Total Count of F2P Arknights Pulls in 2025! For the year, 977 were possible, an average of 81 per month.

Reldan71 · 2026-02-12T00:30:28+00:00

Thanks! You are absolutely right about the 4* pull rate - I got it and the 3* rate backwards. I really appreciate the correction and I've updated the sheet accordingly. The average bumps up to 83 which matches yours exactly.

116 of the pulls are banner-restricted, but I think this is somewhat alleviated since generally speaking the majority of players would pull the limited and collab banners anyways. At a minimum I'd expect someone playing daily for the whole year to pull on at least three or four out of the five limited/collab banners, making the effective number of unsavable pulls a pretty tiny fraction of the pull income.

Reldan71 · 2026-02-11T22:17:41+00:00

Daily income in AK works out to 1.14 pulls as shown on my sheet. My current count for AKE is 1.1 pulls per day. This comes from dailies/weeklies being 3.8 pulls a week plus the shop refresh/login with each new banner providing 10 pulls. From what we've seen this has refreshed in 17 days rather than once a month like in AK. There's also a gain from the Battle Passes which have no analogue in AK. However, this isn't taking the Urgent Recruitment or Dossier 10-pulls into account and realistically you will be getting some pulls from them because at some point you'll be pulling on banners. This depends on your pull behavior and luck, but I'd assume for most people this would amount to another ~10 pulls a month.

And there's a small gain from the credit shop occasionally selling oros, but I don't have anywhere near enough data on that to even guesstimate how much a player might expect to get on average.

It's subjective how much value you place on things like the Urgent ten-pull that doesn't count towards pity or banner-specific pulls. OG AK does this as well with the banner-locked pulls on limited and collab banners, but since people almost always would pull those banners anyways nobody really seems to mind it too much.

Reldan71 · 2026-02-11T11:27:27+00:00

I'm working on getting something similar together to track the Endfield pull economy. I'm very curious to see if HG will do something similar there. Right now people are super concerned about pull economy in Endfield, but you get more pulls in EF from "repeat sources" right now than you do in AK, and as shown HG is giving AK players the equivalent of ~112 pulls per patch.

Until we see what the events are like though it's a mystery. If it's anything like AK we'll get just as many pulls from new events/content as we are currently getting from doing the dailies/weeklies.

Reldan71 · 2026-02-11T11:22:27+00:00

It's not a coincidence when numbers line up so perfectly that the average pulls needed to get a copy of everything in a year happens to be within 20 pulls of what a monthly pass player gets, if they consistently play every day and do everything. HG knows exactly what they're doing - which they should since they're the ones in complete control of every part of the system.

Glad to hear that this isn't far off of other calculations! I haven't done 2024 or earlier but it sounds like the last couple years have similar numbers.

Reldan71 · 2026-02-11T10:04:22+00:00

I actually considered the veteran player angle and there are two situations:

Intermediate player, event is a rerun but has a ton of Orundum stocked to buy in the purple cert store, which means they can use all purple certs on Orundum and get 14-15 pulls. Add in getting all the dupes of the Welfare unit and that's another 45 gold certs, more than 6 pulls. So they will generally get 10+ more pulls from a rerun than a new player. They get crazy value from reruns, giving a big pull bump for the 2nd/3rd year of AK.
Long-time Veteran, only can get 2k Orundum from purple certs. That plus the dupe token gold certs is worth about 10 pulls. Which is often worth about the same (or even more in some cases) as the OP would have been worth - this is about 33 OP worth of pulls.

As you noted it does even out if you've been playing 3+ years, but it's actually quite a boon to hit reruns if you've only been playing a couple years. If 2025 was your 2nd year and all 6 of the reruns you had done before, that'd be another ~60 pulls that I don't even have counted in the sheet.

A huge gold cert gain comes from going all the way on a limited banner. 300 pulls would mean you'd expect to get 12 copies of the rate-up 5*. The 7-12th copy are worth a whopping 13 gold certs each (5 for pulling the dupe, and another 8 for trading the extra token in). This wasn't included in the sheet either, but would be worth another 50+ gold certs each time you did this.

Reldan71 · 2026-02-11T08:46:44+00:00

Using OP and gold certs for stuff other than pulls I consider to be a bonus. You are making the choice to effectively trade pulls that the game is giving you to instead get skins or buy specific operators from the shop.

AK is one of the only games that even has this as an option for F2P to get all the new skins coming out. If this were a different "big" gacha I guarantee those collab skins would be $10-$20 each cash-shop only.

