@cvi said in WTF Bites:
@Gustav said in WTF Bites:
Do you know how much some people spend on Genshin Impact skins?
How many meters of "special" audiophile-grade "directional" ethernet cable do you get for one Genshin Impact skin?
Well, if you want to go down the :
Genshin has very few "skins", as in different looks for a character. What it has are a bunch of characters (the game's rarity system uses 1-5 star rankings, but for this purpose only 5 star items matter) with limited availability. These characters are only available for two weeks every so often. (So often being "When introduced and then whenever afterward Hoyoverse thinks they'll make enough money.")
Most of these characters have an associated weapon that is likely their best choice. These special weapons are also only available during the same two week rotation.
In addition, all the "normal" characters (4 or 5 s) and weapons (3-5 s) are available at the same time.
Genshin uses a "gacha" system, which works much the same as the loot boxes other games use. You convert an in-game currency (named "Primogems" or "Primos" for short) to "pulls" of the slot machine, which gives you one random item from the entire list of available items. You earn Primogems while playing the game as well as spending money. When you spend money you earn an out-of-game currency that you can convert to Primos.
So, since it's random, what are the odds involved? Each pull of the gacha has a 0.6% chance to give you a 5 item. Rough math will tell you that it takes 167 pulls to probably get one. Not necessarily the one you wanted, but something with that rating.
Thankfully, the game has a few systems to make it a tiny bit less punishing. I'm going to smush them together and just call it the Pity System.
First, you can do either 1 or 10 pulls at the same time. If you do 10 pulls at once, at least one of them is guaranteed to be a 4 or 5 item. So you never want to do just 1 pull.
Second, if you do 89 pulls without getting a 5 , the 90th pull will be a 5 . (Pity 1)
Third, for these limited availability items, the first time you get a 5 you have a 50-50 chance for it to be the limited one. If you lose the 50-50, the second time you get a 5 it will be the limited one. (Pity 2)
Fourth, the chance to get a 5 goes up the closer you get to the 90th pull.
Combined, the above means that there's an upper bound of 180 pulls for you to get that character or weapon you want, but it's probably going to be less.
Now that we've got the system down, let's talk money. $100 US will give you (after conversion) 8080 Primogems. A pull costs 160 Primogems, so that $100 gives you 50.5 pulls. $300 gives you 151.5 pulls, which is probably enough to get that limited character or weapon. $400 will ensure it with some pulls left over.
However, that just gets you one copy of one of them. Characters and weapons are improved as you get more copies of them, up to a limit. If you want to max out your new character you need to get them 7 times and their weapon 5 times. 180 * 12 = 2160 / 50.5 ≈ 42.7, so $4,300 if you have the worst luck.
Back to the question: I remember seeing a "this is so dumb" article about a $1,000 audiophile ethernet cable, so 4 of those and maybe one "low-end" audiophile SATA cable or something?
PSA: Just Say No to Genshin's monetization.
Edit: I misremembered; it's 0.6%, not 0.5%, and the chance goes up as you get close to pull 90 whether or not you've lost the 50-50. The upper bound is still 180, though, so that math remains the same. You're just more likely to hit it before then than I thought, typically between 75 and 80 pulls.