"now every game has an open world now instead of just jpegs and slideshows!" and I'll never forgive you for it. i don't want botw I want the slideshows
I know this comment was made in good faith, however also this is just demonstrably untrue in relation to the effect genshin has had on pity rates
Pity Rates and You: I Fucking Love Picking Poison
You’ll hear the phrase “kinder and more generous than other gacha games” often, but statistically speaking, they can’t all be more generous, right? Someone has to be drawing the short straw here, and data trends towards it being mihoyo fans.
First of all, there’s the elephant in the room: genshin’s rates are some of the lowest on the market. If you look at this post describing contemporary SSR rates roughly around the time it released, you would find that it would be second from the bottom at 0.6% split 50/50 for a 0.3% chance at a banner character, several times below FEH (which has 6% base with the same 50/50 for on and off banner) and even below FGO (which splits its 1% character chance 80/20, for a 0.8% on-banner rate). Also, it didn’t even invent the hard pity. That was Granblue Fantasy’s Andira circa 2016 fleecing a streamer for 2,276 pulls, which led to legislation demanding visible rates for each available item. Speaking of, Grubble (and FEH and most games) have banners with raised SSR rates (6% and 8%) which mihoyo games don’t have, several have banners that guarantee a SSR per 10-pull like The Battle Cats which mihoyo games also don’t have, even more follow the KanColle model where the actual units are mostly timegated / free and they make their money on rings and skins like Azur Lane and Girls Frontline, which mihoyo games also don’t have. Through that lens, the “generous” pity (of 180 pulls compared to the usual 300 for an on-banner) is less of an added consumer protection and more of a consolidation: you’re going to pay less for an individual hard pity hit but you’re going to hit more often and regularly.
Second, that 180 number is basically a lie. More than anything else, genshin (and mihoyo’s) impact on the gacha market has been letting companies know it’s A-okay to lock fundamental parts of a unit’s kit behind duplicates. FGO’s dupe system affects DPS numbers on their NPs. Similarly, FEH has merges that add stats. Neither lock skills or qualitative talent changes behind rolling 7 copies. In that context, at the higher end genshin is actually comparable to other gacha games, and a fair bit worse if you need more than one copy to be viable, which a new unit often is, with 360+ vs. 300. Or it would be, if you didn’t also have to roll for weapons.
Generally, gacha games consider having to roll for weapons on a separate banner gauche. This is because it’s the same bullshit without the reason you’re rolling (the jpegs). There’s a reason why unless the units are free and it’s the main gacha (King’s Raid), the units are directly tied to rolling for the weapons and getting one means getting the other (Granblue), they’re included in the pool but on a separate (higher) rate (FGO, 4%), or if you’re shameless about wanting nothing more than to shake down your players for every red dime (Cookie Run), you don’t tend to do it. The fact that for years people talking about how generous genshin is didn’t mention you needed to roll up to 240 more pulls to get the weapon for the character you just rolled should be grounds to immediately disqualify them from any discussion of kindness on the spot, and the fact that it isn’t immediately brought up is a failure of messaging on the part of consumer protection. Even if the character was a complete package on the first draw (it isn’t) and with the new improved pity for the weapon, the combined 340 pulls is still higher than the industry standard of 300.
Let’s talk about the rolling pity. Theoretically, it’s a good thing: nothing worse than having a fat pity built up that you don’t get to cash out on, right? This is where I’m going to become an annoying contrarian, and say that a rolling pity for an on-banner unit actually incentivizes bad habits for a player that is trying to be free to play, by the way. Part of the things that gachas try to sell you beyond outfits and flexing social power is being able to be less choosy about which banners you roll on—which is because strictly speaking, rolling on a banner as a f2pbtw without enough for a spark fucking sucks. If you don’t get it, that’s it, unless you spend. Allowing people to just pull whenever since they’re always working towards a spark on average causes people to impulse purchase more for the same reason that paying in installments do: several smaller purchases that add up feel less big than an equivalent lump sum. In that sense, several smaller pulling sprees spread across banners they’re ambivalently positive about leave the prospective f2pbbq more vulnerable to the whims of chance than if they had just saved up for one banner they really really wanted, not less.
So where does that leave us? Genshin on the whole did not introduce new generosity, and if you actually look at the numbers comparative to games before it, it innovated mostly on being the pay-in-installments of gacha rates and splitting a larger number up into smaller, marketable chunks while having some of the lowest rates in the industry. Why? It’s simple, it also had more budget than most of the industry. 3D models are expensive. Open worlds are expensive. By raising the graphical and content standards of what a gacha game “should” look like, mihoyo necessitated that as a whole the genre got more predatory if they wanted to make money. You can see this very clearly with GFL1 vs. GFL2: 2d sprites and images can make their money with timegates and skins, but 3D models need a full main and weapon gacha to sustain them. Similarly one only needs to see the difference between the convolution and sheer number of payment points of Arknights and Endfield to understand what the economics of that increased overhead looks like. Mihoyo games in general and genshin in specific were undoubtedly lodestars to the rest of the industry—they showed in bright, shining light that the wider gaming audience were ready and willing to be fleeced in worse terms for more as long as you slapped an open world on top. It’s the klarna of gacha and it’s become the new standard, and I’ll never forgive them for it.
there's been a lot of clips of this gorgeous privaty cosplayer at a korean baseball game otherwise experiencing it completely seriously and like. you go girl.
