THEY ACTUALLY LISTENED ! No wayyy ! Check out Hoyoverse's response to the complaints they received regarding this mode : t.co/INPHgiA6i8 " In addition, following the official launch of the new gameplay mode "Imaginarium Theater," we are also continuing to monitor Travelers' feedback : - The initial intention behind the design of "Imaginarium Theater" was to provide Travelers with new and diverse combat experiences through the introduction of new scenarios. However, there are indeed various shortcomings in the current gameplay, particularly in the lack of sufficient positive feedback for different party lineups during battles. Therefore, in the upcoming adjustments, we will continue to focus on elemental reactions and consider designing more strategically powerful and user-friendly mechanisms for everyone to consider. - Furthermore, regarding the issue raised by many Travelers about "the randomness of character acquisition," a mechanic to "push specific characters" has already been implemented. However, as the effect of the mechanic remains at a subtle level, the actual results are not ideal. In future iterations, we will also optimize the method of obtaining characters, such as providing multiple options for players to choose from in certain instances of character acquisition. Optimizations for "Imaginarium Theater" are currently under development and will continue to be implemented in subsequent updates. We hope that these changes will provide Travelers with a better gameplay experience. We sincerely appreciate everyone's constructive feedback. "
I can't believe they actually responded immediately to this, which is a good thing! Just surprising. Let's see how it turns out. Also, thanks for the update!
I have just accepted it at this point that if you want beautiful exploration, world building and lore- play genshin and if you want real endgame just play honkai star rail. Imaginarium theater just feels like an indirect message from hoyo that they dont care about endgame in genshin, if they truly cared about implimenting an actual endgame then they had Labrinth warriors just lying there in front of them as a perfect game mode OR in my opinion they should have just gone the divergent universe route and made it so that every character you own was pre-levelled and usable. Giving players access to characters instead of restricting them is the key to making a truly enjoyable game mode in my opinion.
I thought more about the labyrinth warriors event & was like " maybe they couldn't implement it for technical reasons that we aren't aware of ", maybe it was too big for phones if it was permanent, or something idk, I'm not a game dev 😆. But I agree with what you said, give me access to my characters if you really want me to enjoy a game mode, otherwise it just feels bad.
I am a Day 1 Player. And I had to boost 8 Characters to Level 70 because I mostly have water units build. I also always throw away trash artifacts. So i basiclly had 8 characters with nothing equiped. Beat the Mode with the Trail Characters, Hu Tao, Klee and Jean alone. Took me 4 hours and was hell of frustrating ... And I wasted around 3000 resin for characters I will never use again.
Yeah I didn't adress the issue regarding the availability of characters to level up + artifacts to equip them, which makes the problem even worse and your experience is a good example of it. But at least they quickly reacted to the feedback of the players & hopefully these issues will be ironed out for the next iterations of the theater !
In one instance I ended up having three DPS's and no supports... There are too many random aspects of this mode for it to be enjoyable. In theory it's not the worst idea, but the execution of it makes very mediocre in practice.
About the elemental restriction, I feel like they should do that instead of forcing you to use a certain element, those element are instead buffed, while those who aren't on the list a bit nerfed.
Who in hoyo thought that forcing us to choose many characters with limited time of uses, and then letting every time only to choose from what random charactes the game decided for you, and not even allowing to not use a full team of 4, is a brilliant idea?! Why don't they just let us choose from any character we selected, I don't even care about limit of uses, but why should my team be random all the time?
It def didn't get playtested well enough. I'm speculating here but the game devs might have had pressure to include those restrictions by higher ups, in a move to push players to spend more ... Those restrictions scream " pull more " & " use more ressources than you can afford " type of message.
@@vlday I hope soon whales stop spending on this game because of higher ups' decisions. I heard that most of the bad stuff in Genshin is because of director that worked during first 3 years of Honkai 3rd.
They should've ditched either the Vigor mechanic, the elemental restriction, or at least made it optional for a higher difficulty. There are too many ridiculous limitations in this game with resources for this nonsense. It's punishing newer players and people who haven't been playing long enough to have 100+ resin restores banked. I was frustrated because visually it's stunning, the concept itself is really fun, and I like being able to interact with party members, among other things, but as it stands I don't think I'm touching this again. It feels terrible not being able to clear basic content because your teams are locked behind stupid restrictions AND/OR a vigor system. We did not need both, and this feels like punishment for the whole community because a vocal minority was whining about a lack of high-end content.
Agreed, these restrictions are out of touch when you realize how limited the access to ressources is in Genshin. The worst part is that I feel like they tried to please everyone, veterans by having a lot of character & elemental restrictions to reward their horizontal investment, and newer players by having relatively low hp bosses to fight, and ended up annoying both types of players 😆
Personally, I don't like it at all. As you said, regarding building characters, I mostly only built characters I like, which are mostly Geo and Anemo 5☆s. I have not a single built Pyro and only Cyno and kinda Keqing built for Electro. I mostly use one team for exploration, which are Kazuha, Kokomi, Zhongli and a random character I wanna play at that time (currently Navia). I do have some Hydro built (I do have to get new artifacts for Ayato, though) and Cryo and Dendro, I really just fully built Alhaitham. Nahida not done yet. But I also have a lot of moments where I go "Don't feel like farming". Because some drops are annoying (Handguards and whatever the Blubberbeasts drop) for example. So the theater is no fun for me. Maybe it gets better IF they add Geo, but they hate Geo, so they maybe even skip that, like the elemental reation battle event they did not too long ago.
It's punishing certain playstyles for no real reason, and that's why it has a lot of issues from a game design perspective. Hopefully it will be fixed in the next iterations 👍
@@vlday I agree. I also hope it gets fixed. I only managed to beat normal because they gave me Alhaitham to use. And I honestly wanted to start building Pyro when I get Diluc. Which I still don't have Dx Though, tbh, I would probably just build Diluc, because I like him x3
As someone who is at AR 55 I despise the character and elemanal restrictions. I have had an almost completely consistent character team throughtout my whole playthrough of the game because it was all I needed to get through the game. I have many charcters, yes, but it feels so sudden for hoyo to say "Yeah, you know those characters that haven't seen the light of day since the last Hu Tao re-run and are only at lvl 20? Yeah, well you need to go level all of them up and give them half decent artifacts so you can play this game mode that barely gives (what I think is) substantial rewards for your effort." I get that this game mode is end content and I have no problem with lvling my characters up to meet the standards and try out new play styles the thing is, the process is so tedious and it felt so random to me that all of a sudden I needed to have a large array of different charcters to meet the element restrictions AND have them all leveled up to be half decent characters that I won't even pull out during open world exploration or upcoming quests.
Waay back I was outraged because instead of doing something like making different artifact sets available on different days in a domain...or letting us select the artifact set we want to farm for...instead of that exceedingly simpler solution, they gave us strongbox. Something people cheered for... Now, instead of doing something like Labyrinth Warriors...they gave us this. I think they're just lazy, bro. If I had to spell it out in as few words as possible, Imaginarium was rushed endgame solution for Hoyo to APPEAR like they were raining blessings on it's players.
It def gives the impression of "being rushed" yes, maybe that's because of finally having some competition & them trying to do something in panic mode to retain players.
Great video mate. I never even noticed those restrictions for entering because I've been playing for a lot of years now, but I do see how it might affect other players now
It was a good concept but agreed that it was ruined by too many restrictions. First, you have the slight rng to the Acts. Second, the featured elements are the only usable ones for registering your units. Third, Hard Mode requires way too many units. And last, the vigor system. I don't like the fact that Hoyo is forcing elements on me (what if the featured element is one I don't like?), or forcing me to waste resources to potentially level a unit I don't like just to meet the requirements. It isn't like Abyss where it does have element checks like the current pyro shield mobs but you are not hardlocked to only Hydro. You can use other elements to meet the check assuming you don't like Hydro or do not have enough Hydro units.
Also something to add to your comment : it's extremely rare to get hard countered in the abyss on both sides. My Neuvillette can't beat the hydro tulpa ? I can use him on the other side. My Xiao isn't super effective against the Wenut ? I can always run him on the other side etc.
