I personally did not expect miHoYo to cave. But it seems like they finally did to shut up, what was the equivalent of a child not getting their way in a toy store, where they are throwing a major tantrum while laying on the ground kicking and screaming. And they obviously did not want that to spill over into their 2.2 update livestream and the upcoming online concert. Neither side of the spectrum should be proud of how they conducted themselves. There are proper ways to criticize the sort of silent treatment that miHoYo was engaging in. Some parts of this player community took things a bit too far (including extreme review bombing, dumping on some voice actors yet again, and threatening harm to miHoYo staff; seriously, that BS is way over the line), while miHoYo’s Genshin Impact “leadership”, could’ve avoided all of this by simply reading the tea leaves, and communicating respectfully with their player community (instead of the radio silence over the course of several days). That’s one of the issues; a lack of respect from both sides.
So even though miHoYo is now sending out in-game mail with some rewards (the above is from players on the Asia server), THERE ARE NO WINNERS in what happened. What happened has further tainted my view of this community, while miHoYo have put themselves into an even more distasteful light as a company. I’ve always been a proponent of the “vote with your wallet” tactic when reasonable feedback (like ones I’ve tried to give in their surveys) fails to materialize with any changes. Gacha games are a different beast though since whales/leviathans are what these companies “listen” to. Yes, the over the top complaints ended up resulting in miHoYo giving players what was supposed to be part of a $30 cash shop package (there was also a name card, a blueprint for a teapot decor, and some primogems to go along with this specific glider).
It honestly feels dirtier getting something like this because of what happened. The above also does not even rectify why things got so out of hand to begin with. Why? Because miHoYo not directly acknowledging it (by just sending out a normal sounding message along with a few items to get the community to finally shutup), means the same mistake can happen again in the future. The toxic part of this community will now smugly declare victory and pat themselves on the back while also weaponizing these sort of tactics in the future. And anyone who doesn’t fall into this group think collective, will end up becoming targets for this toxicity. That’s a formula for a “wonderful” community which I personally would not want anything to do with. As a result, I’m down to following just ONE Genshin Impact content creator; taka gg for his guides whenever I can’t figure things out on my own. It’s a single player game (with limited co-op), and I just want to play it in ignorant bliss from now on rather then having to watch this kind of side distraction drama happening (and filling up my YouTube recommendations with crap that ends up having me wasting time on posts like this).
UPDATE: the Genshin Impact community is not monolithic by any stretch. However, there are several groups within this community that have zero brain cells; some of them are review bombing other games not even made by miHoYo, and sending death threats to anyone who aren’t agreeing with their immature/irrational over the top misconduct. This community seriously needs to grow the hell up. It’s embarrassing (and literally sucking the fun out of this game or even being associated with it).
