That looks like the perfect outfit for a stroll to the Totem of Earth!

Like I mentioned before, “tutorial pulls” are part of that hyper-generosity that gachas will commonly have for new players

I don’t feel it’s “hyper”, it’s only 8 crystals instead of 10 for guaranteed Noelle. Other (non-tutorial) pull categories have something guaranteed for 10 crystals, what exactly they guarantee changes depending on current events and such. Classic pulls category is 10 crystals for guaranteed 4+ star something, which can be character or weapon.

to give them enough of a dopamine rush to hang around and be more likely to spend more later

“Dopamine rush” sounds like a bit of a stretch, because normal gameplay here with tons of randomized minibosses, minigames and puzzles, all of which reward you fancy chests with random loot in open-world, gives way more dopamine every few minutes, and the whole gacha thing feels quite underwhelming compared to that in terms of neurochemistry.

Give it another week and you will find that the supposed good luck runs out, as well as the free currency offered for things like logging in, and then it will start requiring a ton of grinding or real world money to acquire the necessary currency to get to the “pity” in order to ensure you get a top-rarity item. That’s how gacha systems work.

Sure, I will be looking carefully at this dynamics as I progress. I find it quite surprising what you’re describing is still not there.

and can’t last or elee the game will not make nearly as much money

Who knows, maybe it makes enough money even without being that pushy? For me it’s too early to say.

(2) Also, I’m personally more interested in “no money” challenge. I like “gambling elements” tbh and enjoy all kinds of RNG in games: starting from randomized items stats in Diablo and procgen in roguelikes and ending with randomized perks in roguelites and stuff like pulls in Genshin. So for me “gambling elements” themselves aren’t something inherently bad and definitely not something I would want to avoid. For me, it’s social implications of gambling mechanics that are sometimes bad (in context of people who can’t control their spending), but not randomness or mechanics themselves.

(1) Well, all I can say for now is that my week of playing wasn’t enough to be able to say whether this is even possible at all. Maybe there will be more unlocked characters from regular questing later in the game, but so far I only got a single dendro character (Collei) from a random pull. And I think there were some open world mini-puzzles activated by dendro. I don’t think there were a lot of them though. Also they are definitely optional and not a big deal. Could also be possible it was intended for later game players going back with their dendro characters unlocked organically in the later questlines.

vulnerable people are paying more than they can afford to finance the game for everyone

Well said. I think a lot of things in the world work like this, unfortunately. Like, some people have to work long hours or hard jobs because they didn’t choose a career path that would allow them to work less and earn more. I mean, it sounds very different, but it’s also kinda similar in a way. There are people suffering for the benefit of other people. Saying they could choose another job is the same as saying vulnerable people could choose to not be vulnerable.

Legislation that effectively adds an upper limit to unlock the entire game with a sensible maximum monthly cost for new content, is needed in my opinion.

Agree, this is a great idea.

The only “pity” I dealt with at this point is guaranteed 4star for every 10 pulls. It can be anything though, not necessarily a character. But there are sometimes special offers (like tutorial pull) that indeed guarantee that you get a particular character or item for 10 pulls.

With a gacha, if they’re promoting some super-strong character, weapon, etc. that you want and you buy currency to spend in the gacha, you are not guaranteed to get that item or anything of the same quality/rarity in any of those pulls you make

I have only basic understanding of those systems, but it seems, there are “pity” systems which do give some guarantees that you get something if you fail rolling for it for long enough. I do agree it’s all very gamblish at its core though.

No money challenge so far sounds very realistic to me, but no gatcha at all? I’m not sure you can get characters except early game ones any other way. And those starter characters don’t even cover full list of elemental powers meaning you won’t even be able to solve some open-world puzzles that require certain elementals to interact with stuff. And I’m not sure those crystals can be used for much more than wishes (aka pulls aka gatcha? do I understand correctly it’s all synonyms?).

PS: also the tutorial pull isn’t forced I think? it’s just -20% meaning it’s 8 crystals for 10 wishes, but you’re free to not use it at all

brain

RPG enjoyers have talked like this since before computer games existed. I think D&D terminology for all their kinds of dice rolls and internal math would sound similar, but even more gibberish.

What I’m trying to figure out is exactly how pushy they are. Because I’m playing Genshin for a week already and there wasn’t a single moment I considered spending real money. Even a week worth of this kind of content (open world, quests, parkour, puzzles, minigames, bosses, mini bosses, multiple types of craft, randomized encounters, etc), is quite something and there’s still no sign of anything P2W on the horizon. Should I even expect some extra beefy bosses that are impossible to beat without buying crystals for tons of wishes? If not, then how is it morally different from any game that has any paid extra content at all? Like, you definitely can buy some optional cosmetics in almost any MMORPG game. People who can’t live without buying all the unnecessary cosmetics will proceed to spend a lot of money there as well.

Honestly it was pretty good

Yeah, I have never seen anyone talking about benefits of gacha model online. People only ever talk about it like it’s pure evil in its most refined form. Yet to hear anyone say how this model allows developers to fund basically F2P “Breath of the Wild” tier games with 100x more content.

Anyone into Genshin here? When do you think the urge to spend a lot starts? I’m AR19 now, I rolled 2 characters from 20 basic wishes (Noelle and Collei), and I think I have enough crystals and primos for maybe 10-20 wishes more which is likely to yield yet another 2 characters (or more if I’m lucky). At this point, I still have no clue when I should start wanting to spend real money. There seems to be so much content to earn primos and everything else I need organically.

Good response. A bit offtopic but:

Earlier this month our Jim called upon Bethesda to remake Morrowind rather than Oblivion. “You cowards,” Jim wrote, calling Morrowind a “special game, where a beautifully unique fantasy setting is locked away behind technology and interface design that has aged particularly badly”.

I prefer Morrowind’s UI to Skyrim’s, even with SkyUI mod:

• It’s more fun to have individual item icons than just text or generic icon just for item type
• Those classic brass borders are beautiful
• Choosing one of multiple reply options work more reliable in Morrowind, in Skyrim when playing on PC you often click one option and it still picks the wrong one because you didn’t scroll enough

Overall, this whole system was obviously designed for consoles and it doesn’t really work well on PC even with mods. I don’t really remember Oblivion’s interface, but the one in Morrowind’s is something that I think definitely needs less “fixing” than Skyrim’s for example. And I don’t think it aged bad at all. Also hotkey system was great, I really miss it in Skyrim, potions are way less fun when you need to go through a bunch of menus every time you want to drink one.