As a day 1 player i have somewhat enough characters to beat this mode. I didn't get all 8 medals, but they're just for flex, so i don't care. BUT! The problem arised on my challenge account. I do a catalyst only run just for fun. And i even managed to 36* abyss there several times, but i doubt i'll be able to do even the lowest lvl of difficulty, because there're only 8 catalyst characters that meet the requirements. And i miss 1 from those 8. Yes, i can borrow someone's Klee (probably my own from the main account, i lvl her up rn for this purpose), and i can get Wrio and Baizhu from a special invitation, so it'll make exactly 10, but i believe it won't allow me to enter because you need to have 10 usable characters from the get-go, and it doesn't count last two as a part of requirement. At least i think. But as for the highest difficulty - yeah, i'll need to lvl up at least 4 non-catalyst users to lvl 70. At least i hope it's not all 8 i'm missing. And what's the most annoying thing is a randomizer of the whole event. Let's imagine i bring 18 characters,but i can only use 10. Meaning i'll have to force some characters to basically solo some stages, and i'd need to save Sucrose and Wander for the monolith stage somehow, and i'd need to save Yanfei/Klee + Baizhu + 1 electro (i hope Lisa) until the very end, but i have no idea how these characters will come and in what order, so this lvl of RNG management is really annoying. And it's only this stage, where we can use electro (there're only 2 catalysts - Lisa and Yae Miko), pyro (only Yanfei and Klee) and anemo (4 characters total: Wanderer, Xianyun, Sucrose and Heizhou, and my Heizhou isn't even built properly). But what if it's dendro, geo and hydro for example? I'll be left with even less characters to choose from! There're only to dendro units: Nhida and Baizhu. 4 hydro: Barbara, Kokomi, Mona and Neuvellette (ok, 5 if we count that new girl coming in 5.0) and only one, ONE, geo character: Ningguang. 80% of these characters are not even damage dealers! And assuming i'll ignore this mode, the rewards i get monthly on these accounts will drastically decrease. From abyss monthly i was collecting 1100 primos, but now it's almost half of that number. Like 600ish smth? I dunno... It's so bad, i can't even find words to describe my disappointment with all of these. What would be great thing to do: is to allow you use all of your characters, just limit it to 18 as well and leave it random as it is. They could even leave that annoying "energy" thingy. But make it so we can use all elements without restrictions. It'd be more fun that way!
Yeah, the mode excludes a ton of players depending on their playstyles, their character selection (in the case of your challenge account, only catalyst) or their preferences, and that's why it's a failed endgame gameplay loop. There was a lot of good ideas in the comment section, like buffing certain elements & nerfing others in terms of damage output, or like u are suggesting, give us access to all characters but limit the max at 18. Hopefully they heard the feedback of the playerbase & they will adjust that in the future 👍
@@vlday i actually didn't do survey in game. So they don't know about my feedback, because i doubt they read that stuff at all. Why do i think so? Because since the very beginning of 1.0 i was asking for two specific things: skip button and billets exchange. First one is self-explanatory i assume, bit second one is smth not many people even talk about. From the 1.0 what i wanted the most is the option to exchange one billet type to another: like changing catalyst billet to the claymore, or sword to the bow, etc. And each patch i was asking for it for the first two years. So when they did introduce billet exchange it was simply one region billet to another. And you can't even imagine my disappointment at that time. That's why i gave up on surveys as a whole, it's just the waste of time. Also after starting my challenge account i noticed how many things in this game restricts you and forces you to use specific characters. I know they need to "sell" the said character, but holy shit do i really need to use only that character? I can understand some "challenges" like infamous archer challenge in Inazuma (which took me 8 hours to complete without using bow), but i literally don't understand why they write the story in a way where the game forces you to use 1 specific character and provides no option to use your team + that character. Like why the hell did i roasted those samurais for 4 hours with torches in Kazuha's quest? Why the heck i have to use only Raiden in her story quest? And for love of god, why the heck they patched the option to drown your enemies in water? (i had to take L in Itto's and Kazuha's quests because of it) Just why? And in some quests everything is fine and you can use your characters even if the main character of the story told you to step aside (Gaming's event quest, Zhongli's second quest, Ganyu's quest, etc). I will never forget how i rage quitted in the last lantern rite where the game forced me to use only Yelan and i spent two hours trying to keep aggro on hillichurls with the torches so they could burn the grass (on limited area btw) and i could slowly roast that treasure hoarder who clearly had more hp than he should. I also almost whent out of the grass i can burn because of it. My point is - those limitations were always there, and what's more boggling my mind is that the more game exists the more limitations there're. They fix stupid bugs no one asked to fix (like the ability to drown enemies, nowadays they just stuck at the edge of water and don't follow you), and don't do anything to fix what really needs to be fixed! I do like Genshin, but i'm really disappointed by it.
@@atomicgrave4340 I hear your frustration, I really do. I used to fill those surveys everytime but stopped doing it also because of how tone deaf the company was to our complaints. With that being said, now that there's competition, ALL OF A SUDDEN they are talking about the shortcommings in their newest game mode & acknowledging the issues it has. Crazy huh ? So yeah don't get super high expectations, it's a gacha company at the end of the day, BUT there's a little bit of hope now that they are a bit more stressed about their market shares 😁
Me who lvled everyone because 1st. I like everyone 2nd. Them being 70/80 gave me 2 extra wishes 3rd. I got them all to 80/80 because I didn't wsnns farm artefacts
Having this playstyle is fine with the theater & I'm glad it didn't cause problems for you. Unfortunately, other playstyles can go through some issues to JUST access the game mode which, honestly, doesn't make sense.
@@vlday i get it, my friend complained that she couldn't do it (I somehow first tried it lol) and idk if I'm even going to be able to complete it on another friends account since they don't build many characters
I had to use a bunch of resources to build characters up that i didnt plan on using and the game mode isnt fun. Feels like a bootleg hsr mode that wasnt properly tested. Also the buffs that you get should elevate your poorly built teams to slightly ok levels but instead my low investment characters were useless, so the buffs suck imo
5:45 This is so true. I'm at AR58 with _almost_ enough characters to get to Hard mode. Thing is, Genshin never gave me enough reasons to level up alteratives to certain characters + some elements have too many characters locked behind Event Banners or Standard Banner RNG. Currently, I have too manu DPSs, and not enough supports. I already had to start building Cyno (I was new, benched him due to Scarabs) and Keqing (got her after Raiden, so she was useless to me), but I still lack 1 character. From my options, I decided to go with Lisa over Beidou simply because of Lisa's DEF shred. My biggest grudge is that Genshin NEVER gave me a reason to pick up certain characters. I already have all my characters to Ascension 3 because free wishes, but nothing more. Wanna know why? Because I already have 3 already working teams. And the Imaginarium Theater rendered all three of them useless. Neuvillette, Furina, Zhongli, Nahida, Xingqiu, and many more are completely useless for the Theater, and those are the characters I've spent most time building. The Element restriction is so frustrating man, like at least let US decide our 4 Special Guests, instead of punishing players for not pulling for every single character.
The scarabs ... I still have PTSD from that hahaha But I agree and your suggestion regarding the special guests is actually a good one. I feel like those restrictions are just trying to gate keep the content, and needs to go. Cuz right now it's elemental restrictions but who says that in the future it won't be Weapon type restrictions ? Or hair color restrictions idk 🤣
To tell you the truth, most gacha games as they get older will change meta on horizontal investment than the usual vertical investment for Spiral Abyss as it's what sells characters and resources (if ppl refresh resin or buy packs). It was just a matter of time. Is it annoying? Yes. But it's endgame of endgames and a norm in the gacha industry. HSR did it sooner since you'd want different characters on hand for every elemental coverage for specific shields. GI on the other hand I found is a more of a beginner's game for gacha, so they've only implemented it now. Been telling my friends to invest horizontally slowly through the years, did they listen? Nope. I can't blame them tho, they're not gacha gamers in general. Most gachas want you get and build as many characters needed with limited resources. It's part of the grind. Hoyo is just much more stingy in GI than most of their games or compared to other gachas.
Yeah fr. I'm not that big of a gacha gamer, but Genshin isn't my first gacha game (it's HI3rd), and sadly over there, some characters are so broken I've never had to bench them unless their 'element' was completely useless (Herrscher of Human: Ego (Elysia)), so I'm not that used to horizontal investment. Thankfully enough, though, I do have plenty of options. But I still need to build them, and the biggest hurdle is to get enough Boss mats and good enough Artifacts as a F2P. One of the biggest problems towards building characters, in my opinion, is material accessibility. I've had Cyno ever since 3.5, got him to Ascencion 3 for the wishes and never used him due to him needing Scarabs and them being so far apart from eachother compared to other unit's materials I had. So, when you add not knowing much about horizontal investment in gacha games + resin restrictions + annoying materials, you get people with not enough characters even after getting to a comfortable endgame state on their account.
I see, so it's a common practice in the gacha industry. Genshin is the only gacha I play, so Im really not that used to these mechanics😮💨(and will never be ...)
@@KyzenEX Material access has been my main gripe w/ Genshin all these years. I heard from leaks that there will be changes to weekly boss materials for easier access as of 5.0, but for materials on the map, you have to farm them yourself regardless. I usually use Kyostinv's guides for those efficient material farming (I did for those starfish for Clorinde and Neuv). The guy makes the process into 5 to 10 minutes. Don't shy away from efficient farming routes, it'll save you a lot of time. Also, w/ Genshin being an open world, hoard everything. I hoarded Beryl conches until I had 168 (enough to fully ascend 1 character) before Charlotte came out while exploring in the overworld. It saved me time when I got her and build her. Have that mindset when you explore Natlan when it releases, you never know you might need it, and you'll thank yourself later. But I will agree that the Imaginarium's implementation is as clunky as you say for its debut. Could have been done better.
