Mommy Kafka Gave Me A Gambling Addiction

Better to have, and not need, than to need, and not have.

• Franz Kafka

Non-clickbait title: Looking At Honkai: Star Rail's Gacha Mechanics.

I've probably spent around $400 AUD on a slot machine to collect hot anime waifus/husbandos in Honkai: Star Rail (HSR) since it's release in April of this year.

Do I regret this? No, I've spent more than that on worse things. ^{(1) (1)} To expand on this, I at least get enjoyment from playing HSR, whereas this font almost objectively makes this website worse by bloating it with unnecessary cruft.

Before HSR, I genuinely could not see the appeal in gambling (I actually still don't, but we'll get to that), and while some gacha games looked a little interesting to me, the what looked like gambling to me - gacha mechanics was an instant turn off.

So what made me start playing HSR?

Her.

Her name's Kafka.

She's my mum now.

So anyway, after being hooked in by my new mum, as it turns out, the game is actually pretty fun.

It's an enjoyable space comedy ^{(2) (2)} The game is honestly pretty funny, it's written very well. game with kinda shallow JRPG turn based combat. The characters are all entertaining and pretty likeable, but I guess that's what you need if you want people to pull our their credit cards. Special highlight on their English dubs, all the EN voice actors and their performances are honestly great (especially Kafka), I never had any urge to switch dubs.

But we're not here to talk about that, we're here to talk about gambling.

I linked a Wikipedia page to gacha games when I last mentioned it in this post, but since you most certainly didn't read it, I'll explain it for you myself.

"Gacha" is a term derived from Japanese capsule-toy vending machines where you insert coins and receive a random toy in return. In the context of video games, "gacha" refers to a mechanic that involves players spending either in-game currency or real money to receive a random reward.

The primary characteristic of a gacha game is the random chance to obtain characters, items, or other rewards. Just like capsule-toy machines, you don't know what you'll get until you "pull" or "roll."

This inherently makes gacha games pay-to-win since some characters and items are just better than others, but HSR isn't PvP so it doesn't really matter (I have no idea why people play PvP gachas, seems like a horrible idea to me).

On that, let's look back at HSR. You can pull for characters or "light cones". I'm going to ignore light cones because I don't pull for them, so we'll only be looking at characters.

Interlude

Ok, I wrote what's above like 10 minutes ago and I've just been staring at this document, not knowing what to write ever since. This is more complicated to explain than I thought it would be, if you're unfamiliar with gacha - get ready for a ride.

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You can pull (called "warps" in HSR) for characters on two "banners" or "events":

• The standard permanent warp event, which you use "Star Rail Passes" for.
• The limited-time availability character warp event, which you use "Star Rail Special Passes" for. These run for a limited time (normally 20 days) but give boosted rates on the specified characters in the banner. Here's the banner for Kafka, which started over a week ago.

I'll only be talking about the character event warp to simplify things, because that's the one you normally pull for and you can just apply the same concepts to the standard warp by ignoring boosted character rates.

So one pull is one "Star Rail Special Pass", which you can sometimes get in-game (rarely), but the easiest way is to purchase them with 160 "Stellar Jades".

You can also get jades in-game, but that takes a while to accumulate, so you can purchase "Oneric Shards" with real world money from the store to then convert into jades (these are a 1 to 1 conversion).

So how much do shards cost? Well… it's complicated.

You can only buy a set number of shards and they don't scale linearly with cost. So 60 shards is $1.99 (30 shards per dollar), but 300 shards is $7.99 (37 shards per dollar). The most you can buy is 6480 shards for $149.99 (43 shards per dollar).

BUT WAIT, that's still not including the bonus top ups.

For your first purchase on each set of shards you get double the amount, with the bonus halving each purchase.

So the first time you spend $1.99, you get 120 shards (60 bonus + 60 for 60 shards per dollar), then 90 (30 bonus + 60 for 45 shards per dollar) the next time, then 75 (15 bonus + 60 for 38 shards per dollar).

