Sword of Convallaria's Lead Designer Bails After Just 3 Months — Pay Cuts, Stealth Nerfs, Gacha Greed, and a Boss That Literally Breaks Your Legs

A mobile game barely three months old, and its lead designer has allegedly cashed the year-end bonus and vanished — and that's just the tip of the iceberg. On the NGA forum thread about Sword of Convallaria (铃兰之剑), one player summed up the situation perfectly: 'Stacked debuff after debuff, and then the lead designer took the bonus and ran. This game hasn't had a single piece of good news since CN launch.'

It started with a post revealing that the core planner behind Sword of Convallaria had left the company, with the studio now urgently hiring a replacement. This came on top of reports that XD Entertainment, the parent company, had slashed salaries across the board — including guaranteed base pay for the game team. Players quickly connected the dots: 'The money negotiation probably fell through. The game made bank early on, so the boss figured they were hot stuff. Classic capitalist playbook.'

But what really set the community ablaze was the game's own parade of disasters. The headliner was the Chinese New Year event: only three months into CN server launch, the devs straight-up copy-pasted event stage stats from the Taiwan server — which was already three months ahead in progression. The result? CNY event stages with difficulty on par with endgame hard modes. One boss had 90% defense-ignoring penetration damage plus a 'leg-break' mechanic that instantly kills low-mobility characters. Players who had been grinding daily for three solid months said the content was brutal, and you basically needed the two newest gacha characters to cheese through it. All this suffering? Reward: a profile avatar frame. As one player put it, 'Even the monsters are P2W. It's like they have no balance designer — maybe the balance designer also quit.'

The CNY monetization was equally jaw-dropping. The 'generous' New Year discount? 97% of original price — a whopping 3% off. Combined with laughable cashback, a double-UP banner with 360 pity, 150 diamonds per pull, and a measly 20 diamonds for reaching level 60, players called it a 'masterclass in wisdom.' One highly upvoted comment sarcastically listed every pain point, then concluded: 'We're going for hardcore, no waifu pandering here. Can Girls' Frontline 2 even compete?' — comparing their own game's disasters to the then-NGA-dominating GFL2 meltdown. Peak dark humor.

What made players truly lose faith was the stealth character changes. Within the CN server's first three months, characters like Sophia and August were quietly buffed on the Taiwan server, then retroactively shipped to CN. But official announcements used vague terms like 'fix' and 'adjust' to disguise what were actually straight-up power boosts to bait pulls from the current banner. The star-rank gap was also widening fast — one new character's key ability had a 30% trigger rate at 4 stars but 100% at 5 stars. Meanwhile, a unlucky whale reportedly spent nearly 700 pulls (roughly 8000 RMB / $1100+) to max-star a character.

Revenue data told the same grim story. Per charts shared by players, Sword of Convallaria was leading the SRPG mobile market in December and January, but by February it had already dropped to roughly the same level as competitor Steel Front (钢岚). Players predicted a 'massive freefall incoming.' One commenter reminisced about the early days when the game was trading blows with Steel Front: 'They were fighting back and forth, then went silent. I thought the Zilong (紫龙) players had accepted their fate — turns out this one just self-destructed.'

To be fair, some players acknowledged the game's strengths. The story writing was praised as genuinely good, with dedicated fans on Weibo doing plot recaps. But the immediate reply was telling: 'Loads of people come here asking about this game, and I always tell them: play through the story mode, experience the different endings, and don't touch the progression system.' Translation: great narrative, but the grind and monetization have already driven away most players.

As for where the runaway designer ended up, speculation ran wild. Some bet on miHoYo, NetEase, or Tencent poaching him with fat offers. One commenter quipped, 'Hopefully he went to make a single-player game,' while others pointed fingers at rival studios. The only certainty: Sword of Convallaria is still desperately hiring a lead planner — and rival studio bosses are probably laughing all the way to the bank: 'Their main product is barely making waves despite cannibalizing Langrisser's revenue, while the competition keeps self-destructing one after another.'