Any company that has a product built on recurring payments will always tend towards becoming predatory in the money they need to extract because #1 they need to have pinch points to ensure they get money at regular, predictable intervals since they're a business and #2 because there is absolutely no reason for them not to turn the dial up on the micro-transactions -- up and up -- slowly until the profit gained is cancelled out by the quitting players.
I'll be honest.... I don't see what there is to backlash against.
I've been playing the game and uhh, I've spent £15. I feel absolutely zero malicious intent in any of the systems. I didn't even get a notification when my daily Blessing (paid for for one month) ran out and didn't notice it had run out for 2 days before I renewed it.
It doesn't feel like there is much here that is really that bad. I feel like any whales that exist must be people that have more money than sense because it really doesn't get you ahead in terms of power level and the only real benefit is in having some fun characters to play -- I am content waiting the long haul to get those characters and I'm still enjoying the game.
Will the dial go up on transactions? Perhaps. But I'm not seeing evidence of that so far and Mihoyo have issued a statement that they hear people on the resin system complaints, this indicates an easing back and listening to the community in my opinion. In the long-long term that may change when player counts dwindle enormously but there's no sign of this now and I really don't mind THAT much if it happens a year or 2 down the line when I move onto other things.
EDIT: I think what I mean to say here is that if a bunch of extremely rich streamers and youtubers spend ridiculous amounts of money on this I feel like uhh... They wanted to? They did it for their viewers? They did it because of Twitch not because the game made them do it. I also don't actually give a shit if the game milks the rich, fuck em? I only care if the poor are also getting exploited and... It doesn't feel that way to me. I've felt like the game isn't predatory at all, Apex Legends, Valorant and others have made me more uncomfortable, enough to quit those games entirely because their monetisation felt predatory to me, this just doesn't ever feel that way at all in my opinion.
Gacha is predatory because if it finds the addictive personality folks, those folks WILL spend $10,000+ easy on gacha "pulls" to get their "waifu"/favored gacha pull. Which are just digital .jpg's, for the record.
I mean, I'm not going to call for their banning or anything (I mean shit, I've played the SMT:Dx2, Final Fantasy Agito MMO, and Fire Emblem gachas before quitting due to boredom and how shitty Gacha as a mechanic is), but they are scummy practices.
I know how gacha works, I've played gacha. What I'm saying is that I'm not actually seeing the same mechanism with this. It's... Different. It does not feel the same as any of the standard gachas at all. I'm a person that does often feel an impulse to do that kind of thing, Apex was pretty unhealthy for me, other lootboxes have been too, this just isn't doing it. Right now I have like 15k in primogems piled up that I simply haven't used on pulls at all.
I really will go to bat for this. Have you played it? Have you played other gachas? There's a real difference in the way this makes you feel compared to them. This doesn't give me any feeling of needing to even engage in the gacha at all beyond a few pulls here or there that have to be honest been mainly earned for free, I've not touched the pulls that I earned from the Blessing I paid for because I felt guilty for playing hundreds of hours without paying for anything.
The only thing that ever has actually bothered me, but only a little bit and not in the cataclysmic levels of the nerds on reddit, has been the resin system. That does feel geared towards making people pay to continue grinding, and if you're the type that wants to just grind one single task in a day instead of do a dozen different tasks then it will make you pay for more resin in order to continue your grind. The pulls though? Nope. Feels different.
I'm not very far in but I've seen lots of discussions about how you need to ration your XP items because late game it doesn't give you near enough of them. I think its around rank 30 or so when the crunch starts to hit bad from what I've read.
You definitely have to do the money/xp veins in the adventure journal a few times in the post-30 levels but it's not really bad or anything. You don't need that resin for domains much in those level ranges. At 40 and 45 this gets very significant but you quickly realise that you only need 2 characters intended as your dps characters, your other 6 characters (two 4 character teams) will essentially be various forms of elemental support.
I poured my xp items into 2 max levelled dps and have a bunch of different levels on other characters.
The real grind isn't in xp, which actually only provides very small benefits to your character in power, the real grind is for talent level up materials, artifacts and weapon level up materials. This essentially becomes a "do a little bit each day" task for you though. The intention here is obviously just to slow players down and give them something to do in the time between updates so they don't just stop playing the game because they have no more progression to pursue.
Gotcha that makes sense. I'm still figuring everything out. I haven't used hardly anything cause I'm afraid I'm gonna bone myself if I don't spend right.
If I can make one suggestion -- hold your resin replenishment items until level 40 or 45. You will get better drops for artifacts from dungeons later on (5* artifacts) and being able to replenish your resin will then allow you to go on a mega grind to farm them if you so wish. That's more or less the only major mistake I felt I made with my resources, I did have to go grind a bit for exp/gold but never felt like it significantly gated me. The only major gating that is sometimes a touch upsetting to me is having to wait a day or 2 from a domain in order to get that item you need to upgrade a weapon.
Trying not to bomb you with dumb questions but does gold ever become rare? I feel like I have so much gold and nothing to spend it on.
Yes you'll use absolutely all of it when you increase your world ranks and will probably need to do the veins on one or two days in order to get some more. At some point or another you will run out of just about every single resource you have and need to go and earn some more of it. The only resource I have never run out of are the upgrade crystals for weapons which the game seems to just liberally throw hundreds and hundreds of unnecessary ones at us.
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I have Xiangling as main dps on team 1 and Razor as main dps on team 2. Xiangling + Crescent Pike is absurd, that weapon is one of the best weapons in the game and craftable. After dropping her bear it procs an additional hit for every hit which can also crit and receive damage boosts. Barbara and Noelle are my healers for each team but honestly Noelle's healing is poor and I'm underperforming in Abyss because of her, when I get a new healer I will probably replace her. Later constellations might change that but that's going to be luck or a long time waiting.
I like Chongyun a lot as support. Also he's speeeedy to bunnyhop around with. Amber is basically essential for popping ice enemy elemental shields in Abyss so she's not to be underrated too much, I know a lot of people using her for that support role.
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