This is a pretty standard method used in the gaming industry to obfuscate how much money your actually spending and make it harder to determine how much things actually cost. Fortnite is another popular game that employs similar "store mechanics".

But Fortnite doesn't have gambling. ^{(3) (3)} I think? Haven't looked at it in a while, but I'm pretty sure the rotating store isn't gambling, just a predatory FOMO machine.

Ok, let's go into the drop rates for each pull. In HSR you can either get 4-star or 5-star characters, with the latter being rarer and stronger in-game.

The base rate for a 4-star character is 5.1% ^{(4) (4)} These numbers are given to you by the game... because of gambling regulations. this increases to 13% for characters on the banner.

The base rate for a 5-star character is 0.6% this increases to 1.6% for the character on the banner (there's only one five-star on the banner along with three 4-star characters).

These are incredibly low odds. To counteract this, there's the "pity" system.

Within 10 pulls, at least one 4-star or above character is guaranteed. The chance of a 4-star is 99.44% and the chance of a 5-star is 0.6%.

Within 90 pulls, at least one 5-star is guaranteed.

On the character event banner, the first time you pull a 5-star there is a 50% chance that 5-star will be the promotional character (Kafka in our case). If you lose the 50/50 (don't get Kafka), the next 5-star is guaranteed to be the promotional character.

Alright, I think that's all.

To be clear, it is possible to play the game without spending any money, you won't be getting as many 5-stars because you won't be able to get the rail passes and jades needed to reach pity before a limited banner ends, meaning you'll have to skip a few, but it is possible.

Either way, the game (and genre as a whole) is still incredibly predatory. But I think even with the gambling, the fact that I'm guaranteed to get what I want (eventually) is what is letting my conscious continue to play it and spend money on it.

I am not a big risk taker, and the idea of losing money - even for the chance of gaining more, is just not a thing that appeals to me.

I think the fact that I know I'm never going to see that money back ever again helps. I'm a lot more careless with my money when it comes to entertainment ^{(5) (5)} See my Steam library with over 1500 games and a less than 40% have-played rate. than monetary investments (not that this is a good thing).

With each character I want in HSR, I approach it by just planning for the worst case scenario every time, and determining if my money is worth that.

The promotional 5-star is guaranteed every 90 pulls if I win the 50/50 otherwise the 5-star is guaranteed in 180 pulls. So I just assume it takes 180 pulls to get a 5-star.

Ignoring any jades I've gotten from playing the game, 6480 jades (converted from shards) cost $150 for 43 jades per dollar (ignoring the bonus top ups because those will go away eventually).

Each pull is 160 jades, so a 5-star costs 28,800 jades which is $670.

So, a 5-star costs $670? No, obviously that is WAY too much and actually pretty unfair on the game to say. I have eight 5-stars from pulls and I only spent $400.

You do actually get a lot of currency in-game to supplement spending real money, ^{(6) (6)} Depending on how long you wait between each banner. So far I've only been skipping every other banner but since I got Kafka, I'm not really interested in any other characters, so I'll probably be skipping more in the future. so I'd half that number to each 5-star costing $335 in the worst case.

So here's the question we've all been waiting for. Is Kafka worth $335?

Yes.

Epilogue

I also want to mention how these games are absolute cash cows. I'm honestly probably only a slightly-above average spender on the game. I skip banners. I don't pull for light cones. I do my dailies.

There's a common term for a very small proportion of players who spend an unusually large amount of money on gacha pulls, essentially subsidising the game for other players who spend smaller amounts of money, or the free-to-play players that spend no money at all. They're often colloquially referred to as "whales".

These are people who spend thousands on the game, and honestly probably actually do have a gambling addition. But by many estimates normally make up around 80-90% of the game's revenue.

Now look at this Reddit post that shows that HSR made $220,817,800 USD last July in China.

A SINGLE MONTH. IN JUST CHINA.

WHAT THE FUCK.