With the arrival of the game Fate Grand Order to the west, we ahve been witness of an uprising in the amount of players inclined to this game. Offering an interestiy story based game, a simple yet engaging combat mechanic, Fate Grand Order has already ammased quite a following.



Since the game is msotly aimed for teenages and young adults, it has come to our atention and concer one of the key game "mechanics" and also main source of profit from the game. Microtransactions are no new to the western players, but a game that is heavily based arround that mechanic is quite perplexing.





In a scale from 1 to 5 Stars, the servants are stocked in a specific pool. When there is a "rate up" the gacha increases the chances that X character shown in the flair will appear if a high rarity servant is rolled.

Upon "rolling the gacha" you are trading in game currency known as Saint Quartz in order to have a chance to earn a high rarity servant. The odds for getting said servant as heavily stacked against the player. Alas "the house always wins" the cahnces of pulling an SSR (Super Super Rare) servant are 1%, while the chacnes of pulling a SR servant go up to 3-4%.



If the odds were not only shady, the fact that the "servant" pool is shared with the "CE" (Craft essences) equippable cards that grants effects to the units (they have same rarity of servants). Only makes things even worse for the player, granting more than once CE stead of a servant.



In game pictures of the combat.

Now the gacha itself is quite punishing, among "veterans" from teh JP server, there are stories of players spending over 5 thousand dollars in order to roll and I quote "my waifu" during a rate up, only to fall in despair as they didn´t get what they wanted.

This is a serious issues, while the game puts an age block to prevent spending more than desired. It is really simple to bypass this by changing your age. The gacha itself has become the modern age of gambling. In the wild west they called them "one armed bandit", to the early slots machines. We are upon a new era of gambling and is now called "gacha".

Why is such a troublesome matter? lets do some math shall we?

1% - Five star Servant

3% - Four star Servant

40% - Three star Servant

4% - Five star CE

12% - Four star CE

40% - Three star CE

That's from the current Saint Quartz gacha. We'll assume this holds for future gachas. The three star stuff might change, but that's not really important; I'm focusing more on the four and five star statistics.

First of all, let's calculate some probabilities of how many rolls it takes to get a five star Servant.

5 Star Servant

For a 1% chance: roll once.

For a 25% chance: roll 29 times.

For a 50% chance: roll 69 times.

For a 75% chance: roll 138 times.

For a 99% chance: roll 459 times.

With these facts in hand we can already tell how the gacha is designed to be a money eating machine. Asuming that we are out of luck and we want to have a guaranteed SSR servant the amount of rolls goes up to 459. With a a price of 30 dolalrs pack of 45 SQ, we are talking of a huge amount of 13.770$ dollars spent in game currency.

if this isnt a sign of how dangerous this game can be without proper check, we are up to one of the biggest scams of the century, disguised under the banner of a "free to play game".

.

Advertisement