@@vlday Well, if it helps, the main thing in playing a gacha game is to slowly build a diverse account to have all your bases covered since devs are notorious in throwing any sort of meta your way. Gacha games are slow progress as an f2p for this reason, as it persuades ppl who want faster progression to pay. For those who don't like that very slow and horizontal grind, I'd suggest them playing a non gacha game instead. I mean no offense, but that sort of patience as an f2p is not for everyone.
@@diahprasetianingtyas6822 Oh don't worry about it, no offense taken, especially since I consider myself be a VERY patient F2P player. Been a degen min maxer in this game since the first week of its release, doing artifact & elite boss routes for the longest time, saving my primos accordingly etc. I don't have any issue with the grinding aspect, in fact I like it a lot. But I wanted to showcase the issues the game mode has, with many players, by using my secondary account as an example (I don't min max that account at all, I wanna keep my sanity 🤣)
Man i hate this mode so much. Im ar 57 and I can't even complete the normal mode after I was forced to level up like 3 random characters i don't give two shits about to level 60/70. I just don't know why i should invenst into these characters when building a decently strong character in this game is hell especially in the artifacts and weapon aspects. After two years of playing this game i have only 4 functional teams: wanderer hypercarry, neuvillette hypercarry, alhaitham hyperbloom and somewhat functional Diluc vaporize team. Only one of these is usable in the theater.. not to mention I can't use them in the same team because each character has only two uses:) i just gotta accept that I'll only do the easy mode.. but that means I'll miss out on a lot of primogems. Spiral abyss is much better
I agree that spiral abyss is way better, at least for me ! I enjoy that kind of end game way more because you can play virtually any character you want AND it's challenging. They already addressed the criticism that the theater got, hopefully they can improve the experience in the future 👍
At first I didn't like the restrictions either but after some tries I really liked the gamemode. People complaining that they can't use all their characters is kinda dumb. Sorry... you guys complaining aboud END GAME content. The mode finally rewards players that go out of their way and build lesser used characters. Yes, a newbie won't manage the difficult mode. As same as doing fullstar 12.3 abyss. Now people have to think about building few characters a lot for spiral or many characters manageable for theater. that's all. The only thing I wished they do because it would be more dynamic is getting more support characters from friends.
Your comment is very confusing. First of all, the theater is NOT a proper endgame. An endgame is supposed to offer the players a challenging & replayable gameplay loop. This mode fails to deliver that experience. The theater is EXTREMELY easy and the fact it restricts your characters directly hinders its replayability. In fact it's even worse than that cuz denying you the progress you made on many of your characters doesn't make sense in an Endgame content : Imagine you are playing a RPG and the last donjon of the game just tells you " oh no sorry, you won't be able to beat this donjon with this warrior class. Better go back & select another one" Second of all, you literally made my point by saying that now, "people have to think about building few characters a lot for spiral or many characters manageable for theater". Because of how stingy hoyoverse is with ressources, you are putting a lot of your playerbase at a crossroad : Do you want to play Spiral abyss endgame or Imaginarium theater endgame ? Without spending, you could be spending many months if not YEARS achieving both goals, that's just insane. It's basically punishing you for either not having enough ressources, or having a certain style of play : You enjoy pushing your Ayaka to her maximum potential (getting her the proper teammates & weapon etc.), congratulation you can play abyss but too bad, you'll miss out on this theater version. You enjoy playing many characters without maxing them & extracting their full potential, good you have access to the theater but forget about getting all the rewards in spiral abyss. How is this a good game design ? Finally I'll just point you toward Hoyoverse's response (in the pinned comment). The fact that they acknowledge the issues of the theater (which is an EXTREMELY rare behavior from them) just tells you that these complaints are completely viable, and that you are just not seeing the whole picture.
@@vlday you are aware that people have different taste and can enjoy different things? There are literally several rumors/leaks about different permanent things they want to implement sooner or later. Just because you don't enjoy it doesn't mean everyone thinks it's bad. More optimized yes, but the concept it still very enjoyable for me. I personally hate the cardgame and it is all over the game. Still I wouldn't talk about it over and over.
@@blackdomeh You are missing the point. Me not having fun in the game mode doesn't matter, it's the last part of the video and as I said, it's the most subjective one. I tried to showcase factual issues about the game mode, tackling the problems of replayability, lack of difficulty, management of ressources, unsynergistic teams etc. I see its problems from a game design point of view, and I talk about them. If anything, that's what any game dev want for their game. It's called feedback. So if people are having fun that makes my complaints not valid ? How does it work exactly ? Criticizing a game mode doesn't mean you hate it, it means you want it to be better, to be improved. Especially if this game mode is permanent & supposed to be endgame. Also I don't look into leaks, So I'm never basing my opinions on rumors or potential misinformations (Free Ayaka when hitting AR42 nowayyyy poggerrrrs) ...
@@vlday I see, I was possibly put of by your clickbaity title and the general vibe from CCs I stumbled upon. Since the theater came out I saw so many unfair criticisms or complains especially on youtube and twitter. Like even thinking ahead with character usage and boons in general is too much to ask. Like, I agree that there need to be some optimizations done and I will address my personal problems in the survey too. (And I sound very confusing because english is not my first language. But I think I get my point across good enough.)
In my opinion, the main problem is the total character restrictions, really. I have around 25 eligible characters to use (and they have "proper" build, even if not great), and it was a pretty fun mode in my opinion. My first playthrough I borrowed a Chevreuse so I put 6 pyro and 6 electro in total (not counting opening characters). So it was just a given to try the mode again with the unused characters in the first playthrough: Sigewinne, Baizhu, Alhaitham and the Anemo characters (and some Pyro that I didn't use, like Gaming). It was pretty challenging and fun. I could see weird synergies that actually worked, like using Lisa's Burst as a Support for Raiden DPS, Dori's Burst as a Support for Sethos' Charged Attack, Sigewinne+Kazuha to setup Vapes for my Gaming, etc. Also, this is the kind of mode where the discourse of "Why use Xinyan when you can use Thoma or Yanfei instead" is simply invalid, since you can use all of them. It really is a "anti-meta" mode in a sense, so I could see people that like the "national" team core could have trouble enjoying (not sure if that's your case). Anyways, I think it's fair to not enjoy the mode, but even though at the beginning I thought the restrictions were dumb, it was way more fun than expected for me.
Fair take tbh but I don't agree with the "anti-meta" view. Why would I raise & build a unit that is redundant & doesn't max the potential of my favorite characters ? I could use a Xinyan to shield my Xiao (in fact my xinyan is actually built on main account lol), but why would I do that if MANY other units do that job better than her ? Why would I allocate those precious ressources on her (in this example) ? Just so I can pat myself on the back telling myself that this will be useful in the theater at some point ?? If ressources were abundant in genshin, then sure why not, could be fun to have a variety of characters built "just in case" ... but unfortunately hoyo's stinginess makes it unrealistic for players to build that many characters (especially if you are f2p). As I said in the video, playing a suboptimal version of my favorite characters in an ENDGAME mode doesn't make sense to me from a game design perspective, but as I said in the video also, that's ME ... I don't have fun doing that & fun is subjective soooo ...
@@vlday You asked "why", and I'd say, because you have the choice to do so and not make it be useless now. If you build Xinyan now, you can use her in Theater. Thoma, Yanfei and Dehya could work as well, and now you have the option to not try to choose the "best" one, and have situations where you use the ones you chose to build. And you can still stick to your meta-picks as well (like bennett/xiangling), but you can't rely on them too much. That's why I said it's "anti-meta". No one is forced to build Xinyan because of that mode (unless it's an early account and they don't have many options, but I was "forced" to build xingqiu at the beginning as well even though I don't like him, so it's how the game works, I guess). Oh, and about how troublesome is to build characters: I agree. But I don't think the mode is at fault there, it's the leveling up system that should be improved imo.
