The difference is in the details, that with other paid DLC, you actually get the thing you paid for, guaranteed. With a gacha, if they’re promoting some super-strong character, weapon, etc. that you want and you buy currency to spend in the gacha, you are not guaranteed to get that item or anything of the same quality/rarity in any of those pulls you make. It’s all random chance, gambling at its core. Exceptionally good or bad luck can start playing psychological tricks on you, such as FOMO (there will always be something stronger coming soon), sunk cost fallacy (you’ve already dumped this much into it and got nothing, what’s the difference with this much more?), and before you know it, if you’re not watching carefully, you’ve spent far more in in-game and/or real money than you realized. That’s far different than a one-time purchase straight-up for a cosmetic or weapon to use with no further need to spend any more, and that’s what gets people hooked like gambling. You may not have experienced this much because gachas tend to be very generous to new players in order to get them started out quickly as whales fodder and get them hooked on the adrenaline rush of “winning” in the gacha system before the gacha currency starts to dry up on them.
What I’m trying to figure out is exactly how pushy they are. Because I’m playing Genshin for a week already and there wasn’t a single moment I considered spending real money. Even a week worth of this kind of content (open world, quests, parkour, puzzles, minigames, bosses, mini bosses, multiple types of craft, randomized encounters, etc), is quite something and there’s still no sign of anything P2W on the horizon. Should I even expect some extra beefy bosses that are impossible to beat without buying crystals for tons of wishes? If not, then how is it morally different from any game that has any paid extra content at all? Like, you definitely can buy some optional cosmetics in almost any MMORPG game. People who can’t live without buying all the unnecessary cosmetics will proceed to spend a lot of money there as well.
Grangle1@lemm.ee 5 days ago
hisao@ani.social 5 days ago
With a gacha, if they’re promoting some super-strong character, weapon, etc. that you want and you buy currency to spend in the gacha, you are not guaranteed to get that item or anything of the same quality/rarity in any of those pulls you make
I have only basic understanding of those systems, but it seems, there are “pity” systems which do give some guarantees that you get something if you fail rolling for it for long enough. I do agree it’s all very gamblish at its core though.
Grangle1@lemm.ee 5 days ago
Most “pity” systems require hundreds of pulls beforehand, which unless someone saves months worth of free currency for those pulls, can be very expensive in real world money to get the currency to afford. In a way, pity systems are just designed to increase the amount of money players spend.
hisao@ani.social 5 days ago
The only “pity” I dealt with at this point is guaranteed 4star for every 10 pulls. It can be anything though, not necessarily a character. But there are sometimes special offers (like tutorial pull) that indeed guarantee that you get a particular character or item for 10 pulls.
Vipsu@lemmy.world 5 days ago
How do you think genshin impact would work with no gatcha challenge?
Meanin no gatcha pulls other than maybe forced tutorial one. You’d have to make due with only characters and gear you can earn without gatcha. Premium currency earned by playing can be used for anything else but not for any gatcha.
I recall reading that even the tutorial gatcha pull is always the same.
hisao@ani.social 5 days ago
No money challenge so far sounds very realistic to me, but no gatcha at all? I’m not sure you can get characters except early game ones any other way. And those starter characters don’t even cover full list of elemental powers meaning you won’t even be able to solve some open-world puzzles that require certain elementals to interact with stuff. And I’m not sure those crystals can be used for much more than wishes (aka pulls aka gatcha? do I understand correctly it’s all synonyms?).
Vipsu@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Yeah no gatcha is no gatcha, no wishes so you would have to make due with starter characters.
Its basically challenge run that also tests how good the game is without any gambling elements.
hisao@ani.social 5 days ago
Also, I’m personally more interested in “no money” challenge. I like “gambling elements” tbh and enjoy all kinds of RNG in games: starting from randomized items stats in Diablo and procgen in roguelikes and ending with randomized perks in roguelites and stuff like pulls in Genshin. So for me “gambling elements” themselves aren’t something inherently bad and definitely not something I would want to avoid. For me, it’s social implications of gambling mechanics that are sometimes bad (in context of people who can’t control their spending), but not randomness or mechanics themselves.
hisao@ani.social 5 days ago
Well, all I can say for now is that my week of playing wasn’t enough to be able to say whether this is even possible at all. Maybe there will be more unlocked characters from regular questing later in the game, but so far I only got a single dendro character (Collei) from a random pull. And I think there were some open world mini-puzzles activated by dendro. I don’t think there were a lot of them though. Also they are definitely optional and not a big deal. Could also be possible it was intended for later game players going back with their dendro characters unlocked organically in the later questlines.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Buying a blind box, loot crate, card pack, etc. with a random chance for items is something that we as people have a high chance of finding addictive, like some kind of misplaced survival instinct. Genshin monetizes their game that way, and you may be lucky like me and not have whatever gene causes us to become crippling gambling addicts, but Mihoyo became a multibillion dollar company off of exploiting those people the same way you might find someone at a corner store playing scratch-off lottery tickets all day, or someone seated at a slot machine with a jar of quarters, mindlessly pulling the lever over and over again.
That’s quite different than if you say, “I’m selling item X. It costs Y.” Digital items that are arbitrarily only available for a limited time, more often than not through battle passes these days, are like gacha, similarly manipulative. I wouldn’t call MMORPGs some bastion of morality, either. I’m sure you saw the same stories I did back in WoW’s heyday of parents neglecting their children because they were helplessly addicted to WoW. Whether by accident or design, WoW took the addictiveness in Diablo’s design and, thanks to a lucrative monthly subscription fee, created an incentive for their developers to pursue avenues to keep players playing longer.