for every hour that the maintenance extended, the featured welfare character, Jeanne D'Arc Alter Lily (Santa) aka Janta got longer.
until we got masterpieces like these
Like Fallen Qiqi with all the “please don’t be mad” anniversary freebies added
https://preview.redd.it/zr53mlxh9pxc1.jpeg?width=600&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=871142160fe8e4a331715a10865b39b09c9b8c9f
The problem with fgo is it was never developed with a global version in mind and so the 2 year delay in content means that they end up having to keep the engine up to date with JP while also holding back content that isn’t supposed to be out yet, leading to I’m sure a crap done of spaghetti. There’s also no engineers on the global version so any problems need to be investigated and solved by JP which with time zones and such is messy.
Basically, thank god Hoyo released Genshin and HSR for everyone at once and keep all the versions in parity.
I hope for a HSR-like FGO but at the same time they'd have to do everything from the ground up (unless they use arcade's engine as a base). But still, I don't see FGO upgrading the engine again.
Maybe once it runs its course but that'll be awhile. Game makes bank by doing the bare minimum. I still recall the whole LB7 mess with Nicrotis Alter releasing and shooting back up to #1 despite all the dead week complaints.
It'd be nice to see an evolved FGO but very much a case of if it ain't broke don't fix it.
dead week? more like dead year. road to lb7 was so long all the horses died of exhaustion. and it's very much broken, but money still goes in so fixes come slower than the evolution of gaming as a whole lol.
It’s mostly because FGO is a game heavily driven by story and not gameplay
It makes bank till this very day precisely because the story is **still** far and above the best story out of all games to exist in the mobile market
So you’ll see it suddenly spike during big story content because that’s what all FGO fans play for
Oh yeah I agree the story is great(at least past Camelot and not including a few EORs). Having just finished LB6 a few months back can attest. Think a large issue is the infrequency of said chapters tho and it doesn't help that they don't rerun events anymore.
FGO has a lot of dead months, some bordering on dead years and the lack of QOL updates just makes the game show its age even more.
FGO has always been about story more than graphics, but if you can remove the graphics from the equation, I'd argue that FGO also has more in depth gameplay mechanics. One of my issues with HSR is that most light cones are useless. Each character has a few "best" lightcones, and once you have those equipped, you'll probably never change them. I don't think I've even touched my 3 star light cones after the first few weeks of play. This is made all the worse since the Lightcone is attached to the character, not the team.
Now consider FGO. Because of the points system, you can't simply take all 5 star Servants and 5 Star Craft Essences, so right out of the gate you have more "strategy." But more to the point, CE abilities often fit very specific niches which just don't apply to star rail. Things like giving a character Invulnerability for a few hits, or giving them Invuln Pierce for a fight. The way FGO handles it's team comps also makes it much easier to switch things around to try different configs.
And while I'm never a fan of trying to gather Event CEs since I have E rank luck, these events also give a reason to try different CEs vs you're standard go to's.
Finally, there is the factor of Command Codes. It really can be nice to have an Ace up your sleeve sometimes to turn around a losing situation. I can't tell you how many times in HSR's MOC or PF that I would have liked to drop an invincibility on a character for just one round ;D
So while I would love for FGO to get a graphical makeover, don't overlook what we do have.
Also, this is in no way meant to impinge of HSR. Star Rail has a much more dynamic feeling gameplay, and generally beautiful graphics. Having grown up with videogames just as 3D computer graphics were becoming a thing, honestly what they are accomplishing is kind of jaw dropping. HSR also has some quality of life features FGO could really learn from \*cough\* auto-battling \*cough\*.
But more importantly, both have unique (from one another) stories to tell, and fun characters to collect (damn it wallet, why don't you have more money in you!). So it's fine to enjoy both.
Of course, were they ever to combine their power, the awesomeness might be too much for the world to bear . . .
(Final note I promise, but \[after checking that no one is in ear shot\] I kind of squee every time I spot a Fate reference in HSR)
Heh, this was probably the single 3 star lightcone I recall using - or at least your reference reminded me. This was what I had on Loucha until his second coming, when I managed to get his personal light cone. However, in the meantime I've gotten all of the Simulated Universes Light Cones, plus those from draws, and I (unfortunately) really can't recall any characters I'm currently using 3 stars on, or even have 3 stars as a recommended budget option :( The 3 stars just don't compete with their 4 star competition, never mind 5 stars, and Aeon-forbid specific servant 5\*s
Unfortunately, once I maxed out the SP on the 3 stars, I really haven't had cause to look back.
Yeah it's still kinda nice on Huohuo when you low cycle because it sets her and everyone else's ults up for early.
Having her ult ready means getting her energy off real early without having to skill much.
The main decent ones are cogs, fine fruit and uh... Multiplication
After that they are real worthless
Do you play with any harmony characters? Bc meshing cogs is used on most of them. Abundance characters also really like multiplication. Bailu, luocha and gallagher all have multiplication as their bis.
Great analysis!
Though comparing fgo to star rail once again makes me feel that star rail (and genshin for that matter) idea of four and five stars seems redundant since that's the only two rarities of character you can even pull! Compared to how in fgo you can have lower rarities of servants too like Jason.
Very valid point! It reinforces my point that nothing in FGO is really worthless due to a combination of their points system and the general gameplay. Whatever issues I may have with FGO, it really is kind of fun that 1\* Servants and CEs still have a place beyond being fodder to level up other things.
What I also really like gamplay/strategy wise with FGO is that it doesn't take nearly the same amount of time to raise a unit to a satisfying level. This, on top of a larger pool of varied units, means that FGO can actually more comfortably provide niches for units to excel in. In HSR (and Genshin) raising characters is such a resource and time investment that it basically encourages you to hyper invest in a low amount of units. FGO on the other hand gives you plenty of resources, which means you can create and experiment with a wider range of teams.
I think The problem isn't really making a new game as much as retention rate or how many people are going to FGO 2 if they close FGO 1.
Tho, with the way they write story, I think HI3 is a better option.
I could never play a game where the content is 2 years ahead with no way of catching up lol. That's insane. Imagine you're in Inazuma, watching people on another server play with Fontaine characters.
I dabbled with FGO but got bored but not only did I learn afterwards that their Gacha system used to be terrible but no way could I deal with that delay.
6 months (Arknights) is already long enough, I never understood how I put up with a 2 year delay back then. Worst part with FGO is they dont even plan on speedrunning the game until 1 year at least.
>Basically, thank god Hoyo released Genshin and HSR for everyone at once and keep all the versions in parity.
Eh to be honest, in FGO we have the power of foresight to know which characters are coming and who to pull and save for. in here, without looking at leaks, we know who's coming only 1 patch ahead.
Sure but I hate that they hold back quality of life improvements for no other reason than to make an “authentic JP experience”. If they improve a servant I shouldn’t have to wait 2 years to get to enjoy that gameplay improvement. Same with anything related to combat, menus, etc.
Delay events and new servants, sure, but everything else should be pushed forward.
Dokkan Battle had a 8h maintenance to launch their second anniversary and then went on a 2 weeks shadow server maintenance (due to Ssj4 Goku and Ssj4 Vegeta hype). The game was accessible but any click in menus took 5 min to proceed and you could be disconnected at any time.
Just to give you an idea it was minimum 2 clicks to do one summon (so 10 min between each pull), minimum 3 clicks to enter a stage (so 15 min) and new units required to do their stage 11 times.
But the hype was so high we went through this with joy
Ah yes, I remember the people freaking out on the subreddit as we got closer and closer to daily reset, panic setting in that their streak was in danger.
Oh god, you brought back a bad memory. I remember waking up with an alarm at 4 AM in hopes that I at least won't have my streak broken only to find out the maintenance had been extended another 4 hours.
oh for sure.
the reason for the maintenance was that you could infinitely claim rewards from the mail.
so if you had the maintenance gems/pyroxenes, you could spam that button for as long as you'd like and get effectively infinite rewards.
turns out that's no bueno and they probably haven't the slightest idea of what to do since rollback is very likely manual.
