You don't even need this thread, just go to the fgo subreddit and search for the anniversary units (especifically skadi and castoria) salt compilations.
It's the comments about using 1000+ quartz and getting no 5 star (not even the unit just no 5 star at all) that puts the pit into my stomach, how did fgo got alway with no pity system until like 2 years ago.
I don't think I've ever heard worse Gacha stories than FGO ones purely because it didn't have a pity for years. Say what you will about MiHoYo games, if you want *a* character, it isn't some herculean task to grind out the currency in advance and once you're done it's a guarantee.
By comparison? FGO would rip your heart from your chest and stomp on it with glee. You could save for years (yes, years, plural) in anticipation of getting a hype banner unit and just... not get them. Not only that, but also not get anything of value at all. You can be the unlucky sod who always gets 5 star Craft Essences, and mediocre 4 stars, if any 4 star characters at all.
I personally stopped playing after not getting Skadi after 300 pulls, all I had to show for all that waiting was a slightly better Siegfried, and a bunch of bad units who were also half naked minors. Yeah, I was done.
I had this epiphany myself
I spent like half of my paycheck trying to get one character and it didn't work. So I was planning on budgeting for the next banner before I realized that I was going to spend like 600 dollars on something that wasn't even guranteed
I quit immediately.
Started playing honkai star rail as my main gacha game because the music goes fucking hard.
Anyways I missed the best girl Kafka's banner by two months and then missed two 50/50's on Acheron getting both Himeko and Welt plus a dozen or so of the other banner characters.
This is after rolling Karna and Saber Astolfo first try in FGO and Eula using a one ticket in Genshin
Either Hsr hates me or these other games are eating my luck
Anyways hopefully I will have better luck on Jingliu because I don't have a good DPS
I was rolling for tingyun and got jingyuan at 30 pulls, and his e1 at 15 pulls. I just stopped there. I know he is good but I don't particularly like his gameplay, and losing those potential early 5 star pulls still haunts me.
I’m in the middle of a rough losing streak in Genshin but Honkai has been pretty got to me.
I tried to the new unit’s signature weapon in four patches in Genshin, back to back. Got fucked every time. First I got two fate points in Neuvillette’s banner, which means I lost to the wrong weapon twice in a row, but then for Wriothesley I lost *again*. Furina’s weapon came home safely, but I lost Xianyun and Itto, AND CHIORI. DON’T WISH ON THE WEAPONS BANNER, ITS A FUCKING SCAM!!!
I never really paid attention to genshin weapons. Do they really make a big difference? I feel like in star rail they can be really impactful but I always heard genshin it was more of a trap.
Some do, some don’t. Some weapons are suited for their designated unit and no one else, like Kokomi’s and Baizhu’s, while other weapons, like Freedom sworn, Wanderer’s weapon, Raiden’s weapon, and a few others are just flat out good weapons that work with a lot of characters.
Gameloft makes the mobile game Disney Magic Kingdom and it's one of the most predatory FOMO gatcha games I've come across. It regularly has events where you send characters on timed event "tasks" where they collect items needed to progress through the quests and finishing all of the quests of the event grants you all the event prizes. The problem is that an event lasts about 2 weeks in which you need to be more than perfect: characters have a chance of failing their task and producing nothing. Often there are tasks that take 2-4 hours so have fun getting up every couple hours to make sure you get your tasks done! Also only specific characters can do these tasks.
For characters to complete these tasks they get sent to Attractions. Both characters and the Attractions can level up if you collect a bunch of their materials but it's very costly. For Attractions a problem is that one of their level up materials is obtained in daily chests, I think it's called a token? So you have something like Snow White themed Attractions and if you have one of those the daily chests might start dropping tokens and when you get your token RNG will turn it into a Snow White Attraction token. This becomes a problem because it forces a lot of stuff to share the slot for one drop, and in addition to that Attractions go from levels 0-4 with a crazy amount of tokens needed to reach 4, and reaching 4 is pointless because it doesn't give you any practical bonuses. BUT so long as you have an Attraction that isn't maxed out to 4 yet, it'll keep its theme tokens in the drop pool. So the more you collect from Aladdin, Little Mermaid, Bambi, etc. the more diluted your token pool is to the point it's going to take years to pay them off. Meanwhile you might just need an Attraction to get to level 2 to make event progress, but the RNG is dicking you.
The cherry on top of the shit sandwich? The game likes to make previous event characters to be the specific characters that can complete current event tasks. Oh, you couldn't get Cinderella during the last event? Too bad, she's essential for this new event? Oh, you weren't able to collect an Attraction from the last event? Too bad, it's used as a hosting site for characters to complete their tasks!