@@vlday Your reason for not building the unit is because you believe its a waste of resources. To be fovaroable to you, I believe you're basing how useful a character is on open world and spiral abyss. For example why build xinyan when your layla has a better shield for both spiral abyss and open world activities. But in my opinion why can't theatre mechanics be considered? Why can't it be theatre, spiral and open world. When you think of building why can't you go like "Well I don't want to put resources into her because I already have a shielder that I like for open world and spiral abyss, but she will help me out a bit with theatre mechanics si let me just level her up to 70" why can't your thought process be like that it? Is it because you dislike theatre? Is it because you believe the rewards are too little? A reason that you gave before prior to what I said is because its a waste of resources and I disagree. You also never explained why its a waste aside from saying resources are scarce. You could say it's a waste of your time to even play genshin to begin with since time is a scarce resource and everything you get from this game is digital and will be realistically lost when the game inevitable shuts down their servers. My point is that how do you determine what is a waste in genshin? Is it spiral abyss? Open world? Character design? Voice lines? Game play? Or is it a mix? If its a mix then that makes your point of wasting resources even less valid. It's entirely opinionated as to whether you should build xinyan on your account at all or just keep farming RNG artifacts. Entirely. Xinyan could be of use in theatre but obviously you don't consider that. Remember value in terms of meta is entirely controlled by hoyo. If they remove spiral abyss you wouldn't need such a strong shield. If they add theatre you would need a few (maybe) strong shields. If they remove theatre then you only need 2 in general. When hoyo adds something like theatre that promotes building lower level units, you should build them because hoyo has given value to them. You can call it a waste due to limited resources but are the resources so limited that after building xinyan on your main account you couldn't clear spiral abyss? Obviously not. And the same applies to both my AR 59 and AR 56 accounts. Even if one has a lot more backlogged resources than the other, I could still use my resin wisely (aka building characters I need for theatre as an f2p) and get it done. I still want to know what you mean by waste of resources. How you determine value. Is it off spiral abyss and if so why spiral abyss and not theatre. If theatre was added before spiral abyss I believe spiral abyss will be getting hate. F2p saying its too hard and hoyo having to nerf it. Whales and high invested account would still clear it easily (check skizdal, he is f2p and clears spiral abyss and theatre with ease). A lot of f2p can do spiral abyss after a while. I mean that youtube eake cleared spiral abyss 32 stars on a fresh account in 3 weeks. What's stopping him from there going like (as an f2p mind you) "let me build a few randoms for theatre now that I have gotten most of the resources from spiral". So please explain your logic behind waste of resources and value in genshin.
@@putent9623 Okay so lemme try to quickly answer the main point of each paragraph, hopefully it will clear the air : Paragraph 1 : My thought process can't be like that because of two very important points : Ressources are scarce in genshin + Redundancy of units. Let's pick the example of shielders : On my main account I have ZL, Xinyan, Diona & Thoma leveled & I use them from time to time. I don't have layla leveled up despite her being better than Thoma & Diona. At the time, the decision was " I don't like her that much + I have this job currently covered by 3 other units (xinyan doesn't count her shield is a joke). So now, If I don't have enough cryo units, I will be leveling up Layla JUST TO ACCESS the theater ? that's the definition of wasting ressources because Diona is already leveled & ready to be played. Paragraph 2 : Answered that earlier but I'll add that leveling up a character to 70 JUST TO ACCESS a game mode is a waste of ressource. This character won't be even used in combat, and the sole purpose of that process is just to unlock the difficulty mode, as shown in the video with Beidou & Chev. In the video, me not leveling up Beidou & Chev doesn't mean these units are useless. But ON THAT account & the way it's played (not a lot of electro units leveled because all my electros are maxed on main) it's the definition of wasting ressources. Paragraph 3 : Yes ressources are limited. I don't know how you play the game but in my case, I can't max more than 2 characters per patch. There's 84 playable characters in genshin. I hope you see my point now. Paragraph 4 : I hope the answers above helped but I'll add another thing regarding the definition of waste : Let's say AS AN EXAMPLE, that I don't like Kaveh for different reasons (don't like the design, the gameplay, whatever other reason). Telling me to use scarce ressources, on a character I dislike, just to access the game mode is for me, the DEFINITION OF wasting my ressources. It has nothing to do with performance or meta or whatever reason. If you are forced to use ressources on characters you don't like, that's wasted ressources (it's suggestive ofc, but it's still ressources that you would have liked allocating elsewhere). Also regarding the F2P argument, you need to have a good banner and be lucky getting the right characters to beat it that fast. In most cases it will take way more time, those examples are the exceptions, not the rule. And it's not as linear as you are making it look to be : You can clear 36 stars abyss with that lineup but that doesn't mean you are done for life with spiral abyss. The next one could have a combination of elemental & dps check like the current abyss for example. So there will be pressure to keep going for more performant units in that case, putting more pressure on the decision to go for more " other whatever units to play theater ". Pfew ! Okay hopefully that was enough elements to answer your questions !
@putent9623 Maybe I can shed some light on the "What's a waste" question. It all comes back to resin. You need it for EVERYTHING in this game and yet you get precious little of it from week to week. For context: I started playing last year. I'm mostly F2P with the exception of BP, a Welkin here or there, or banners for characters I really want. it's been just over a year for me now, and since I wasn't aware of how scarce Resin was OR how necessary it would be for every aspect of this game I'm always too short to build every character I pull. That means a player like me has to be a lot more frugal with their resources. Every player has to look at the content and decide what kind of content they want to run, right? For most people that's Spiral Abyss, which requires two teams. So players are usually encouraged to build out a few different options for both sides, yes? Even major content creators will advise players to be frugal with their resources and focus on building out a few certain kinds of characters with the expectation that you'll then have no major difficulty clearing most of the game's content. So you need resin for: - Artifacts - Talent books - World boss drops - EXP books (leylines) - Mora (leylines) - Weekly boss drops - And NOW to use your overflow encounter points, starting in patch 4.8 We don't have a resin bank. We only earn 200 in a normal period, one every eight minutes. Free BP only gives you a total of five resin every ten levels, paid BP still only gives you ten, and remember that you're limited in how much you can level your BP every week. If you grind BP that's a maximum of 4 extra refreshes (240 resin in a week). Now toss in the housing item reset, right? That's one a week also, so 60 additional resin in a week. This is old but you need- "Total: 4,245 resin, or 23.58 days, (at 180 resin per day) to max a character." That says a lot. If you haven't been saving your resin before AR40 (which I didn't know I needed to, and I think a lot of players didn't either), haven't been playing the game for at least a year, and/or collect a lot of characters (especially if you're without a fair understanding of who you should/want to level) it is SO easy to waste resources. The resource in question is resin. Granted, that number has shifted now that they bumped the resin cap up to 200, but only technically since the refresh rate stayed the same (1 every 8 minutes with NO bank for overflow). It's still a major problem. The community has BEEN asking Hoyo to give us a resin bank and/or up the refresh rate. Hence: Using resin to level a character you're ONLY going to use for *ONE* game mode is, indeed, WASTEFUL.
Guys!! Always remember to answer the Survey Feedback to make clear what you dislike from this event! With enough proper feedback and well written suggestions, tweaks will be made! This is why these Surveys are done. Always keep this in mind: Direct and clear feedback is ALWAYS better than making videos and posts elsewhere when it comes to *_actually_* getting HYV to hear us. Sadly we're hindered because of the fact that they mostly listen to the CN playerbase (bigger player count and more $ from them), but these suggestions are always useful on top of the CN feedback!
Im going to be honnest with you, I used to fill those surveys EVERY patch, and stopped doing it months ago because of how tone def hoyo seemed to be with Genshin. I will make an exception for the next survey though & will be properly writting my feedback regarding imaginarium theater, they really need to fix its issues.
@@vlday I always fill them because well, they're there for something. With enough outcry both outside the game and in these surveys they'll *_have_* to listen. Thankfully I read your pinned comment and they did listen. Still, making suggestions via the Surveys is still a better way to push the to actually fix the problem ^^
Leveling up characters to 70 is nothing. Compare that to artefact for these characters, which is in best case annoying as you don't have layout to put artefact back and in worst resin needed for 70 a character dwarfs in comparison. Have nearly same complains about that mode but I add it feels more like chlorinde/arle advert intead of proper mode. My well build hu-tao hits like wet noodle there and my c3 raiden hits lot less than on corresponding abyss floor. By the way I am surprised how you treat chevruse, she with baizu are only characters allowing you to play a proper team
This is my second account, I don't have a use for chevreuse on it since all my electro units (keqing, cyno, clorinde, kuki, beidou, fischl) are maxed & crowned on the main account. I will max her when I get her on main account obviously.
![ปฏิเสธไม่ไหว (Crush on you) - LIPTA feat. No One Else [Official MV]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/NBw1jF342vw/mqdefault.jpg)
THEY ACTUALLY LISTENED ! No wayyy ! Check out Hoyoverse's response to the complaints they received regarding this mode : t.co/INPHgiA6i8
" In addition, following the official launch of the new gameplay mode "Imaginarium Theater," we are also continuing to monitor Travelers' feedback :
- The initial intention behind the design of "Imaginarium Theater" was to provide Travelers with new and diverse combat experiences through the introduction of new scenarios. However, there are indeed various shortcomings in the current gameplay, particularly in the lack of sufficient positive feedback for different party lineups during battles. Therefore, in the upcoming adjustments, we will continue to focus on elemental reactions and consider designing more strategically powerful and user-friendly mechanisms for everyone to consider.