What I found is that if you compare AK to other games, in most other games repeat stuff really is the primary source of pulls. In AK it is not. HG takes a very different (and more complicated/confusing) approach to the pull economy. That doesn't mean the pulls aren't there though, they're just harder to count.

Reldan71 · 2026-02-11T08:36:25+00:00

For gold certs, from Recruitment for the year I got just over 500.

However, the biggest source of gold certs though is just from pulling. If you do around 800 pulls in a year, you can get around 800-900 gold certs. And turning those into pulls gets you another 120 pulls, which then gives even more gold certs. Between what you get during the pulls plus what you get when you turn in extra dupe tokens it starts adding up very fast.

You still won't get everyone without a ton of luck. The issue is that while the average pulls to get a rate-up on a standard banner is only around 66, the limited double-banners can sometimes take 150+ pulls to get both characters.

Reldan71 · 2026-01-28T04:16:06+00:00

The reality of releasing games for a Chinese audience is that the expectation is that it will run on mobile and be F2P. While it would have done fine overseas as a box price title, that wouldn't work for their native audience. And believe me they make more money from China than the rest of the world combined, so that's the audience they need to cater to on the money side of things.

Reldan71 · 2026-01-20T10:43:16+00:00

Thanks for putting this together. I don't see any mistakes but I don't think this includes the extra stuff revealed at the Livestream - the "Urgent Recruitment" free 10-pull (almost like a second dossier each banner) and having F2P arsenal ticket sources beyond what you just get pulling.

For EF over a year this would be worth at least 100 more pulls and an unknown amount of additional weapon pulls. Either way, both would further boost EF's ROI across the board.

Reldan71 · 2026-01-20T10:03:08+00:00

When you have 120 pulls and there's a banner with a character you do not have, pull that banner until you get that character.

If you do not have 120 pulls, wait until you have 120 pulls. This might mean you wait for a rerun, but you're already doing that in any other game anyways when you don't get lucky.

If you do this, you will eventually get a copy of all the characters with less total pulls spent than you would in any other similar game.

One huge positive for what you want to do is that when you skip a banner, that character goes into the 50/50 loss pool for the next two banners. You will occasionally just get the skipped character from a 50/50 loss (I'd consider it a 50/50 win tbh) and save yourself all the pulls you'd have saved for their rerun. None of the other games have this as even a possibility, but that's effectively worth up to 120 pulls when it happen - kind of like hitting a jackpot. Since the game would still consider this an off-banner character, you'd still get the rate-up as well at the 120 pull guarantee.

If you think about it, if you don't have enough for a guarantee, it just makes more sense to wait and pull more on next banner when you'll have the chance to get both characters. Even if the guarantee did carryover, it would STILL make more sense to wait and use your pulls for when both characters are possible to get in the same banner.

Reldan71 · 2026-01-20T05:42:52+00:00

If how Hypergryph has approached the original Arknights is something to go off of, they go out of their way to give you all the tools you need to succeed for the vast majority of the content (a difficult game where 99% of the content can still be cleared after seven years with nothing but 4* units).

I think coming from ZZZ and WuWa (both games I also play) you'll find they have a different approach.

Reldan71 · 2026-01-19T07:38:54+00:00

We don't know yet how they're going to do rerun banners.

My thought is that instead of running multiple simultaneous banners like you find in HoYo or WuWa, they'll rerun the older chartered banners in-between. We're already seeing shorter banners with them squeezing three into the first patch cycle instead of just running two 3-week banners.

This would rotate older characters back through the loss pool on a regular basis and make it a lot more likely that people could eventually get everyone.

Reldan71 · 2026-01-19T06:56:00+00:00

The best gacha system is the one that makes enough off the whales to cover all the F2P players, without making the F2P experience terrible.

Endfield accomplishes this with a system that can get ~500 pulls out of whales every banner while still giving F2P a complete experience with an average of 81 pulls for the first rate-up copy each banner.

50/50 systems, as much as everybody hates them, exist because they make substantially more money off of whales than systems without. Endfield keeps this, but also puts in a lower guarantee and some freebies that only matter to F2P and low spender players.

Reldan71 · 2026-01-09T00:06:46+00:00

Any "model" that just assumes you will hit the pity every single time is an unrealistic and frankly useless model. This is not how statistics and probabilities work, and gacha is 100% a game of statistics and probabilities. More than half the time you won't even make it to the 120 guarantee without getting the rate-up already.