so it's dec 2024. the first void hunter, extremely broken ass character, very hyped up from the beta, hoshimi miyabi releases. she breaks the fucking game in half. with a f2p team she can freeze a boss like 3 times in a stun and straight up kill score attack bosses. even ice resistant match ups just die. the only reason to play ANYONE else is because you NEED to have other teams. new content releases. miyabi kills it. new content releases. miyabi kills it. NEW CONTENT RELEASES. MIYABI KILLS IT.
this goes on for like a year. the devs are in a situation. this unit is not only as strong as predicted she is beyond that. with a f2p team of a dog and a kid. so here's, in order, what they did to try and reign her in, so that people would fucking roll ANYONE ELSE, because the company needs to make money to survive. you couldn't justify rolling for either an ice character or an anomaly character without it being in relation to miyabi
-new bosses can't be frozen. doesn't matter, miyabi's modifiers are so patently stupid she can blitz them anyways
-bosses need to be ice resistant or they fucking die.
-new bosses feature the miasma shield mechanic, which is tailor made to be broken down by the new rupture archetype, and has increased defense and anomaly/disorder resistance. bosses also generally gain disorder resistance. doesn't matter, because the miyabi players have saved a spirit bomb of rolls, and just fired on the BiS rupture character. another void hunter! also miyabi players just built PEN on miyabi!
-later on we get a SEPARATE SHIELD MECHANIC THAT REDUCES CRIT DAMAGE, which miyabi uniquely scales off of, so that they can make anomaly focused bosses again and not need them to be 40% ice resistant (which miyabi could STILL PUNCH THROUGH, mind you)
-THE NEW ELEMENT IN 2.8/3.X SPECIFICALLY DOES NOT CREATE DISORDERS, CUTTING OFF MIYABI FROM BENEFITING FROM IT. NEW BOSS THAT USES THIS ELEMENT ON ITSELF STILL A GREAT MATCHUP FOR MIYABI.
now I don't. envy the zenless devs' situation regarding this. extremely hyped character makes them ten zenillion dollars. then she breaks the game. oh, well, we have other focuses. wait, she's still being used a lot. wait, they're not rolling. shit. what do we do. uh. fuck.
how do you even design any other attacker in this space, let alone ice or anomaly character? every little bit of anomaly support gets slorped up by miyabi to make her even stronger. vivian, yuzuha, then nangong. then the player base gets complacent. 'oh man my miyabi isn't clearing anymore the power creep is ridiculous.' your miyabi SHOULDN'T have been clearing that content anymore in the first place and it's finally catching up. the miyabi everywhere engine WAS NOT SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN.
and like. they did their best. the infinity stones of anti-miyabi tech combined into 2.8's boss and that has somehow allowed promeia to exist as a better matchup...SPECIFICALLY for that boss BECAUSE IT APPLIES WIND TO ITSELF TO BLOCK DISORDERS. it's just really really funny. the existence of this fox just chokes so much design space.
don't get me started on ysg. same thing but worse.
(real silos don't have little doors on the bottom for access because like, they're huge and all the grain would probably blow them off the hinges, but i needed an interaction point for the building.)
the shit they've been doing to baku in zeztz is insane. what the fuck. I don't think any rider has suffered more than this boy. it's 33-34 episodes in and he doesn't even have any valid ships that's how fucking alone he is. jesus christ. even kuuga had godai's boytoy in the police.
-child soldier with induced amnesia, born for the explicit purpose of being a secret organization's most powerful weapon and sired by its leader before being given to adoptive parents
-adoptive parents die. adopted sister is threatened with his death and enlisted in the organization as well
-because of the nature of the bad guys in zeztz, the leader has constant nightmares of baku's suffering when trying to save people, which recreates phenomena in real life. meaning every time baku has tried to help someone irl he is blasted by some ridiculous anti-miracle like a small meteor, lightning, sharks, and ufos
-series starts with him as a young adult. no job, no friends, no nothing. all he has is his dreams where he can lucid dream being a badass super agent
-tries to help someone out irl and GETS RUN OVER BY A CAR
-the next 26 episodes are him struggling against the conspiracy of the organization, its opposition, and his role in everything
-HE GETS SHOT AND KILLED AT THE END, FAILING TO ACHIEVE ANYTHING
-OOPS IT WAS ALL A FUCKING PREMONITION, WAKES BACK UP AFTER GETTING RUN OVER AT EP 1, FULLY AWARE THE ORGANIZATION IS GOING TO BETRAY HIM
-fights alone, again. his allies are acquaintances at best and because ep 1-26 were a fucking dream his friendship with them is reset and now he's just a crazy guy that knows things he shouldn't
-nearly kills his adoptive sister when learning she was another agent
-DIES AGAIN BECAUSE HIS BELT WAS EXPLODED
-SPENDS 20 YEARS, ALONE, ISOLATED IN HIS DYING DREAM REPAIRING AND UPGRADING HIS BELT
this motherfucker is so alone HE HAS NO FRIENDS IN THE COMMERCIALS. THE SERIES IS 2/3 DONE. HE HASN'T ONCE EVEN FOUGHT THE SAME VAGUE FOE AS ANOTHER RIDER.
Nepunowaburanberupuruuzu @amratsu - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
pixelskylines
kaledo-art
romaincrisis
discoholicmusic
blakekathryn
prguitarman
ellievsbear
dededos
baratheonpilled
