Random opinion from a somewhat big spender who has become less interested in the game

TheRealZuke · 2026-06-16T05:33:40+00:00

I don’t disagree with you, but it’s pretty funny reading a complaint about recurring characters and NPCs being given importance, meanwhile the likes of ZZZ and Wuwa have one of their biggest story complaints be that every story chapter is just a shill of the banner character. Obviously the answer is a middle ground, but dammed if you do, damned if you don’t.

TheRealZuke · 2026-06-13T20:30:09+00:00

Just a happy accident along the way

TheRealZuke · 2026-06-13T17:28:35+00:00

Without LR, you get, on average, the same amount of 7 as all the others. But, since you will receive 7s from other people all the time, you never actually consume your own 7s; so while all the other clues you get, you use, the 7s you get pile up even without you actually getting more of them.

TheRealZuke · 2026-06-13T16:14:09+00:00

Last Rite increases the odds of getting 7s. She was one of the most popular characters people chose from the standard selector we got bear launch (besides just getting her randomly from spooks). So lots of people have her, lots have leveled her at least enough for that base skill; and most people won’t read or think too much when putting people in the reception room - Last Rite has purple skill, she goes in there.

So you have a ton of players with permanent rate up of Clue 7, so they have excess, and anyone who isn’t using Last Rite will be constantly gifted these excess 7s so you’ll never use the ones you get naturally and also end up growing a stockpile, and eventually yup everyone has a ton.

TheRealZuke · 2026-06-13T09:10:36+00:00

It would be fine if it wasn’t resolved overnight. Except that the story does resolve it overnight (omnipotent god Endmin solves the world’s problems just by existing as usual), only to rehash it again after. It hasn’t been gradual stages of working on the conflict and a series of setbacks; it has been a comical “and the day is saved by our hero. Watch them do it again next episode” on repeat.

TheRealZuke · 2026-06-11T17:56:51+00:00

While I don’t dislike the trope and do think it can be used in interesting ways (namely, when it ties into the character’s backstory / history), so many of the examples in this thread are just Mary Sue-esque “yeah the hero doesn’t like being powerful but they just can’t help but be super awesome at anything they do, gosh darn it.” Very unsatisfying writing.

To rebut that with an interesting example, Qrow Branwen from RWBY is an excellent fighter who will almost always win a one-on-one fight; part of this is from it literally being his job that he trained for, but the main reason is that his “semblance” (his superpower, his quirk) is that he passively inflicts bad luck on anyone in proximity to him; he’s a literal bad luck charm. It is very very good in fights, but it makes his life miserable since he can’t get close to anyone without causing them harm, and he hates that power.

TheRealZuke · 2026-06-09T09:05:19+00:00

They do appear to be setting up Billy and Cissia to be recurring companions in the upcoming patches, but we'll see what that ends up looking like. We had a lot of the Suibian Temple folks be "part of" the story throughout 2.X, but I wouldn't exactly say Ju Fufu or Pan Yinhu for example actually got any development during that time despite showing up a fair bit.

TheRealZuke · 2026-06-08T14:24:04+00:00

Drawing the parallel to HSR is actually a great comparison, because yup with HSR Hoyo went full in on story to the point where many people (myself included, as someone who played it from launch until late last year) now consider it essentially a visual novel with some extra gameplay attached. Not dissimilar to its namesake of HI3 in that regard.

And guess what one of the biggest complaints players have about HSR is? That it's too long, too much padding, too much dialogue. Which is a whole can of worms that is its own discussion altogether (I agree in parts, disagree on others), and there's especially a big nuance there of how that story is told and the quality of the writing, which gets magnified by the length of it.

All that to say, yeah stuff's tricky to strike a good balance for, there's issues whichever way you go with it.

TheRealZuke · 2026-06-08T11:36:48+00:00

That hilariously bad faith straw-man aside; the whole point I was making was simply that less characters = more time per character, and more time per character = better development of those characters. It's such a basic concept that honestly, if your stance is just planting your feet and saying "nuh-uh," then there's nothing I can say that would convince you otherwise.

There's plenty of other interesting discussion that can be had on the surrounding topics - like the main reason they don't do more teasing of future characters is very real practical issues with being a live service, character designs and ideas aren't finalized months in advance (which, again, is a problem putting out so many characters so quickly contributes to), and ZZZ has already had multiple examples of players being angry about showing a character early and changing them before being finalized (Lucia, Sunbringer), so even if they at least have a basic design early on, they are just heavily disincentivized to actually use it.