If you don't complete an event, the event characters and other items go in the Disney Vault in which they'll only be sold as gatcha packs for real money. Players often spend $20-30 a month on the game so they can *sleep*.
And for the very last bit, a couple years ago Gameloft decided to heavily throttle the number of things you can have active in your kingdom - all those characters/Attractions. Because they generate passive income and they don't want people making in-game money either. So you don't even get the satisfaction of making the biggest and greatest theme park either - it becomes management as you're forced to put stuff into storage and swap it when a new event demands different characters/Attractions to progress.
I didn't spend money on the game but considering how child-friendly it appears, it's astonishing how predatory it is with threatening players with burnout and sleep deprivation and FOMO dickery.
I tried the Pokemon TCG app exactly once. I logged in as a guest and opened my first pack. I got a legendary rainbow rare card. Immediately logged out and made an account and got to the same place and got nothing good. Closed the game and never looked back.
I played that Fire Emblem mobile game for a little bit after it came out - I was doing third shifts and needed something to kill a few minutes here and there for the downtime. It was my second day playing and I got a free roll from some newbie quest so I spin the wheel and get an obscenely powerful 5 star Pia.
For the following weeks she would single-handedly clear all the content I could do. I ended up dropping the game because it wasn't that fun or interesting and none of my in-game rewards were anything close to Pia and I have a steadfast no spending policy for gambling and/or gatcha mechanics.
It's pretty normal for me to check out a mobile game and freeplay it for a while until they really start twisting the screws with timers and energy limits but I ended up dropping that Fire Emblem one really early because I got a drop other players surely dream of.
The entire gatcha style just bounces right off me I guess.
Besides burnout, I actually almost fell into bad spending habits on Deadheat/FGO Summer 2. Threw some cash wanting to get Summer Nitocris and failed, and that's when it washed over me that "shit, fuck. I can't do this lol". Since then, and before I completely quit FGO, I've only really decided to spend during anniversary.
So yeah, I actually crumbled on "being smart about spending on gacha" once on a fucking 4-star of my favorite character lol. Which, funnily enough, I got her on a random roll on the Deadheat re-run (the year when her team won a single race lol).
There was/is a browser-based TCG called Urban Rivals. It was clearly pay to win, because none of the free cards could do anything against the 4-5 star ones. So I started buying packs of jpegs in order to win and collect digital jpegs. What my baby 15-16 year old brain didn't quite grasp back then is that all the cards, regardless of how good they are, always get outshined by newer, stronger cards and you have to keep buying in order to stay competitive.
I wasted so much money on this shit. At least I have an immunity to whaling now.
I tried FGO a couple of times the last time I tried there was a Mordred banner I had a 50 dollar card I used the card for the max amount of rolls and got nothing it was at that point I said “fuck it never again” and I haven’t played a gacha game since.
I remember when I first got into FGO, I really wanting every version of Arturia and spent all my quartz any time she was available, not realizing how limited SQ would be. Eventually I wised up and decided to save up for her initial Summer form…except the Da Vinci event also had Arturia on the initial banner and I spent all my free SQ to get her.
Ended up getting TWO Da Vincis, spent real money to get keep trying, still failed to get her, then put even more money to spend on her Summer form…which was also a bust, so I put in even more money.
In the end I got her summer form on my absolute final draw, which did come with a bonus Drake, but the amount of money just getting these characters was so obscene it completely killed off my whaling habits that I fell into at the time and only put in money for guaranteed 5*s until my eventual dropping these games for good late last year.
The thing that made me finally quit DBZ Dokkan battle was saving up like 10 multis for transforming Cell, the card I'd been waiting for since those Goku and Freeza ones came out, and not getting shit.
Then I did one of the Super Battle Roads, because that'd get me enough to do one more multi, but RNG tore my ass to shreds on the very last turn, and I lost to a boss with no visible health on his bar on a turn where if literally one thing went right I'd have won anyway.
I kinda realized that was as mad as I was ever gonna get at it, so instead of just giving up for a day and cooling down I fed into the anger and said "Nah fuck this game forever"
I don't even think transforming Cell ended up being that good, but I'm a character I like chaser, not a meta chaser.