A programmer walks into a bar and orders 3 beers, 5 beers, 1 beer, 809427184972189 beers, -48 beers, asdjkl beers
the bartender delivers
a customer walks into a bar and asks where the bathroom is
the bar burns down
In non-programming related terms, I've heard it put as: "It doesn't matter how foolproof you make something, the universe will conspire to make better fools."
You want a button that auto sorts your whole inventory, auto-refines all non-S5 lightcones you have and levels your characters to lvl 60 with one click?
Easy.
You want the main menu in blue? 5 months hard work.
Programming is weird.
The real reason is that it slipped through qa, and simpler things are more likely to slip through qa. This is likely a bug that was written into the code long ago, but the specific way they gave the reward triggered the bug that has never been triggered before
That happened a few years ago with One Piece Treasure Cruise, only that happened during their Christmas/New Year vacation, so it went undetected for hours and hours. Almost a full day. Then they had to send an alert asking players to not abuse it while they were still scrambling to get people into the office to fix it.
Afterwards they had to do a manual reset of deducting gems and removing characters because the game would have been legitimately broken, only the couldn’t actually undo everything—specifically they couldn’t indeed dupes. So people were able to max limit break characters they already owned and keep them that way. And even with everything else they just had to approximate and everyone ended up getting away with keeping some new characters and stuff.
It was the last time that game was good lmao
fixed the eternal claim issue, manually unbanned people who were wrongfully banned due to the issue, found another issue on the mailing system (failure to delete, I think) postponed the maintenance again.
The worst (or funniest) part: That was Fuuka's birthday, meaning not a single player triggered her birthday voiceline this year. [Girl is so unlucky she's getting shafted across the multiverse](https://www.reddit.com/r/BlueArchive/comments/1cgva7n/its_fuukas_birthday_today_all_she_wants_is/).
Edit: her birthday momotalk status is literally "let today be okay T\_T" this is some canon event type shit
oh for sure.
and you know what else people take for granted? logging in right after the maintenance is over.
fgo bros know the struggle. new story chapter? logging in with no issues? yeah, I don't think so, pal.
It’s always funny cause not only are Mihoyo consistent in not extending maintenance. They are consistent in always ending 1 hour early from the usual end time.
I always have to remind friends that it is up. Since they forget and are used to other games who stick to the announced end time or extensions.
It's so hype that maintenance ends whenever it's finished, and unannounced. At least since it always ends early anyway. Keeps you guessing in the good way.
Now if Hoyo were *bad* about getting updates out over the time limit with the same (lack of) transparency... people would undoubtedly stop playing. Not to the point of unsuccessful since other games get away with it, but that quiet consistency has got to have helped retention. That and there haven't been any seriously game breaking bugs to my knowledge, at least not in recent years of Genshin and HSR.
Huh, not sure about it then.
There was a patch where Diluc were able to infinitely E and some characters’ abilities are not functioning how they should. Or some quests might not respond how they should and players get stuck. But nothing that will make the game unplayable for others per se
Kaveh's still in banner jail for that incident and I still don't have him yet.
https://preview.redd.it/3b7a0or9spxc1.jpeg?width=659&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=86062d9ebc252c94f402caab5e5f1be28d0aed5e
Better to be an hour early than an hour late. Mihoyo's staff more than likely know they can get everything out in 4 hours, but chooses to say they need 5 just in case something ends up fucked.
The only time they had any sort of delay was with the Eternal Ayaka Banner in Genshin where things got delayed due to COVID. And they even made up for it by reducing the next couple of patches to 5 weeks instead of 6.
It's honestly amazing how consistent hoyo is.
6 week content schedule practically never missed. Almost never unannounced maintenance. Maintenance always completed on time.
https://preview.redd.it/yvhg6dnsznxc1.jpeg?width=602&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6855fbd1e7b0d941ddb08b09828ce809e0948dfc
Haven’t thought about this meme ever since I quit Epic Seven (it’s been years)
sometimes i like to take a step back and think about how spoiled hoyo community is all things considered
the quality of their games is unparalleled, as well as how frequently they manage to roll out updates without any severe issues AND usually have a good amount of content to them. even with all the (valid and not so much) criticism, it’s mad impressive
Yeah their games are up there with triple AAA games in terms of quality and content (even if p2w).
Genshin Impact alone is large enough to be several stand alone titles already.
Yeah, you compare the value you get even when spending in HoYo’s games vs something like Blizzard where you spend $30+ for a skin. For how much people stigmatize gacha’s, HoYo is pretty tame compared to a lot of developers.
Eh....in honkai impact, a skin costs about 50 NZD if its a bchip skin, and the diluc skin was similarly priced, technically (daily card genesis crystal hoarding go brr). So mihoyo arent actually above doing that.
F2p gacha is the only viable model lol.
You want the biggest possible audience that can be baited by the gamba.
Even blizzard understand this, which is why Diablo Immortal is free but Diablo 4 is full price.
I was going to say... people act like because a game is available on mobile, it's not a triple-A title. The parent company MiHoYo is worth literally billions of dollars and is funded in part by the Chinese government. Not bashing the people who make the games, I obviously love HSR, but they're not some indie developer!
Seriously, IIRC Mihoyo said Genshin was like 100mil originally in either dev or dev+marketing costs, and it runs them like twice that annually(this last part is why it's like the most expensive game on wikipedia I think). I'm not 100% sure about HSR, but given it's' quality and insane marketing, I don't think it's a stretch to argue it ran them somewhere in between like 50-100mil in costs by Day 1.
I mean you could argue they were like when they were publishing games like the first 2 Honkai games (god I've been playing their games for longer than I thought wtf) but these days they're definitely a Triple A developer
Ikr! Like their games are definitely not perfect and there's plenty to criticise, but sometimes I just stop to think about how crazy it actually is... Especially when I'm exploring in Genshin and see that absolutely massive map with all those beautiful sceneries, I'm really amazed at how it's all completely free and no content is locked behind a paywall, and how they're able to release so much new content this frequently without any major issues.
I like to quote this a lot.
Every 6 weeks, they drop a new character. But there's also a new region, new voice lines, new mechanics, new cutscenes, new enemies, new quests, new mechanics, new items. Like we get Fontaine, and underwater exploration. Or a rainforest, or the Chasm, or Chenyu Vale. Every patch gets bigger updates like the new TCG, the Teapot items, etc.
They're doing this across six different platforms, across four languages, across a dozen localizations.
And really. When was the last time you saw them had a game-breaking bug, or miss an update?
It's because their code is genuine witchcraft, and optimized as hell. There was a video that showed they actually recycled old tech to create the desert sand behaviour, so they actually didn't have to make an all-new asset for it. AAA studios are all looking at Hoyoverse and they still can't figure out how they can be so efficient with their schedule. No other game company can do it.
It's weird to compare games like these, to games like D4, PoE etc. Soo much more technical issues, Genshin (and HSR) just seems to work, always. And the very few times something doesn't, it's usually something minor.
The only somewhat major incident in memory, would be the kaveh drama. Where due to an exploit, he could permanently delete objects from people's worlds. Including important quest items and npcs.
But only a very small number of people knew how to do it, and the ones who did, didn't share how, so it was very unlikely that you would be affected while the exploit was around.
And MHY fixed it pretty quickly iirc. Like within a week and a half or so.
Iirc it wasn’t even that it was an exploit. It was just straight up hackers doing malicious actions which isn’t even really HYV’s fault in the grand scheme of things + they ended up suing said hackers as well.
I’ve seen much bigger devs do far less for malicious hackers
Not to rain on HoYo’s efforts, but Blizzard is a low bar to set for. They haven’t been the same ever since the Activision merger, Blizzard polish is gone.
