FWIW I think 80% of face value deals mostly stopped since Covid 
. Searching slickdeals, I see one super outlier walmart deal that was even better (close to 70% of face value, and it must have been up for like 5 minutes cuz i missed it lol), but nothing else in that general tier recently. I pay a fair amount of attention to the availability of these deals, cuz I have a number of subscriptions and like to reduce my costs by snatching gift card deals up.
Deals like the following are more typical now, where you pay full face but get bonus credit at the store selling the card (I actually got one for $15 bonus at Amazon). Itās not bad but not as good a value as the old deals.
If Genshin Impact was targeting customers like patio11 they would not treat an $8000 spender like this. They would have customer service appropriate to their target customer.
Comments have some info about how bad customer support is (when your account gets hacked/stolen, which is the main thing people want help with). The whole subreddit has lots of problematic stuff. I found it because someone posted about getting their account back but the hacker destroyed most of their weapons and artifacts while he had it, and those were not restored.
Oh and Genshin didnāt launch with 2FA. I didnāt even know it had been added ā presumably tens of millions of people donāt know ā but I saw it just now when searching to double check that Genshin doesnāt have 2FA.
Video says Genshin microtransactions do harm. He says people willing to email him and lie about their kid having cancer, to try to get him to buy them stuff due to sympathy, would also swipe a credit card when they shouldnāt spend the money. Also I saw this comment:
I am not gonna lie, I literally 1 hour ago left a Genshin Facebook Community because of harassment and cyberbullying. It was all because someone was making fun of another person for pity building on a banner. 100s of people started mocking them and calling them a gambling addicted clown. After I said, let them do what they want, I suddenly got attacked with insults myself. I enjoy this game so much but the community can be extremely toxic.
Note how the specific thing a person got ganged up on and attacked for was (allegedly) being a victim of the microtransactions system. A lot of people play the game, rationalize their own spending or way of dealing with the gameās monetization, and want to blame the victims not the system when anyone has a hard time with the system.
This kind of attitude comes up with a lot of stuff. There are tons of systems that hurt a small percentage of people, e.g. 2% or 0.03%. The government has tons of systems like this that work moderately OK for most people but screw over some edge cases. And because governments have a lot of citizens, screwing over even one person in a million can create hundreds of victims ā¦ who get no sympathy because their case sounds so weird/outlier/atypical/unlucky/etc. Lots of people find highly negative results so unrealistic that they decide the victim is a liar and it canāt really be that bad since they got an OK result and everyone they know got an OK result.
Some systems screw people over pretty much just by luck, so if you acknowledge a victim got unlucky then youāre also acknowledging that it could happen to you. Rather than face that risk and live with it, many people would rather say the victim must have done something wrong instead of merely getting unlucky.
Asmon interviews a whale who says gacha games like Genshin got him started on way spending too much money on video games. he has spent 12-15k on Lost Ark in the first month. he initially planned not to swipe his credit card. but then he got some bad gambling luck in one of the terrible gambling systems and rage-swiped.
also these games prey on people who expect the system to be more fair and less rigged than it is. they design the game systems to be so awful that itās hard for anyone to believe, take seriously and wrap their heads around. people are too charitable, and too used to halfway-reasonable stuff in our society ā they have too much of an assumption and expectation of good will ā and they are being exploited for it (similar to how criminals and con artists also get away with a lot more stuff because society is so open, trusting, benefit-of-the-doubt giving etc.).
itās hard to make a direct comparison, but these games are way more rigged/unfair than IRL casinos (where āthe house always winsā).
in other words, these games, like criminals, are helping destroy our high-trust society and turn people into wary pessimists and cynics. these games are helping change peopleās sense of life to more of a malevolent universe premise.
Thereās an advantage to mobile games being really bad and having extraordinarily predatory monetization instead of just being a little bad.
The people who know what theyāre talking about and complain make accurate statements.
If the game is really bad, the accurate statements are really negative.
If the game is mildly bad, the accurate statements are mildly bad.
Which is easier to believe if you donāt know a content creator well and see him trash talking a game you have a positive opinion of? That is has some mild flaws? Or that itās god awful?
People are very skeptical of āthis is unbelievably badā type claims. So making the game extra super bad baits critics to make statements that are less persuasive.
Put another way, the worse the game is, the larger the viewpoint gap between the players and the skeptics. So itās harder for them to communicate in positive ways, understand each other, etc. The worse the game is, the less the critics sympathize with or listen to the players. And the less the players listen to the critics who seem so harsh.
Similar dynamics can apply with other things. Iāve found people tend to not believe me and become oppositional when I say something is super bad. They are much more willing to believe it has a few flaws or is moderately bad. But if something is worse than that, I donāt want to lie and say itās better than it is. So by making the thing extra bad, they create more conflict between me and flawed audience members. Theyāre exploiting a flaw in people to assume stuff is probably kinda medium. They make stuff thatās extra super bad, exploitative, evil, predatory, etc., and itās hard to whistle blow it because people are so skeptical that anything would be that bad.
The trick is to make stuff thatās so bad that, when itās described accurately, everyone assumes the speaker is exaggerating.
I wrote this while watching a video criticizing Diablo Immortal, a game where fully gearing a character costs over half a million dollars (on average, since thereās a ton of gambling involved).