How clueless can a game's operations team get? Laigu Mixin just delivered a masterclass — in a single update, they somehow found a way to screw over literally every type of player at once.
It all went down during the 6 PM update on April 29th. The devs of Laigu Mixin (a small-studio gacha game published by Bilibili) suddenly added a 3000-point selector for any standard 6-star character to the point shop, refreshing monthly. Sounds generous, right? But the timing was spectacularly awful — the previous limited banner was about to close, meaning anyone who wanted to hit pity had already done so. The new banner was about to drop, and most players had already burned through their resources.
To understand how catastrophic this move is, you need to know how Laigu Mixin's pity point system works. The game has two banner types: rate-up (UP) and standard. Characters have constellation-like upgrades (命座, zhìmìng), but only the third level gives a meaningful skill boost. Both banners guarantee a 6-star at 70 pulls (can be off-rate). On the UP banner, you can choose the rate-up character at 160 pulls. If you don't, leftover pity converts to points at a 1:10 ratio when the banner ends — so a full 160-pull pity gives 1600 points. Here's the kicker: the standard banner generates ZERO points.
Before this update, the point shop only had junk items nobody cared about. Most players would pull the rate-up character and then top up to a full pity (160 pulls) since the sunk cost was too high to waste — might as well grab an extra 6-star. Whales would also pull on the standard banner for constellation upgrades. Then suddenly: 3000 points for a free standard 6-star selector, refreshing every month!
The math is brutal. Players who completed one full pity only have 1600 points — 1400 short of the selector. That's essentially a free 6-star they'll never get. Whales who pulled across multiple banners are looking at missing out on two or more selectors. Meanwhile, F2P savers and hoarders who didn't pull? They get a free selector every 300 pulls going forward. It's raining freebies for the patient and salt in the wound for the spenders. The original poster raged: 'The ops team is absolutely clueless' and 'they found the one path that manages to offend everyone.'
The comment section erupted into an all-out civil war. The top reply nailed it: 'Basically this is backstabbing whales to court F2P players. You only see this kind of strategy when the game's reputation is already in the gutter — is this game really that desperate?' The implication being: no healthy game would willingly antagonize its paying customers.
The other side pushed back hard. One player fired back: 'Don't you dare speak for everyone.' Another did the math: 'Only people who were a few pulls short of pity and force-completed it got screwed. Everyone else is unaffected.' Someone even dropped group chat screenshots showing their friends were celebrating the change.
The discourse got spicy fast. One commenter quipped: 'Small games really do have the most copium-addicted whiteknights' — implying anyone defending this change is a braindead shill. On the other side, a player who hit hard pity shared their pain: 'I had to go to 160 pulls for each of the two UP characters, picked one for a useless 1st constellation — absolute clown behavior.' You can practically taste the salt.
But wait, there's more. The same update also introduced a baffling stamina overflow recovery system in the dormitory. Overflow stamina gets stored in the dorm room, with a cap of 350 based on your furniture count (comfort value). Sounds reasonable? Here's where the spaghetti code kicks in: the recovery rate is tiered — the first 5 overflow points recover at 1 per 4 minutes, points 6-10 at 1 per 5 minutes, and anything beyond 10 at the normal 6-minute rate.
In theory, if you log in every 20 minutes to collect, you can squeeze out an extra 120 stamina per day. But here's the thing — this game is stingy with upgrade materials. EXP, gold, weapon substats all need grinding, and stamina is always scarce. So now the game is essentially punishing dedicated players: 'Contributing to daily active users by clearing stamina is pure suffering,' as one player put it.
The system's documentation is just as messy as the implementation. One player confessed they 'spent days rage-clicking through the confusing UI before accidentally discovering the dorm stamina feature, having missed 2-3 days of overflow.' Even worse, another player found that the storage mechanic only triggers AFTER you've logged in with full stamina once — otherwise overflow just vanishes into the void. Peak indie studio energy.
All in all, Laigu Mixin pulled off a masterclass in 'good intentions, catastrophic execution.' The welfare is real, but the timing and implementation hit every possible nerve. One commenter's summary was chef's kiss: 'Only whales are hurting. Most low-spenders pull for character-specific constellation upgrades. Who's actually throwing 300 pulls into the standard banner?' But in a niche indie gacha with a small player base, antagonizing whales is... certainly a choice. As one veteran observed: 'Screwing over whales to please F2P players is standard Bilibili game ops — they did the same thing with Senjien.' Welcome to the beautiful chaos of small-studio gacha management — where they'll always find a way to surprise you, just never in the way you'd hope.
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