Since April 2020, I have been playing Arknights, a gacha game. In the meantime, I have been keeping track of important in-game events, such as character pulls and upgrades. I believe it’s time for some nice data visualisation and some reasoning on why people shouldn’t do p2w (pay-to-win) in gacha games, or simply play them.
The gamble
The gacha system in Arknights are centered on those 6-star operators. They are the most decisive, and of course most sought-after resource in the game. But they are hard to acquire as well.
First, the chance to pull those 6-stars is slim. For every pull, the prabability to hit the jackpot is 2%. Those pulls are granted to the players on a daily basis, but with very limited quantity. Players need to do p2w for more pulls. I mean pulls. Not even straightforward 6-stars.
Second, there are possibilities that you get a duplicated 6-star. At the beginning of the game, naturally, you have 100% probability to pull a new one in your first ever 6-star hit. But when you are deep in the game, the chance for a new one goes down quickly and inevitably.
The plot above shows how many 6-stars I have over time. The count ramps up quickly because I do p2w at the start of the game. After p2w stopped and 6-stars accumulated, it’s harder to get new 6-stars. Surprisingly, the overall slope doesn’t gentle after I stopped p2w. One reason is that over the course I have understood how to hoard pull chances and maximize my odds.
The grind
Another important aspect of the game is grinding. Once you have those fancy characters, you need to train them with in-game resources. In Arknights, you can raise the operator’s elite level and skill mastery level. With characters of higher eliteness and mastery, you can conquer stages of higher difficulty, unlock resources of higher value, and push even higher your operator’s elite and skill mastery level.
Interestingly, the game is designed to be friendly to new players (whom the majority of profit comes from), so that a few decisive characters at max elite and skill mastery level can do the hardest stages of the game. The plot below shows how many characters I have at max elite and skill mastery level over time. At day 105 I have already conquered the hardest stage of the game - level 18 of Contingency Contract. You can imagine how intensive the struggle was in the first few months, and how quickly the joy vanished and everything becomes a stomp afterwards.
Is gacha a hoax?
There are so many gacha games on the market and it happens for a reason. Arknights is labelled as one of the best among them. But the core mechanics don’t change. The pulls are addictive. The grind is meaningless. And another two facts suggest that it is still a hoax:
- P2W improves your in-game strength in Arknights, making stages and challenges easier to conquer, which actually destroys your gaming experience.
- Arknights profit mainly from new players, so the stages have a very low cap of difficulty, putting p2w and grinding further in a meaningless position.
It seems a bad idea to invest money and time on gacha games. If you like gaming, why don’t spend time on those better designed, plotted and operated games, ffs?
Just like League of Legends, CS:GO, FIFA, or Need for Speed?
WAIT… they are now gacha games too!