- Furthermore, regarding the issue raised by many Travelers about "the randomness of character acquisition," a mechanic to "push specific characters" has already been implemented. However, as the effect of the mechanic remains at a subtle level, the actual results are not ideal. In future iterations, we will also optimize the method of obtaining characters, such as providing multiple options for players to choose from in certain instances of character acquisition.
Optimizations for "Imaginarium Theater" are currently under development and will continue to be implemented in subsequent updates. We hope that these changes will provide Travelers with a better gameplay experience. We sincerely appreciate everyone's constructive feedback. "
Gonna have to agree. I had problems understanding what i was doing. This was very hard for a F2P player.
I can't believe they actually responded immediately to this, which is a good thing! Just surprising. Let's see how it turns out. Also, thanks for the update!
I have just accepted it at this point that if you want beautiful exploration, world building and lore- play genshin and if you want real endgame just play honkai star rail. Imaginarium theater just feels like an indirect message from hoyo that they dont care about endgame in genshin, if they truly cared about implimenting an actual endgame then they had Labrinth warriors just lying there in front of them as a perfect game mode OR in my opinion they should have just gone the divergent universe route and made it so that every character you own was pre-levelled and usable. Giving players access to characters instead of restricting them is the key to making a truly enjoyable game mode in my opinion.
I thought more about the labyrinth warriors event & was like " maybe they couldn't implement it for technical reasons that we aren't aware of ", maybe it was too big for phones if it was permanent, or something idk, I'm not a game dev 😆. But I agree with what you said, give me access to my characters if you really want me to enjoy a game mode, otherwise it just feels bad.
you get all of these in hsr, its just not open world
I am a Day 1 Player. And I had to boost 8 Characters to Level 70 because I mostly have water units build. I also always throw away trash artifacts. So i basiclly had 8 characters with nothing equiped. Beat the Mode with the Trail Characters, Hu Tao, Klee and Jean alone. Took me 4 hours and was hell of frustrating ...
And I wasted around 3000 resin for characters I will never use again.
Yeah I didn't adress the issue regarding the availability of characters to level up + artifacts to equip them, which makes the problem even worse and your experience is a good example of it. But at least they quickly reacted to the feedback of the players & hopefully these issues will be ironed out for the next iterations of the theater !
In one instance I ended up having three DPS's and no supports... There are too many random aspects of this mode for it to be enjoyable. In theory it's not the worst idea, but the execution of it makes very mediocre in practice.
exactly my overall feeling yeah. At least they acknowledge the issues & are going to work on more optimizations for the game mode in the future.
About the elemental restriction, I feel like they should do that instead of forcing you to use a certain element, those element are instead buffed, while those who aren't on the list a bit nerfed.
@@ZE.brigitte that would be wayyyy better indeed
@@vlday Yeah, so like that you are rewarded for using the character they want :')
Who in hoyo thought that forcing us to choose many characters with limited time of uses, and then letting every time only to choose from what random charactes the game decided for you, and not even allowing to not use a full team of 4, is a brilliant idea?! Why don't they just let us choose from any character we selected, I don't even care about limit of uses, but why should my team be random all the time?
It def didn't get playtested well enough. I'm speculating here but the game devs might have had pressure to include those restrictions by higher ups, in a move to push players to spend more ... Those restrictions scream " pull more " & " use more ressources than you can afford " type of message.
@@vlday I hope soon whales stop spending on this game because of higher ups' decisions. I heard that most of the bad stuff in Genshin is because of director that worked during first 3 years of Honkai 3rd.
They should've ditched either the Vigor mechanic, the elemental restriction, or at least made it optional for a higher difficulty. There are too many ridiculous limitations in this game with resources for this nonsense. It's punishing newer players and people who haven't been playing long enough to have 100+ resin restores banked.
I was frustrated because visually it's stunning, the concept itself is really fun, and I like being able to interact with party members, among other things, but as it stands I don't think I'm touching this again. It feels terrible not being able to clear basic content because your teams are locked behind stupid restrictions AND/OR a vigor system. We did not need both, and this feels like punishment for the whole community because a vocal minority was whining about a lack of high-end content.
Agreed, these restrictions are out of touch when you realize how limited the access to ressources is in Genshin. The worst part is that I feel like they tried to please everyone, veterans by having a lot of character & elemental restrictions to reward their horizontal investment, and newer players by having relatively low hp bosses to fight, and ended up annoying both types of players 😆
Personally, I don't like it at all. As you said, regarding building characters, I mostly only built characters I like, which are mostly Geo and Anemo 5☆s. I have not a single built Pyro and only Cyno and kinda Keqing built for Electro.
I mostly use one team for exploration, which are Kazuha, Kokomi, Zhongli and a random character I wanna play at that time (currently Navia).
I do have some Hydro built (I do have to get new artifacts for Ayato, though) and Cryo and Dendro, I really just fully built Alhaitham. Nahida not done yet.
But I also have a lot of moments where I go "Don't feel like farming". Because some drops are annoying (Handguards and whatever the Blubberbeasts drop) for example.
So the theater is no fun for me.
Maybe it gets better IF they add Geo, but they hate Geo, so they maybe even skip that, like the elemental reation battle event they did not too long ago.
It's punishing certain playstyles for no real reason, and that's why it has a lot of issues from a game design perspective.
Hopefully it will be fixed in the next iterations 👍
@@vlday I agree. I also hope it gets fixed.
I only managed to beat normal because they gave me Alhaitham to use.
And I honestly wanted to start building Pyro when I get Diluc. Which I still don't have Dx
Though, tbh, I would probably just build Diluc, because I like him x3
As someone who is at AR 55 I despise the character and elemanal restrictions. I have had an almost completely consistent character team throughtout my whole playthrough of the game because it was all I needed to get through the game. I have many charcters, yes, but it feels so sudden for hoyo to say "Yeah, you know those characters that haven't seen the light of day since the last Hu Tao re-run and are only at lvl 20? Yeah, well you need to go level all of them up and give them half decent artifacts so you can play this game mode that barely gives (what I think is) substantial rewards for your effort."
I get that this game mode is end content and I have no problem with lvling my characters up to meet the standards and try out new play styles the thing is, the process is so tedious and it felt so random to me that all of a sudden I needed to have a large array of different charcters to meet the element restrictions AND have them all leveled up to be half decent characters that I won't even pull out during open world exploration or upcoming quests.
Tedious is the right word ! The restriction isn't making the game mode hard, it's just annoying & tedious as you said.
hoyo indirectly telling their players to give them more money.
Waay back I was outraged because instead of doing something like making different artifact sets available on different days in a domain...or letting us select the artifact set we want to farm for...instead of that exceedingly simpler solution, they gave us strongbox. Something people cheered for...
Now, instead of doing something like Labyrinth Warriors...they gave us this.
I think they're just lazy, bro. If I had to spell it out in as few words as possible, Imaginarium was rushed endgame solution for Hoyo to APPEAR like they were raining blessings on it's players.
It def gives the impression of "being rushed" yes, maybe that's because of finally having some competition & them trying to do something in panic mode to retain players.
Great video mate. I never even noticed those restrictions for entering because I've been playing for a lot of years now, but I do see how it might affect other players now
It was a good concept but agreed that it was ruined by too many restrictions. First, you have the slight rng to the Acts. Second, the featured elements are the only usable ones for registering your units. Third, Hard Mode requires way too many units. And last, the vigor system.
I don't like the fact that Hoyo is forcing elements on me (what if the featured element is one I don't like?), or forcing me to waste resources to potentially level a unit I don't like just to meet the requirements. It isn't like Abyss where it does have element checks like the current pyro shield mobs but you are not hardlocked to only Hydro. You can use other elements to meet the check assuming you don't like Hydro or do not have enough Hydro units.
Also something to add to your comment : it's extremely rare to get hard countered in the abyss on both sides. My Neuvillette can't beat the hydro tulpa ? I can use him on the other side. My Xiao isn't super effective against the Wenut ? I can always run him on the other side etc.
