Pre-Registration 5-Star Selector Ends Early, Sparking Outrage: Won't Even Give Away a 5-Star in a 6-Star Game?

In the gacha gaming world, pre-registration character selectors are a standard crowd-pleasing move — let players pick a favorite character ahead of launch, everyone logs in on day one with a head start, win-win. But Backtrack (白荆回廊) decided to put its own spin on things: the 5-star selector event quietly expired before the game even went live, shutting out a wave of fence-sitting players who were still on the sidelines.

The original poster shared what appeared to be an official marketing snippet claiming "5-star characters are incredibly powerful and rare in the game," paired with an eye-roll emoji — dripping with sarcasm.

The comment section erupted immediately. The first reply was a meme image, followed by a commenter who cut straight to the heart of the matter:

"Doesn't Backtrack have 6-stars though?" — arguably the most devastating one-liner in this whole controversy. The game's highest rarity tier is 6-star, making 5-star units merely above-average at best. The official pitch framing 5-stars as "incredibly powerful and rare" struck players as laughably overblown.

A beta tester shared their firsthand experience: "I participated in every beta test for Backtrack. Last night after midnight I saw people saying to pick Wargod in the selector, so I went to do it — only to find out it had already expired. This is a game I managed to get burned by before I even started playing." They added they'd burn through the monthly pass from the cashback rewards and then quit: "A 5-star character, and they still have to make it time-limited?"

Another camp argued the issue was "fixable or ignorable either way," but the real tell was what it revealed about the devs' willingness to listen: "If they don't fix something this small, it means their threshold for caving to player feedback is a lot higher." In other words, if they won't budge on something this trivial, don't hold your breath for bigger concessions down the road.

Of course, some players thought the whole fuss was overblown: "It's just a 5-star, chill out" / "An SR-tier character is causing this much drama?" / "It's only a 5-star, you'd think people missed out on a 6-star or something."

But the counter-attacks were sharper: "They can afford to hire all those real content creators for ads, but can't spare a 5-star selector? Their stinginess got exposed real fast." "All that money for influencer marketing but not a single 5-star giveaway?" One commenter was even more blunt: "In a game with 6-stars, 5-stars are basically trash. They're too cheap to even give away trash. I've never seen a pre-registration event end before the game even launches — is it just because it's a Tencent game?"

Some players also analyzed the operational dead end: if they extend the event to launch day, the flood of new players who never knew about it will feel cheated when they learn they're missing a free 5-star — creating an even bigger uproar. But if they just give everyone a free 5-star selector, the players who actually participated in the pre-registration event look like clowns. There's no clean way out.

As one commenter perfectly summarized: "After the Girls' Frontline 2 meltdown dominating the forums, all I can say is — that's it? This doesn't even qualify as minor drama. Flavorless, forgettable, neither here nor there." Still, small things reveal big truths. A single time-limited 5-star selector has exposed the company's attitude toward player generosity — whether they'll walk it back remains to be seen.

For context: Backtrack (白荆回廊) is a gacha RPG developed by Shanghai Aurogon (上海烛龙) and published by Tencent. Commenters also compared the situation to FGO's Chinese server launch, which had a similar pre-registration selector but without comparable controversy.