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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.