As a day 1 player i have somewhat enough characters to beat this mode. I didn't get all 8 medals, but they're just for flex, so i don't care. BUT! The problem arised on my challenge account. I do a catalyst only run just for fun. And i even managed to 36* abyss there several times, but i doubt i'll be able to do even the lowest lvl of difficulty, because there're only 8 catalyst characters that meet the requirements. And i miss 1 from those 8. Yes, i can borrow someone's Klee (probably my own from the main account, i lvl her up rn for this purpose), and i can get Wrio and Baizhu from a special invitation, so it'll make exactly 10, but i believe it won't allow me to enter because you need to have 10 usable characters from the get-go, and it doesn't count last two as a part of requirement. At least i think. But as for the highest difficulty - yeah, i'll need to lvl up at least 4 non-catalyst users to lvl 70. At least i hope it's not all 8 i'm missing. And what's the most annoying thing is a randomizer of the whole event. Let's imagine i bring 18 characters,but i can only use 10. Meaning i'll have to force some characters to basically solo some stages, and i'd need to save Sucrose and Wander for the monolith stage somehow, and i'd need to save Yanfei/Klee + Baizhu + 1 electro (i hope Lisa) until the very end, but i have no idea how these characters will come and in what order, so this lvl of RNG management is really annoying. And it's only this stage, where we can use electro (there're only 2 catalysts - Lisa and Yae Miko), pyro (only Yanfei and Klee) and anemo (4 characters total: Wanderer, Xianyun, Sucrose and Heizhou, and my Heizhou isn't even built properly). But what if it's dendro, geo and hydro for example? I'll be left with even less characters to choose from! There're only to dendro units: Nhida and Baizhu. 4 hydro: Barbara, Kokomi, Mona and Neuvellette (ok, 5 if we count that new girl coming in 5.0) and only one, ONE, geo character: Ningguang. 80% of these characters are not even damage dealers!
And assuming i'll ignore this mode, the rewards i get monthly on these accounts will drastically decrease. From abyss monthly i was collecting 1100 primos, but now it's almost half of that number. Like 600ish smth? I dunno... It's so bad, i can't even find words to describe my disappointment with all of these.
What would be great thing to do: is to allow you use all of your characters, just limit it to 18 as well and leave it random as it is. They could even leave that annoying "energy" thingy. But make it so we can use all elements without restrictions. It'd be more fun that way!
Yeah, the mode excludes a ton of players depending on their playstyles, their character selection (in the case of your challenge account, only catalyst) or their preferences, and that's why it's a failed endgame gameplay loop. There was a lot of good ideas in the comment section, like buffing certain elements & nerfing others in terms of damage output, or like u are suggesting, give us access to all characters but limit the max at 18. Hopefully they heard the feedback of the playerbase & they will adjust that in the future 👍
@@vlday i actually didn't do survey in game. So they don't know about my feedback, because i doubt they read that stuff at all. Why do i think so? Because since the very beginning of 1.0 i was asking for two specific things: skip button and billets exchange. First one is self-explanatory i assume, bit second one is smth not many people even talk about. From the 1.0 what i wanted the most is the option to exchange one billet type to another: like changing catalyst billet to the claymore, or sword to the bow, etc. And each patch i was asking for it for the first two years. So when they did introduce billet exchange it was simply one region billet to another. And you can't even imagine my disappointment at that time. That's why i gave up on surveys as a whole, it's just the waste of time.
Also after starting my challenge account i noticed how many things in this game restricts you and forces you to use specific characters. I know they need to "sell" the said character, but holy shit do i really need to use only that character? I can understand some "challenges" like infamous archer challenge in Inazuma (which took me 8 hours to complete without using bow), but i literally don't understand why they write the story in a way where the game forces you to use 1 specific character and provides no option to use your team + that character. Like why the hell did i roasted those samurais for 4 hours with torches in Kazuha's quest? Why the heck i have to use only Raiden in her story quest? And for love of god, why the heck they patched the option to drown your enemies in water? (i had to take L in Itto's and Kazuha's quests because of it) Just why? And in some quests everything is fine and you can use your characters even if the main character of the story told you to step aside (Gaming's event quest, Zhongli's second quest, Ganyu's quest, etc). I will never forget how i rage quitted in the last lantern rite where the game forced me to use only Yelan and i spent two hours trying to keep aggro on hillichurls with the torches so they could burn the grass (on limited area btw) and i could slowly roast that treasure hoarder who clearly had more hp than he should. I also almost whent out of the grass i can burn because of it.
My point is - those limitations were always there, and what's more boggling my mind is that the more game exists the more limitations there're. They fix stupid bugs no one asked to fix (like the ability to drown enemies, nowadays they just stuck at the edge of water and don't follow you), and don't do anything to fix what really needs to be fixed! I do like Genshin, but i'm really disappointed by it.
@@atomicgrave4340 I hear your frustration, I really do. I used to fill those surveys everytime but stopped doing it also because of how tone deaf the company was to our complaints.
With that being said, now that there's competition, ALL OF A SUDDEN they are talking about the shortcommings in their newest game mode & acknowledging the issues it has. Crazy huh ? So yeah don't get super high expectations, it's a gacha company at the end of the day, BUT there's a little bit of hope now that they are a bit more stressed about their market shares 😁
Me who lvled everyone because
1st. I like everyone
2nd. Them being 70/80 gave me 2 extra wishes
3rd. I got them all to 80/80 because I didn't wsnns farm artefacts
Having this playstyle is fine with the theater & I'm glad it didn't cause problems for you. Unfortunately, other playstyles can go through some issues to JUST access the game mode which, honestly, doesn't make sense.
@@vlday i get it, my friend complained that she couldn't do it (I somehow first tried it lol) and idk if I'm even going to be able to complete it on another friends account since they don't build many characters
I had to use a bunch of resources to build characters up that i didnt plan on using and the game mode isnt fun. Feels like a bootleg hsr mode that wasnt properly tested. Also the buffs that you get should elevate your poorly built teams to slightly ok levels but instead my low investment characters were useless, so the buffs suck imo
There''s legit 0 incentive to go for the buffs Vs. going for characters ... definitely feels like it wasn't properly tested indeed ...
5:45 This is so true. I'm at AR58 with _almost_ enough characters to get to Hard mode. Thing is, Genshin never gave me enough reasons to level up alteratives to certain characters + some elements have too many characters locked behind Event Banners or Standard Banner RNG. Currently, I have too manu DPSs, and not enough supports. I already had to start building Cyno (I was new, benched him due to Scarabs) and Keqing (got her after Raiden, so she was useless to me), but I still lack 1 character. From my options, I decided to go with Lisa over Beidou simply because of Lisa's DEF shred.
My biggest grudge is that Genshin NEVER gave me a reason to pick up certain characters. I already have all my characters to Ascension 3 because free wishes, but nothing more. Wanna know why? Because I already have 3 already working teams. And the Imaginarium Theater rendered all three of them useless. Neuvillette, Furina, Zhongli, Nahida, Xingqiu, and many more are completely useless for the Theater, and those are the characters I've spent most time building. The Element restriction is so frustrating man, like at least let US decide our 4 Special Guests, instead of punishing players for not pulling for every single character.
The scarabs ... I still have PTSD from that hahaha
But I agree and your suggestion regarding the special guests is actually a good one. I feel like those restrictions are just trying to gate keep the content, and needs to go. Cuz right now it's elemental restrictions but who says that in the future it won't be Weapon type restrictions ? Or hair color restrictions idk 🤣
@@vlday Imagine a Catalyst only Theater 💀 Now that would be super messed up lmao
To tell you the truth, most gacha games as they get older will change meta on horizontal investment than the usual vertical investment for Spiral Abyss as it's what sells characters and resources (if ppl refresh resin or buy packs). It was just a matter of time. Is it annoying? Yes. But it's endgame of endgames and a norm in the gacha industry. HSR did it sooner since you'd want different characters on hand for every elemental coverage for specific shields. GI on the other hand I found is a more of a beginner's game for gacha, so they've only implemented it now. Been telling my friends to invest horizontally slowly through the years, did they listen? Nope. I can't blame them tho, they're not gacha gamers in general. Most gachas want you get and build as many characters needed with limited resources. It's part of the grind. Hoyo is just much more stingy in GI than most of their games or compared to other gachas.
Yeah fr. I'm not that big of a gacha gamer, but Genshin isn't my first gacha game (it's HI3rd), and sadly over there, some characters are so broken I've never had to bench them unless their 'element' was completely useless (Herrscher of Human: Ego (Elysia)), so I'm not that used to horizontal investment.
Thankfully enough, though, I do have plenty of options. But I still need to build them, and the biggest hurdle is to get enough Boss mats and good enough Artifacts as a F2P. One of the biggest problems towards building characters, in my opinion, is material accessibility. I've had Cyno ever since 3.5, got him to Ascencion 3 for the wishes and never used him due to him needing Scarabs and them being so far apart from eachother compared to other unit's materials I had.
So, when you add not knowing much about horizontal investment in gacha games + resin restrictions + annoying materials, you get people with not enough characters even after getting to a comfortable endgame state on their account.
I see, so it's a common practice in the gacha industry. Genshin is the only gacha I play, so Im really not that used to these mechanics😮💨(and will never be ...)
@@KyzenEX Material access has been my main gripe w/ Genshin all these years. I heard from leaks that there will be changes to weekly boss materials for easier access as of 5.0, but for materials on the map, you have to farm them yourself regardless. I usually use Kyostinv's guides for those efficient material farming (I did for those starfish for Clorinde and Neuv). The guy makes the process into 5 to 10 minutes. Don't shy away from efficient farming routes, it'll save you a lot of time.
