Arknights Endfield

Tuco said:

This is the first "gacha" game I've played, although the concept of gambling and loot boxes pervades many other games of course.

When reading about the game the amount of focus, and whining, on the Gacha mechanics is so bizarre to me. It's like going to an all-expenses paid trip to Vegas and seeing shows, buffets, amazing buildings, street entertainment, strip clubs and everything else, then you go see what your buddies are up to and they're bitching about the returns on the slot machines.

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There's a lot of gachas on the market, including their more or less direct competitors with Genshin and WuWa, so people are going to compare to gambling mechanics. Fact is in this game, it's kinda shit so far, they needlessly made it more complex, and added extra layers of FOMO, and there's nothing to counterbalance that, it's just roughly the same odds on average, just in a shittier package. It's not absolute dogshit like some ppl say, but it's certainly one of the worst aspect of the game, long term(it has like 0 impact currently since it's 1.0 and even the free chars are good).

Gachas in general I think get a worse reputation than needed, I was pretty surprised when I picked one up on a whim(ZZZ when it released, in 2024) and found out it's actually much easier to play one F2P than the vast majority of F2P MMOs(especially KR ones but even others). Edit: Modern gachas that is, the older ones are still dogshit, and JP still makes obvious cashgrab anime IP gachas that close within 6months constantly.

Like at no point are you required to spend, and they usually have various levels of spending schemes so if you spend only a little bit you get more relatively than if you whale, although obviously the impact is less. Stuff like the 5$ sub or the battlepasses(sometimes, not all games) let you spend a little bit and get good value, or you can skip entirely and still have a good experience provided you're not a degenerate and can plan your pulls.

Meanwhile you try to play Black Desert or even PoE without spending anything and it's like shooting yourself in the dick. You don't need to spend THAT much to fix that, but there's definitely a you need x$ to actually play even if it's "free".

I played ZZZ for like a year or so and spent about 30bucks(half of which was definitely not needed but I didn't know what I was doing at first) and I have all the best teams, I just don't have all the flexible options and niche stuff. And obviously I don't have 7copies of every char to compete with the .1% whales but wtf cares.