That's because as much drought Genshin has, it has never have so empty in events as HSR nowadays.
Its so empty I don't feel playing it at all except for Endgame & CW/DU Mondays (and thats like 20-40 minutes max).
It got even worse because the last 2 "events" (mind you for the total of three events in the whole patch) besides the useless multiplier ones are, basically, having no gameplay. One is just long auto session (bar one out of 7 stages), while another one is just extra rewards for....spending stamina.
Events don't make money, characters do. HSR fell victim of at this point many months long circlejerk of "Wait for 4.0, don't pull anyone no matter what". People have finished off their premier 3.x team with Cyrene and that was the last time they were willing to spend in this cycle.
Honestly I think you're even selling things a little short; After how Therta has aged, it's closer to "Wait for 4.2/anniversary". We're in the era of clear favorites and carefully crafted optimal full teams now.
Like, there are absolutely ways to make that sort of style WORK, but doing so would require them to change the gacha system on a fundamental level and that's extremely unlikely. (Although, to be fair, HSR did kinda do it before)
Hoyo in general seems extremely averse to admitting that some 5*s have less value than others, and/or that reruns are 90% of the time terrible ideas to pull on unless the character is really strong OR you really like the character.
Amusingly, HSR is probably one of the better of the three main Hoyo games at admitting that, thanks to the customizable 50/50 pool, the character buffs, and the token shop, and yet the game is powercreeping (and HP creeping) so fast that it's too little too late. Seele/Blade/Fu Xuan choices are better than the base 50/50s but not so much that losing to them doesn't feel just as bad (especially with how much of a madman you have to be to optimize Seele), the first round of character buffs made them usable but didn't increase their pull value relative to the rest of the game so it didn't really help matters (even for the one character whose buffs were excellent; She was already necessary for that team comp), and I still can't get over how they made a big deal about adding Topaz to the token shop when she's the third worst option to get from it and she STILL would have been if she was added at its launch!
It's still only worth pulling on the new stuff, and only the SPECIFIC new stuff, at that.
Especially with how power creep and team design has gone it has gone from "pulling for strong units" to "pull for flagship" to "save until you can pull for full battleship". A lot of players are waiting until it becomes clearer which battleship is going to be the pushed one before spending I think.
True, and the character they offer is just suck or most people already have it (except Dahlia but even then its mostly for servicing Break which has questionable future anyways).
Well if u miss two units of that break team getting dahlia is literally waste of gems , and not to mention there's a new archytpe they will destroy the game coming out so why bother building anything lol hsr is cooked , just get the flagship team and thats it gg
I'm loving hsr downfall let this be a lesson for the idiot devs power creep kills ur games I like to enjoy the units and I would like to use them in the future. Hsr has the worst power creep its insane 4.0 will be hitting millions of dmg while achron barely does a million and that's with her e2 and lc
Its not really a downfall, when the game just had rerun banners this month. It will be back in top5 next month and the devs wont learn their lesson. Gacha gamers are too stupid anyways and will whale even if game is powercreep central
Significant powercreep is inevitable, some games reach that stage sooner than others, but all of them do eventually. Novelty just wears off, people can't just indefinitely remain excited for new characters, at some point you will have to use crude methods to make them desirable. And HSR is vulnerable to that more than most, since combat is all there is to a character, nothing else matters, not how they feel to control, not how they zoom around the map, nothing.
"Significant power is inevitable" tell that to fgo. For all the blame the shit gacha gets they actually balance even one star units when they fall off.
FGO also has a lot of possible interactions with classes, traits, alignments, buffs/debuffs, NP type etc so they have a much wider space to develop in and avoid making an explicit 'X but better'.
Let's be real, they have favorites. Emiya is the first servant with 5 buffs but is still bad when herc just needed his guts buff and he's set for the end of existence
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u/Stormer2345 Genshin, R1999, HSR Feb 01 '26
Tbf, look at the banners rn.