Genshin Impact

[AnimeFangirl]

They need a credible competitor to light a fire under their seats. Right now Genshin is in a class of its own, and that's both good and bad.

[dragon1412]

More like they lucked out making the launch during Covid time rather than a class of it's own really, Genshin pretty much has a monopoly on open world anime style game. The 1st of it's kind was Peria chronicles by Nexon but it was cancelled during developments in 2019 I thinks, don't know if anyone still remember it.

Then after a while Blue protocol, tower of fantasy and Genshin announced, but it took different directions, Genshin rushed itself to make it during the covid times, while Blue protocol and Tower of fantasy took it times, but Covid got worse and effectively make the productions in limbo for a while, giving Genshin even longer time to hold monopoly and get players. If I remember correctly, Blue protocol and tower of Fantasy was meant to have a beta at the start of this summer according to their roadmap year ago. Thing are changing though since most countries are starting to get the majority already vaccinated, and start the developments back on track, well, even then Genshin still have the monopoly at least by the end of this year if all the news about other games is true, ToF is 2022, while BP is still no official planning yet. If anything Genshin would have trouble when those came out since unlike Genshin which is mostly single players, pretty much all other announced game are full blown MMO. Anime style game exist before, but they are mostly dungeon based or instance based like Elsword and Closers. Genshin was truly the 1st open world of it's style.

[Marina2]

Originally Posted by dragon1412

More like they lucked out making the launch during Covid time rather than a class of it's own really, Genshin pretty much has a monopoly on open world anime style game. The 1st of it's kind was Peria chronicles by Nexon but it was cancelled during developments in 2019 I thinks, don't know if anyone still remember it.

Then after a while Blue protocol, tower of fantasy and Genshin announced, but it took different directions, Genshin rushed itself to make it during the covid times, while Blue protocol and Tower of fantasy took it times, but Covid got worse and effectively make the productions in limbo for a while, giving Genshin even longer time to hold monopoly and get players. If I remember correctly, Blue protocol and tower of Fantasy was meant to have a beta at the start of this summer according to their roadmap year ago. Thing are changing though since most countries are starting to get the majority already vaccinated, and start the developments back on track, well, even then Genshin still have the monopoly at least by the end of this year if all the news about other games is true, ToF is 2022, while BP is still no official planning yet. If anything Genshin would have trouble when those came out since unlike Genshin which is mostly single players, pretty much all other announced game are full blown MMO. Anime style game exist before, but they are mostly dungeon based or instance based like Elsword and Closers. Genshin was truly the 1st open world of it's style.

Genshin Impact has different target group than Blue protocol and tower of Fantasy. I don't think they are direct competitors to Genshin.

[GDB]

Originally Posted by dragon1412

If anything Genshin would have trouble when those came out since unlike Genshin which is mostly single players, pretty much all other announced game are full blown MMO.

There's more than enough people who don't want anything to do with MMOs. I know I'd never touch another MMO, just like I'm never going to touch another Chinese gacha game after Arknights and Genshin's nonsense.

[dragon1412]

Originally Posted by Marina2

Genshin Impact has different target group than Blue protocol and tower of Fantasy. I don't think they are direct competitors to Genshin.

Depend, I mean, I knew a fair amounts of people getting into Genshin simply as a place holder for Blue protocol, and Blue protocol aside, ToW model is actually very close to Genshin. I'd say that target group is actually pretty blur in this type of game, MMO is fine if they accomodated single player more, which Blue protocol and PSO2 seem to already take noted of and mentioned it in their interviews. Big problem with MMO is raid and team based dungeon, but those thing are precisely the reason why MMO wave died down a fews years ago, most developers now pretty much accept that big raids and dungeon with forced role is simply hard to get players these day and they can be really toxic with their requirements.

@GDB: might i knows why you hate MMO ??? Purely interested, since most people I knews hate MMO simply because of Toxic teams building for dungeon and horrible raids.

[Sheba]

If i want to go back to MMORPGs, i'd just recover my FFXIVARR account.

