Why the bug I wrote became a core gameplay mechanic?!
Chapter 588 - 571: Enhancing the Significance of Old Characters

Chapter 588: Chapter 571: Enhancing the Significance of Old Characters

Enhancing Qing Lin benefits both the current players who have Qing Lin and those who do not yet but might obtain her in the future.

But why are players dissatisfied?

Because they feel that enhancing Qing Lin has devalued originally powerful characters like Lei Tu and Cold Frost.

Everyone was playing well with Lei Tu and Cold Frost, and then suddenly you enhance Qing Lin. Isn’t this just prompting everyone to pull for Qing Lin again?

Although the game experience hasn’t changed, this comparison still makes many players uncomfortable.

Zhuge Jun continued to explain: "This is the main reason why many developers refrain from enhancing characters and adjusting game balance.

"Because enhancing a character can make players feel that their own characters are devalued. And enhancing old characters has no actual benefits for the developers.

"So their optimal approach is this: never enhance old characters but keep introducing increasingly powerful new characters, both in terms of mechanics and numerical values.

"Players have actually become accustomed to this model.

"For players, it’s reasonable to enhance new characters, and they can accept devaluing old characters since they’ve enjoyed them for a long time; but for developers, introducing new characters is the only way to drive player spending. Enhancing old characters would just mean giving free benefits to many players who already have them, leading to complaints.

"So, that’s the approach other developers take.

"But here I want to ask, just because it’s always been this way, does it make it right? It looks like a choice shared by both developers and players, but what’s the cost? What is the cost?

"The cost is that old characters, even if they are clearly weak, unsuitable in game mechanics, have great character designs and high popularity, they’ll never get a chance to appear again.

"Because if they’re not strong enough, they simply don’t deserve to join the table.

"The old characters you painstakingly pulled are not worth preserving, they are 100% devalued by new characters and will never recover.

"Nitiandang’s mechanism, at first glance, seems unreasonable and doesn’t fit the normal pattern of gacha games.

"But let’s think about it: if Qing Lin can be enhanced, it means other characters can also be enhanced.

"You might avoid pulling for Xing Ying and Ningyun Monarch because of their perceived weakness, but it proves that these characters perceived as weak could become essential due to changes in game mechanics.

"You pulled for Jiye, but soon found it devalued by Hero, and that was frustrating. But think about it, perhaps Jiye might be enhanced sometime in the future?

"Hero is a character given for free, if Nitiandang was truly after profit, why enhance Hero?

"Obviously, Nitiandang does not want to follow the usual spiral-up numerical game of gacha games.

"Nitiandang is teaching you to play in a more rational and enjoyable way:

"Firstly, you absolutely don’t have to worry about character strength; even if you don’t pull any cards at all, just with Hero and Xi Yun, the two initial free characters, you can smoothly complete all the plots.

"These two characters will continuously get stronger as the plot progresses, not just in terms of numeric values, but also activating new mechanics. Although they might not completely compare with the best UP pool five-star characters, their strength is already sufficient.

"Secondly, you shouldn’t focus too much on the strength in the UP pool, as strength is dynamically changing!

"What tests strong now does not mean it will continue to be strong in the next version; what tests weak now might turn around in a month.

"So, everyone should return to the essence, revert to XP gacha. Pull for characters you like directly without worrying about their current strength.

"Lastly, this design also makes more sense in terms of the storyline.

"In other games, although clearly the protagonist, by the end, they just become a camera, only responsible for moving the plot and disappear when it comes to fighting.

"Why? Because all stars given to the protagonist are free and players won’t spend on them, so they can’t let the protagonist occupy a slot!

"If the protagonist is too strong, who would bother pulling gacha?

"But from the perspective of storyline, this is unreasonable. The protagonist, clearly the focus of the story and the great hero of salvation, is actually weaker than a four-star extra, no teams willing to include them. Does that make sense?

"Nitiandang’s enhancement of the protagonist is actually aligning the character’s strength with the plot development while the production team voluntarily forgoes a large revenue stream, gifting zero-spend players a continuously evolving, never worrying about strength, super five-star character.

"So, does Nitiandang’s approach have any flaws?

"I think, if we carefully consider, it actually doesn’t. When pondering issues, we shouldn’t be stuck in the mindset of other developers, we need to think more about which mechanics benefit us and which harm us."

Originally there were many dissenting voices in the video, but at this point, they were significantly quieter.

The voices in support started to increase.