Also, w/ Genshin being an open world, hoard everything. I hoarded Beryl conches until I had 168 (enough to fully ascend 1 character) before Charlotte came out while exploring in the overworld. It saved me time when I got her and build her. Have that mindset when you explore Natlan when it releases, you never know you might need it, and you'll thank yourself later.
But I will agree that the Imaginarium's implementation is as clunky as you say for its debut. Could have been done better.
@@vlday Well, if it helps, the main thing in playing a gacha game is to slowly build a diverse account to have all your bases covered since devs are notorious in throwing any sort of meta your way. Gacha games are slow progress as an f2p for this reason, as it persuades ppl who want faster progression to pay. For those who don't like that very slow and horizontal grind, I'd suggest them playing a non gacha game instead. I mean no offense, but that sort of patience as an f2p is not for everyone.
@@diahprasetianingtyas6822 Oh don't worry about it, no offense taken, especially since I consider myself be a VERY patient F2P player. Been a degen min maxer in this game since the first week of its release, doing artifact & elite boss routes for the longest time, saving my primos accordingly etc. I don't have any issue with the grinding aspect, in fact I like it a lot. But I wanted to showcase the issues the game mode has, with many players, by using my secondary account as an example (I don't min max that account at all, I wanna keep my sanity 🤣)
Man i hate this mode so much. Im ar 57 and I can't even complete the normal mode after I was forced to level up like 3 random characters i don't give two shits about to level 60/70. I just don't know why i should invenst into these characters when building a decently strong character in this game is hell especially in the artifacts and weapon aspects. After two years of playing this game i have only 4 functional teams: wanderer hypercarry, neuvillette hypercarry, alhaitham hyperbloom and somewhat functional Diluc vaporize team. Only one of these is usable in the theater.. not to mention I can't use them in the same team because each character has only two uses:) i just gotta accept that I'll only do the easy mode.. but that means I'll miss out on a lot of primogems. Spiral abyss is much better
I agree that spiral abyss is way better, at least for me ! I enjoy that kind of end game way more because you can play virtually any character you want AND it's challenging.
They already addressed the criticism that the theater got, hopefully they can improve the experience in the future 👍
At first I didn't like the restrictions either but after some tries I really liked the gamemode.
People complaining that they can't use all their characters is kinda dumb. Sorry... you guys complaining aboud END GAME content. The mode finally rewards players that go out of their way and build lesser used characters.
Yes, a newbie won't manage the difficult mode. As same as doing fullstar 12.3 abyss.
Now people have to think about building few characters a lot for spiral or many characters manageable for theater. that's all.
The only thing I wished they do because it would be more dynamic is getting more support characters from friends.
Your comment is very confusing.
First of all, the theater is NOT a proper endgame. An endgame is supposed to offer the players a challenging & replayable gameplay loop. This mode fails to deliver that experience. The theater is EXTREMELY easy and the fact it restricts your characters directly hinders its replayability.
In fact it's even worse than that cuz denying you the progress you made on many of your characters doesn't make sense in an Endgame content : Imagine you are playing a RPG and the last donjon of the game just tells you " oh no sorry, you won't be able to beat this donjon with this warrior class. Better go back & select another one"
Second of all, you literally made my point by saying that now, "people have to think about building few characters a lot for spiral or many characters manageable for theater". Because of how stingy hoyoverse is with ressources, you are putting a lot of your playerbase at a crossroad : Do you want to play Spiral abyss endgame or Imaginarium theater endgame ? Without spending, you could be spending many months if not YEARS achieving both goals, that's just insane.
It's basically punishing you for either not having enough ressources, or having a certain style of play : You enjoy pushing your Ayaka to her maximum potential (getting her the proper teammates & weapon etc.), congratulation you can play abyss but too bad, you'll miss out on this theater version. You enjoy playing many characters without maxing them & extracting their full potential, good you have access to the theater but forget about getting all the rewards in spiral abyss. How is this a good game design ?
Finally I'll just point you toward Hoyoverse's response (in the pinned comment). The fact that they acknowledge the issues of the theater (which is an EXTREMELY rare behavior from them) just tells you that these complaints are completely viable, and that you are just not seeing the whole picture.
@@vlday you are aware that people have different taste and can enjoy different things?
There are literally several rumors/leaks about different permanent things they want to implement sooner or later.
Just because you don't enjoy it doesn't mean everyone thinks it's bad.
More optimized yes, but the concept it still very enjoyable for me.
I personally hate the cardgame and it is all over the game. Still I wouldn't talk about it over and over.
@@blackdomeh You are missing the point. Me not having fun in the game mode doesn't matter, it's the last part of the video and as I said, it's the most subjective one.
I tried to showcase factual issues about the game mode, tackling the problems of replayability, lack of difficulty, management of ressources, unsynergistic teams etc.
I see its problems from a game design point of view, and I talk about them. If anything, that's what any game dev want for their game. It's called feedback.
So if people are having fun that makes my complaints not valid ? How does it work exactly ?
Criticizing a game mode doesn't mean you hate it, it means you want it to be better, to be improved. Especially if this game mode is permanent & supposed to be endgame.
Also I don't look into leaks, So I'm never basing my opinions on rumors or potential misinformations (Free Ayaka when hitting AR42 nowayyyy poggerrrrs) ...
@@vlday I see, I was possibly put of by your clickbaity title and the general vibe from CCs I stumbled upon. Since the theater came out I saw so many unfair criticisms or complains especially on youtube and twitter. Like even thinking ahead with character usage and boons in general is too much to ask.
Like, I agree that there need to be some optimizations done and I will address my personal problems in the survey too.
(And I sound very confusing because english is not my first language. But I think I get my point across good enough.)
@@blackdomeh All good, I appreciate you sharing your opinion !
In my opinion, the main problem is the total character restrictions, really. I have around 25 eligible characters to use (and they have "proper" build, even if not great), and it was a pretty fun mode in my opinion. My first playthrough I borrowed a Chevreuse so I put 6 pyro and 6 electro in total (not counting opening characters). So it was just a given to try the mode again with the unused characters in the first playthrough: Sigewinne, Baizhu, Alhaitham and the Anemo characters (and some Pyro that I didn't use, like Gaming). It was pretty challenging and fun.
I could see weird synergies that actually worked, like using Lisa's Burst as a Support for Raiden DPS, Dori's Burst as a Support for Sethos' Charged Attack, Sigewinne+Kazuha to setup Vapes for my Gaming, etc.
Also, this is the kind of mode where the discourse of "Why use Xinyan when you can use Thoma or Yanfei instead" is simply invalid, since you can use all of them. It really is a "anti-meta" mode in a sense, so I could see people that like the "national" team core could have trouble enjoying (not sure if that's your case).
Anyways, I think it's fair to not enjoy the mode, but even though at the beginning I thought the restrictions were dumb, it was way more fun than expected for me.
Fair take tbh but I don't agree with the "anti-meta" view. Why would I raise & build a unit that is redundant & doesn't max the potential of my favorite characters ? I could use a Xinyan to shield my Xiao (in fact my xinyan is actually built on main account lol), but why would I do that if MANY other units do that job better than her ? Why would I allocate those precious ressources on her (in this example) ? Just so I can pat myself on the back telling myself that this will be useful in the theater at some point ??
If ressources were abundant in genshin, then sure why not, could be fun to have a variety of characters built "just in case" ... but unfortunately hoyo's stinginess makes it unrealistic for players to build that many characters (especially if you are f2p).
As I said in the video, playing a suboptimal version of my favorite characters in an ENDGAME mode doesn't make sense to me from a game design perspective, but as I said in the video also, that's ME ... I don't have fun doing that & fun is subjective soooo ...
@@vlday You asked "why", and I'd say, because you have the choice to do so and not make it be useless now.
If you build Xinyan now, you can use her in Theater. Thoma, Yanfei and Dehya could work as well, and now you have the option to not try to choose the "best" one, and have situations where you use the ones you chose to build. And you can still stick to your meta-picks as well (like bennett/xiangling), but you can't rely on them too much.
That's why I said it's "anti-meta". No one is forced to build Xinyan because of that mode (unless it's an early account and they don't have many options, but I was "forced" to build xingqiu at the beginning as well even though I don't like him, so it's how the game works, I guess).
Oh, and about how troublesome is to build characters: I agree. But I don't think the mode is at fault there, it's the leveling up system that should be improved imo.