[Marcus H.]

Yeah, I think moving on from MMOs is a good decision. Imagine spending several hours straight farming for gear or valuable items with a single-digit drop rate. The ones who grew up playing MMOs no longer have the time to do that. And that's why gacha games are all the rage nowadays.

[relentlessflame]

Originally Posted by GDB

mihoyo putting more time, effort, and money into going after leakers than they are balancing characters, kits, fixing bugs, and writing a proper story combined is about to make me quit just to get away from this horrid company. First the Zhongli response, then the Yoimiya response, and now this.

This may not be a popular answer, but it's not like their legal department has anything to do with any of the other issues anyway, or whatever the legal department does precludes anything happening on the development side. This is a company with thousands of employees in different departments, not like literally one guy choosing to spend time on one thing or another. And as for the leakers, they signed a legally-binding contract to become a tester and broke it, so why should they be surprised if the aggrieved party pursues legal restitution? Did they just think MiHoYo should overlook people breaking the contract forever because somehow "the ends justify the means"? If the complaint is that MiHoYo needs to be more forthcoming with details, I can support that, but expecting them to tacitly condone leakers breaking their NDA wasn't ever really realistic. The more bold they got about flouting the contract, the more likely it was that legal would eventually act, and honestly the leakers always knew the risk.

And well... non-meta characters happen in basically all gacha games. Look at any Cygames property -- new characters release all the time in regular and even special banners that don't compete at all in the meta, but you get them if you like the character, or they serve some small niche, or you just like collecting them all. I realize that this game is a bit more involved than most gacha games, but I think people are acting like this is a fighting game optimized for PvP tournaments so balance is an essential thing when Genshin just isn't that type of game. So for example, while I do think there is some clunkiness about Yoimiya's kit and the fact she's single-target isn't very competitive in the Abyss meta, I really think the anger some people have is just disproportionate to the problem. In the next 4 years, at this rate, the roster is going to grow to over 75 5-star characters, and no doubt some of them won't objectively shine except in very niche circumstances, so I don't think it's sustainable for people to keep getting this angry all the time. Of course, it's important to provide feedback, and maybe they will do an eventual balance pass or have some sort of future buff system for older characters that let them address things in retrospect (as many gacha games do), but yeah... people are making every single thing into a five-alarm fire and people will just start tuning them out.

Not saying you're wrong to be fed up with the game or it's way of doing things -- that's totally fair and up to you -- but, at the same time, I really can't understand the degree of outrage that some people have about every single thing. People act like just because they're making money it's somehow trivial to hire infinity+1 resources to focus on everything at once, but I can say from experience that that's actually really hard when the ship is in motion, you're churning out large updates on a fixed schedule, and you need people to have a certain level of competence to contribute meaningfully without creating new problems. I'm not saying they shouldn't do better -- of course, everyone should strive to do better, and they should take the feedback seriously as a way to improve -- but I can also understand why they are keeping the primary focus on moving forward. In the grand scheme of things, honestly, most of the things people are getting super mad about will pass. And yeah probably some bugs will never get fixed and this will constantly grate some people the wrong way, but that's also a reality of nearly any large scale software development too.

Basically... I think people just need to relax a bit and pick their battles. Being angry as a default state isn't healthy and isn't fun. And yeah, if you're so angry or burnt-out by these issues that you can't have fun anymore, it is better to just quit and come back later on when the next region releases or something. The game will still be there and maybe after a break you can better appreciate the good things to help balance out the bad.

[GDB]

Originally Posted by dragon1412

@GDB: might i knows why you hate MMO ??? Purely interested, since most people I knews hate MMO simply because of Toxic teams building for dungeon and horrible raids.

Toxic playerbases + hatred of having to rely on others to get things done.

Originally Posted by relentlessflame

This may not be a popular answer, but it's not like their legal department has anything to do with any of the other issues anyway, or whatever the legal department does precludes anything happening on the development side.

