Im not disputing the fact that online gaming is great, it is.  I game online quite often but unless a game's online section is made seamless and without major faults then there may be doubts for a game's replability - even then once the online gets tiring or less active, that is when modes such as world league and similar modes manager mode builds on the replayability of a game. 

In terms of comparing Rugby games to Football games they are a world apart, first of all Fifa having "billions" of features and neat stuff is because of their budget and the fact that they reached where they are due to the many iterations of ***les along with hard competition in that market.  I would like to think that if Rugby gaming ***les ever reach that level of complexity then a need for a forum like this would be very low, even then in my honest opinion it would not be a negative aspect for the game.

I have bought and played most if not all Rugby games since JLR and what I enjoy most is their competition & season modes.  With RLL, their main focus was the online feature and they decided to leave out the season modes but this has eventuated in the game becoming practically dead.  I'm quite certain that this may be because of the reasons I have been mentioning or market factors.  Not to mention lots (and I mean lots) of gamers onsold their RLL game after realising there were no season modes.

After commenting yesterday, I hopped on RLL to have a few online matches as I already played the competition modes to death - but I couldn't find a player for up to 30min so I gave up but when I first got the game the online was decent.  Now that this has happened I cannot see myself playing the game unless I have friends over or until the next NRL season picks up.

To sum up online play alone in my opinion is not the key to a game's longevity.