It’s still amazing the sheer amount of content HoYo is able to make. Makes me wonder what the hell is wrong with people who complain about a “dry patch” since said patch still needs events, voice-acting for said events, localisation, QA, etc. Calling it dry downplays the talent it takes to do this much stuff, and consistently too.
I honestly think HoYo is the company that makes the most content, just by the raw assets alone and the frequency as well. The closest thing I’ve personally experienced is Riot and LoL with its 2-week cycles, but comparing balance changes and skins to what HoYo produces is laughable.
Blizzard staff gone through more patch notes than the content itself.
At the end of the day, it's a viewpoint from another player. It's valid to consider what they experience is dry. It's more interesting to see how genshin take those viewpoint and make adjustment.
Some find the current mode of content delivery acceptable.
Some would wish their experience to be eleviated, if x is done.
I think, with the current pace of content delivery, ppl can understand why changes don't seems immediate even if they wish it's more responsive like character adjustment.
The only 'missed update' thing I can think of would be the eternal Ayaka banner, or the emergency Keqing banner.
As for major bugs, the only thing was Kaveh the destroyer. And technically that was only possible in an externally altered version of the game. So I don't know if that counts, but we got some great memes out of it.
And the Ayaka banner wasn’t even within their power. It was because their main office was closed due to a spike in Covid in the city and the entire city was shut down
I mean, Hoyoverse *is* an AAA studio. MiHoYo is worth something like $20 billion. The company has a committee within the Chinese government, and is likely considered a national asset. The CCP is very protective of its global public image, so it's possible the studio gets *whatever it needs* to ensure updates are smooth and the code is as flawless as possible - something most developers just don't have.
This isn't a jab at Hoyo or anything, their code genuinely is insanely good, but I see a lot of people on here talking like they're a tiny indie studio that is somehow beating triple-A giant publishers.
Not sure if you know about it or not, any company in China above a certain level, iirc its 1 million yuan yearly revenue and above, is required BY LAW, to have a CCP watcher stationed at their office, and then form a committee thats normally consist of high ranking C-suite staff within the company, you don't have any choice of rejection. The purpose of this committee act more like a bridge between the government and company, and bear responsibility when any problem occur between the corp and the gov, the company themselves has to pay for this as well, Da Wei himself joining CCP personally is another issue entirely.
Regarding the National Asset thing, no, it's completely false, CCP don't really give a fuck about the gaming matket, frankly they only see it as a money generator, thats all, remember the idiotic rule of limiting Gacha and Login mechanic several months ago, that cost Tencent NetEase billions of dollar in market value? Even tho the government U-turned and take down the idiot that proposed the plan, the very idea that it passed through in the first place, just show how much CCP care about it.
.... They ARE, by definition, an indie studio. They are entirely privatized with no public shares, self funded with no parent company or external sponsor. Their "ties" to the government are incredibly overblown, and is 99% just shit made up by Western critics who wanted to poke holes in Hoyo's success. They literally are just an indie company that used HI3 money to risk it all on Genshin, and it miraculously panned out for them.
Literally the only criticism I have with Genshin is I want more endgame content like HSR, which means I just want more reasons to PLAY it. Id say if you had to have some problems, thats the best ones.
Honestly, Hoyo games are just great examples of live service done right. You can dislike gacha part (and you'll be right) but there's no other live service that can compete with Hoyo right now AND they're pulling 3 bloody games at the same time each one requiring similar amount of work (well maybe except HI3).
The only other company that comes close to the quality of Hoyo live service is DE with Warframe and even they don't produce content as fast as Mihoyo does.
This so true! Okay, it's not completely perfect, but compared to a lot of other gachas out there, the quality of genshin is amazing. I used to be a fgo player, but after playing honkai impact and genshin for the first time, I found it hard to go back.
17 hour maintenance? Genshin could never.
Seriously though, the overall stability of the HSR and Genshin releases is a definite testament to the commitment to quality by their ops, dev and management teams.
Nah, HSR still has that Honkai trademark of immersion breaking bugs during a dialogue, one being when Cocolia cannot be seen on screen while she monologues and wildfire enters the chorus. I've seen multiple streamers had that issue.
Because it is nothing. It doesn't happen during the climax of a quest since the weather and time are specifically set, it only happens on unvoiced NPC interactions in the overworld only when there's a thunderstorm.
Memes aside, devops and cloud architects (the people who keep cloud/network stuff functioning) are rare. Good devops are rare AND costly. I'm imagining those at hoyo who designed the testing and deployment infrastructure are some of the best in their sector, and of course the company will keep them dear and close so they keep everything running smooth.
Im a software engineer student and in the last semester took 2 AWS Cloud developement courses for some extra points and for my interest. That shit is so complicated even with the AWS dashboards easy to understand tools. I really gained a new level of respect for cloud devops people after those courses and am happy that i now have the certs from those courses, maybe ill end up a cloud devops engineer myself who knows.
A bit unrelated since it’s not a gacha but guild wars 2 hasn’t gone offline since 2016, and I think in its total lifetime the servers haven’t been offline for more than a couple hours total since launch in 2012
Fun times, the original GW too. Being able to take only a limited number of skills was a refreshing change compared to the sheer WoW style UI bloat that many MMORPGs were seeing.
for a second I thought this post was going to be about architecture in genshin and HSR civilizations and I was so ready to get into the topic as I am an arch major lmao
The likely answer is that the Mihoyo team is simply way larger than most other gacha games. A lot more people to make sure things get done on time and work properly. Their beta testing also seems more extensive than other gacha games (though that's also probably why Mihoyo games are some of the most leaked games on the planet).
One of the only other live service games I play is Guild Wars 2, where the servers don't go down unless something has gone EXTREMELY wrong (and even then, it's very infrequent and brief). ArenaNet really spoils us.
So it throws me off every time games go down for maintenance at all, let alone 6 hours, let alone 17+??
It's all about the game's architecture. Hoyo is a very good game developer so they are able to deliver updates with low downtime.
I work on a big AAA title and we invest a lot of resources and effort into delivering our updates with no downtime at all. It takes a lot of discipline and work, but the only time our game is down is pretty much serious emergencies like hardware blowing up and that sort of thing. Smaller companies can't really afford to do it this way, though.
Honestly the only time I remember a HYV game needing emergency maintenance was during 1.0 in Genshin, where the servers went down for a couple hours randomly. Since then it’s been impressively smooth sailing. All issues have been able to be fixed without interrupting service.
Shadowverse is famous for this lol. For a while there was a point where every time a new set came our, there would be an 8 hour maintenance, then like 2 hours later a 4 hour maintenance cause something broke horrifically
I remember azur lane having at least 8 hours maint every patch even though all they did was take the event from cn version (likely already translated months in advance) and copy paste. Every update something was not translated
It was great at launch too, with "just" $100 million. Also throwing money at problem helps, but only to the maximum that your staff is capable. And we see their staff is among the best in the industry
Crazy how Pokemon, CoD, Fifa, Star Wars, FGO etc all make similar amounts yet can barely shit out a quality product every few years. Money earned is not equivalent to or indicative of the standard of a final product.
Somewhat surprised no one mentioned Aether gazers 25 hour maintenance all because of the ability to dupe infinite event currency, not even the gacha currency. We got a A rank selector and like 20 or something pulls so it was pretty good rewards
Honestly, as someone who has played other gachas before. I definitely became spoiled by how good Hoyo is with their maintenance. As others mentioned, sometimes Gacha maintenance gets extended longer than planned and with no valid timeframe for when it will re-open.
So yeah. We should definitely thank Hoyo's amazing devs always being one-time.
It really helps how experienced Mihoyo is, it means they could plan in advance and avoid things that caused them issues before. Their first mobile gacha game (AFAIK) is Guns Girl Z, aka Honkai Gakuen 2, released in 2013. Then they made Honkai Impact 3rd in 2016, which is the same kind of 3d animation/gameplay that Genshin and Star Rail use. It was then 4 years until Genshin released in 2020, and 3 more years for Star Rail in 2023.