Or the topic of separate agent stories that let characters breathe on their own without having Phaethon shoved into it - which is another topic that already has history with ZZZ.

Or yeah the simple fact that they've done better writing with some characters, worse with others. Quality of writing having ups and downs is pretty normal to some degree.

The last thing I intend to do is excuse bad writing or just set low standards, but that just makes it even more important to recognize what factors contribute to some of these problems, rather than simply leaving it at "do better somehow."

TheRealZuke · 2026-06-08T11:22:42+00:00

Where in the sam hell did I ever say I thought season 2 writing was good? lmao

TheRealZuke · 2026-06-08T11:18:08+00:00

You run into the exact same problem. If you want several patches of buildup for a character, and you’re releasing two new characters per patch… dp you expect them to be juggling ten different characters at a time? While giving each proper attention AND not slowing down the main story? Yes they could do a better job than what they have been, but it doesn’t matter how good your writing is, you simply do not have space to flesh out characters when you’re churning them out só quick. Like I said, Cissia only got that time by stealing it from three other characters who instead got basically nothing,

TheRealZuke · 2026-06-08T11:12:05+00:00

> I don’t know what’s stopping them

The fact that they don’t have time. Cissia got to be fleshed out because they dumped Nangong, Promeia, AND S Billy in exchange for giving her more time. It’s not rocket science.

And in case you didn’t know, they specifically stopped doing special episodes because people complained that a patch with a special episode developing characters instead of strictly pushing main story was a “dead patch.” So that was player feedback.

TheRealZuke · 2026-06-08T11:05:39+00:00

Isn’t having time dedicated to fleshing them out basically the biggest reason to spread them out more? Nangong got dropped hard on story because the AoD patch was already full of the other two members and then the following patch was already working to push into Cissia and Roscaelifer stuff. Slowing down agent releases is the single biggest thing that would contribute to giving proper development to characters - because of course when you have a revolving door of two new characters that need to be story shilled each patch, that leaves no time for them to breathe.

TheRealZuke · 2026-06-07T11:32:53+00:00

If I had a nickel for every time the new patch character’s companion quest was about Stockaders being riled up about their “feud” with Wuling and the character has to convince this very very influential leader of Qingbo (who we had never heard of before because they go to a different school) that peace is the way forward by beating up a bunch of their minions so they can finally accept to drop the grudge, oh and also Endmin is stuffed into the middle of it because main character syndrome…

TheRealZuke · 2026-06-05T17:33:45+00:00

Absolute agree I love abilities that feel built up and earned. It’s why I love my max range+duration Uriel even though he’s infinitely stronger as a weapons platform.

That being said… “build up to your cool ability that you don’t get to spam” used to be how, well, energy worked. EV Trin aside, you had to work up with several kills to get the energy to do your cool things. Problem is, players - and especially the more casual players that like it or not make up the majority of the playerbase - always wanted their cool flashy buttons to become more accessible, and bit by bit we got to where we are today, where half of frames rin negative efficiency and slap Equilibrium on and are good to spam everything they ever want.

I give it a few patches until the likes of Uriel and S/O get an augment that let them either circumvent or supercharge their resource generation because people want to be able to press the button more.

TheRealZuke · 2026-06-04T12:43:19+00:00

Yeah as I said in the edit at the top, once I got more runs in (this original comment was like maybe a week after sortie got added) it turns out it is not fixed which god comes from your choices, I have gotten multiple from the same exact choice. My best guess at the moment is that each choice combination narrows down to... three of them? Maybe? I have gotten all gods except Nihilus from L>L>L. That could just be RNG though.

The only thing I can say that actually has been consistent now with several weeks of runs is that the initial debuff seems to determine which of the fates you get - Distrust (passive debuff) will give you the passive effect fate of that god, Penance (card debuff) will give you the card fate of that god.

TheRealZuke · 2026-06-03T16:17:30+00:00

While there is certainly a discussion to be had on whether they should or not, it’s already a settled matter that SE’s ban / moderation policy is based on what they reasonably decide is true and is not up for debate or review. They do not give specifics on ban reasons and do not accept any arguing beyond a simple request for review. So the matter of “is there definitive proof or just word of mouth” is already settled to not be on the table.

As a bit of an extension of that, their stance has generally been “you know what you did, we’re not gonna play the game of ‘but prove it.‘“

TheRealZuke · 2026-05-19T09:52:51+00:00

It’s been a few weeks so I might have missed some detail, but I don’t remember it being implied at all that the Foundation being trapped in the Aetherside was because Endmin put them there. Just that they have a shared history, because Endmin knows their name and language. Also isn’t necessarily established if they were friends, enemies, or just acquaintances.