Oh, I'm not saying they're doing this instead of the other things. I'm just saying it's pathetic that they're putting more time, effort, and money into this instead of other things.

And as for the leakers, they signed a legally-binding contract to become a tester and broke it

Honeyhunter didn't sign an NDA and they got targeted. Not only the part of their site with leaks, but everything hosted on the same server including non-genshin things like Monster Hunter got taken down because of mihoyo.

expecting them to tacitly condone leakers breaking their NDA wasn't ever really realistic

My understanding is that they do for Honkai.

I really think the anger some people have is just disproportionate to the problem

Bow mechanics are screwed beyond belief. There's nothing disproportionate about the anger there when your ranged unit has to be in melee to not miss a near stationary target (or in some cases, a stationary target).

it's important to provide feedback

Which they've proven they ignore, or worse actively talk down to those who do so.

it is better to just quit and come back later on when the next region releases or something

I'm going to quit, but I'm not going to come back to it. The issues I have with mihoyo (and Chinese developers at large, but mihoyo especially has extra issues) aren't going to change because it's seemingly an intrinsic trait of their company.

[Marcus H.]

Honeyhunter didn't sign an NDA and they got targeted. Not only the part of their site with leaks, but everything hosted on the same server including non-genshin things like Monster Hunter got taken down because of mihoyo.

Gotta think about it: if they got leaked info, info that shouldn't escape from the beta testers, then someone fucked up along the way. Even if miHoYo fails to determine the beta tester who provided Honey with that intel, it doesn't free up Honey from any legal responsibility since the only remaining possibility is datamining, which is in itself a gray area if not totally illegal (ToS says "do not reverse-engineer the client files). Bottomline: Honey hosts things they shouldn't host (leaked info) and it doesn't matter how they obtained it because the act is what matters here.

[GDB]

TOS isn't a legal standard, it's an agreement for use. If you break it, all mihoyo can do is terminate access to their service.

[MeoTwister5]

Honey Impact actually left a pretty tasteless and probably racist response in their new host.

Genshit Infarct™ is a registered trademark of MeMeHoYo Co., Ltd.

This website is made for educational and research purpose (and us, eating macaroni). Images and data belong to decaying mind of mentally unstable game designer, considering himself a brain-damaged horse suffering from PTSD syndrome, caused by multiple copium infusions and are pretty fictional. Any similarity of names, data or images with resources of gambling waifu game with 3+ ESRB Rating, developed by some third party company, whos whole legal department can't make a clear paragraph in English, are entirely coincidental.

[relentlessflame]

Originally Posted by GDB

Honeyhunter didn't sign an NDA and they got targeted. Not only the part of their site with leaks, but everything hosted on the same server including non-genshin things like Monster Hunter got taken down because of mihoyo.

They're hosting information that they know is under NDA, which is protected under copyright and trade secret law. Sites are responsible for the content they publish on their sites. It's just like how AnimeSuki used to host fansub torrents, and companies sometimes came after us to remove those torrent links. It's not like we could claim "we didn't make the fansub so we're not the ones who did the infringing."

The fact that other stuff got taken down as a side-effect is whatever their hosting provider did in response to the legal request. It's not like MiHoYo said "destroy the server and everything hosted on it." It was a request to take down their infringing content, and the hosting provider seemingly decided to go for the nuclear option (which was no doubt covered by that provider's ToS).

But again, when you host content like that, you should know the risk, and at least in my opinion you should own it. They have no "right" to host a site that has NDA information on it. (Their snarky and, yes, arguably racist retort posted above is pretty telling of their childishness. Should be glad they only got their site taken down, and didn't get a legal threat delivered to their front door like someone I know did.)

Originally Posted by GDB

My understanding is that they do for Honkai.

With Honkai, the Global servers are operating several patches behind the Chinese servers, so the Global audience automatically has this sort of heads-up/preview of what's going on, so don't need to rely on leaks. I don't know what they may do about leaks internally inside China for that game, but the Global Honkai community doesn't have this problem. In some ways they have been "spoiled" by this, as it makes planning ahead easier than customers in the home market were able to do. (I've seen a similar thing happen with Korean MMORPGs, for instance.)