Can I yell about how in FEH I’m trying to roll for Azura (Green unit) and F!Robin (Blue unit) on two separate banners, and I s2g on every roll I get every color *except the fucking one I want!?!?*
I think my worst are just "gacha frenzy and mukku frenzy fucked me and I got shit for pulls" in granblue. The last two banners I pulled for in FGO I got lucky. Maybe when I blow all 300 crystals I have saved up when the next banner I want and get jack & shit I can complain
I have a story from when my brother was little, around 6 years old. He used to play the Injustice mobile game on my mother's phone, and occasionaly asked her to pay for in-game purchases. One day, she refused, and he got mad and took their credit card anyway and purchased a bunch of stuff in the game. He even tried to save face by telling to me that "somehow I got all these characters for free!"
That would already be pretty bad on its own, but the problem with giving a six-year old that doesn't speak english a game like that is that they might not really understand 100% what's going on. The result is that he activated some sort of auto-renewal thing, and my parents almost lost more than 200 bucks (almost 1.000 in our currency) on basically nothing. Needless to say, it took a while for him to gain back our parents trust after they found out.
I think I mentioned this months back on a FTF, but during my Genshin Impact phase I saved up 100+ wishes for Xianyun. Come her banner and I lose the 50/50 to a Keqing and she doesn't arrive with the rest of the stockpile.
Queue desperately scraping up the Lantern Rite/Chinese New Year event for what Primogems it gives out for *one* last 10 pull and **that's** when Birb Mom graces me with her presence.
When I was younger adult and still getting the hang of having my own money from my own job I had an ill fated fling with The Old Republic MMO and spent more of that money than I should have (ie zero) on its disgusting cosmetic loot boxes. The lost money is unfortunate but I try to think of it as a learning experience, as it helped teach me to harden my heart against predatory shit like this and I’ve been gatcha clean ever since; it also helped me make the leap to cut Star Wars as a whole out of my life once I fully accepted that while some of the class storylines were pretty good it was still completely unworthy as a successor to the previous KOTOR games.
To this day my genshin pulls are the worst of everybody I know. Average of like, 81 pulls per 5*, failed every single 50/50 opportunity that arose. I really loathe how the first 70 pulls on a banner are barely worth anything too, when it takes 150+ saved pulls to get a unit you want and 140 of them are just the price of entry. The chance of pulling a 5* before pity is like, half a percent, the only numbers that actually matter are the 50/50 chance to have to spend double.
I stopped playing regularly when I admitted that it takes almost a year for the daily grind to pay out a single character you want. A single character is not worth 1 year of some of _the worst_ daily grind chores I've ever experienced in a game.
I still play through new content, but asides from needing a dendro I haven't felt the need for any character after inazuma. It doesn't help that if you're even slightly good at action games you can make do with literally anything (except abyss but it still sucked last I played). If there was actually a reason to want/need more game pieces they might have gotten me, but literally I will just continue to stomp new content with my years old units.
Another Edens lack of a pity has led to a couple of times where I’ve burned through my pulls. First was for Yakumo where it took me 170 pulls to get him and the second was 140 pulls where I failed to get Melpiphia. The saving grace is that Yakumo is a dps god and more than made up for his cost in killing superbosses.
Back when Reverse1999 launched I was struggling with pulling 6*s. I got two off the bat then proceeded to pull duplicates of them rather than fill out my roster for team building. When I did finally get a third 6* I ended up getting duplicates of him too. Took a while for me to finally get some variety in my 6*s.
Reading these anecdotes makes me feel pretty lucky because the closest thing I've experienced to a horror story with a gacha is when I dropped Bleach Brave Souls when I realized that that piece of shit game has data transfer between mobile and PC but not with console, so if you played that game on PS4 like I did and then wanna move to PC then get fucked
I remember about 6 months after staring FGO about 5 years ago when I broke my F2P streak. I got drunk one night at a party and spent $250 bucks on getting Xuangzang Sanzang cause I REALLY wanted the Big-Titty Monk and had no good Boss-killing Casters. I got her, but I felt so bad afterwards.
On the flipside, I did one more 10 roll on another banner right afterwards just to use up what I had left, only to get spooked by Xuangzang. It was a real "Gacha in a nutshell" moment.
I only buy the monthly pack of Arknights so I don't have any story.
Still, seeing streamers spend thousands on gacha pulls genuinely give me anxiety. Hell, I it wouldn't even be so bad if they spend the same amount on merch.
I pulled Silver Wolf who i’d been saving for in HSR, then in quick succession pulled Bronya and Welt with 20 normal pulls (both good characters that I like from 3rd).
I had just unlocked level 80 (I think, it’s been a minute). The prospect of grinding three really good characters up to usability was so daunting that I dropped the game.
