Just six months after launch, and the devs are already reaching deep into players' wallets. Thousand Years Journey (千年之旅) recently announced a new weapon gacha banner, and the NGA community went absolutely nuclear.
According to the official announcement, the weapon banner shares the same pull rates and hard/soft pity system as the character banner, but at half the pull cost. Free acquisition routes will also be available. Sounds generous on paper? Veterans saw through it instantly — the OP dropped a single devastating line: "What a familiar move. Some other game already did this." That 'other game' is NIKKE: Goddess of Victory (胜利女神：妮姬).
To understand why this blew up, you need to know how Thousand Years Journey's gacha worked until now. Since launch, the game only had character banners for 'Mages' (魔女) — the pilot units. Their equipment came bundled with the character pull, meaning there was no separate weapon gacha. Players joined a game that promised a certain spending ceiling via character banners only. Now, half a year later, an entirely new revenue stream is being bolted on. To most, this looks like a classic bait-and-switch.
One highly upvoted commenter perfectly captured the absurdity of the official 'we're buffing old characters' framing: "We plan to make underused characters viable" → "How?" → "Go pull their signature weapon." Instead of adding strengthening quests or rework systems like normal games do, the 'buff' is literally a new gacha banner you have to pay into. The irony was not lost on anyone.
Another player quipped: "Great. I already tolerated the last one." This suggests the weapon pool isn't the first time the game has tested player patience. A more analytical comment from the 15th floor broke down the real logic: a previous 'Star Radiance' banner had turned players into hoarders (囤积资源的屯屯鼠) who stopped spending, so the devs needed a new revenue channel to extract pulls from the playerbase.
Players immediately drew parallels to NIKKE. "This 'buff old characters with signature weapons' routine is so f***ing familiar — did they learn from Shift Up?" one commenter asked. Another added: "They claim weapon pools will help old characters see play, but really it's just about squeezing more money. NIKKE, is that you?" NIKKE infamously added its own weapon system under similar 'quality of life' pretexts and got dragged for it as one of gacha gaming's most transparent cash grabs. Thousand Years Journey is now speedrunning the same playbook.
The most brutal exchange came from the 10th floor: "Brothers still playing — sell your accounts while the game still has players and its reputation hasn't completely tanked. Every gacha that added weapons mid-lifecycle ended up dying." The reply was even colder: "You think anyone's still buying Thousand Years accounts?" — not even the dignity of an exit strategy.
A particularly insightful commenter connected the dots: "Releasing a new rarity tier during CNY was clearly the start of an accelerated monetization sprint. No good can come of it. So no matter how they package this weapon pool, the moment it goes live, I'm dumping all my pulls and quitting without hesitation." Combined with the earlier new-rarity introduction, the weapon banner is being read by many as a telltale sign that the game has entered its 'end-of-life milk the whales' phase.
Not all takes were doom and gloom, though. Some acknowledged the half-price pull cost as a mitigating factor but still felt the timing was too aggressive — "half a year is way too soon." Others noted that if weapons only affect endgame content like Dream Realm (幻梦), it might be tolerable; but if regular stages start scaling with weapon power creep, then there's no point waiting for the next limited banner.
As of writing, the devs have not responded to the community backlash. But regardless of how the weapon pool actually performs at launch, the label of 'mid-lifecycle weapon gacha' is now permanently attached to this game — and in the Chinese gacha community, that's essentially a death sentence.
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