A niche gacha game that's been quietly surviving on life support for three years just went viral — not for a cool new update, but because its top spenders collectively lost their minds. Soul Tide, an all-female harem turn-based RPG launched in 2021, has always been a nobody in the gacha world. You'd never stumble upon it unless you were specifically hunting for waifu-collector games. But a recent turf war over yuri content vs. 'ML purity' just blew the lid off this tiny community.
The origin story is straightforward. Some players on Soul Tide's Baidu Tieba (a Reddit-like forum) took issue with yuri-bait storylines — scenes where female characters showed romantic or flirtatious interactions with each other. For a game marketed as an all-female harem where waifus are supposed to orbit around the (male) player, this was apparently crossing a line.
The devs sided with the ML purists (麻辣仙人, slang for players who demand strict harem-only content with zero yuri elements) and deleted the controversial 'yuri supremacy' storyline. This decision immediately enraged a different camp — and not just any camp, but the game's biggest whales.
All 11 top-ranked players on the game's Anomaly Ranking leaderboard simultaneously changed their in-game display names to protest. The messages were brutal — 'ML purists are barking dogs,' 'brain-dead,' 'disown your own mother,' 'sending condolences to the brain-dead.' It was one of the most spectacular whale revolts the gacha community had seen in 2024.
The NGA comment section was fascinating. One user nailed the paradox perfectly: 'So the players of an all-female harem game are opposing ML content? But they also hate yuri fans (百合豚, bǎi hé tún). So what do they actually want?' This question cuts to the heart of the matter — the whales were rejecting both sides of the spectrum.
A top-voted reply applied what they called the 'two butt cheeks theory' to analyze the situation: 'People often feel their real demands aren't respectable, so they hide behind grander slogans. If you're anti-yuri AND anti-ML, how exactly are you being anti-yuri, and how exactly are you being anti-ML?' The implication was clear: these whales didn't really care about ideological purity — they wanted something far more personal and ambiguous.
Some players suspected a conspiracy: 'My guess is the devs planted a few sockpuppet posts demanding ML changes, then used that as cover to make the edits — all to capitalize on the recent 'no males in my gacha' wave.' Pure speculation, but the 'devs playing 4D chess' theory gained real traction in the community.
The undisputed masterpiece of this entire thread was Floor 13's rewrite of a famous Fan Zhiyi (范志毅, Chinese football legend) rant — originally a viral copypasta about China's terrible football team, now adapted perfectly for Soul Tide's predicament. The reworked version hit every beat: 'Soul Tide changes versions month after month — have they actually changed anything? Same soup, different bowl!' 'You kicked out your biggest whales — can you afford to kick them out? You can't. You don't have any more suckers left!' 'Next you'll lose to Wuhua Mixi, then to Slude, then to Galaxy Boundary Line — soon there'll be nobody left to lose to!' The kicker — 'Have you no shame?' — was chef's kiss. Easily the best copypasta adaptation of 2024.
Floor 16 doubled down with a pointed jab: 'If they can't even fix a few lines of dialogue, you think they'll fix anything substantive? The only explanation is that those lines are someone's personal passion project (内部爱, nèi bù ài — dev favoritism).' The implication being that the devs' stubbornness wasn't strategic — it was sentimental.
As of now, the three-way war shows no signs of cooling down. Whales are voting with their wallets and their outrage, ML purists insist they're the rightful core audience, and the devs are stuck in the crossfire. For a game already hanging by a thread, alienating your top spenders is existential. But as our reporter 'Yu Wenbo' so eloquently put it — this station will continue to follow the story.
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