My take on the fiasco surrounding Genshin Impact 1st anniversary celebration
Hey, people. How is life? Recently, there is a huge fiasco that I saw within the gaming community. It is actually really...How should I say? I do have my dissatisfaction with the rewards for the celebration but the community outrage is getting way too out of hand.
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| OUTRAGE! |
This post will not be the most pleasant for me and for most people but I feel that after the live stream regarding the upcoming 2.2 Patch (which has been a little underwhelming, for me) and the online music concert, it's time to address the madness of this whole fiasco. Well, also, things have calmed down a bit so it's time for me to talk about it.
Brief Intro
People who dunno what Genshin Impact is...I would describe to you what it is. Genshin Impact is an action role-playing game developed and published by Chinese video game developer and animation studio miHoYo. I knew this company because I was once a player of Honkai Impact years ago.
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GENSHIN IMPACT! |
Anyway, this game is groundbreaking because of the cross-platform feature. You can play this game on Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4 and 5, Android, iOS and maybe, in the future, Nintendo Switch. The fact that it's an open-world environment game gets me going to play it. I didn't have the right tools to play it for quite a while so I missed quite a lot of the old content. It's a gacha game...with one of the worst drop rates that I've experienced in my life.
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| The current banner... |
I'm not gonna further talk about the crazy things that Genshin got into like the incident in the ChinaJoy convention and the account security issue. You can read about it yourself on Wikipedia. With that said, you and I can deduce that it's not the first that Genshin has caught itself in controversy. Mihoyo too, with the bunny girl outfit thing in Honkai. I'm not gonna further elaborate on it. SO, let's go!
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The moment when it was announced... |
The Start
The whole thing boiled over on September 28, 2021, when the player's
frustration for the past few patches exploded like a supervolcano
eruption. When they saw the updates are only the in-game mail from
Ayaka, my wife waifu and only the rewards that were
announced in the pre-2.1 Patch Livestream is given, the community exploded
in anger. All those dissatisfaction and missed expectation boiled over.
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| 我干脆躺平了。。。 |
What is worst is that Mihoyo did everything to clamp down on players ranting about the anniversary rewards. So what happened is that they started to "bomb" Mihoyo in every angle possible, whether it be in their official Discord server, the Play Store page for Genshin and even on the Honkai Play Store page. What's worse they started to "bomb" other apps in the app store. Now...that's unacceptable. Why bring other apps into this? Some people did that for trolls but I believe that there are people genuinely angry about the lacklustre rewards for the anniversary celebrations.
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| The aftermath of the review bombing |
Anyway, with that whole fiasco essentially coming to a close after the live stream and online concert (I believe the anger is still smouldering), the whole fiasco has caused a dip in the rating of this game on Google Play Store and reputation damage as a few news sites including Forbes reported on this (yeah EVEN Forbes!!! This shows how serious it become). From this whole mess, I'm trying to set apart the noise from the path of me finding the truth behind this whole fiasco. The review bombing of other related app is unacceptable and childish. Well, they are also trolls who weigh in on this. We're gonna ignore them but we can't ignore the genuine concern for the players and former players. As for the ones who attacked Honkai by review bombing them because they are from the same company, I understand the logic but this is not the way to do it as both games development teams are probably separate. Well, I've said I have to say so let's go.
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| ...why do you do this, people? |
The Main Causes
Finding out the root cause for this fiasco is quite tough in the midst of the mess and noise. Nowadays, there is too much noise and the truth is far too few in between. Regardless of that, I will try my best to get this going. I won't name the niche one, like a certain Tectone who hates on Mona's and Ayaka's dash. ALSO, I'm NOT gonna weigh in on that. Anyway, here are the two main causes:
Mihoyo's Poor Communication
This incident really shone a light on how poor Mihoyo's response to the players' concerns, especially the complaints of the poor anniversary reward. The four special in-game mail rewards are essentially a band-aid solution to calm the player base down as the two special rewards, the special wind glider and the special furniture that could play music were meant to be sold in a special pack at a later date and the flames of anger during that time is still very strong.
