Oblivion Before Night Devs NERF a Gacha Banner Character While She's STILL on Rate-Up — Compensation Branded a 'Refund Desk', Community Erupts

Ever seen a gacha game nerf a rate-up character while her banner is STILL running? The devs of Oblivion Before Night said 'hold my beer' — and the compensation somehow made it worse.

Oblivion Before Night (忘却前夜) is a Slay the Spire-style roguelike deckbuilder with Lovecraftian themes. It launched last December but is currently only available on HK/TW servers — mainland China release is nowhere in sight. With zero domestic marketing, the game survives purely on word-of-mouth from dedicated fans. In an era where gacha games increasingly go for power creep and casual-friendly metas, Oblivion Before Night actually earned a reputation as genuinely fun on NGA forums, thanks to its solid StS-inspired core gameplay.

And yet, this tiny game that could die any day from low revenue decides to nerf the character currently on rate-up. The character in question is 'Daphneidale' (达芙黛尔), whose core mechanic lets her 'Neck Snap Strike' permanently stack damage whenever it kills an enemy — more trash mobs = higher ceiling. She completely powercrept every existing character on release, sitting uncontested at Tier 0 for any stage with a long mid-section.

The devs' justification? Players in the leaderboard mode were using Daphneidale to clear level 70 stages at level 60 by fishing for perfect openings. They claimed that 'constantly resetting for optimal starts leads to fatigue and makes other playstyles irrelevant.' Translation: she's too strong and it'll hurt sales of future banners.

But wait, it gets spicier. The 'compensation' offers two options: Option A — break your pulled Daphneidale into universal upgrade shards (think FGO's Holy Grail equivalent), with lucky players getting generic constellation items based on how many copies they pulled. Option B — full rollback to before you pulled on the banner, meaning everything you got from the gacha is confiscated, and you get back only the resources spent on leveling Daphneidale herself. Resources invested in her best-in-slot support character 'The Magician,' who is practically useless outside Daphneidale teams? The devs said they're 'still discussing it.'

On top of nerfing the character herself, the devs also deleted the 'Mirror' buff (which copies a card into your deck), arguing it 'makes drawing cards too cheap.' Here's the problem: Mirror was a nice-to-have for Daphneidale but absolutely essential for other specific builds — collateral damage that the devs didn't even bother addressing. The gacha uses the 'MiHoYo triple-layer' system: 30-pull soft pity at 33.3% rate-up chance, 120-pull hard pity, max 3 constellations. Daphneidale's key power spike is at C2, and tons of players dumped everything they had to get there — now it's all down the drain.

The comment section went nuclear. Players dug up the studio's track record — apparently during beta testing, they already nerfed a character with the excuse that 'the main story is supposed to be this hard, you shouldn't survive more than three rounds without dying.' Veterans compared this to World Flipper's infamous 'Chain Wind' (连击风) nerf incident, noting that game could've been huge if not for that catastrophic balance decision. One commenter nailed it: 'They nerf the OP character first, but weak characters they promised to buff? Months later and they haven't done jack. Only fixes that benefit players get priority'd, huh?'

To be fair, some players admitted Daphneidale was genuinely overtuned — one poster put it vividly: 'Normal DPS characters use pistols and assault rifles. Daphneidale pulls out a railgun. Climb a few floors of the tower and fire once — the whole tower's gone.' But even they agreed: nerfing gacha characters in a pure PvE game is a cardinal sin. As one commenter put it: 'E7 nerfs characters because it's PvP-heavy and compensates with selectors. Darkest Dungeon 2 nerfs in DLC but characters aren't gacha-locked. Gacha characters cost real money — nerfing them is just unacceptable.'

Players also unearthed more damning details: just one month after launch, the devs planned to rework the 4-element Abyss mode to lock characters and equipment, requiring 6 teams of 24 characters and 48 equipment slots. One commenter summed it up: 'Any ONE of these would cause a meltdown in any other game. This studio managed to do all three at once and insists on going through with it — truly galaxy-brain levels of incompetence.' Another added: 'They're not doing this on purpose, they're just genuinely bad at balancing. My prediction: they won't be able to nerf Daphneidale to a reasonable level either, they'll just nuke her into uselessness, leaving four cripples to fight over scraps.'

The drama is still unfolding. Players voluntarily promoted this game because genuinely fun gacha titles are a rare breed these days, even though the HK/TW version is clearly an 'early access beta test' with tons of unfinished content. Yet the devs chose to go to war with their own playerbase. As the original poster put it: 'Revenue will teach them how to make games.' If this ever launches on mainland China, players better think twice about whether a game that nerfs rate-up characters is worth their time — or money.