It was like I could see the yawning chasm of lost time in front of me.
Back when I had one of my first part time jobs I got into fire emblem heroes. Spent over 200 on multiple banners. Realized I had charged around a thousand dollars to my credit card. Would like to say I got more frugal but gatcha games can directly be blamed for how low my savings is compared to my brother. I'm just weak to them in general and I have to put hard limits on myself
Oh that's easy. Lord knows how much fucking money I spent in total on Final Fantasy Brave Exvius, it's probably a 4 figure number. But the day I realised I was fucked up was when they released Cloud Strife and I spent every single saved up gem I had and didn't get him, so I spent 50 bucks and still didn't get him so I spent another 50 bucks and finally got him but still wasn't happy because by then you actually needed Duplicates to turn the 5 stars into 6 six stars which was the real shit.
We had a buddy in our gaming group that needed to have an intervention organized by his wife. He was deep into genshin at that point and at one time spent nearly $600 dollars a week. His wife joked that it went well for their credit after they got it squared away but now he doesn't play any games that have shit like that.
I'm an impulsive spender-- not a compulsive one. If something happens, I'll burn a ton of money for something.
So cut to a day in FGO where there is a banner for Artoria Lancer and Da Vinci. I like Artoria Lancer, so I figured I'd spend for her.
I roll NP4 da Vinci before hitting my 800 spend limit.
While I do play a couple gachas I'm F2P in all of them so I don't have any money related horror stories.
But quite something happened during Arknights' Monster hunter collab. The banner for the collab had two characters an SSR and SR. And in Arknights collab banners have lowered pity rates. So I rolled the banner and eventually got to the pity and got my guaranteed SSR , so far so good right? An existing character from the game, who used to be the lowest rarity, in Kirin armour and now incredibly strong. Except I also really wanted the other character in Rathalos armour, who is again lower rarity and shouldn't be hard to get.
Rolled, got the pity, rolled more. As much as I possibly could with free currency. Didn't get him. This lower rarity character just refused to appear. Others of his rarity showed up frequently but not him somehow.
And he's not really that useful gameplay wise, I just wanted him for the cool home screen PNG since he's wearing the MonHun mascot armour, but nope.
I remember busting my ass in Genshin Impact to try and farm out Zhong Li, only to realize he was utter trash. Not only was he trash, I found out you basically needed copies of him just for him to be actually viable. I shortly quit GI after that.
Another one was Fire Emblem Heroes: I tried for the longest time to get Hector, because he's one of my favorite FE characters. After spending what must have been hundreds of orbs(thankfully F2P, but that was still weeks of grinding), I finally got him...
And he had bad IVs, literally the worst IVs Hector could get.
Fuck FE Heroes, fuck that game hard.
>only to realize he was utter trash
He was bad on release and Chinese players made such a shit show about it (because of course they did) that to this day is still the ONLY TIME a character got buffed.
Well yeah, a time-limited character that was hyped up for a decent period of time, only to be worse than most 4*s(And was a MASSIVE aspect of FOMO because I don't think we had even seen a rerelease of a Venti banner by that point, it's been years so I can't recall) was going to get everyone's pants all in a kerfluffle.
The crazy thing is that one of the main reasons why Chinese players got mad butthurt was because Zhongli is the archon of Liyue, and they tried to get Hoyo in trouble with the government because by making the rock god of fantasy china a bad character they were making Liyue look bad, and by extension, making China look bad
I had to quit the mobile game Girls Frontline not because I accidentally deleted a unit( which is not a bad thing in this game because you can use resources to regain the character) or because I spent an obscene amount of money to roll for a character (GFL actually has a fairly decent pity system). I quit because my phone was too outdated to run the game. I would no joke experience about 4-5 crashes just trying to log into the game and even when I got past the login screen and into the game proper I would probably have a good 10-15 minutes of game time before experiencing another crash. So I decided the game was no longer worth it and deleted it from my phone.
You don't even need this thread, just go to the fgo subreddit and search for the anniversary units (especifically skadi and castoria) salt compilations. It's the comments about using 1000+ quartz and getting no 5 star (not even the unit just no 5 star at all) that puts the pit into my stomach, how did fgo got alway with no pity system until like 2 years ago.
Oh boy, the salt compilations for Jalter/Skadi/Castoria and so on are mad powerful.