Really, when you think about it, it makes quite a lot of sense!

What many gacha mobile games are most criticized for, is never making any balance adjustments.

Clearly, many old characters’ usage rates have fallen to single digits, completely unable to keep up with the pace of numerical inflation. Just a slight tweak in their values could let these old characters stand up and shine again, but developers refuse to change.

Not only do they not change this, even those talents with obvious design flaws which from the start have either been very funny or even degrading, are not corrected.

Why not correct them?

Clearly, it’s for the reason mentioned by Zhuge Jun.

Enhancing old characters will upset players who pulled new characters and does not help the developers’ revenue at all, so why enhance them?

Why not leave all this room for adjustment to the new characters? Players love gacha, and the developers make money too.

But obviously, Nitiandang wants to upend this mechanism from the roots.

Who says old characters can’t be enhanced? I’m enhancing them!

From Qing Lin, to Xing Ying, to Ningyun Monarch, and then to Hero.

The stance of Nitiandang is: No matter whether the character is an UP pool character or not, whether their stats are weak or the mechanics are poor, when it’s time to enhance, we will definitely enhance!

So, players shouldn’t have any anxiety over power levels; just draw cards based on your own XP, draw whoever you like.

After all, even if this character is weak now, they will be enhanced later on.

Even if they aren’t enhanced for a while, relying on the two characters given at the start, Hero and Xi Yun, is enough to smoothly get through story Chapters without a poor experience.

Lilith was dumbfounded after watching this video.

She felt as if she could already see negative emotions decreasing!

It’s still the same issue, but once the player’s perspective changes, the generation of negative emotions plummets.

From the comments, it’s apparent that many players who drew Jiye, who should have been the angriest and contributed the most to negative emotions, are now coming around.

"That’s true, since all characters have a chance to be enhanced, Jiye might be enhanced later too, just need to be patient."

"Right, I drew Jiye simply because I can’t resist this kind of white-haired pretty boy; pure XP draw. I was angry before because I felt his power was blown by Gold Coins, but now thinking about it, since he can still be enhanced later, it doesn’t matter if he’s weak now, just need to be patient."

"Indeed, this spiral enhancement mechanism is not bad, it’s much more player-friendly than those games where you must continuously draw new characters."

Lilith was grinding her teeth with frustration: "Gu Fan, check if there are any plans to enhance Jiye later!"

If there are no enhancement plans later, then these players are just getting their hopes up for nothing.

Their dashed hopes will also generate negative emotions.

Gu Fan operated on the computer: "...There are, President Li. Roughly in the 5.0 version once, and again in the 8.0 version."

Lilith felt a darkness before her eyes.

Damn, these players might actually have their patience rewarded?

You can imagine how much positive emotion this bunch will generate then...

"Damn it, can’t we cancel it!" Lilith was very angry.

Gu Fan shook his head: "I don’t think so, President Li. These contents are all planned, changing anything would void the original agreements."

Lilith ground her teeth: "Damn it!

"Why enhance this Jiye, why!"

Gu Fan paused a moment: "President Li, to fulfill your design, it had to be done.

"This method can effectively generate negative emotions among power players and hoarders.

"As for the XP faction... they indeed will gain some positive emotions in this process, but our consideration was that the power player and hoarder faction are more fixed and concentrated, while the XP faction is quite scattered, as everyone’s XP wildly varies, making it hard to target."

Lilith frowned: "What do you mean my design? This was clearly your idea initially!"

Gu Fan immediately clarified: "President Li, I just gave a suggestion, you were the one who approved it.

"You even said this method was ’simply perfect’ at the time."

Lilith, with a dark face, said: "Okay, I get it now!"

From the previous situation, this method indeed seemed quite perfect.

Because in the gacha, players can basically be divided into the XP faction, power faction, and hoarders, and often times power players and hoarders overlap.

The so-called XP faction just draws the characters they like, not caring about the strength;

While the power faction only pays for character strength, not drawing if not strong.

Hoarding players, well, they save up a lot of draws, skipping many characters that aren’t a must-draw, only drawing key characters, and mostly only high-star.

Although targeting the XP faction can also generate negative emotions, everyone’s preferences differ too much. Targeting just one type of character doesn’t affect other XP faction players, which isn’t cost-effective.

So, targeting the power faction and hoarders is a good method to garner negative emotions.

Steady and efficient.

But the only issue is...

What if these power players and hoarders turn into XP faction players?