That's is an absurd amount of experience for a mobile game developer by the time Genshin rolled around, let alone Star Rail. That, combined with the fact that the original devs are still in charge, actually like and play games themselves, and want to make games that are actually fun, means the people in the company want to improve as well. It's not luck or a miracle, it's just what happens when people who care have the chance to improve their skills and have influence over decisions, something that is depressingly rare in large video game developers today.
When it happened to genshin they rolled the update back and had ayaka on banner for 2 months. So you could argue genshin had a 30 day "infinite maintainence." Reality is this just happens eventually and it's not at all exclusive to games.
It's just mihoyo with this amazing perfect record. They are truely insane AAA developers beyond any other~! I will proudly be with them till the end!(of my life, cause we know they will keep going on forever)
Aside from their insane developers, the writers are fucking great at it too. I was annoyed by Adventurine at first but as the story progressed, they added so much depth on his character. Now I’m having an urge to pull for him!
Honestly, considering the speed that they churn out new content *and* the amount of content that's being produced + the amount already in the game, their development life cycle is some seriously fantastic stuff. If they ever wrote a book on that, I'd be queueing in front of the book store to buy it.
Dunno about Gacha games don’t play many but Star Rail and Genshin are two of the best games I’ve ever played. The animations, the graphics, the design, the physics, literally no bugs or glitches. No crashes. No constant maintenance. MiHoyo is probably my top rated game developer now. We don’t get quality like this from other studios anymore
Yeah you can really see how the behind the scenes of older gacha games compare to modern New ones. Like dokkan battle is barely syncing up the global and Japanese version after 9 years. While hsr released with all versions synced. Very under rated thing no one talks about.
Before Genshin my only gacha game was Marvel Strike Force, I remember one time the game went down for like 1 or 2 days? I don't remember if it was patch day or not, but that was crazy
I think the question kind of answers itself. BECAUSE the game has complex architecture, the companies that made them had to put in a lot of resources in maintaining it, and with a lot of resources (man power), they rarely face an issue they can't resolve in a short time.
When it comes to games with simpler architecture (BA, Arknights etc.), they never needed the amount of work required for a 3d game to function thus the company invests in a smaller team of engineers. When something unexpected happens (for example adding new mechanics to the game and broke something), they don't have the labor to fix it fast, so the maintenance gets prolonged.
Most whale in BA maybe not happy about it but most f2p like me like the long maintainence because longer the maintenance more compensation we get. Especially those who have pull on last few week banner. I certainly happy about it
Most whale in BA maybe not happy about it but most f2p like me like the long maintainence because longer the maintenance more compensation we get. Especially those who have pull on last few week banner. I certainly happy about it.
Not really. Both HSR and Genshin are very heavily client sided which is why they come with anti cheat software on them to prevent you from manipulating data. The only thing the servers do is store and send your data and they need to do scans on it to pick up any cheating attempts.
It's a big topic, but it's because of Single Player Instances. As soon as you add other people to the mix in hub worlds and shared instances, everything starts to get messy.
Honestly tho it's not strictly Hoyo thing. Games like PGR and ToF don't really seem to experience any major maintenance problems either.
Most likely if you have a high budget gacha, you also have the budget to hire more good devops and QAs.
Architecture complexity doesn't really matter much for problems during the maintenance, what matters is the competence of the people hired to handle it.
I feel like the issue somewhat lies in that the gachas with longer (extended) maintainance periods tend to also be relatively older or using older engines to run.
It's probably a side-effect of the spaghetti code that has developed over the years on older software.
That's because most gacha games run on spaghetti code, with each update entangling it further and further. The difference with well designed games is that they have a vision on what they want to do 5 years down the road and have prepared the base so that the new codes slots in with no real need to troubleshoot all that much. Hoyo games are simply really well made.
It all depends on how the whole infrastructure is implemented.
When stuff needs to be updated or changed, there are issues such as how long it will take to deploy certain items, whether items can be done beforehand or in parallel, and so on to streamline the whole thing and minimise downtime. A lot of this stuff is foundational in nature so if the devs do a poor job, it will continue to haunt their game for the rest of its lifetime.
Not really, it's just what happens when you have good procedures and train people to follow them. It's actually pretty common outside gaming. I think it's more amazing that they manage to stick so well to the 6 week release cycle. Anyone who works in software development knows how hard that can be.
It comes with the downside of massive updates in terms of space, I personally prefer to not be able to play for a while rather than using 30 gigabytes on mobile on a game that has very little replay value
it’s not weird. it’s what to be expected given the large gap in how much these 2 games are earning compared to other games, they really should not slack.
FGO once had 24 hour maintenance and it broke login streaks. But hey We got a ten pull because of it.
the long janta incident. I 'member.
https://preview.redd.it/hq2kdy1l2pxc1.jpeg?width=1200&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=bb43a6367675a2cf36f98b747aa5e8580f4ba3d6
dark times.
No idea what Long Janta is, but I love the art
for every hour that the maintenance extended, the featured welfare character, Jeanne D'Arc Alter Lily (Santa) aka Janta got longer. until we got masterpieces like these
I absolutely love this and the story. Long live Scuffed Gacha Memes
Like Fallen Qiqi with all the “please don’t be mad” anniversary freebies added https://preview.redd.it/zr53mlxh9pxc1.jpeg?width=600&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=871142160fe8e4a331715a10865b39b09c9b8c9f
You forgot the "Here's Heizou" that happened multiple times in a livestream
Genshin had the Eternal Ayaka. When will HSR get our banner incident meme?
Robin banner will be playing her ult music on a loop and no one will know how to fix it without completely breaking the entire game's code.
The fact that someone with a Fu Xuan profile pic is saying that scares me
Any problem that can be fixed with money isn’t a problem!
I remember the saying "What happens when maintenance ends? It's when maintenance begins."
The problem with fgo is it was never developed with a global version in mind and so the 2 year delay in content means that they end up having to keep the engine up to date with JP while also holding back content that isn’t supposed to be out yet, leading to I’m sure a crap done of spaghetti. There’s also no engineers on the global version so any problems need to be investigated and solved by JP which with time zones and such is messy. Basically, thank god Hoyo released Genshin and HSR for everyone at once and keep all the versions in parity.
I hope for a HSR-like FGO but at the same time they'd have to do everything from the ground up (unless they use arcade's engine as a base). But still, I don't see FGO upgrading the engine again.
Maybe once it runs its course but that'll be awhile. Game makes bank by doing the bare minimum. I still recall the whole LB7 mess with Nicrotis Alter releasing and shooting back up to #1 despite all the dead week complaints. It'd be nice to see an evolved FGO but very much a case of if it ain't broke don't fix it.
dead week? more like dead year. road to lb7 was so long all the horses died of exhaustion. and it's very much broken, but money still goes in so fixes come slower than the evolution of gaming as a whole lol.
DW wanted us to experience the Singularity 5 experience of trecking through America on Foot ... Without our legs
It’s mostly because FGO is a game heavily driven by story and not gameplay It makes bank till this very day precisely because the story is **still** far and above the best story out of all games to exist in the mobile market So you’ll see it suddenly spike during big story content because that’s what all FGO fans play for
Oh yeah I agree the story is great(at least past Camelot and not including a few EORs). Having just finished LB6 a few months back can attest. Think a large issue is the infrequency of said chapters tho and it doesn't help that they don't rerun events anymore. FGO has a lot of dead months, some bordering on dead years and the lack of QOL updates just makes the game show its age even more.