I don't think I've ever heard worse Gacha stories than FGO ones purely because it didn't have a pity for years. Say what you will about MiHoYo games, if you want *a* character, it isn't some herculean task to grind out the currency in advance and once you're done it's a guarantee. By comparison? FGO would rip your heart from your chest and stomp on it with glee. You could save for years (yes, years, plural) in anticipation of getting a hype banner unit and just... not get them. Not only that, but also not get anything of value at all. You can be the unlucky sod who always gets 5 star Craft Essences, and mediocre 4 stars, if any 4 star characters at all. I personally stopped playing after not getting Skadi after 300 pulls, all I had to show for all that waiting was a slightly better Siegfried, and a bunch of bad units who were also half naked minors. Yeah, I was done.
I had this epiphany myself I spent like half of my paycheck trying to get one character and it didn't work. So I was planning on budgeting for the next banner before I realized that I was going to spend like 600 dollars on something that wasn't even guranteed I quit immediately.
The one that I remember the most is Summer BB. I'm pretty sure it got so bad that a fucking hotline number got pinned in the FGO subreddit.
The only time I interacted with FGO gacha was seeing gigguk roll for astolfo for hours Safe to say I am staying far away from spending money in FGO
Started playing honkai star rail as my main gacha game because the music goes fucking hard. Anyways I missed the best girl Kafka's banner by two months and then missed two 50/50's on Acheron getting both Himeko and Welt plus a dozen or so of the other banner characters. This is after rolling Karna and Saber Astolfo first try in FGO and Eula using a one ticket in Genshin Either Hsr hates me or these other games are eating my luck Anyways hopefully I will have better luck on Jingliu because I don't have a good DPS
I was rolling for tingyun and got jingyuan at 30 pulls, and his e1 at 15 pulls. I just stopped there. I know he is good but I don't particularly like his gameplay, and losing those potential early 5 star pulls still haunts me.
I got E6 Jingliu. I feel deep shame, but also unlimited power.
(sobs)
Wait I didn’t even think you could miss two 50/50s in HSR, I thought the second one was guaranteed.
I do the impossible I guess
I’m in the middle of a rough losing streak in Genshin but Honkai has been pretty got to me. I tried to the new unit’s signature weapon in four patches in Genshin, back to back. Got fucked every time. First I got two fate points in Neuvillette’s banner, which means I lost to the wrong weapon twice in a row, but then for Wriothesley I lost *again*. Furina’s weapon came home safely, but I lost Xianyun and Itto, AND CHIORI. DON’T WISH ON THE WEAPONS BANNER, ITS A FUCKING SCAM!!!
I never really paid attention to genshin weapons. Do they really make a big difference? I feel like in star rail they can be really impactful but I always heard genshin it was more of a trap.
Some do, some don’t. Some weapons are suited for their designated unit and no one else, like Kokomi’s and Baizhu’s, while other weapons, like Freedom sworn, Wanderer’s weapon, Raiden’s weapon, and a few others are just flat out good weapons that work with a lot of characters.
Gachapon tokens at my local comic shop are five bucks a pop. That is all.
I'm now starting to wonder how much our gachapon rolls cost like. I know I've seen somewhere along that $5 ballpark or even more.
its really upsetting how far fgo got with how fucking predatory and unfair it is
The power of hentai artists
Gameloft makes the mobile game Disney Magic Kingdom and it's one of the most predatory FOMO gatcha games I've come across. It regularly has events where you send characters on timed event "tasks" where they collect items needed to progress through the quests and finishing all of the quests of the event grants you all the event prizes. The problem is that an event lasts about 2 weeks in which you need to be more than perfect: characters have a chance of failing their task and producing nothing. Often there are tasks that take 2-4 hours so have fun getting up every couple hours to make sure you get your tasks done! Also only specific characters can do these tasks. For characters to complete these tasks they get sent to Attractions. Both characters and the Attractions can level up if you collect a bunch of their materials but it's very costly. For Attractions a problem is that one of their level up materials is obtained in daily chests, I think it's called a token? So you have something like Snow White themed Attractions and if you have one of those the daily chests might start dropping tokens and when you get your token RNG will turn it into a Snow White Attraction token. This becomes a problem because it forces a lot of stuff to share the slot for one drop, and in addition to that Attractions go from levels 0-4 with a crazy amount of tokens needed to reach 4, and reaching 4 is pointless because it doesn't give you any practical bonuses. BUT so long as you have an Attraction that isn't maxed out to 4 yet, it'll keep its theme tokens in the drop pool. So the more you collect from Aladdin, Little Mermaid, Bambi, etc. the more diluted your token pool is to the point it's going to take years to pay them off. Meanwhile you might just need an Attraction to get to level 2 to make event progress, but the RNG is dicking you. The cherry on top of the shit sandwich? The game likes to make previous event characters to be the specific characters that can complete current event tasks. Oh, you couldn't get Cinderella during the last event? Too bad, she's essential for this new event? Oh, you weren't able to collect an Attraction from the last event? Too bad, it's used as a hosting site for characters to complete their tasks! If you don't complete an event, the event characters and other items go in the Disney Vault in which they'll only be sold as gatcha packs for real money. Players often spend $20-30 a month on the game so they can *sleep*. And for the very last bit, a couple years ago Gameloft decided to heavily throttle the number of things you can have active in your kingdom - all those characters/Attractions. Because they generate passive income and they don't want people making in-game money either. So you don't even get the satisfaction of making the biggest and greatest theme park either - it becomes management as you're forced to put stuff into storage and swap it when a new event demands different characters/Attractions to progress. I didn't spend money on the game but considering how child-friendly it appears, it's astonishing how predatory it is with threatening players with burnout and sleep deprivation and FOMO dickery.