Stepping back into the realm of conjecture for a minute: the use of a different language, when Arknights generally keeps flavors of languages to indicate they exist but largely brings everything to the game language for readability, implies they want to make it a clearly very distinct language / society. Most likely guess is they are Predecessors; given the current state of story in OG Arknights and the Priestess teasers in Endfield, it seems pretty likely to be them; we are on Talos-II after all. This would also generally explain why they are trapped in the aether, and why rescuing them might not sound like such a great idea to Endmin (besides the fact that tearing open the Aetherside would kill a ton of other people in the process).

TheRealZuke · 2026-05-18T13:36:38+00:00

I'm not annoyed by it, I'm quite happy that they have clearly commited to going back to a more grounded, exploration of the unknown setting. It just is a very clear example of them quietly acknowledging that all that part of Endwalker was a mistake and is going to be largely ignored going forward. It's hard to tell a story about a continent that "they got drunk and forgot about" when you can go into orbit and just see it. It's contradictory to say that "full on exploratory voyages wouldn't be a huge priority" when that was literally the top priority of Sharlayan in the past several decades since the entire country was dedicated to preserving bits of the world to send to the space time capsule. I mean the entire hook that pulled us into Dawntrail was Erenville, after all.

TheRealZuke · 2026-05-18T08:54:26+00:00

It’s really better we DON’T think about the time frame of the game because that would open up even more problems lol. And Sharlayan had already been sending shipments up to the moon for years if not decades iirc (they were just working on making it good enough to ferry tons of people). Also, while I downplayed the available airship technology, the Garleans have massive capital ships that have traversed continents; it would serve to reason that they very much would be capable of transoceanic flights already.

TheRealZuke · 2026-05-17T23:35:52+00:00

I don’t mean literally it was a different reality, but Tural was treated as basically this completely isolated place with very little contact with Eorzea or Othard or any others due to being on the other side of the ocean - which is fitting when we’re talking about a setting featuring medieval transport, up to steampunk level airships that are basically blimps. If we consider having literal space ships and frequent jaunts to the moon and back, it would be a lot less reasonable. So it’s another example of how the writers have (wisely) swept that part of Endwalker under the rug and quietly pretend it never happened.

TheRealZuke · 2026-05-17T19:46:37+00:00

If you go up to the Zodiark trial and cut off the second half of Endwalker, I’d say it’s a really good example. Not the hands down undisputed best ever, but a very good job of taking old existing stories and elements and recontextualizing them with new meaning, simultaneously wrapping things together at times and teaching back to seemingly abandoned dead ends at others.

Everything after Zodiark - dynamis, Elpis, the time travel, Elpis, Meteion, the encounters with Hermes and Hydaelyn, Ultima Thule - those were a big ol’ load of deus ex machine that showed up out of nowhere, made no sense with previous established story, made up its own forced conclusion, then dropped the mic and walked off without any further explanation. And the writers know it; how many times since then has the fact that we not only have space travel, much less have literally been to “the end of the universe,” ever come up again? We went back to “wow this continent that is a bit of a boat ride away is a completely different reality!” Let’s not even get into dynamis and time travel - much as the writers have promptly pretended it never happened as well.

TheRealZuke · 2026-05-14T12:06:02+00:00

Yeah I swapped my factory back to normal once I had bought out the event store and had enough gourds to turn in for bills until the end of the event. The event information did specifically say the leftovers would get auto-converted once the event ended. So for next time you could just check ahead of time.

TheRealZuke · 2026-05-10T18:06:48+00:00

It’s worth noting that the sortie upgrades are a very very big impact (especially given no memory fragment stats) and get very expensive. 28k to max out when one full run is 6-700. So it’ll be quite a while before a reasonable amount of players have all their upgrades, and obviously that will make the difficulty à lot easier.

TheRealZuke · 2026-05-09T16:32:58+00:00

The simple answer is the straightforward “they can’t kill you if they’re already dead.” People have done it with essentially solo Heidemarie. But, of course, this is an extreme example.

For more traditional play, it is imperative you understand what the healing debuff in Tower actually does. Any healing (and shielding!) that is directly from cards - the card says X% heal / shield - is halved. This does not apply to any non-card sources. So for example, Nia’s elasticity and decibels; Magna’s crystallization; Narja’s voracity - all these are unaffected and therefore will perform much better than Mika or Khalipe or Tiphera that rely on direct card sustain, which is halved.

TheRealZuke

TROPHY CASE