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| The headlines in Gamesradar... |
Their response to the fans' outrage came in late before the 2.2 Patch Livestream on the 1st October 2021 (UTC +8) albeit indirectly. I feel that Mihoyo and the team are not willing to face the fans regarding this fiasco. The post from the developer in Hoyolab is a more direct communication to the fans and slightly better than nothing. Still, it's not good enough to address a lot of the issues and bugs in this game to the fans. They could do better, I believe. One more thing, the clamping down on dissent is not exactly great from their side. They could've responded to the outrage MUCH earlier than the 1st of October, which is around 2 days after the raging.
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| The 2.2 Livestream... |
The Feel That the Game Haven't Grown with the Player Base
I understand this very well after this anniversary celebration fiasco came to light. Mihoyo feels out of touch with the player base. Although they do have competitions and community events for players and fans to participate in, the issue is that the prize pool feels insufficient and not satisfying in comparison to what the player base and fan base put out to participate in their community events. A lot of people feel that Mihoyo is not giving back to the community sufficiently despite so much support that people gave into the game.
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| facepalm... |
Other Issues with Genshin
With those points being made, those two are definitely the most obvious ones because those are two main things that anger the fans and players alike. There are a few other things that have trouble and even annoyed the player base for a long time. Let's go!
Lack of End Game Content
For myself, I dun have many issues with this although I did play in the Spiral Abyss a few times. BUT for the hardcore players and people who use a lot of time to play in this game, it's quite a problem as there are not many places to test the limits of their characters, weapons and artefact builds other than the spiral abyss. They want to feel that the grinding is worth their time by testing the limits out in different end game arenas.
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| The Spiral Abyss... |
I understand that it was once labelled as a casual game (if I remember correctly), which is fine for me as I dun have all the time in the world (like streamers) to play games. However, it also means that the casual players can be burnt out in the game when they get into the phase where they have to grind for stronger equipment for the characters in their account with few to no end game in sight.
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| A certain Reddit post that really exemplifies this issue... |
The Issue Regarding the In-game Characters
There are characters with problems with their mechanics that the players complain like Xinyan's level 3 shield doesn't proc properly, complaints with Yoimiya attack mechanics, complaints with Raiden's burst not working with Beidou, the huge imbalance of character amount in respect to the elements etc. There are some of them I do understand but the bug where Xinyan's level 3 shield cannot properly is still NOT being addressed TILL THIS VERY DAY.
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| The developers' letter |
Oh, the recent developer letter? Nothing. No response on the bug fixes for Xinyan's shield, the account security fixes takes way too long (previously before I came in), improvement of the weapons banners takes too long (and even to some, the improvement is minuscule), all of these things add up. Also, they haven't addressed the other more important bug other than things such as the glow of Raiden Shogun "Resolve Stack Ring" (as I call it) glows too brightly in a dark cave. Overall, they are hardly much although I do appreciate the fixes that they announced that they trying to do.
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| Xinyan...please fix her, Mihoyo |
Imbalance of Character Compositions
There's a lack of hydro and geo characters but too many Cyro and Pyro characters. I personally hoped that Mihoyo would add more characters to the hydro and geo character. Also, one thing, where are the dendro characters? Why until now, there is still NO dendro character? It's just one of the few things that I'm feeling a little displeased about.
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| Nice picture... |
Lack of a Roadmap
Looks like it's a lot of people's concern...even I wanna know what is next for the game. For me, it isn't a huge concern as the other two games that I play don't have that kind of thing. For me, I just hope that they announce new characters, new mechanics, new enemies, new regions, new character and weapon banners and other new updates in a way that the players have time to prepare for. What I think is more appropriate is that Mihoyo and the development team have some amount of transparency to what they are planning to do so that the player can prepare for the next events and the latest updates.
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| Roadmap? |
Resin Issue
I think this has been the player base demand for quite a while. Since they would like it to be a casual game and wants it to last a long time, I doubt that they will make too many changes. Regardless of that, I feel that increasing the resin cap, increasing the number of weekly bosses that will get the resin discount and increasing the rate of resin refresh accordingly is appropriate as the map of Teyvat increases in size and is only appropriate to do so.
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| The resin...the pain for the players... |
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