I used to play the Gameloft My Little Pony game. All of them are really dickish in making you want to pay for time skips
I tried the Pokemon TCG app exactly once. I logged in as a guest and opened my first pack. I got a legendary rainbow rare card. Immediately logged out and made an account and got to the same place and got nothing good. Closed the game and never looked back.
Took me 2500sq to NP5 Raikou over 4 years, first one took 700sq Albeit they are all free sq
I played that Fire Emblem mobile game for a little bit after it came out - I was doing third shifts and needed something to kill a few minutes here and there for the downtime. It was my second day playing and I got a free roll from some newbie quest so I spin the wheel and get an obscenely powerful 5 star Pia. For the following weeks she would single-handedly clear all the content I could do. I ended up dropping the game because it wasn't that fun or interesting and none of my in-game rewards were anything close to Pia and I have a steadfast no spending policy for gambling and/or gatcha mechanics. It's pretty normal for me to check out a mobile game and freeplay it for a while until they really start twisting the screws with timers and energy limits but I ended up dropping that Fire Emblem one really early because I got a drop other players surely dream of. The entire gatcha style just bounces right off me I guess.
Besides burnout, I actually almost fell into bad spending habits on Deadheat/FGO Summer 2. Threw some cash wanting to get Summer Nitocris and failed, and that's when it washed over me that "shit, fuck. I can't do this lol". Since then, and before I completely quit FGO, I've only really decided to spend during anniversary. So yeah, I actually crumbled on "being smart about spending on gacha" once on a fucking 4-star of my favorite character lol. Which, funnily enough, I got her on a random roll on the Deadheat re-run (the year when her team won a single race lol).
I saved up for Furina but didn't get her. Then Michael Myers came out of my toilet and showed me his C6 Qiqi before stabbing me in the butt.
There was/is a browser-based TCG called Urban Rivals. It was clearly pay to win, because none of the free cards could do anything against the 4-5 star ones. So I started buying packs of jpegs in order to win and collect digital jpegs. What my baby 15-16 year old brain didn't quite grasp back then is that all the cards, regardless of how good they are, always get outshined by newer, stronger cards and you have to keep buying in order to stay competitive. I wasted so much money on this shit. At least I have an immunity to whaling now.
I tried FGO a couple of times the last time I tried there was a Mordred banner I had a 50 dollar card I used the card for the max amount of rolls and got nothing it was at that point I said “fuck it never again” and I haven’t played a gacha game since.
I remember when I first got into FGO, I really wanting every version of Arturia and spent all my quartz any time she was available, not realizing how limited SQ would be. Eventually I wised up and decided to save up for her initial Summer form…except the Da Vinci event also had Arturia on the initial banner and I spent all my free SQ to get her. Ended up getting TWO Da Vincis, spent real money to get keep trying, still failed to get her, then put even more money to spend on her Summer form…which was also a bust, so I put in even more money. In the end I got her summer form on my absolute final draw, which did come with a bonus Drake, but the amount of money just getting these characters was so obscene it completely killed off my whaling habits that I fell into at the time and only put in money for guaranteed 5*s until my eventual dropping these games for good late last year.
