"Enhance the experience"

Screenshot from the game I can't believe it's not Gambling which is a very well make joke game that takes the piss out of lootboxes and doesn't try to sell you some bullshit microtransactions on top of charging you for the game itself

Some one of the ESA's big claims about lootboxes is they "Enhance theexperience" of people playing said games. This is a pretty big condemnation of the quality of the games themselves and shows how seemingly reliant the industry is on these kind of psychological hooks rather than merely making a quality experience. When I reviewed the Xbox Live Indie game Sexy Island Adventure many years ago the medical grade sedative I was recovering from, at the time, enhanced the experience enough that I finished the game. Without my optical nerve trying to cut off blood to my brain to avoid having to keep experiencing the awfulness. 

Plenty of things can "enhance the experience", even the worst of movies with friend taking the piss out of them can make them enjoyable. The claim they enhance the experience for players suggests the games themselves are rather lacking for this to be something the ESA thinks is a good defence of lootboxes.

The thing is the ESA are accidentally touching upon the reality of the situation. Lootboxes make games worse. Before they were removed from Shadow of War the game had a grindy awful end game according to many who played it. Overwatch's main form of visible progression for a player is opening lootboxes and getting the items out of them to dress your characters up to look cool, compare that to Paladins where while there are plenty of lootbox only skins there are also progression reward skins, only a couple per character but they are there. Lootboxes give that little rush of adrenaline but to make it so it feels like they're "enhancing" a game the game must be made more dull and tedious and less rewarding such that opening such lootboxes is seen as a step up and can give that extra little buzz that comes from what is randomised gambling. The games then offer the incentive as such of getting more of that buzz by letting you pay more for the lootboxes. It should shock and kind of disgust most people that Paladins, a Free to Play game offers a visible progression that isn't dependent on lootboxes.

Evie Champion Mastery Skin taken from the Paladins Wiki

Lootboxes being needed to "enhance the experience" suggests you have a pretty bad game to begin with if you're reliant on them to enhance it and not the moment to moment gameplay or major moments in said game. The reality is the only thing Lootboxes enhance are corporate bottom lines and ultimately the overblown salaries of top CEOs. Lootboxes aren't keeping studios open or supporting the developers either, but that is a piece for another time.