Quote Originally Posted by Voidmage View Post
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The posts alone that say “a character once is usually not enough” are just plain misinformation.
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No you don’t get a lesser experience if you don’t pay money and even if that was the case we are talking about 5 bucks a month.
You're vagueposting me, but I'm gonna call you out on it.

Gachas may not handle duplicate character pulls the same way, but the reality is many provide significant incentive to their acquisition through stats and additional abilities. For some it's as simple as one extra character per upgrade levels, often up to 5. Others employ a shard system that frequently translates to needing 6+ copies of a character due to escalating costs per upgrade level. A few go even further by wanting character combos at specific upgrade levels for further bonuses. Many of these games also have "challenging content" implicitly aimed toward whales with rankings and (the rich get richer kind of) rewards and the like where not having optimal parties and configurations makes it mathematically impossible to compete or even complete. This isn't fiction. This isn't hyperbole. You may have been convinced you're getting the same value per dollar, or maybe more, but as someone who played and complete RPGs before all this BS existed, I can't really stress enough that gacha gamers are not getting a superior experience. Not all subs are $5, either. For all the games I've tried, $10-15 is more the norm. You can't exactly refute some lock QoL features behind it, either.

Far as I'm concerned, Genshin is right up there with Dark Souls in distorting perceptions of video games and what makes them good. Go play Suikoden. 108 characters to recruit. Not all combat-oriented. Not all are great or get much story relevance... not unlike gacha. Regardless, it's proof that an RPG can expose a player to a wide cast of characters without relying on a slot machine for acquisition. Plus you're not waiting 3+ years for a completed story that may not even finish because oops NA/Global just wasn't profitable enough. And for every game I've tried where people say it's all doable with free story characters, you're always making the game harder for yourself by taking that route. Always. You're grinding longer, wiping more often, losing ways to counter mechanics, and generally just falling behind. That's a lesser experience.

Go play Another Eden, the unfortunate successor to Chrono Trigger, and only use main cast units sticking to base difficulty. Even the difference of power between old launch pulls and those today is a sweeping gulf of difference. You know what? This is another one of those games people have tried to argue is F2P Friendly because of the usual tired litany of copium catchphrases and self-inflicted blindness brought on by sunken cost fallacy (You, too, can have a max light Aldo running the same dungeon 2000 times over 300 days at the expense of all others!). Is it a bad game when you peel away all the deliberate gatekeeping and partitioning? No, and that's what makes it all the more infuriating because a good, standalone RPG could've existed instead.

Sometimes it's sad how that can and does apply to MMOs, too. Both styles get so caught up in their own trappings that the game itself suffers.