Arknights Ads on Qidian Use Outdated Banners From Months Ago — Players Roast Hypergryph's Marketing Dept as 'More Corrupt Than miHoYo'

Qidian's welfare center — a quiet little corner of the app where you watch ads in exchange for free chapter tokens — just became the latest drama arena for gacha gamers. A player posted on NGA saying they spotted Arknights ads while browsing Qidian, which initially seemed like a good sign... until they noticed the featured characters were hilariously outdated: Executor the Ex Foedere, Fartooth, and Lee — all characters whose rate-up banners ended months ago.

截图显示起点APP中出现的方舟广告界面

The OP added that across three separate ad impressions from yesterday to today, every single one featured a retired banner character. Not a single current rate-up unit was shown. For a game with a relatively fast rotation schedule, this level of promotional lag is pretty embarrassing.

The comments section exploded. The top-voted reply went straight for Hypergryph's jugular:

One highly upvoted commenter wrote: 'I can't even cope anymore — Hypergryph's marketing department must be more corrupt than miHoYo's. At least miHoYo's ads feature current or upcoming rate-up characters. YJ is literally promoting nothing.' This sentiment resonated hard with the community, who clearly have long-standing frustrations with Arknights' marketing efforts.

More players piled on with their own 'evidence': Zhihu apparently still shows launch-era Arknights ads; Bilibili is still running Executor the Ex Foedere's EP; even NGA itself — Hypergryph's own turf — has been running the Sami roguelike ad without updates for ages. This isn't a one-off oversight — it's a systemic problem.

To be fair, a few players tried to play devil's advocate — arguing that new players wouldn't know which characters are 'expired' anyway, and that the ads just need to look appealing enough to draw people in. Maybe the outdated materials actually perform well in click-through data? But this defense was quickly shut down: if you're paying for ad placements and nobody bothers to update the creative assets, that means the entire campaign pipeline has zero oversight.

The absolute showstopper comment came from someone claiming to be a PR industry veteran. They shared that they once audited a subsidiary company's PR expenses and discovered a 'sentiment monitoring platform' that cost nearly 1 million RMB per year — its actual mechanism? Outsourced PR workers manually searching Baidu every day. 'The lazy marketing departments never send out proper assets or reference links — they just tell people to Google it themselves. If I could find it by searching, what the hell do I need the marketing department for? Just sitting in the office drinking tea and doing nothing?'

Worth noting: this outdated-ad problem isn't unique to Arknights. Commenters pointed out that Honkai: Star Rail ads have been running Bailu footage for ages, Genshin Impact frequently uses Inazuma-era visuals, and Baidu Tieba still shows ads from Reverse: 1999's launch. In a way, this exposes a widespread industry issue with Chinese mobile game UA (user acquisition) — companies throw money at ad placements, but nobody monitors whether the creatives are actually current.

Bottom line: this incident is minor in isolation, but it hit a nerve because it perfectly encapsulated the community's long-running frustration with Hypergryph's marketing. When your competitors are running targeted ads with their latest banner characters and you're recycling months-old footage, that's not cost-cutting — that's coasting. And the PR veteran's anecdote elevated the discussion from 'Arknights marketing is bad' to 'what exactly are these big studio marketing departments doing all day?' Sitting in the office drinking tea while doing nothing — sounds about right for a lot of people's lived experience.