Trainwreck: Punishing Gray Raven
On December 5th, the mobile game Punishing Gray Raven, a spectacle fighter gacha mobile game developed by Kuro Games released their Open Beta test to the public after 3 years in development. There was 3 Closed beta test prior to the open beta and the reception for all 3 test was lukewarm at best. However, unlike VGAME, the developers over at Kuro Games keeps an eye to all the feedback and each test got better and better. They also constantly reported to the players on the development of the game and acted extremely fast on feedback. Despite the game still being a bit rough on the last CBT, players were all hyped for the OBT for a lot of us believed that the issues we had will definitely be addressed in OBT. A livestream was held a day before the OBT and it addressed a lot of issues players had with the game and also reached the top charts on bilibili’s livestream ranking. The livestream also revealed an event in which if the server crashed or had login issues during the launch period (December 5th — 11th) of the game, they will send out a free costume and also a profile picture in-game but if the game doesn’t have any crashes or login issues, we will get a victory profile picture instead.
The game opened it doors officially on December 5th, 10.00AM GMT+8 and player flooded the servers. To nobody’s surprise, the game only had server loading issues, since if you are that confident in your server that you make an event based on it, your server must be pretty good. People who were playing the game was praising it, the combat felt great, the camera was great and the graphics are pretty good. We are looking at a real contender to Honkai Impact 3 here, everyone said. Even better, they gave out 10k black cards (gems) to everyone! One 10 pull is 2500 black cards, so that’s 40 pulls!! The first guaranteed S only need 40 pulls, so everyone rejoiced. However, disaster struck after a few hours of the game being up. The server shutdown immediately.
Keyword here, it was shutdown immediately, not crashed, it was shutdown for maintenance by the developers. Why? I too was wondering. Shortly after, their official bilibili account made a post saying that the 10k black cards was a mistake! What?! It was a mistake?! It was supposed to be 1000 black cards not 10k black cards. Players was furious, because now they are losing significantly in progress behind the players that claimed the 10k black cards early enough. People were review bombing on bilibili, how could make such a mistake. It felt like it was a slap in the face to players who entered the game a little bit late, because now they get 1000 black cards as opposed to 10k the others are having. I bet even the developers didn’t see this coming, they panicked, panicked hard. They didn’t know how to compensate the players that didn’t receive the 10k black cards. Many will say, duh? Just revert the players who got the 10k black cards, is that simple. However, the issue wasn’t fixed immediately, so there is a portion of players who already spent the 10k black cards on gacha. Kuro games can’t do anything about it and due to their lack of technical ability, they couldn’t track down who received the 10k black cards and who didn’t. They went silent for a while before posting another statement saying that they will start a livestream immediately to communicate with the players on a compensation. https://www.bilibili.com/video/av78149962 the livestream.
From the livestream, we know that because it was shutdown immediately, some players experienced a progression reset, which pissed off even more players. Since it was a discussion with the players, a player sent the line “不把玩家当人看？” Which roughly translates to “You guys don’t see players as human beings?”, they responded with “就是把你们当人看才直播的啊” which quickly became a running joke within the mobile gaming community. The meaning behind the response is definitely with good intention, just in chinese, the line is a bit more…sensitive you can say, putting it out of context can have drastically different meaning. In the end, their compensation will be a free S selector, a custom costume to all players who registered in-game before 1PM GMT +8 (players who received the 10k black cards won’t get this costume) and the developers promise to punish all of the players who received the 10k black cards. I think we all can see the problem with this compensation, but just in-case you don’t, I will tell you why this compensation is extremely retarded.
Free S selector? Hell yah, that’s amazing! Everyone gets free S?! Even the 10k black cards receivers. Which means they are now even further ahead in progression compared to others. This obviously will piss some people off, since the only difference between you and another player is that he got lucky and got more time than you, not because he is better or richer than you. The custom costume and the punishment to players who received the 10k black cards are the worst. First of all, the costume is only sent to players who registered in-game before 1PM GMT +8, so, if you had a job, school even, didn’t have time to play the game on launch hour, you won’t get the skin. You can see why people are mad about this, I’m not getting a skin just because I was being a good person and working?!! Moreover, this skin is exclusive, you can’t buy this. Imagine 2 years down the road, you tell your friends that you didn’t get this exclusive skin because you were being a good person and working. That will sound awful. The punishment to players who claimed the 10k black cards is the retardest. First of all, is not the players mistake that they claimed the 10k black card, it was your fault Kuro Games. You were the one who sent it out, we just claimed it, thinking it was a gift. I’m getting punished for taking a fucking gift the developers sent? You on drugs? I already lost the ability to get a free exclusive skin and now you want to punish me for it? There are also players who reported to Kuro Games that they received 10k black cards and asked if it was a mistake, those players who surrender themselves are also getting punished. The punishment is that they will take back the 10k black card from your account, if you have spent it, it will be negative 10k black cards. Emailing them your account info will speed up the process and they appreciate it, but you still fucking get 10k black cards deducted from your account, seriously? This is just so retarded.
