But those recent, orthodox game features can be roundly ignored and their presence does not diminish the wonder of the true core of the player-defined experience.
It retains a core of the players who were deserving winners of the 2007 World Cup in France and who last year beat New Zealand in all three Tri-Nations meetings, taking the championship for the first time since 2004.
Noble was not quite starting from scratch, as a hard core of the players who dug deep to provide some memorable moments in the Crusaders' debut season – notably their wins at Bradford, and at home to Salford and Noble's Wigan – agreed to swap south Wales for north.
"We've kept the good core of the players, which is promising," Reynolds added.
"With the core of the players we have, if we can build them and retain them, then we should have good goals next season.
Figure 4 illustrates the core of the four players game in barycentric coordinates which are computed by TUGlab.
The core of the Senators' players returned and the team played their games in the St . Louis Arena
When Irish fans were cavorting around at World Cups, did they stop and complain about the core nationality of the players they were cheering on?
"In any transfer window, all we often hear about are possible new arrivals and targets coming out of the blue and we can sometimes forget the importance of keeping a really competitive core of players at the club, players who know what it means to play for Wigan Athletic, who have daily standards and the level of performance to make them deserve being rewarded.
But that still leaves 32.4 million playing it as of mid-September, and given the economics of free-to-play games – which tend to make the majority of their income from a tiny, highly-engaged core of players – the app is likely to still be pulling in hundreds of millions of dollars a month.
At the core of the experience, though, are the player characters – or more precisely, the extensive customisation system that awaits them.