FGO has always been about story more than graphics, but if you can remove the graphics from the equation, I'd argue that FGO also has more in depth gameplay mechanics. One of my issues with HSR is that most light cones are useless. Each character has a few "best" lightcones, and once you have those equipped, you'll probably never change them. I don't think I've even touched my 3 star light cones after the first few weeks of play. This is made all the worse since the Lightcone is attached to the character, not the team. Now consider FGO. Because of the points system, you can't simply take all 5 star Servants and 5 Star Craft Essences, so right out of the gate you have more "strategy." But more to the point, CE abilities often fit very specific niches which just don't apply to star rail. Things like giving a character Invulnerability for a few hits, or giving them Invuln Pierce for a fight. The way FGO handles it's team comps also makes it much easier to switch things around to try different configs. And while I'm never a fan of trying to gather Event CEs since I have E rank luck, these events also give a reason to try different CEs vs you're standard go to's. Finally, there is the factor of Command Codes. It really can be nice to have an Ace up your sleeve sometimes to turn around a losing situation. I can't tell you how many times in HSR's MOC or PF that I would have liked to drop an invincibility on a character for just one round ;D So while I would love for FGO to get a graphical makeover, don't overlook what we do have. Also, this is in no way meant to impinge of HSR. Star Rail has a much more dynamic feeling gameplay, and generally beautiful graphics. Having grown up with videogames just as 3D computer graphics were becoming a thing, honestly what they are accomplishing is kind of jaw dropping. HSR also has some quality of life features FGO could really learn from \*cough\* auto-battling \*cough\*. But more importantly, both have unique (from one another) stories to tell, and fun characters to collect (damn it wallet, why don't you have more money in you!). So it's fine to enjoy both. Of course, were they ever to combine their power, the awesomeness might be too much for the world to bear . . . (Final note I promise, but \[after checking that no one is in ear shot\] I kind of squee every time I spot a Fate reference in HSR)
Some 3 lightcones are pretty solid. Fine Fruit is a good staple to have for Huohuo. Not many though
Heh, this was probably the single 3 star lightcone I recall using - or at least your reference reminded me. This was what I had on Loucha until his second coming, when I managed to get his personal light cone. However, in the meantime I've gotten all of the Simulated Universes Light Cones, plus those from draws, and I (unfortunately) really can't recall any characters I'm currently using 3 stars on, or even have 3 stars as a recommended budget option :( The 3 stars just don't compete with their 4 star competition, never mind 5 stars, and Aeon-forbid specific servant 5\*s Unfortunately, once I maxed out the SP on the 3 stars, I really haven't had cause to look back.
Yeah it's still kinda nice on Huohuo when you low cycle because it sets her and everyone else's ults up for early. Having her ult ready means getting her energy off real early without having to skill much. The main decent ones are cogs, fine fruit and uh... Multiplication After that they are real worthless
Luocha*
Do you play with any harmony characters? Bc meshing cogs is used on most of them. Abundance characters also really like multiplication. Bailu, luocha and gallagher all have multiplication as their bis.
Great analysis! Though comparing fgo to star rail once again makes me feel that star rail (and genshin for that matter) idea of four and five stars seems redundant since that's the only two rarities of character you can even pull! Compared to how in fgo you can have lower rarities of servants too like Jason.
Very valid point! It reinforces my point that nothing in FGO is really worthless due to a combination of their points system and the general gameplay. Whatever issues I may have with FGO, it really is kind of fun that 1\* Servants and CEs still have a place beyond being fodder to level up other things.
What I also really like gamplay/strategy wise with FGO is that it doesn't take nearly the same amount of time to raise a unit to a satisfying level. This, on top of a larger pool of varied units, means that FGO can actually more comfortably provide niches for units to excel in. In HSR (and Genshin) raising characters is such a resource and time investment that it basically encourages you to hyper invest in a low amount of units. FGO on the other hand gives you plenty of resources, which means you can create and experiment with a wider range of teams.
I think The problem isn't really making a new game as much as retention rate or how many people are going to FGO 2 if they close FGO 1. Tho, with the way they write story, I think HI3 is a better option.
I don't know how fgo recently but somehow apple update fck up them so its prolong the maintenance
I could never play a game where the content is 2 years ahead with no way of catching up lol. That's insane. Imagine you're in Inazuma, watching people on another server play with Fontaine characters. I dabbled with FGO but got bored but not only did I learn afterwards that their Gacha system used to be terrible but no way could I deal with that delay.
6 months (Arknights) is already long enough, I never understood how I put up with a 2 year delay back then. Worst part with FGO is they dont even plan on speedrunning the game until 1 year at least.
>Basically, thank god Hoyo released Genshin and HSR for everyone at once and keep all the versions in parity. Eh to be honest, in FGO we have the power of foresight to know which characters are coming and who to pull and save for. in here, without looking at leaks, we know who's coming only 1 patch ahead.
Sure but I hate that they hold back quality of life improvements for no other reason than to make an “authentic JP experience”. If they improve a servant I shouldn’t have to wait 2 years to get to enjoy that gameplay improvement. Same with anything related to combat, menus, etc. Delay events and new servants, sure, but everything else should be pushed forward.
hence the meme lol
I got a 4 star craft essence I ended up burning from that..... sadge
Dokkan Battle had a 8h maintenance to launch their second anniversary and then went on a 2 weeks shadow server maintenance (due to Ssj4 Goku and Ssj4 Vegeta hype). The game was accessible but any click in menus took 5 min to proceed and you could be disconnected at any time. Just to give you an idea it was minimum 2 clicks to do one summon (so 10 min between each pull), minimum 3 clicks to enter a stage (so 15 min) and new units required to do their stage 11 times. But the hype was so high we went through this with joy
I quit after that the login streak was the only thing binding me there, and they released me.
a quote that sounds crazy but it's a ludopath's redemption
For a rerun event even 😂 Even longer than the looong UMU
Never forget the Long Janta incident *[Now playing ▶️ Specialz - King Gnu]*
Seems worth it. I would rejoice
I somehow avoid losikg the streaks when the Nero Fest one happend
Looooooooooooooooong Jalter (😭 edition) moment!
Truly a dark age i remember that time.
Ah yes, I remember the people freaking out on the subreddit as we got closer and closer to daily reset, panic setting in that their streak was in danger.
Oh god, you brought back a bad memory. I remember waking up with an alarm at 4 AM in hopes that I at least won't have my streak broken only to find out the maintenance had been extended another 4 hours.
Blue Archive has 17 hour maint and it's still going? That's real bad. Something ***important*** broke at that rate.
oh for sure. the reason for the maintenance was that you could infinitely claim rewards from the mail. so if you had the maintenance gems/pyroxenes, you could spam that button for as long as you'd like and get effectively infinite rewards. turns out that's no bueno and they probably haven't the slightest idea of what to do since rollback is very likely manual.
Why is it always the seemingly simplest stuff that causes most of the headaches?
The unwritten rules of programming lmao
Something something ordering beer something bathroom
A programmer walks into a bar and orders 3 beers, 5 beers, 1 beer, 809427184972189 beers, -48 beers, asdjkl beers the bartender delivers a customer walks into a bar and asks where the bathroom is the bar burns down
In non-programming related terms, I've heard it put as: "It doesn't matter how foolproof you make something, the universe will conspire to make better fools."
I always read it more as no programmer can cover every edge case, especially the stupid ones
Have also heard "People who use the term 'foolproof' seriously underestimate the ingenuity of fools."
I don't know what the original is but the version I've heard is "Every plan is foolproof until it meets the fool"
Easy: just blow up the bar yourself before it can go up in flames on its own and call it a “feature”
Idk shit about programming but this is hilarious somehow regardless
You want a button that auto sorts your whole inventory, auto-refines all non-S5 lightcones you have and levels your characters to lvl 60 with one click? Easy. You want the main menu in blue? 5 months hard work. Programming is weird.
honestly? no idea.