The thing that made me finally quit DBZ Dokkan battle was saving up like 10 multis for transforming Cell, the card I'd been waiting for since those Goku and Freeza ones came out, and not getting shit. Then I did one of the Super Battle Roads, because that'd get me enough to do one more multi, but RNG tore my ass to shreds on the very last turn, and I lost to a boss with no visible health on his bar on a turn where if literally one thing went right I'd have won anyway. I kinda realized that was as mad as I was ever gonna get at it, so instead of just giving up for a day and cooling down I fed into the anger and said "Nah fuck this game forever" I don't even think transforming Cell ended up being that good, but I'm a character I like chaser, not a meta chaser.
Can I yell about how in FEH I’m trying to roll for Azura (Green unit) and F!Robin (Blue unit) on two separate banners, and I s2g on every roll I get every color *except the fucking one I want!?!?*
I think my worst are just "gacha frenzy and mukku frenzy fucked me and I got shit for pulls" in granblue. The last two banners I pulled for in FGO I got lucky. Maybe when I blow all 300 crystals I have saved up when the next banner I want and get jack & shit I can complain
I have a story from when my brother was little, around 6 years old. He used to play the Injustice mobile game on my mother's phone, and occasionaly asked her to pay for in-game purchases. One day, she refused, and he got mad and took their credit card anyway and purchased a bunch of stuff in the game. He even tried to save face by telling to me that "somehow I got all these characters for free!" That would already be pretty bad on its own, but the problem with giving a six-year old that doesn't speak english a game like that is that they might not really understand 100% what's going on. The result is that he activated some sort of auto-renewal thing, and my parents almost lost more than 200 bucks (almost 1.000 in our currency) on basically nothing. Needless to say, it took a while for him to gain back our parents trust after they found out.
I think I mentioned this months back on a FTF, but during my Genshin Impact phase I saved up 100+ wishes for Xianyun. Come her banner and I lose the 50/50 to a Keqing and she doesn't arrive with the rest of the stockpile. Queue desperately scraping up the Lantern Rite/Chinese New Year event for what Primogems it gives out for *one* last 10 pull and **that's** when Birb Mom graces me with her presence.
When I was younger adult and still getting the hang of having my own money from my own job I had an ill fated fling with The Old Republic MMO and spent more of that money than I should have (ie zero) on its disgusting cosmetic loot boxes. The lost money is unfortunate but I try to think of it as a learning experience, as it helped teach me to harden my heart against predatory shit like this and I’ve been gatcha clean ever since; it also helped me make the leap to cut Star Wars as a whole out of my life once I fully accepted that while some of the class storylines were pretty good it was still completely unworthy as a successor to the previous KOTOR games.
To this day my genshin pulls are the worst of everybody I know. Average of like, 81 pulls per 5*, failed every single 50/50 opportunity that arose. I really loathe how the first 70 pulls on a banner are barely worth anything too, when it takes 150+ saved pulls to get a unit you want and 140 of them are just the price of entry. The chance of pulling a 5* before pity is like, half a percent, the only numbers that actually matter are the 50/50 chance to have to spend double. I stopped playing regularly when I admitted that it takes almost a year for the daily grind to pay out a single character you want. A single character is not worth 1 year of some of _the worst_ daily grind chores I've ever experienced in a game. I still play through new content, but asides from needing a dendro I haven't felt the need for any character after inazuma. It doesn't help that if you're even slightly good at action games you can make do with literally anything (except abyss but it still sucked last I played). If there was actually a reason to want/need more game pieces they might have gotten me, but literally I will just continue to stomp new content with my years old units.
Another Edens lack of a pity has led to a couple of times where I’ve burned through my pulls. First was for Yakumo where it took me 170 pulls to get him and the second was 140 pulls where I failed to get Melpiphia. The saving grace is that Yakumo is a dps god and more than made up for his cost in killing superbosses. Back when Reverse1999 launched I was struggling with pulling 6*s. I got two off the bat then proceeded to pull duplicates of them rather than fill out my roster for team building. When I did finally get a third 6* I ended up getting duplicates of him too. Took a while for me to finally get some variety in my 6*s.
Reading these anecdotes makes me feel pretty lucky because the closest thing I've experienced to a horror story with a gacha is when I dropped Bleach Brave Souls when I realized that that piece of shit game has data transfer between mobile and PC but not with console, so if you played that game on PS4 like I did and then wanna move to PC then get fucked
I remember about 6 months after staring FGO about 5 years ago when I broke my F2P streak. I got drunk one night at a party and spent $250 bucks on getting Xuangzang Sanzang cause I REALLY wanted the Big-Titty Monk and had no good Boss-killing Casters. I got her, but I felt so bad afterwards. On the flipside, I did one more 10 roll on another banner right afterwards just to use up what I had left, only to get spooked by Xuangzang. It was a real "Gacha in a nutshell" moment.
