Reposting my survey response here just so I can update/revise it and cut and paste it whenever they send out player surveys, but I'm very welcome to discussion on any of these points.
As you well should know, it's hard to give an honest opinion on [recent characters] because it's nearly impossible to raise any new characters that you pull up to a useable level without multiple WEEKS of preparation beforehand.
Resin is Sabotaging Genshin.
Everyone agrees that Resin, as it is, is bad. There are dozens of lengthy complaints on social media sites, and articles have even started making their way into mainstream media.
The world is stunning, and contains some of the best use of vertical space I've ever seen. And of course the characters are all lovingly handcrafted with their own carefully woven histories and design. unfortunately, around Adventure Rank 35, the game suddenly transformed for me from a gorgeous AAA adventure into a stunted daily chore. That's a tragedy, because it all seems so avoidable!
For one, I am familiar with the use of things like daily rewards systems. These systems can be a cheap and relatively effective (if slightly manipulative) means of encouraging retention. You're giving all of your users an incentive to check in every day and remember what they like about your system, and (valuable for mobile users) a quick sense of completion if they need to log back off. Importantly, however, daily goals systems should always be secondary. You need the user to log back in and find that there is something valuable in the system there to engage with. Even in the best-case scenarios, the daily rewards themselves can feel like a chore.
Comparing Genshin's Resin with daily rewards in other games makes this pretty apparent. Resin is also pretty obviously redundant for Genshin, in this respect. Genshin already has at least three other systems (daily quests, rotating domain rewards and overworld monster respawns) to draw players back to the game on a regular basis.
Genshin's most engaging and multiplayer-friendly content is actively discouraged via resin. That means that at higher levels, players are funnelled away from hard content, and from playing with other players and into weird degenerate gameplay patterns: scouring the map for chests and ore and “investigating” crates hoping for disposable artifacts to use as crafting materials.
One last, obviously negative effect of the current resin system is that it couples character progression to adventure rank. This means that no matter how long I play Genshin, I will always be incentivised to keep a handful of primary characters levelled up, equipped and trained at the expense of the others. This is annoying as a player, but also clearly at odds with the gacha monetisation model. Gacha ethics aside, miHoYo definitely wants players to want to collect as many characters as they can as quickly as possible. You should feel fantastic every time you pull a new five star character, even if they don't obviously fit on your current Spiral Abyss team.
There are also less obvious downstream consequences of the above. One is that content creators are forced into producing much worse content. Watching streamers hunting artifact spawns is far less exciting than watching boss fights. Also, everyone has so little opportunity to experiment with builds that nobody really understands the tradeoffs, nor the real potential of each character (and yes, I strongly suspect this influenced the public reaction to Zhongli).
It's highly likely that the Resin system directly reduces demand for gacha sales. It's also important to note that the size of a market is not infinite. Adding more ways for a user to spend money doesn't equate to the user having more money to spend. Sales of resin refreshes likely directly cannibalise (steal revenue from) sales of gacha pulls. And we can also point out that there are already no less than four revenue streams (Resin, Wishes, Blessing of the Welkin Moon and Battle Pass), with cosmetics anticipated on the horizon. Personally, I'd be surprised to learn that Resin sales make up much more than a rounding error on income from gacha pulls or the monthly subscription options.
Another key effect Resin has is throttling player progression. Given that the game is still early, and has limited content, is it important to keep players from running out before you have the chance to add more? I would reject the hypothesis here. First of all: As a player, it's pure downside to run into an arbitrary progression lockout. I want to play games at my pace, not at some arbitrary pace the developer has set for me. If I get to the end and have time to do something else before new content releases, that's not a downside for me! When new content is released, there's a good chance it draws me back anyway. Additionally, as I argued earlier, I believe it's way better for retention if it's actually possible for me to quickly catch up with my friends (and others can catch up with me) so we can spend more of our time playing with each other.
Some have pointed out that if you eliminate a system (like Resin) that other game systems have been designed around, it's likely to not be a trivial effort to keep the game functioning smoothly as a whole. That's true, but given that there are so many redundancies and degenerate side effects with Resin now, I suspect it's actually much more likely that more systems were designed without resin in mind than the reverse.
I genuinely can't think of any other good reasons to keep Resin around. Any value it offers is either negligible or made redundant by other systems that already exist.
At this point, I think it's worth just taking a step back and imagining what this change would look like.
I think miHoYo would be wise to consider a few other tweaks, but let's just see what happens if we delete Resin outright, with no other changes.
Look how much better the game feels, immediately:
Suddenly, players shift to spend most of their time engaging with the most rewarding content: bosses and domains. These are much more interesting than running around mining and collecting white artifacts and Mora. They are also the best multiplayer content available in the game. You'll suddenly feel great about hanging out in your friend's world for hours, instead of helping with one boss and then feeling like a third wheel.
Low level artifacts and Mora are no longer bottlenecks, and players never have to scour the map for them again.