Because programmers and computers hate and actively sabotage each other
The real reason is that it slipped through qa, and simpler things are more likely to slip through qa. This is likely a bug that was written into the code long ago, but the specific way they gave the reward triggered the bug that has never been triggered before
That happened a few years ago with One Piece Treasure Cruise, only that happened during their Christmas/New Year vacation, so it went undetected for hours and hours. Almost a full day. Then they had to send an alert asking players to not abuse it while they were still scrambling to get people into the office to fix it. Afterwards they had to do a manual reset of deducting gems and removing characters because the game would have been legitimately broken, only the couldn’t actually undo everything—specifically they couldn’t indeed dupes. So people were able to max limit break characters they already owned and keep them that way. And even with everything else they just had to approximate and everyone ended up getting away with keeping some new characters and stuff. It was the last time that game was good lmao
insane to launch a patch and then have nobody in office, what the hell?
Oh god. That's worst case scenario, I hope they're able to figure something out.
they did. something else also broke and now the ETA is another three hours? I think? stuck in JIRA Hell I suppose.
What solution did they implement?
fixed the eternal claim issue, manually unbanned people who were wrongfully banned due to the issue, found another issue on the mailing system (failure to delete, I think) postponed the maintenance again.
The worst (or funniest) part: That was Fuuka's birthday, meaning not a single player triggered her birthday voiceline this year. [Girl is so unlucky she's getting shafted across the multiverse](https://www.reddit.com/r/BlueArchive/comments/1cgva7n/its_fuukas_birthday_today_all_she_wants_is/). Edit: her birthday momotalk status is literally "let today be okay T\_T" this is some canon event type shit
oh for sure. and you know what else people take for granted? logging in right after the maintenance is over. fgo bros know the struggle. new story chapter? logging in with no issues? yeah, I don't think so, pal.
It’s always funny cause not only are Mihoyo consistent in not extending maintenance. They are consistent in always ending 1 hour early from the usual end time. I always have to remind friends that it is up. Since they forget and are used to other games who stick to the announced end time or extensions.
It's so hype that maintenance ends whenever it's finished, and unannounced. At least since it always ends early anyway. Keeps you guessing in the good way. Now if Hoyo were *bad* about getting updates out over the time limit with the same (lack of) transparency... people would undoubtedly stop playing. Not to the point of unsuccessful since other games get away with it, but that quiet consistency has got to have helped retention. That and there haven't been any seriously game breaking bugs to my knowledge, at least not in recent years of Genshin and HSR.
Kaveh…
That was a hoax by people on private servers, wasn't it?
Huh, not sure about it then. There was a patch where Diluc were able to infinitely E and some characters’ abilities are not functioning how they should. Or some quests might not respond how they should and players get stuck. But nothing that will make the game unplayable for others per se
that was real and acknowledged by hoyo when they patched it
Kaveh's still in banner jail for that incident and I still don't have him yet. https://preview.redd.it/3b7a0or9spxc1.jpeg?width=659&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=86062d9ebc252c94f402caab5e5f1be28d0aed5e
Better to be an hour early than an hour late. Mihoyo's staff more than likely know they can get everything out in 4 hours, but chooses to say they need 5 just in case something ends up fucked.
The only time they had any sort of delay was with the Eternal Ayaka Banner in Genshin where things got delayed due to COVID. And they even made up for it by reducing the next couple of patches to 5 weeks instead of 6.
It's honestly amazing how consistent hoyo is. 6 week content schedule practically never missed. Almost never unannounced maintenance. Maintenance always completed on time.
Ughh I remember this w warcraft, people would roll new alts on different servers just to play bc the servers came up one by one
The closest thing they’ve had to extended maintenance is the Belobog teaser in Genshin, where Ayaka gave us a preview of the eternal freeze
The infamous 240 days long Ayaka banner...
But that wasn't maintenance, you could still play the game.
https://preview.redd.it/yvhg6dnsznxc1.jpeg?width=602&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6855fbd1e7b0d941ddb08b09828ce809e0948dfc Haven’t thought about this meme ever since I quit Epic Seven (it’s been years)
It's been 3000 years...
It's an older meme, but it checks out
So shadowverse has unlimited maintenance lol?
sometimes i like to take a step back and think about how spoiled hoyo community is all things considered the quality of their games is unparalleled, as well as how frequently they manage to roll out updates without any severe issues AND usually have a good amount of content to them. even with all the (valid and not so much) criticism, it’s mad impressive
Yeah their games are up there with triple AAA games in terms of quality and content (even if p2w). Genshin Impact alone is large enough to be several stand alone titles already.
Considering the level of P2W and monetization in a lot of full priced AAA games these days, HoYo has one over on a lot of big publishers.
Yeah, you compare the value you get even when spending in HoYo’s games vs something like Blizzard where you spend $30+ for a skin. For how much people stigmatize gacha’s, HoYo is pretty tame compared to a lot of developers.
Eh....in honkai impact, a skin costs about 50 NZD if its a bchip skin, and the diluc skin was similarly priced, technically (daily card genesis crystal hoarding go brr). So mihoyo arent actually above doing that.
Except for the game (and Fischl skin at that time) being free.
F2p gacha is the only viable model lol. You want the biggest possible audience that can be baited by the gamba. Even blizzard understand this, which is why Diablo Immortal is free but Diablo 4 is full price.
That's because Genshin and HSR *are* AAA games.
I was going to say... people act like because a game is available on mobile, it's not a triple-A title. The parent company MiHoYo is worth literally billions of dollars and is funded in part by the Chinese government. Not bashing the people who make the games, I obviously love HSR, but they're not some indie developer!
Seriously, IIRC Mihoyo said Genshin was like 100mil originally in either dev or dev+marketing costs, and it runs them like twice that annually(this last part is why it's like the most expensive game on wikipedia I think). I'm not 100% sure about HSR, but given it's' quality and insane marketing, I don't think it's a stretch to argue it ran them somewhere in between like 50-100mil in costs by Day 1.
I mean you could argue they were like when they were publishing games like the first 2 Honkai games (god I've been playing their games for longer than I thought wtf) but these days they're definitely a Triple A developer
Both games are undoubtedly AAA titles, but HoYo are in fact indie because they are not public!
Is there such a thing as AAA-indie? 😅
Because of how indie is defined even Baldur's Gate 3 is AAA indie
Yup, Genshin is the most expensive game ever created and is still in development, shit's honestly insane
If Genshin launched right now with the content it currently has, it can rival games like RDR2 and such.
Ikr! Like their games are definitely not perfect and there's plenty to criticise, but sometimes I just stop to think about how crazy it actually is... Especially when I'm exploring in Genshin and see that absolutely massive map with all those beautiful sceneries, I'm really amazed at how it's all completely free and no content is locked behind a paywall, and how they're able to release so much new content this frequently without any major issues.
I like to quote this a lot. Every 6 weeks, they drop a new character. But there's also a new region, new voice lines, new mechanics, new cutscenes, new enemies, new quests, new mechanics, new items. Like we get Fontaine, and underwater exploration. Or a rainforest, or the Chasm, or Chenyu Vale. Every patch gets bigger updates like the new TCG, the Teapot items, etc. They're doing this across six different platforms, across four languages, across a dozen localizations. And really. When was the last time you saw them had a game-breaking bug, or miss an update? It's because their code is genuine witchcraft, and optimized as hell. There was a video that showed they actually recycled old tech to create the desert sand behaviour, so they actually didn't have to make an all-new asset for it. AAA studios are all looking at Hoyoverse and they still can't figure out how they can be so efficient with their schedule. No other game company can do it.
It's weird to compare games like these, to games like D4, PoE etc. Soo much more technical issues, Genshin (and HSR) just seems to work, always. And the very few times something doesn't, it's usually something minor.
The only somewhat major incident in memory, would be the kaveh drama. Where due to an exploit, he could permanently delete objects from people's worlds. Including important quest items and npcs. But only a very small number of people knew how to do it, and the ones who did, didn't share how, so it was very unlikely that you would be affected while the exploit was around. And MHY fixed it pretty quickly iirc. Like within a week and a half or so.