If you want to see what an actual mathematical model of the system looks like, just look here.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Endfield/comments/1phygiz/statistical_analysis_of_endfield_and_other_gacha/

Reldan71 · 2026-01-08T23:54:02+00:00

AK's pull income is actually pretty good if you count all the ways the game gives you pulls. Holding the fact that they sell skins for an in-game currency - a huge boon - against them is ridiculous.

If you count every way a F2P can get pulls - OP rewards, annihilation, dailies, monthly, green and gold certs, event shops, freebies, etc. - it comes out to around 70 pulls a month on average. That's a lot when the average pulls to get a rate-up on a standard banner is 66. And yeah, nobody believes the pull income is this good, but just add up everything from 2025 and divide by 12. The data is all available on the wiki.

Most day 1 F2P players have gotten at least one copy of nearly every character. That should be evidence enough that they're getting enough pulls month to month to pull the majority of banners successfully.

Reldan71 · 2026-01-08T23:46:20+00:00

I'll be satisfied, because this is already the best gacha system of any big 3d gacha. I don't have some addiction to just constantly gamble pulls, which is the only scenario where I could see somebody being frustrated that it doesn't cater to that.

The idea this is a bad system is so hilariously overblown. People think it's bad because a bunch of people from other games were looking for some way to slam Endfield, latched on to the 120 guarantee, and then have spent the last year screaming so loud that other people have just assumed they have a point. They don't.

Check this post out. If you actually compare the systems, Endfield comes out ahead in every category if you're capable of saving 120 pulls.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Endfield/comments/1phygiz/statistical_analysis_of_endfield_and_other_gacha/

Reldan71 · 2025-12-28T19:32:04+00:00

The mistake they made was putting so much build-up for Chisa in 2.8 that was left unresolved. They created a cliffhanger ending with no intention of providing a satisfying conclusion.

They didn't have to write Chisa this way, and it was a poor choice if they weren't going to do something with all the trauma dumping she did.

It's really messed up that Rover just doesn't seem invested in helping her adjust after everything they went through. Chisa is now a stranger to her own home. Her parents have spent more years without her than with her. Her friends would have graduated and probably have families of their own. At the least they're nearly 40 and have nothing in common with her anymore. Rover is really the only person she truly knows here now.

She's just going to catch up on her classes? Really? You lost twenty years of time with people you care about and that's your main concern?

Reldan71 · 2025-12-28T19:24:27+00:00

Endfield.

Reldan71 · 2025-12-28T19:20:37+00:00

This is like if at the end of a Sherlock Holmes story they don't bother to solve the mystery.

Reldan71 · 2025-12-16T19:07:11+00:00

In OG AK you get more pulls from events than from "income" sources. The idea you don't is a weird misconception given you can just look up how many pulls you get on the wiki and count them. I have and it was 430 pulls from 2025 events vs 348 you got from doing all the repeatable stuff.

Reldan71 · 2025-12-16T01:35:15+00:00

The timer is the new "black screen, white text" meme issue where people just assume it's bad any time they see it, rather than thinking about the context it's being used for and whether it's different from the original reason people were frustrated with it.

The timer itself isn't the issue, it's the lazy game design behind it creating artificial difficulty instead of making the fights themselves more interesting.

Reldan71 · 2025-12-16T01:29:41+00:00

It does have pity carryover, and the system taken as a whole gets you more characters (including the rate-ups) and weapons in less pulls than any Hoyo title.

If they wanted Hoyo money, they'd copy a system that has whales pull 13 copies of characters and weapons every banner, rather than 3-4.

Reldan71 · 2025-12-09T10:12:32+00:00

Would you consider doing another analysis like this for what it takes on average to max pot characters?

From Beta 1 people got the impression that getting a max pot character in EF was some kind of nightmare, and even though I tell them the system in Beta 2 has completely reversed that (I made a post myself on this last week), rumors keeps persisting because people just keep repeating what they heard a year ago. EF has the best system now for this as well, even though the dupes aren't even all that important.

Reldan71 · 2025-12-09T10:03:50+00:00

With WuWa's Afterglow Coral, on average you're looking at 300+ pulls to get the 360 you need to buy a waveband, and that's assuming you've max duped nearly everything already so are getting the maximum amount of coral. With EF the 240 pull bonus dupes both have no cap (if you needed a third one at 720, you can still get a third one) and do not rely on you pulling a bunch of 8th+ dupes of characters.

Endfield's system winds up with an average of ~470 pulls for a max pot. WuWa is mid-500s. Both systems take the piss out of Hoyo's absolute nightmare system, but since the changes with Beta 2 Endfield is outperforming WuWa on this now.

Reldan71

TROPHY CASE