YouTube and streaming platform content gets much more interesting, because you get to watch players with more than one high level character spend their time playing interesting content.
Players hit AR 50, run out of story content and top out a character. And… now they have the luxury of wanting new characters and experimenting with item builds! Also, they realise they've caught up with their friends, and can play meaningful multiplayer content with them that advances exactly those goals!
The entire resin system needs to be reworked heavily. Players should be incentivized to play the game more, not punished for wanting to do more activities. Furthermore, experience and mora being locked behind resin heavily disincentivizes wishing on banners, because you simply do not have the resources to use the characters that you pull.
There are many options for improvement, my personal favorite choices:
1. Remove resin entirely and make all domains and leylines on a cooldown basis. Something like leylines refreshing every hour and domains refreshing every two hours. You can cap the amount of Adventure Exp earned per day just like how the BP has a weekly cap so that people don't progress their rank too far, but we would REALLY like to be able to experience that content multiple times per day in order to be able to effectively raise more than just 2 characters at a time. Artifacts have quite a lot of RNG on them anyway, and adding more stats down the line will water them down even further. Having access to more materials would only make people WANT to pull more on the character and weapon banners because they can actually utilize new characters. currently we CANNOT.
2. Halve the resin required for activities and award Fragile Resin for completing daily commissions. This would require the least amount of changes but still alleviate the feeling of having nothing to do 20 minutes after logging in.
3. Let chests and world encounters actually respawn. This would allow players to actively do what they had fun doing in the first 30 ranks of the game, explore and find chests. I'm not talking about only 10 common chests per day, i mean entire regions full of untouched chests again so that we can actually earn primogems for playing the game as it was intended again. Again you can cap the amount of AR EXP earned in one day similarly to the BP weekly cap.
4. Resin is only required to be spent to get rewards of the HIGHEST tier of reward available, but you can still earn lower tiers of rewards in each dungeon/leyline/Elite. for example, you can gain purple weapon ascendancy materials if you are AR 36+ in the weapon material domains by spending resin, but you can still do it without spending resin to earn lower quantities of green and blue weapon materials. Same with elites and leylines - spending resin on the blossom gives you full rewards including purple, doing it without resin still awards you with green and blue rewards, or lesser amounts of mora for the gold leyline.
5. Add a domain type that awards fragile resin. You would run this type of domain in order to collect resin to do the other domains. You even have completely unused domains just sitting there available for repurposing after the quests are completed in the Temple of the Falcon, Wolf, Lion, & Eagle. Just let people run these dungeons endlessly with scaled up enemies based on world level. Go all the way through the Temple, complete an event at the end, get rewarded with a fragile (or condensed) resin which allows you to go and do another type of domain/leyline/elite. This solution also requires very minimal changes, just reworking these dungeons to scale up and adding a fragile (or condensed) resin to the end chest that spawns.
6. Let us craft Fragile resins using open world materials such as hilichurl masks and treasure hoarder tokens and such. These materials are already highly valuable for ascension but at least we would be able to explore and grind the open world and feel like we are making progress toward resin-gated rewards as well.
7. Remove resin entirely and let Leylines award keys that unlock domains and elite bosses. In this version, you would run one leyline and it would give you a key or access to the domain or Elite of your choice. You could put caps on this or remove AR EXP entirely after doing each domain once per day, but then at least we could run content every day and choose how we want to experience it.
I understand MiHoYo wants players to feel incentivized to play as much as they want, but not feel punished for not grinding. However currently, players do NOT feel incentivized for playing as much as they want, so the balance of that equation is extremely lopsided.
Further, Primogem acquisition rate AFTER THE STORY IS COMPLETED is not generous enough. AT ALL. chests very quickly dry up, quests come to a crashing halt, and all you are left with is the daily commissions and the welkin blessing. it's just simply not enough. Loyal players, who have stuck with this game through to the end of the available content and even beyond that who continue to play every day should be rewarded with MORE primogems by completing activities in-game. it is simply unacceptable that the server maintenance downtime is nearly twice as rewarding as what you can achieve in a full day of playing the game. There are, again, many solutions to fix this problem, but the simplest would be to add primogem rewards to activities that (currently) require resin. both systems need a serious redesign and both could be accomplished together.
Lastly, I would like to suggest that there be a toggle option whether or not you would like to receive dupes in order to get Stella Fortunas. I understand that Stella Fortunas (SF's) are like a consolation prize that you pulled a character you already had, but primogem acquisition rate is FAR too low and character rates in the banners are FAR too low as well to save up 90 pulls just to hit the pity timer and get a character you already had if you wanted a new character. Or if you actually want to build up the characters you already have instead of getting some new character (that you can't even raise up because materials are FAR too scarce due to the resin system) then your odds of hitting are even worse. In terms of real money, hitting a pity time requires approximately $200 USD worth of gems. for that amount of money, you should be able to choose at the very least whether you are guaranteed a 5* that you do or don't currently own.