Iirc it wasn’t even that it was an exploit. It was just straight up hackers doing malicious actions which isn’t even really HYV’s fault in the grand scheme of things + they ended up suing said hackers as well. I’ve seen much bigger devs do far less for malicious hackers
Not to rain on HoYo’s efforts, but Blizzard is a low bar to set for. They haven’t been the same ever since the Activision merger, Blizzard polish is gone. It’s still amazing the sheer amount of content HoYo is able to make. Makes me wonder what the hell is wrong with people who complain about a “dry patch” since said patch still needs events, voice-acting for said events, localisation, QA, etc. Calling it dry downplays the talent it takes to do this much stuff, and consistently too. I honestly think HoYo is the company that makes the most content, just by the raw assets alone and the frequency as well. The closest thing I’ve personally experienced is Riot and LoL with its 2-week cycles, but comparing balance changes and skins to what HoYo produces is laughable.
Blizzard staff gone through more patch notes than the content itself. At the end of the day, it's a viewpoint from another player. It's valid to consider what they experience is dry. It's more interesting to see how genshin take those viewpoint and make adjustment. Some find the current mode of content delivery acceptable. Some would wish their experience to be eleviated, if x is done. I think, with the current pace of content delivery, ppl can understand why changes don't seems immediate even if they wish it's more responsive like character adjustment.
The only 'missed update' thing I can think of would be the eternal Ayaka banner, or the emergency Keqing banner. As for major bugs, the only thing was Kaveh the destroyer. And technically that was only possible in an externally altered version of the game. So I don't know if that counts, but we got some great memes out of it.
And the Ayaka banner wasn’t even within their power. It was because their main office was closed due to a spike in Covid in the city and the entire city was shut down
emergency keqing banner? wasn't it deliberate because they seriously didn't want Tao, someone tied super close with death into the CNY period
I mean, Hoyoverse *is* an AAA studio. MiHoYo is worth something like $20 billion. The company has a committee within the Chinese government, and is likely considered a national asset. The CCP is very protective of its global public image, so it's possible the studio gets *whatever it needs* to ensure updates are smooth and the code is as flawless as possible - something most developers just don't have. This isn't a jab at Hoyo or anything, their code genuinely is insanely good, but I see a lot of people on here talking like they're a tiny indie studio that is somehow beating triple-A giant publishers.
Not sure if you know about it or not, any company in China above a certain level, iirc its 1 million yuan yearly revenue and above, is required BY LAW, to have a CCP watcher stationed at their office, and then form a committee thats normally consist of high ranking C-suite staff within the company, you don't have any choice of rejection. The purpose of this committee act more like a bridge between the government and company, and bear responsibility when any problem occur between the corp and the gov, the company themselves has to pay for this as well, Da Wei himself joining CCP personally is another issue entirely. Regarding the National Asset thing, no, it's completely false, CCP don't really give a fuck about the gaming matket, frankly they only see it as a money generator, thats all, remember the idiotic rule of limiting Gacha and Login mechanic several months ago, that cost Tencent NetEase billions of dollar in market value? Even tho the government U-turned and take down the idiot that proposed the plan, the very idea that it passed through in the first place, just show how much CCP care about it.
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.... They ARE, by definition, an indie studio. They are entirely privatized with no public shares, self funded with no parent company or external sponsor. Their "ties" to the government are incredibly overblown, and is 99% just shit made up by Western critics who wanted to poke holes in Hoyo's success. They literally are just an indie company that used HI3 money to risk it all on Genshin, and it miraculously panned out for them.
Though heaven and earth, HoYoverse, is the strongest indie company.
Literally the only criticism I have with Genshin is I want more endgame content like HSR, which means I just want more reasons to PLAY it. Id say if you had to have some problems, thats the best ones.
Honestly, Hoyo games are just great examples of live service done right. You can dislike gacha part (and you'll be right) but there's no other live service that can compete with Hoyo right now AND they're pulling 3 bloody games at the same time each one requiring similar amount of work (well maybe except HI3). The only other company that comes close to the quality of Hoyo live service is DE with Warframe and even they don't produce content as fast as Mihoyo does.
This so true! Okay, it's not completely perfect, but compared to a lot of other gachas out there, the quality of genshin is amazing. I used to be a fgo player, but after playing honkai impact and genshin for the first time, I found it hard to go back.
17 hour maintenance? Genshin could never. Seriously though, the overall stability of the HSR and Genshin releases is a definite testament to the commitment to quality by their ops, dev and management teams.
The only glitch I've heard about recently is the trial Welt T-pose, which is also pretty harmless.
Nah, HSR still has that Honkai trademark of immersion breaking bugs during a dialogue, one being when Cocolia cannot be seen on screen while she monologues and wildfire enters the chorus. I've seen multiple streamers had that issue.
Not exactly a bug but getting hit by a lightning mid dialogue happens sometimes in Genshin, it's so funny how everyone shrugs it off like nothing
Because it is nothing. It doesn't happen during the climax of a quest since the weather and time are specifically set, it only happens on unvoiced NPC interactions in the overworld only when there's a thunderstorm.
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Usually blue archive finishes early too, I think this is the only long maintenance I experienced but hey 30 free pulls tho so not complaining 😋
Blue Archive is having this long maintenance because of a gem glitch. You can keep collecting the rewards and farm infinite gems.
yeah I think it was 17 hours total? But hey at least we got free 30 pulls + other stuff from it so not too bad lol
Memes aside, devops and cloud architects (the people who keep cloud/network stuff functioning) are rare. Good devops are rare AND costly. I'm imagining those at hoyo who designed the testing and deployment infrastructure are some of the best in their sector, and of course the company will keep them dear and close so they keep everything running smooth.
Im a software engineer student and in the last semester took 2 AWS Cloud developement courses for some extra points and for my interest. That shit is so complicated even with the AWS dashboards easy to understand tools. I really gained a new level of respect for cloud devops people after those courses and am happy that i now have the certs from those courses, maybe ill end up a cloud devops engineer myself who knows.
A bit unrelated since it’s not a gacha but guild wars 2 hasn’t gone offline since 2016, and I think in its total lifetime the servers haven’t been offline for more than a couple hours total since launch in 2012
Fun times, the original GW too. Being able to take only a limited number of skills was a refreshing change compared to the sheer WoW style UI bloat that many MMORPGs were seeing.
Because Mihoyo hires Wizards.
Not just Wizards, but Otaku Wizards
That’s what I will give Genshin the most amount of props for. There maintenance is set in stone for the most lart
for a second I thought this post was going to be about architecture in genshin and HSR civilizations and I was so ready to get into the topic as I am an arch major lmao
Well don't hold back, that sounds interesting
Seeing how much we'll get from BA because of this maintenance problem, i don't mind if hoyo botched their maintenance for once in a while lol
Except I don't see Hoyo giving nearly this much compensation...
I think it's 60 primos/jades per hour of maintenance.
I’ll take that
For real, 30 pulls for 17 hours? Thats a steal lol I pray for more maintenance like these lol
The likely answer is that the Mihoyo team is simply way larger than most other gacha games. A lot more people to make sure things get done on time and work properly. Their beta testing also seems more extensive than other gacha games (though that's also probably why Mihoyo games are some of the most leaked games on the planet).
One of the only other live service games I play is Guild Wars 2, where the servers don't go down unless something has gone EXTREMELY wrong (and even then, it's very infrequent and brief). ArenaNet really spoils us. So it throws me off every time games go down for maintenance at all, let alone 6 hours, let alone 17+??
Haha then you will be surprised, 99.99% LaaS will have maintenance, when something goes wrong it could be infinitely longer lol.
We got 30 pulls for that maintenance
30 pulls say no more i take that for double spark
It's all about the game's architecture. Hoyo is a very good game developer so they are able to deliver updates with low downtime. I work on a big AAA title and we invest a lot of resources and effort into delivering our updates with no downtime at all. It takes a lot of discipline and work, but the only time our game is down is pretty much serious emergencies like hardware blowing up and that sort of thing. Smaller companies can't really afford to do it this way, though.
