If your lover lives in Hong Kong and cannot get to Chicago, it will be necessary for you to go to Hong Kong. Perhaps you will spend your life there, and never see Chicago again. And you will, I assure you, as long as space and time divide you from anyone you love, discover a great deal about shipping routes, airlines, earthquake, famine, disease, and war. And you will always know what time it is in Hong Kong, for you love someone who lives there. And love will simply have no choice but to go into battle with space and time and, furthermore, to win.
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"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.
i think this is a really good writeup of gacha games & the effect mihoyo has had on them.
all live service games play on FOMO in order to tempt people to roll but a game with a higher budget is naturally going to be more aggressively monetized AND ask for a larger amount of time from its players
so you have a genre where the baseline expectations used to be closer to a shorter visual novel with interesting gameplay/art/story attached,
turning into something where the baseline expectation is 40 hours of Content in AAA quality released every few months with the newest latest fanciest 3d models
this is bad for the people playing it, because it's obviously going to draw a lot more people in (because lots of people want a 'free' 'aaa-quality' full game every few months!).
many of these people as a result will take the more predatory level of monetization and much greater commitment it asks of your time as 'acceptable' because it's a 'free aaa-quality full game': i would even say that this discourages people from checking out other paid games because hey, genshinlikes are free, they look great, and they have endless content (tm). why can't visual novels do that?
this is bad for the people making it, because the devs are constantly under crunch to put out Tons Of Content on a very short timescale and it never seems to end.
and a lot of these things are very visually impressive, sure, but in terms of the 'content' itself? these games are incentivized to pad their runtime as much as possible to keep people playing (to a level that would probably get them negative reviews if they were a paid game)
and in terms of the story...it's not to say that genshinlikes can 'never' have good story but i think that if you have to write a full story in ~6 months under crunch and then keep doing it i don't think this will lead to a particularly coherent or solid story
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For those who have missed it, a tourist in Hawaii decided it would be fun to chuck a rock (a BIG rock) at a monk seal. He missed, but he was captured on video, and when told it was illegal to interfere with them, said "I'm rich, I can pay the fine."
Is the best part that he got doxxed? No.
Is the best part that he got tracked down by a local and beaten? No.
Arrested on state at federal charges, looking at up to 5 years and 50K? Nope.
The best part is the local city council's reaction.
And the best part of that is the look on the attorney's face.
After the incident, another video went viral showing what appeared to be that man getting a beating. The Maui Police Department said they had no record of any reports of disorderly conduct or assault related to the monk seal incident.
this is a repost from brenton awa's account, who is a conservative republican lawmaker.
he makes a living off of presenting himself as a native hawaiian speaking for the community despite telling a native hawaiian community elder that she should've been killed for criticizing him and that he didn't regret saying it (she was criticizing him for showing up to vote against banning aquarium fishing on her native land, to be clear)
he also insulted our one transgender state rep (who is, you guessed it, mixed and from hawaii) by calling her a slur immediately after she was elected, mocking the rep she unseated for losing to someone like her. [no, 'mahu' is not just 'the normal term for trans women in hawaii': while it can be used as as a term for self-identity, if you call someone else a mahu, it is not being used that way. don't believe me? go call a hawaiian a mahu unprompted and see how they take it]
he has also been the one to introduce legislation that bans talking about sexuality and gender identity in hawaii schools, giving the parents the option to sue if the schools do not comply
as well as introducing bills mandating 'sex-specific' sports teams
every time i see people posting content from his account that's directly playing into his grift where he portrays himself as a defender of hawaiian rights in order to get votes and attention i kind of want to scream
[having spent hours entrenched in content slop] see I think my problem with swords at lesbian weddings is that they're completely divorced from any actual tradition [remembering there's more than one meaning of tradition] as in the swords aren't a specific kind of sword, they're just worshipping the idea of having a sword [remembering tumblr is full of freudlets] not like that [remembering uncontextualised intracommunity commentary will be read as universal ommission] though straight men do it as well, it must be said [remembering tumblr is full of freudlets] not like that [remembering I am at times a 'let myself] though seeing something there isn't entirely hallucinatory
Today my Advanced Clinical Pathology professor trailed off in the middle of class and said, “If I seem distracted, it’s because last night I was talking with a friend and she asked ‘Who’s that chick in Titanic?’ but all I heard was ‘Chicken Titanic,’ and ever since then I’ve been thinking about a chicken on the bow of the Titanic like Kate Winslet, wings held high. It’s all I can think about.”
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Cute and unnecessary detail I just noticed in Persona 3 Reload: Every single appliance in the dorm (other than Aigis) is actually plugged in, even though it makes things look messy.
Also, notice the three wires going into the DVD player - it has AV cables!
I went into the kitchen saying to myself "Well, there's no way they bothered to do the fridge, too." And I was delighted to find out that I was wrong. My fridge doesn't even have a visible power cable.
The couch landline I really like because they made the cord loop behind a cabinet, which just feels like a very real cord management decision a person using the space would make. It also highlights how impractical the dorm's furniture layout is, because there's multiple massive trip hazards just out in the open.
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learning to hate and cut off people who have intentionally mistreated you is an important adult skill that has been shamefully devalued in the past 40 years
I don't have the spoons to put together my own donation drive thing for Hawaiʻi Flood Relief and I haven't really seen a post going around for places to donate to, so uhhh I will make one.
Here are a few places I grabbed from the local news that I've poked around and did my research on. I'm also an Oʻahu local that's lived here for all 30+ years of my life, so I think my knowledge contributes to... something. THAT BEING SAID, please, please, PLEASE do a bit of your own research and use your own best judgement before donating.
The big, bold title should link to the charity/non-profit's main page or about page, while the blue text links to the actual donation page.
Aloha United Way
This charity has been around for as long as I can remember and its general goal is to support Hawaiʻi's welfare and distribute funds to charities as they need them. They have a Community Relief Fund you can donate to here.
Hawaiʻi Foodbank
Another charity that's been around for forever- people who have lost their homes also need food and the foodbank is distributing supplies to people who need it. The direct donation page is here.
(Also, imo, the foodbank is always a good one to donate to because with the high cost of living and The Economy™, they're always gonna need funds no matter what, you're almost guaranteed to be helping someone with a donation)
Hawaiʻi Agricultural Foundation
The HAF's goal is to support local farmers and raise awareness on eating local. The storms have damaged and washed out a LOT of farmland, with an estimated $7 million in damages so far. Without a stable local farm industry, then we'd have to rely on the continental US for everything. Self-sufficiency and affordable food is important. Together with the Hawaiʻi Farm Bureau, the HAF has started a Farmer's Disaster Relief Fund to help farmers recover and rebuild.
Hawaiian Council
The Hawaiian Council is a non-profit organization with the mission to uplift and support Native Hawaiians from various sociopolitical and economic standpoints. They've started an emergency relief fund called Kāko‘o O‘ahu to help support those affected by the floods. The council itself, as well as a lot of the big local companies are also chipping in and matching donations.