With this incident, people started making rumours about the game and finding out how shady kuro games is. A few rumours include a glitch where you can use the S selector multiple times, datamined content from the servers and also kuro games modified their terms and condition after the incident. They came out saying that these are false but the damage had already been done. The terms and condition issue is a bit complicated and I didn’t get a chance to see why it was an issue, so I apologize for not being able to go more in depth on the terms and conditions.
However, the was 1 rumour that they didn’t issue, which is with the rates within the gacha. This has to start with a streamer named 卡特亚, a popular bilibili streamer/content creator, he did a livestream of pulling all the characters to SSS+ (highest rarity level) and how much was spent. People notice that he keeps getting the guaranteed only and S almost never appears on normal pulls. This got people thinking, thinking that the rates are fucked. Someone also calculated that it actually requires 68 pulls to accumulate the rates and get the S and not 60 pulls. Unless, you count the guaranteed as part of the rate…people got extremely mad. Counting the guaranteed pull within your rates is an extremely scummy way to do gacha and universally hated by all gacha players. People were bombing almost every post by Kuro games official bilibili account and weibo account, asking if the rates were true or not that it counts guaranteed. They didn’t respond, until the second character gacha banner came. But before I talk about that, I want to go off to two tangents.
During all of this, people start realising that the game is a buggy mess. Characters body will disappear at the victory screen, co-op straight up didn’t work at launch day, you will just go into an infinite loading screen. The targeting system for the game is also quite buggy, it will switch around 2 enemies constantly when a target dies in the middle of them and lock onto the wrong enemies.
People also started insulting and comment bombing Gray raven creators for playing a shitty game despite never playing the game at all. Shows that people simply have too much time on their hands and love to see the world burn.
Okay back to the rates. On december 14th, the developers announced it’s second banner. Unlike a normal gacha, which is simply a new banner with the same rates, kuro games decide to up their game, releasing a truly game changing gacha system. In this banner, there will be 2 seperate gacha to let you pull on the same rate-up character. Advent and Fate gacha. Advent is your standard rate up gacha, 60 pulls guaranteed, 0.5% chance per pull to get the rate up character. The total chance of getting the rate-up character is 1.9% = 0.5% +60 guaranteed rates. The Fate gacha will be 80–100 pulls guaranteed, 1.5% chance per pull to get the rate up character. The total chance of getting the rate-up character is 1.9% = 1.5% + 80–100 guaranteed rates. They straight up admitted the rates are indeed as the rumours suggest, they are counting the guaranteed into the 1.9%! What in the actual fuck. They didn’t apologize, they didn’t make any excuses, they literally just admit that “Yah our rates are fucked”. The Fate gacha is straight up a joke to begin with, 80–100 guarnteed what the fuck, you can get 90, 80 or even 82 guarnteed. That is way too much and no whales or normal players will even dare to touch that unless they are so confident in their self that they think they can get it in 1 pull (I know honkai does 100, but I’m not saying that’s okay). A handful of players are currently in the discussion of sueing Kuro games for lying about the rates, asking for a refund. The case isn’t officially opened yet and the chance of them winning isn’t all that high in my opinion, since technically they didn’t lie about the rates, they never mention it didn’t count the guaranteed after all, but I’m not a lawyer so maybe the players can win.
That concludes the drama surrounding the game for now. I know that I didn’t cover much about the game’s overall gameplay because this isn’t to let you learn about the game, but to let you know about the game’s management team’s amazing skills. In all seriousness, I really hope kuro games can resolve these issues as soon as possible because the game itself is amazing, but the management team really need to get their shit together. I know Kuro Games does all of the management and publishing internally because they didn’t want to pass on their product to someone else and let them have the deciding factor for the game, which I admire and love but at this rate, I might even be more happy if they gave it to another company to handle their management.