Originally Posted by GDB

Which they've proven they ignore, or worse actively talk down to those who do so.

A lot of improvements have been made as a result of feedback. Obviously, not all feedback can be actioned, and people will have opinions about which issues are critical and which aren't.

And I mean, "actively talking down" is reading an awful lot into tone. Yes, when the Zhongli situation happened they gave a "you're holding it wrong" response at first, which demonstrated they misunderstood the problem and offended some people. They saw they were wrong and reconsidered. But sometimes they're going to give their rationale for a situation, people won't agree, and in the end it's their call. I've not been in a game community yet where this doesn't happen to one extent or another, especially with live service titles. (Even in the ones I can think of that are particularly good examples of trying to listen to players, like FFXIV, there are plenty of bitter people with deep-set grievances against the developers for similar reasons.)

Originally Posted by GDB

I'm going to quit, but I'm not going to come back to it. The issues I have with mihoyo (and Chinese developers at large, but mihoyo especially has extra issues) aren't going to change because it's seemingly an intrinsic trait of their company.

At least in my experience, I truly don't see how Chinese developers are that different than Western developers, Japanese developers, Korean developers, and so on. Live service titles are hard because you have to constantly be moving forward, while players are raising issue for stuff you've already released. The developers are always thinking 6+ months ahead of the players and rarely/never have the time to deal with problems where people are at. Improvements tend to take a long time and become most apparent in retrospect.

Anyway, I hope you find a game that makes you happy. As I've said about many things before, life's too short to keep doing something you hate.

[dragon1412]

Originally Posted by Marcus H.

Yeah, I think moving on from MMOs is a good decision. Imagine spending several hours straight farming for gear or valuable items with a single-digit drop rate. The ones who grew up playing MMOs no longer have the time to do that. And that's why gacha games are all the rage nowadays.

Originally Posted by GDB

Toxic playerbases + hatred of having to rely on others to get things done.

Yeah, pretty much the same reason why I left MMO a fews years ago, and pretty much the community agree that those are the reason why MMO is dying and gacha rise in the face of that. I do think that the problem of having to rely to other is acknowledged though with pretty much all currents developers agree that Raids is just not a thing anymore and is veered toward single player nowadays (I'm pretty sure PSO2 and Blue protocol especially noted this in their interview. Not sure about ToF though.) For me though personally, I'd also add that the story of MMO is generally sub-par as well

It really is the same reason why I excited to Blue protocol, consider that I read in an old interviews being contents are mostly single player doable.

Originally Posted by relentlessflame

At least in my experience, I truly don't see how Chinese developers are that different than Western developers, Japanese developers, Korean developers, and so on. Live service titles are hard because you have to constantly be moving forward, while players are raising issue for stuff you've already released. The developers are always thinking 6+ months ahead of the players and rarely/never have the time to deal with problems where people are at. Improvements tend to take a long time and become most apparent in retrospect.

Anyway, I hope you find a game that makes you happy. As I've said about many things before, life's too short to keep doing something you hate.

I'd say there are definite differences, CN developers and gamers tend to be a lot more upfront and utilize the P2W model, I remember this happen with Blade and Soul, where the CN version actually have the option to let the player earn way more currency at the end of each dungeon by spending real money, I remember it was over 2-3 gold per dungeon in the early beginning. Most CN MMO I play also have some sort of feature enabling P2W model somewhat like some kind of Item that increase the chance of rare drop for 1 month or so. This can lead to some aggressive tactics aim at making money though, and the playerbase tend to devolve into rage war in the end. MHY is pretty much the same for me.

Honkai case is a bit misleading, I mean, even in CN people leak image of new characters in beta test all the time, googling on youtube would get you all about it. Genshin got the tight treatments simply because it was new and a the leak decrease their big earner status.

