Half-Anniversary Disaster: Star Fall Project's Triple-Banner Scam, Fake Sweep, and P2W Gear Shop Drive ~20% of Top Players to Quit

How many landmines can one half-anniversary event hit? Star Fall Project shows you: all of them.

Star Fall Project is a straight-up clone of Epic Seven (E7), commonly dubbed "E18" in the Chinese gacha community for its adult content. It reworks character stats and skills to fit its own meta. Before the half-anniversary, the devs ran a popularity poll, promising to feature the top 3 vote-getters in rate-up banners — and any limited characters could return. The results were fairly predictable: two holiday-limited waifus (Chinese New Year and Christmas variants, obvious from names and outfits) took first and second, while the meta-defining T0 character Yuna — who gives allies a 20% counterattack chance when hit — placed third.

Then came the twist nobody wanted: the devs crammed all three into a SINGLE mixed banner. Three rate-up characters fighting over the same 1% five-star pull rate, with no individual rate boost whatsoever. On a half-anniversary banner, no less.

The weapon (imprint) banner was the same mixed nightmare. Players who wanted just one character ended up pulling the wrong ones en masse, burning through resources. While pity is 120 pulls for characters and 100 for weapons — same as E7 — the key difference is that shop refreshes (your main source of pull currency) are gated by VIP level. F2P players get very few refreshes and can't stockpile resources fast enough. This alone pushed a wave of players out the door.

Next up: the comedy gold "sweep" feature. The game originally only had auto-battle, where your phone or emulator had to stay on with the game running in the background. Players begged for a sweep function for ages. Finally it arrived for the half-anniversary — except it wasn't a sweep at all. It was a "super-accelerated auto" mode.

Instead of instantly clearing stages and returning results, the game still played through every fight — just at absurd speed. Naturally, this turned phones into space heaters, causing overheating and lag. The top reply nailed it: "Super-accelerated auto — isn't this just classic E7? Does your game have spaghetti code too?" Another commenter added: "No Epic Seven clone has ever dared to implement actual sweep. The most sensible approach is what another game does: offline auto-battle."

Then came the bug fixes — specifically, the kind that only fix bugs benefiting players. First was the guild war equipment exploit: the game's defense team only snapshots character stats at the time of placement, so you could strip gear off a placed defender and equip it on another, effectively letting one set of gear serve six defenders. Gone.

Second was the shop exploit: guilds earn 80+ silver tokens daily, and the popular purchase was a 50-stamina pack. Previously, a network lag bug allowed rapid-fire clicking to buy multiple copies before the server registered the transaction — some players used scripts to buy dozens at once. One commenter reminisced: "This exact bug existed in Injustice mobile back in 2014-2015 for infinite gold packs — 10 years later and I'm seeing it again." Also patched.

But the final nail in the coffin was the new cash shop selling top-tier gear directly. After the update, a new shop appeared offering random highest-rarity equipment, refreshable daily to pick what you want. The catch? Purchases require "Rainbow Stardust," a currency obtainable almost exclusively by retiring five-star characters through the battle pass — and refresh attempts are once again tied to VIP level. Whales could gear up exponentially faster than F2P or light spenders, and a chunk of players simply quit.

The community verdict was unanimous. A highly upvoted comment put it perfectly: "This game ate all of E7's crap but threw away everything good about it. Since it's a knockoff adult game that uses tons of AI art, there's zero attachment — people just use cheats and exploits without a care." The same commenter broke down the economics: building one pity takes 1.5+ months of saving, but each banner runs only 14 days with two banners running simultaneously, and hard-whaling costs over ¥10 (≈$1.40) per pull. Others noted the pull luck seems tied to account creation time — "probably the classic server-time-seed RNG."

One player voiced frustration about the story: "I thought since it's an adult game, at least the protagonist wouldn't be a background character like in E7. Turns out the MC isn't even a friend-with-benefits — he's literally just a tool. The event story has the girls living their own lives while the MC can't even get camera time." Others piled on with complaints about Taiwanese adult gacha games in general: "Gacha rates are predatory, unlock conditions for H-scenes are absurd, rewards are stingy, and some games can't even be bothered to use real art instead of AI-generated images."

All in all, this half-anniversary was a masterclass in how NOT to celebrate: a triple-banner cash grab, a fake sweep feature, patching only player-beneficial bugs, and selling endgame gear for cash. The result — roughly 20% of the top-ranked players gone. As one commenter summed up: "Tribute to the legendary domestic GBF — every anniversary they lure in fresh fish with free pulls, then chase away the whales with terrible decisions."