character power steadily diminishes, and you are that frog in the boiling pot with every level your character gets, getting weaker all the time. Your "numbers" may be going up, like DPS and hit points, but in comparison to the difficulty of the game content, you are losing ground at a faster and faster rate with every level.
It is the Slow Lie. Even though your "numbers" go up, the game content is always pulling away from you. With each level you get weaker, not stronger. The longer you play, the more time you invest, and the more you fool yourself into thinking "the next level will make it easier" - but it never will. The game designers need to keep you inside the paywall, they need to keep you in the system. They will promise bigger numbers in the next expansion or next level, and the old content will seem easy, but where you need to be will always require more time, more money, and a larger expenditure of your life.
They don't want to drop off too steeply, which is why the end of the graph levels out, but keeps going down. There is a happy medium where they have addicted the long-term users, and they can keep content difficulty to character power at a certain level. The 25-man raid, the 5 person "heroic" and all those ratios are known and fine-tuned by the game designers of the Slow Lie. They need to keep the long-term players happy. They need to keep things feeling like they are getting better, and your power is going up. But at this point, the numbers and ratios are going to remain the same. You will never be as powerful as you were before the paywall, and the game design is engineered to make you enjoy being weak, but with larger and larger numbers than ever before.
Nothing changes past a certain point. The monsters are difficulty X, and the characters will be of power Y. This X will always be a "good fight" for Y, and when the X+1 monsters show up, the Y+1 characters will have another "good fight." You may notice the content difficulty line goes down along with character power. Things never really get much harder past a certain point, and the content becomes mechanical and scripted. If you know the MMO raid pattern or the pen-and-paper exploit to maximize damage (or turn denial), it all becomes easy pickings. This isn't a game you aren't supposed to win, like Space Invaders, so that content difficulty line never goes up or gets too far out of ratio with character power.
They keep you just relatively powerful enough so you don't quit.
But you will never feel epic, that is, unless you go back to earlier content, but that isn't where you need to be anyways. There are no rewards for you there. You are wasting your time there. You need to be up there on the bleeding edge, pushing yourself. Or feeling like you are pushing yourself. You will never escape that curve.
But the game will trick you into feeling like you are of "pre paywall" power. You will be an epic hero. You will have gear and trappings better than any king. You will be a legend. They will speak of you as a character of great power and influence! Your legendary power in terms of content difficulty will only be lip-service though, because you will be relatively weaker the higher you go compared to your pre-paywall selves.
And yes, when you hit that "I need help" moment where the game asks you to subscribe, or the pen-and-paper game tries to sell you another book with overpowered class options, you may be a little wiser to what they are trying to do. They are promising things will be better if you spend a little more money with them. If you felt great when that blue line was above the red one, and that is why you played, you will probably not be happy with how things go once you lay down some cash. Either you will blow things out for a while until you hit another paywall, or you will pay and things will steadily grow worse anyways as they settle you into the "final ratio" of character power to group size to content difficulty.
They are selling you "the Slow Lie" and while the game may be fun and the community worth it for a while, you will understand what sort of road that is laid out for you. And of course, how they are making you think paying is making the game more fun when the deck will always be stacked against you.
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