[relentlessflame]

Originally Posted by dragon1412

I'd say there are definite differences, CN developers and gamers tend to be a lot more upfront and utilize the P2W model, I remember this happen with Blade and Soul, where the CN version actually have the option to let the player earn way more currency at the end of each dungeon by spending real money, I remember it was over 2-3 gold per dungeon in the early beginning. Most CN MMO I play also have some sort of feature enabling P2W model somewhat like some kind of Item that increase the chance of rare drop for 1 month or so. This can lead to some aggressive tactics aim at making money though, and the playerbase tend to devolve into rage war in the end. MHY is pretty much the same for me.

Well, I didn't mean there were no differences at all in any area, just not really in the areas that he seemed to be talked about at the time. If the conversation were about the business model or monetization, there are definitely differences... although honestly I don't think Genshin is a particularly blatant example of any of the issues you mentioned. In some ways their monetization is less aggressive than many other F2P games I've seen from other countries.

Originally Posted by dragon1412

Honkai case is a bit misleading, I mean, even in CN people leak image of new characters in beta test all the time, googling on youtube would get you all about it. Genshin got the tight treatments simply because it was new and a the leak decrease their big earner status.

Okay, maybe, but I'm really not convinced that this whole thing is really just about leaking info about new characters in the first place. The situation been way beyond that for some time now.

[dragon1412]

It's half and half really, but many of these problem are indeed on MHY side, I think he's right about the whole playing deaf thing, Genshin do this before at the entire hacked account fiasco. And to a certain extent, CN company do have a habit of playing deaf until the whole storm pass. Genshin is a gacha though, by nature their monetization is already built into the system so it doesn't seem as aggressive.

To be fair, the whole leakers hunt thing was way back in Zhongli time, it's got considerably worse and MHY ramp it up during Hutao Banner I think. Most people agree that they just spend way too much money and effort into wrong things is somewhat correct, if they are that concern about leaker, they can simply hired internal beta testers. Pretty much people can guess what will happen when they simply outsourced it to community instead, and most people getting into beta test this way definitely aren't really pro who scrouged up bugs and modifiers and mostly just people looking for new contents. MHY going cheap on beta testers and then spend a lot on leakers hunt is kinda like they create their problem and now trying to brute force it. Not to mentioned that when a new patch come out, there will still people who are going to leak, they can always resort to VPN and throwaways account anyway.

I think you are just over think it, Genshin simply want to capitalize on it's monopoly at the moments and make people spend more instead of saving on prediction of future banner, F2P aside, most dolphin do fall into this type and planned their spending around leaks so MHY probably want them to spend more. Genshin is 1 year old now, it's competitors is starting to resume development, even in CN, there is new Code AOI planned to come out, ToF as well, Nexon also upping their own project SF2 in korea. So the Genshin current state proabably lasting up to early 2022 at most before competitor coming in drove. And MHY wanting the dolphin to spend more is nothing news, I mean, balancing around C1-2 (Kazuha, Raiden) is to target the dolphins rather than whale. The hunt happened is because Genshin was new and there is no competitor on the market.

[GDB]

Originally Posted by relentlessflame

It's not like MiHoYo said "destroy the server and everything hosted on it."

They actually did. Rather than saying to take down genshin.honeyhunter they demanded the entirety of honeyhunter be taken down.

[Marcus H.]

Banner blindness will only affect Day 1 rollers. Each featured banner lasts three weeks. In addition, there's no incentive to rolling as soon as the banner hits. Most reasonable people would just delay their rolls when in doubt. Also I do not want to promote conspiracy theories about Mihoyo's "leaker hunt decree" as a sign of greed; they are simply doing what they are entitled to do as a company with a valuable piece of intellectual property.

And regarding competitors, considering that China is having a shitfit over online gaming, expect widespread delays on gacha game releases for the next year or so.

[AnimeFangirl]

Originally Posted by GDB

Toxic playerbases + hatred of having to rely on others to get things done.