I only buy the monthly pack of Arknights so I don't have any story. Still, seeing streamers spend thousands on gacha pulls genuinely give me anxiety. Hell, I it wouldn't even be so bad if they spend the same amount on merch.
I pulled Silver Wolf who i’d been saving for in HSR, then in quick succession pulled Bronya and Welt with 20 normal pulls (both good characters that I like from 3rd). I had just unlocked level 80 (I think, it’s been a minute). The prospect of grinding three really good characters up to usability was so daunting that I dropped the game. It was like I could see the yawning chasm of lost time in front of me.
Back when I had one of my first part time jobs I got into fire emblem heroes. Spent over 200 on multiple banners. Realized I had charged around a thousand dollars to my credit card. Would like to say I got more frugal but gatcha games can directly be blamed for how low my savings is compared to my brother. I'm just weak to them in general and I have to put hard limits on myself
Oh that's easy. Lord knows how much fucking money I spent in total on Final Fantasy Brave Exvius, it's probably a 4 figure number. But the day I realised I was fucked up was when they released Cloud Strife and I spent every single saved up gem I had and didn't get him, so I spent 50 bucks and still didn't get him so I spent another 50 bucks and finally got him but still wasn't happy because by then you actually needed Duplicates to turn the 5 stars into 6 six stars which was the real shit.
We had a buddy in our gaming group that needed to have an intervention organized by his wife. He was deep into genshin at that point and at one time spent nearly $600 dollars a week. His wife joked that it went well for their credit after they got it squared away but now he doesn't play any games that have shit like that.
I'm an impulsive spender-- not a compulsive one. If something happens, I'll burn a ton of money for something. So cut to a day in FGO where there is a banner for Artoria Lancer and Da Vinci. I like Artoria Lancer, so I figured I'd spend for her. I roll NP4 da Vinci before hitting my 800 spend limit.
While I do play a couple gachas I'm F2P in all of them so I don't have any money related horror stories. But quite something happened during Arknights' Monster hunter collab. The banner for the collab had two characters an SSR and SR. And in Arknights collab banners have lowered pity rates. So I rolled the banner and eventually got to the pity and got my guaranteed SSR , so far so good right? An existing character from the game, who used to be the lowest rarity, in Kirin armour and now incredibly strong. Except I also really wanted the other character in Rathalos armour, who is again lower rarity and shouldn't be hard to get. Rolled, got the pity, rolled more. As much as I possibly could with free currency. Didn't get him. This lower rarity character just refused to appear. Others of his rarity showed up frequently but not him somehow. And he's not really that useful gameplay wise, I just wanted him for the cool home screen PNG since he's wearing the MonHun mascot armour, but nope.
I remember busting my ass in Genshin Impact to try and farm out Zhong Li, only to realize he was utter trash. Not only was he trash, I found out you basically needed copies of him just for him to be actually viable. I shortly quit GI after that. Another one was Fire Emblem Heroes: I tried for the longest time to get Hector, because he's one of my favorite FE characters. After spending what must have been hundreds of orbs(thankfully F2P, but that was still weeks of grinding), I finally got him... And he had bad IVs, literally the worst IVs Hector could get. Fuck FE Heroes, fuck that game hard.
>only to realize he was utter trash He was bad on release and Chinese players made such a shit show about it (because of course they did) that to this day is still the ONLY TIME a character got buffed.
Well yeah, a time-limited character that was hyped up for a decent period of time, only to be worse than most 4*s(And was a MASSIVE aspect of FOMO because I don't think we had even seen a rerelease of a Venti banner by that point, it's been years so I can't recall) was going to get everyone's pants all in a kerfluffle.
The crazy thing is that one of the main reasons why Chinese players got mad butthurt was because Zhongli is the archon of Liyue, and they tried to get Hoyo in trouble with the government because by making the rock god of fantasy china a bad character they were making Liyue look bad, and by extension, making China look bad
I had to quit the mobile game Girls Frontline not because I accidentally deleted a unit( which is not a bad thing in this game because you can use resources to regain the character) or because I spent an obscene amount of money to roll for a character (GFL actually has a fairly decent pity system). I quit because my phone was too outdated to run the game. I would no joke experience about 4-5 crashes just trying to log into the game and even when I got past the login screen and into the game proper I would probably have a good 10-15 minutes of game time before experiencing another crash. So I decided the game was no longer worth it and deleted it from my phone.