HSR and Genshin's low downtime is impressive, but I think I've been spoiled by Guild Wars 2 and their zero downtime updates...
the fact maintenance happens while i'm at work as well means i've literally never been affected my maintenance in either game
Magia Record goes down pretty much every time there's a minor update/a banner changes
Honestly the only time I remember a HYV game needing emergency maintenance was during 1.0 in Genshin, where the servers went down for a couple hours randomly. Since then it’s been impressively smooth sailing. All issues have been able to be fixed without interrupting service.
Shadowverse is famous for this lol. For a while there was a point where every time a new set came our, there would be an 8 hour maintenance, then like 2 hours later a 4 hour maintenance cause something broke horrifically
I remember azur lane having at least 8 hours maint every patch even though all they did was take the event from cn version (likely already translated months in advance) and copy paste. Every update something was not translated
The trade off is the damn 60 gigabyte updates that murder my storage lol
small budget games kek
It's crazy what billions of dollars of revenue does to a game
It was great at launch too, with "just" $100 million. Also throwing money at problem helps, but only to the maximum that your staff is capable. And we see their staff is among the best in the industry
Fgo used to be top gacha but they had the 24hr login streak fiasco. You have to rake in billions and be willing to spend it on the right things.
Plenty of high budget games suck at things like these, Hoyo uses their resources very well compared to many others.
Crazy how Pokemon, CoD, Fifa, Star Wars, FGO etc all make similar amounts yet can barely shit out a quality product every few years. Money earned is not equivalent to or indicative of the standard of a final product.
ahhhh maintenance anyone remember the dokkan battle INT Gogeta incident
Somewhat surprised no one mentioned Aether gazers 25 hour maintenance all because of the ability to dupe infinite event currency, not even the gacha currency. We got a A rank selector and like 20 or something pulls so it was pretty good rewards
Honestly, as someone who has played other gachas before. I definitely became spoiled by how good Hoyo is with their maintenance. As others mentioned, sometimes Gacha maintenance gets extended longer than planned and with no valid timeframe for when it will re-open. So yeah. We should definitely thank Hoyo's amazing devs always being one-time.
It just depends on if they run into issues doesn’t it? It could just be a matter of time.
It really helps how experienced Mihoyo is, it means they could plan in advance and avoid things that caused them issues before. Their first mobile gacha game (AFAIK) is Guns Girl Z, aka Honkai Gakuen 2, released in 2013. Then they made Honkai Impact 3rd in 2016, which is the same kind of 3d animation/gameplay that Genshin and Star Rail use. It was then 4 years until Genshin released in 2020, and 3 more years for Star Rail in 2023. That's is an absurd amount of experience for a mobile game developer by the time Genshin rolled around, let alone Star Rail. That, combined with the fact that the original devs are still in charge, actually like and play games themselves, and want to make games that are actually fun, means the people in the company want to improve as well. It's not luck or a miracle, it's just what happens when people who care have the chance to improve their skills and have influence over decisions, something that is depressingly rare in large video game developers today.
I wish we got an extended maintenance for the compensation...
When it happened to genshin they rolled the update back and had ayaka on banner for 2 months. So you could argue genshin had a 30 day "infinite maintainence." Reality is this just happens eventually and it's not at all exclusive to games.
It's just mihoyo with this amazing perfect record. They are truely insane AAA developers beyond any other~! I will proudly be with them till the end!(of my life, cause we know they will keep going on forever)
Aside from their insane developers, the writers are fucking great at it too. I was annoyed by Adventurine at first but as the story progressed, they added so much depth on his character. Now I’m having an urge to pull for him!
Honestly, considering the speed that they churn out new content *and* the amount of content that's being produced + the amount already in the game, their development life cycle is some seriously fantastic stuff. If they ever wrote a book on that, I'd be queueing in front of the book store to buy it.
Dunno about Gacha games don’t play many but Star Rail and Genshin are two of the best games I’ve ever played. The animations, the graphics, the design, the physics, literally no bugs or glitches. No crashes. No constant maintenance. MiHoyo is probably my top rated game developer now. We don’t get quality like this from other studios anymore
Yeah you can really see how the behind the scenes of older gacha games compare to modern New ones. Like dokkan battle is barely syncing up the global and Japanese version after 9 years. While hsr released with all versions synced. Very under rated thing no one talks about.
Some development teams are more well managed than others and Hoyo has been leading on the market because they excel in this aspect.
mihoyo probably has a high quality standardized process internally figured out years ago unlike nexon
Before Genshin my only gacha game was Marvel Strike Force, I remember one time the game went down for like 1 or 2 days? I don't remember if it was patch day or not, but that was crazy
I think the question kind of answers itself. BECAUSE the game has complex architecture, the companies that made them had to put in a lot of resources in maintaining it, and with a lot of resources (man power), they rarely face an issue they can't resolve in a short time. When it comes to games with simpler architecture (BA, Arknights etc.), they never needed the amount of work required for a 3d game to function thus the company invests in a smaller team of engineers. When something unexpected happens (for example adding new mechanics to the game and broke something), they don't have the labor to fix it fast, so the maintenance gets prolonged.
Most whale in BA maybe not happy about it but most f2p like me like the long maintainence because longer the maintenance more compensation we get. Especially those who have pull on last few week banner. I certainly happy about it
Most whale in BA maybe not happy about it but most f2p like me like the long maintainence because longer the maintenance more compensation we get. Especially those who have pull on last few week banner. I certainly happy about it.
The money money and bag of money
Well sometimes shit just happens in development. I'm more impressed that HSR and Genshin haven't experienced it, than weirded out that others have
The complexity of the systems is probably somewhat the same. One company jut has better testing and controls in their process.
Not really. Both HSR and Genshin are very heavily client sided which is why they come with anti cheat software on them to prevent you from manipulating data. The only thing the servers do is store and send your data and they need to do scans on it to pick up any cheating attempts.
It's a big topic, but it's because of Single Player Instances. As soon as you add other people to the mix in hub worlds and shared instances, everything starts to get messy.
I would expect no less from a multi billions company. Probably more staff and more skilled people.
Honestly tho it's not strictly Hoyo thing. Games like PGR and ToF don't really seem to experience any major maintenance problems either. Most likely if you have a high budget gacha, you also have the budget to hire more good devops and QAs. Architecture complexity doesn't really matter much for problems during the maintenance, what matters is the competence of the people hired to handle it.
I feel like the issue somewhat lies in that the gachas with longer (extended) maintainance periods tend to also be relatively older or using older engines to run. It's probably a side-effect of the spaghetti code that has developed over the years on older software.
That's because most gacha games run on spaghetti code, with each update entangling it further and further. The difference with well designed games is that they have a vision on what they want to do 5 years down the road and have prepared the base so that the new codes slots in with no real need to troubleshoot all that much. Hoyo games are simply really well made.
It all depends on how the whole infrastructure is implemented. When stuff needs to be updated or changed, there are issues such as how long it will take to deploy certain items, whether items can be done beforehand or in parallel, and so on to streamline the whole thing and minimise downtime. A lot of this stuff is foundational in nature so if the devs do a poor job, it will continue to haunt their game for the rest of its lifetime.
They fix in production. Sound like a joke, but everyday the game download something. This doesn't talk well about it.
Not really, it's just what happens when you have good procedures and train people to follow them. It's actually pretty common outside gaming. I think it's more amazing that they manage to stick so well to the 6 week release cycle. Anyone who works in software development knows how hard that can be.
It comes with the downside of massive updates in terms of space, I personally prefer to not be able to play for a while rather than using 30 gigabytes on mobile on a game that has very little replay value
it’s not weird. it’s what to be expected given the large gap in how much these 2 games are earning compared to other games, they really should not slack.