Super feel this one. I wouldn't play Genshin if it wasn't single-player. Mihoyo has nothing to fear from other competitors unless they're single-player as well. All the people I know who play Genshin IRL are busy professionals. They don't have time for guilds, raids, Discord, weekly point targets, arguing with no-life team members and all the other drama that comes from MMOs and team-based games.

[relentlessflame]

Originally Posted by GDB

They actually did. Rather than saying to take down genshin.honeyhunter they demanded the entirety of honeyhunter be taken down.

The DMCA is a takedown notice for infringing content. What the hosting provider decides to do in response to that notice up to the hosting provider, not the complainant. As long as the infringing content was removed, the hosting provider would have complied with the notice, but the tenants were likely also in violation with the hosting provider's ToS.

Originally Posted by Marcus H.

Banner blindness will only affect Day 1 rollers. Each featured banner lasts three weeks. In addition, there's no incentive to rolling as soon as the banner hits. Most reasonable people would just delay their rolls when in doubt. Also I do not want to promote conspiracy theories about Mihoyo's "leaker hunt decree" as a sign of greed; they are simply doing what they are entitled to do as a company with a valuable piece of intellectual property.

Yes, the "this is all to ensure banner blindness" theory doesn't really line up that well with this particular game. First of all, I doubt whatever they do is going to completely eradicate all leaks, and I'm not sure that's even their expectation. (Just like when we used to get takedown notices for anime fansubs, it's not like the companies thought all fansubs would simply stop. The goal is to make it less common or less easy to find.) But even if they did, this game has a very slow and predictable banner cycle. If the goal were just to mess with people's ability to save up primogems, they can just release meta-defining characters one after the other for multiple banners in a row faster than anyone can save up. Even with notice, primogems only come in at a certain speed. And forward visibility only gives you so much benefit because the nuances of the character's kit aren't always clear from leaks anyway, and can change between beta and release. And even upon release, a character can seem weak at first and then consensus shifts to them being unexpectedly strong in certain teams. Or, all they'd have to do at any point in the future is to have a rebalancing patch that adjusts past characters, or some "awakening" system that gives old characters new buffs or something (as many gacha games do), and then all bets are off regardless of visibility.

I definitely have seen gacha games that rely on banner blindness (GBF is a great example), but the banner cycle in this game is so slow and predictable so far that I doubt that's an essential driving factor that has a huge impact on revenue. Popular characters will still be popular, even if announced well in advance, as we see right now with Raiden Shogun (and despite the mixed messages about her place in the meta), and those that surround anticipated characters suffer somewhat, but the game still benefits from building hype about new characters a lot more than they would by not building hype -- as we see with both the Shogun and Ayaka.

Originally Posted by dragon1412

I think you are just over think it, Genshin simply want to capitalize on it's monopoly at the moments and make people spend more instead of saving on prediction of future banner, F2P aside, most dolphin do fall into this type and planned their spending around leaks so MHY probably want them to spend more.

I honestly don't think that's likely the reason. They spend a ton of money on marketing initiatives that are based on an element of surprise and being able to control the message, and then they have beta testers who are breaking their legal contract and sites like this one that are stealing their IP and profiting off of it (5 figures, by their own admission). It really doesn't have to be anything about capitalizing on monopoly, or making dolphins spend more through banner blindness, or whatever. It can simply be because (and in my experience usually is because) someone at the very top is frustrated by these leakers breaking the rules and tells the legal department to do something about it.

There are plenty of other reasons to keep future developments close to the vest: maximizing the marketing value of immediate call to actions, coordinating timed reveals with media partners, avoiding the perception of "promises" when development situations change, and so on. But people have really fixated onto this one theory as if it's the unified theory of everything companies do, and while it may well be "a" factor that's considered sometimes, it's just way too over-simplistic to attribute everything to one single reason. While it's good for people to be suspicious of corporate motives and aware of the manipulative elements of various business models, there's a risk of it turning into conspiracy theories and paranoia too.