After the Wuthering Waves anniversary stream announced very underwhelming rewards alongside a whopping twelve limited character banners presented as “player friendly”, there’s been a lot of people loudly expressing their displeasure, and Kuro’s response so far has been underwhelming.
They cultivated a reputation for generosity thanks to how they responded to the issues and controversy over the course of the game’s first few patches, and after steadying the ship they took a huge step up in the quality of the game from version 2 onwards.
While other prominent gachas have consistently put out very disappointing rewards for their anniversaries, many fans hoped that Kuro would buck the trend and give them something which really celebrated just how far the game has come since the dark days of its launch.
And yet, here we are.
I think pretty much everyone can agree that the rewards they announced during the stream were at best a little underwhelming, and the presentation was an obvious own goal.
But there’s been a little more info since then, and also after thinking through the implications, dare I say it that the outrage over the rerun banners is a little overblown? It’s at least a little more complicated than it seems at first glance.
Let’s talk about where people are coming from, why they are still absolutely right to demand more, and why the whole conversation is a weird one in the first place.
00:00 Intro
01:15 Anniversaries
01:53 Expectations
03:13 What happened?
04:01 What happened? • Rewards
04:48 What happened? • Context
05:28 What happened? • Presentation
06:31 What counts as generous? • Compared to pity
07:16 What counts as generous? • The bigger picture
08:26 What counts as generous? • Setting expectations
09:48 Rerun banners • A minor positive
11:20 Rerun banners • Still not great
12:18 Was it deliberate?
14:09 Psychological anchoring
15:28 Conclusion
Wuthering Waves is an open-world action/exploration game, available on PC, PS5 and mobile devices (iOS & Android).
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