Talk:Christmas 2019/@comment-33844581-20191211003022/@comment-44591442-20191211020007

I don't play other games. I only play FGO. The suffering tempers me. I now have nerves of steel. /s

Fact is, FGO doesn't need to change because the JP fanbase spends so much damn money on the game. Fans are not going to leave something they've spend a shitton of time and money on.

FGO is too popular, too big a money-making giant to fail. Even when we get awful dead weeks upon dead weeks, no guarantees for seasonal welfares or re-runs (where is my Halloween 2019 welfare, where is my Christmas 2018 re-run), don't get better rates or more chances at desired SSRs outside GSSRs and Unregistered Spirit Origins (see: GBF's spark system), and finally, don't get cool console games like GBF: Relink. I'm glad we get something similar in FGO Arcade but that's an arcade game you have to pay to play and you only get a set amount of time to play based on how much money you pay.

The management behind FGO the mobile game just plain sucks. No way to sugarcoat it. It looks really bad when you give out welfares like Lolivinci and Christmas Helena to Arcade players but not to players of the bread-and-butter of the whole operation. Welfare distribution and events should be standardized across both games. That way players of either game don't feel left out. Who knows if Christmas Helena will ever make it to FGO mobile.

After the susprising amount of dead weeks and lack of events we've experienced this year, I've finally come to the conclusion that there are 0 guarantees for anything when it comes to DW. This is not a good look for a company that has to manage a billion-dollar mobile game with constant events, units, and features spanning across years and years. Under DW's management, how many years does FGO have left? That's a question I think about a lot. It's clear there's no concrete plan after the Lostbelt arc. Otherwise DW wouldn't be dragging its feet releasing the Lostbelts at such an excruciatingly slow pace. 2-3 chapters a year is not enough.

Going back to Arcade. I can understand why Arcade players get new welfares and more features, like accessories and whatever else they get that we mobile players don't. Arcade costs money to play. FGO does not. But I'll be damned if FGO's billions in earnings each year don't fund Arcade; it's not like Arcade is funding itself and can thus afford to fully branch away from FGO. If it does, then good. I hope it gets so popular that it's turned into a console game. I'd love to control 3D versions of my favourite servants without having to pay every time I want to play.

It could simply be that Arcade's management is better than FGO mobile's, so Arcade players enjoy more stuff on top of 3D graphics. I see JP users make memes about it in Twitter all the time.

Anyway, you're not wrong about DW's avarice compared to other mobile game companies. Yes, they could be much worse. They could add more P2W elements to the game as the game progresses, but they haven't. Every unit in this game is a viable boss-killer and many low star servants are extremely good. There's no PVP or rankings, thank god. AP is easily replenished because DW can be quite generous with apples. They're slowly starting to get better and better each anniversary with the amount of quartz given out. And let's count our blessings for now, because command codes haven't made it to the gacha yet. They're still completely free. Phew.

Finally, while I can sort of understand why rates are so low (FGO is a waifu collector's game, after all), it's still pretty sad considering how rarely some banners are run. I guess because all content can be beaten with free/common servants, DW decided rates can be low and banners can be rare.

Speaking of which, reading this essay about Gudako and FGO's gacha culture made me think a bit more critically about FGO and my place in it. On one hand, Gudako is just a fun little satire of gacha culture and shouldn't be taken too seriously. But it really says a lot about the kind of people who play this game (and similar ones) and their expectations of what it should be. In the end, so many people in NA and JP find it easy to justify dropping $100-$600 on a servant because waifuism. DW enables this because there's no way to save up for your waifu because there's no telling when her banner will come next. Your only other choice is to pray she turns up in Da Vinci's shop and whale so fucking hard you end up with 10 Spirit Origins. RIP

This turned out to be a long rant, but I've been really annoyed at FGO these past few weeks. Literally nothing to do outside box farming. No LB5 this week. No Halloween welfare this year. 2020 better be good.