@@vlday Your reason for not building the unit is because you believe its a waste of resources. To be fovaroable to you, I believe you're basing how useful a character is on open world and spiral abyss. For example why build xinyan when your layla has a better shield for both spiral abyss and open world activities. But in my opinion why can't theatre mechanics be considered? Why can't it be theatre, spiral and open world. When you think of building why can't you go like "Well I don't want to put resources into her because I already have a shielder that I like for open world and spiral abyss, but she will help me out a bit with theatre mechanics si let me just level her up to 70" why can't your thought process be like that it? Is it because you dislike theatre? Is it because you believe the rewards are too little?
A reason that you gave before prior to what I said is because its a waste of resources and I disagree. You also never explained why its a waste aside from saying resources are scarce. You could say it's a waste of your time to even play genshin to begin with since time is a scarce resource and everything you get from this game is digital and will be realistically lost when the game inevitable shuts down their servers. My point is that how do you determine what is a waste in genshin? Is it spiral abyss? Open world? Character design? Voice lines? Game play? Or is it a mix? If its a mix then that makes your point of wasting resources even less valid. It's entirely opinionated as to whether you should build xinyan on your account at all or just keep farming RNG artifacts. Entirely. Xinyan could be of use in theatre but obviously you don't consider that. Remember value in terms of meta is entirely controlled by hoyo. If they remove spiral abyss you wouldn't need such a strong shield. If they add theatre you would need a few (maybe) strong shields. If they remove theatre then you only need 2 in general.
When hoyo adds something like theatre that promotes building lower level units, you should build them because hoyo has given value to them. You can call it a waste due to limited resources but are the resources so limited that after building xinyan on your main account you couldn't clear spiral abyss? Obviously not. And the same applies to both my AR 59 and AR 56 accounts. Even if one has a lot more backlogged resources than the other, I could still use my resin wisely (aka building characters I need for theatre as an f2p) and get it done.
I still want to know what you mean by waste of resources. How you determine value. Is it off spiral abyss and if so why spiral abyss and not theatre. If theatre was added before spiral abyss I believe spiral abyss will be getting hate. F2p saying its too hard and hoyo having to nerf it. Whales and high invested account would still clear it easily (check skizdal, he is f2p and clears spiral abyss and theatre with ease). A lot of f2p can do spiral abyss after a while. I mean that youtube eake cleared spiral abyss 32 stars on a fresh account in 3 weeks. What's stopping him from there going like (as an f2p mind you) "let me build a few randoms for theatre now that I have gotten most of the resources from spiral".
So please explain your logic behind waste of resources and value in genshin.
@@putent9623 Okay so lemme try to quickly answer the main point of each paragraph, hopefully it will clear the air :
Paragraph 1 : My thought process can't be like that because of two very important points : Ressources are scarce in genshin + Redundancy of units. Let's pick the example of shielders : On my main account I have ZL, Xinyan, Diona & Thoma leveled & I use them from time to time. I don't have layla leveled up despite her being better than Thoma & Diona. At the time, the decision was " I don't like her that much + I have this job currently covered by 3 other units (xinyan doesn't count her shield is a joke). So now, If I don't have enough cryo units, I will be leveling up Layla JUST TO ACCESS the theater ? that's the definition of wasting ressources because Diona is already leveled & ready to be played.
Paragraph 2 : Answered that earlier but I'll add that leveling up a character to 70 JUST TO ACCESS a game mode is a waste of ressource. This character won't be even used in combat, and the sole purpose of that process is just to unlock the difficulty mode, as shown in the video with Beidou & Chev. In the video, me not leveling up Beidou & Chev doesn't mean these units are useless. But ON THAT account & the way it's played (not a lot of electro units leveled because all my electros are maxed on main) it's the definition of wasting ressources.
Paragraph 3 : Yes ressources are limited. I don't know how you play the game but in my case, I can't max more than 2 characters per patch. There's 84 playable characters in genshin. I hope you see my point now.
Paragraph 4 : I hope the answers above helped but I'll add another thing regarding the definition of waste : Let's say AS AN EXAMPLE, that I don't like Kaveh for different reasons (don't like the design, the gameplay, whatever other reason). Telling me to use scarce ressources, on a character I dislike, just to access the game mode is for me, the DEFINITION OF wasting my ressources. It has nothing to do with performance or meta or whatever reason. If you are forced to use ressources on characters you don't like, that's wasted ressources (it's suggestive ofc, but it's still ressources that you would have liked allocating elsewhere).
Also regarding the F2P argument, you need to have a good banner and be lucky getting the right characters to beat it that fast. In most cases it will take way more time, those examples are the exceptions, not the rule. And it's not as linear as you are making it look to be : You can clear 36 stars abyss with that lineup but that doesn't mean you are done for life with spiral abyss. The next one could have a combination of elemental & dps check like the current abyss for example. So there will be pressure to keep going for more performant units in that case, putting more pressure on the decision to go for more " other whatever units to play theater ".
Pfew ! Okay hopefully that was enough elements to answer your questions !
@putent9623 Maybe I can shed some light on the "What's a waste" question. It all comes back to resin. You need it for EVERYTHING in this game and yet you get precious little of it from week to week.
For context: I started playing last year. I'm mostly F2P with the exception of BP, a Welkin here or there, or banners for characters I really want. it's been just over a year for me now, and since I wasn't aware of how scarce Resin was OR how necessary it would be for every aspect of this game I'm always too short to build every character I pull. That means a player like me has to be a lot more frugal with their resources.
Every player has to look at the content and decide what kind of content they want to run, right? For most people that's Spiral Abyss, which requires two teams. So players are usually encouraged to build out a few different options for both sides, yes? Even major content creators will advise players to be frugal with their resources and focus on building out a few certain kinds of characters with the expectation that you'll then have no major difficulty clearing most of the game's content.
So you need resin for:
- Artifacts
- Talent books
- World boss drops
- EXP books (leylines)
- Mora (leylines)
- Weekly boss drops
- And NOW to use your overflow encounter points, starting in patch 4.8
We don't have a resin bank. We only earn 200 in a normal period, one every eight minutes. Free BP only gives you a total of five resin every ten levels, paid BP still only gives you ten, and remember that you're limited in how much you can level your BP every week. If you grind BP that's a maximum of 4 extra refreshes (240 resin in a week). Now toss in the housing item reset, right? That's one a week also, so 60 additional resin in a week.
This is old but you need- "Total: 4,245 resin, or 23.58 days, (at 180 resin per day) to max a character."
That says a lot. If you haven't been saving your resin before AR40 (which I didn't know I needed to, and I think a lot of players didn't either), haven't been playing the game for at least a year, and/or collect a lot of characters (especially if you're without a fair understanding of who you should/want to level) it is SO easy to waste resources. The resource in question is resin.
Granted, that number has shifted now that they bumped the resin cap up to 200, but only technically since the refresh rate stayed the same (1 every 8 minutes with NO bank for overflow). It's still a major problem. The community has BEEN asking Hoyo to give us a resin bank and/or up the refresh rate. Hence: Using resin to level a character you're ONLY going to use for *ONE* game mode is, indeed, WASTEFUL.
Guys!! Always remember to answer the Survey Feedback to make clear what you dislike from this event! With enough proper feedback and well written suggestions, tweaks will be made! This is why these Surveys are done.
Always keep this in mind: Direct and clear feedback is ALWAYS better than making videos and posts elsewhere when it comes to *_actually_* getting HYV to hear us. Sadly we're hindered because of the fact that they mostly listen to the CN playerbase (bigger player count and more $ from them), but these suggestions are always useful on top of the CN feedback!
Im going to be honnest with you, I used to fill those surveys EVERY patch, and stopped doing it months ago because of how tone def hoyo seemed to be with Genshin. I will make an exception for the next survey though & will be properly writting my feedback regarding imaginarium theater, they really need to fix its issues.
@@vlday I always fill them because well, they're there for something.
With enough outcry both outside the game and in these surveys they'll *_have_* to listen. Thankfully I read your pinned comment and they did listen. Still, making suggestions via the Surveys is still a better way to push the to actually fix the problem ^^
Leveling up characters to 70 is nothing. Compare that to artefact for these characters, which is in best case annoying as you don't have layout to put artefact back and in worst resin needed for 70 a character dwarfs in comparison. Have nearly same complains about that mode but I add it feels more like chlorinde/arle advert intead of proper mode. My well build hu-tao hits like wet noodle there and my c3 raiden hits lot less than on corresponding abyss floor. By the way I am surprised how you treat chevruse, she with baizu are only characters allowing you to play a proper team
This is my second account, I don't have a use for chevreuse on it since all my electro units (keqing, cyno, clorinde, kuki, beidou, fischl) are maxed & crowned on the main account. I will max her when I get her on main account obviously.
skill issue.. done it with a 8 month f2p acc with artifacts barely getting rank A
Skill issue… no, it’s just not fun. It’s not hard, just annoying (the whole point of his video)
This ^ ! Done now on both accounts without any issue, it was just annoying to unlock hard difficulty on the second account.
Yeah right
This means you have no life