u/ValyrianE

The main problems I see are:

• Companies cannot rely on money flowing through the payment processor for the duration of that banner because people are buying premium currency long before the actual banner happens, and people do not spend every single premium currency they buy during a banner. People subscribed and saving for months before a banner they like happens (ie people waiting 6 months to a year for a male character to be added), people buying top ups during a spending event that gives a furbo pet and sitting on it till a banner they like happens, people having leftover currency from when they last bought and pulled on a banner months ago, etc.
• Not all premium currency that is bought is equal. You get a lot more primogems per dollar spent when buying a subscription, vs a bundle, vs a first time 2x bonus top up, vs a 2nd time purchase of a pack. And the packs each give slightly different amounts of currency per buck spent.
• The premium pull currency that was bought with real money is being mixed in with the currency people obtain from playing through the content and from doing dailies, livestream redeem codes, etc. Are the companies using a LIFO or FIFO system to decide whether the paid primogems or the free ones are consumed first when pulling? And with with these games having millions of accounts, it would be a server storage nightmare to individually track the source of every primogem obtained per account.

They would very definitely have to have to know this somehow when talking to other companies for collab opportunities.

EDIT: it seems people are not understanding the question.

Let's say someone creates an account and starts playing, and is amassing stellar jades. After 2 months of play, that person decides to subscribe to the game ($5 supply pass + $10 monthly battle pass). The $5 pass gives 3,000 in premium currency for $5. That means every jade/oneric shard acquired from that battle pass is worth $0.0016. The $10 battle pass gives 680 jades, each jade bought for $0.0147, which effectively costs 9.1x more than jades purchased from the $5 express supply pass. Then a month later, a spending event happen. The player knows from leaks that there is a character in the following month that they will want to pull and vertically invest in, so they decide to spend now to get the goodies like a furbo pet. So they spend $200 to get all of the 2x bonus top ups. But each top up pack actually gives a slightly different amount of jades per dollar spent. 1 jade purchased from the $1 pack is worth $0.0083. 1 jade from the $30 pack was purchased for $0.007575. Etc.

Then the next month arrives, and a banner comes that that player finally decides to spend on again. How exactly is this player's money spent calculated? Let's say the player had obtained:

• 16,000 jades for free from playing the game.
• 6,000 stellar jades each worth $0.0016 from 2 months of $5 express supply pass
• 1,360 jades each jades worth $0.0147. from the 2 patches of $10 battle pass
• 120 jades each worth $0.00833 from the $1 first time 2x bonus top up pack
• 600 jades each worth $0.008317 from the $5 first time 2x bonus top up pack
• 1,960 jades each worth $0.007648 from the $15 first time 2x bonus top up pack
• 3,960 jades each worth $0.007573 from the $30 first time 2x bonus top up pack
• 6,560 jades each worth $0.007620 from the $50 first time 2x bonus top up pack
• 12,960 jades each worth $0.007715 from the $100 first time 2x bonus top up pack

So he has 49,520 jades, but over 32% of those jades were purchased for different amounts of money. When that player spends on a banner, how is that spending calculated? Are the free jades consumed/counted first? Once the free jades have been consumed or counted, does it then begin counting the cheapest jades he purchased? Ascending to the most expensive? So if he spends 25,040 jades pulling on a character banner, do the servers attribute that that player has spent $43.648 on that character by consuming his jades in order of ascending expense? So even though the player has spent

What about if enough time passes, and the player accumulates tens of thousands of more jades for free before pulling again. When he pulls on a banner, is the server still consuming his free jades? So if he finishes pulling without having ever finished consuming all of his free jades, then were his bought for jades never counted, and thus he does not add to the revenue total for that banner, even though he spent $200+ many months ago?

What about a different player who only pulls when a new male character comes out every 6 to 9 months and thus never needs to spend. When he pulls on a banner, how is he being factored in? Does he contribute $0 to the revenue stat? If he does not show up in the monetary stat, then in internal meetings, are people having to bring up at least two stats per each character? Actual money spent, and total pulls (regardless of money spent)? So in internal discussions, when two banners are brought up, is someone going to say "character X had this many pulls, but since he was male and it was 6 months since the last one, he only actually had this much money spent on him?"

On HSR and ZZZ subreddits, there was fierce negativity towards the end of the betas for Ashveil and Banyue as they started off overpowered and then got nerfed. Even though they are currently perfectly okay characters, the perception remains that they are weak and should be skipped.

World of Warcraft experienced this with its expansion classes. The Death Knight launched as extremely overpowered, and then received multiple nerfs to bring it in line with the other classes, but the community perceived it as a weak class. So Blizzard did it the other way around with their next class the Monk, which launched weak but then got several rounds of buffs to bring it in line with the other classes, but was perceived by the community as being overpowered and the thing you should play even though it wasn't actually much better than the other classes.

Granblue Fantasy's co-op raids but with HSR's 3D presentation might be neat, at least to check out once. You might be imagining "does each player control one character in a four man party and wait for their turn?". Rest assured that no, that is not how it works in GBF. Every player still controls their own party (for all intents and purposes, you can't see the other player parties, just like how in currency wars the off field characters are not seen). Everyone is still attacking the boss on their own turn in real time, lowering its HP and causing HP triggers to activate. So if you are idling, trying to figure out what to do next, and the other players lower the boss below 50%, then the next time you input a move, the boss will do their 50% HP trigger stuff or whatever. Some people need to do different things like kill different adds simultaneously, or coordinate to make sure that the boss doesn't go into the next phase early. That tight coordination might have to be reserved for a hard mode that only premades would tackle rather than randomly matched up players. Would probably give negligible rewards like Anomaly Arbitration to prevent people from getting mad about it.

It would be great however if there was some way to directly interact with and aid other players. I thought it was pretty fun playing Robin in this new co-op card game event, requesting my partner's dice to upgrade them and then hand him better dies or the ones he needs to fulfill his win condition. Not quite sure how being able to directly aid other players in battle like that would work. Being able to target other player's characters might be a can of worms. If there were 3 or 4 players, that's a total of 12 to 16+ different targets to think about when considering who to heal or buff, which might be a little nutty. Unless you just picked whole parties to buff or apply a shield to or something.