Five-star rated characters in Fire Emblem Heroes are drawn at a rate of 3.25% per summon. Suffice to say, the chances of getting a highly coveted five-star player during a summoning session is not very good.
In casinos, aside from the wild array of side bets available in craps, roulette is considered the game with the worst odds on the floor. The standard American roulette wheel has spots for 1-36, as well as a zero and a double-zero, for a total of 38 numbers for a ball to drop onto; so on every single spin, gamblers have a 2.6315789% of hitting a single number and getting a 36x payout.
The difference with roulette is that there is a variety of ways to hedge your bets, wager on half or quarter spots, mitigate losses and frustration, maximize entertainment and enjoyment, and depending on the casino, drinks are usually free and sometimes the waitresses are hot.
In FEH, you pull the slot machine, get nothing of any value, and then walk away pissed off. In less than 60 seconds. Eventually, you get back on the horse, grind your way to 20 orbs or whatever denomination one feels comfortable getting to before getting back into the casino, and the process repeats itself again and again.
As much as I’m aware of having just quoted a guy who quoted Einstein’s famous line already this week, but the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
In the case of FEH, players do the same thing over and over again, which is grinding the same old maps and missions to get orbs, to get the chance to play the summoning slot machine, and hoping for different results, i.e. five-star focus characters, but then getting saddled with the same sub-mediocre summoning session where they get Donnel, Bartre, Beruka, Setsuna and Wrys; all three-star, no less.
Nothing deflates my enthusiasm for the game faster than the countless times I’ve gone through the insane rat race of grinding out orbs, only to gamble them away for garbage pulls, getting the same shit again and again, with almost no progress made in acquiring better characters to improve my playing experience. Every time I endure a series of shitty pulls, I want to uninstall the game, but I don’t and I eventually start playing again and the cycle repeats itself like true definitive insanity.
I don’t have a Takumi. I don’t have an Azura. I don’t have a Camilla, Hector, Bride Cordelia, Katarina, Reinhardt or any other character that’s been deemed a coveted game-breaker or that I simply just want. They’re all classified as five-star focus, and available as such, and in the case of some characters, are only available for limited periods to where if you don’t have enough orbs saved up or are willing to plunk down actual money, then you have no chance at getting them.
I’m not trying to be so woe-is-me, because I know that I’m not the only player out there going through such frustrations with the game. It’s practically meme-worthy on just how commonplace it is to get tragically pathetic summoning sessions, and there are far more people bitching about the shitty draw rates versus those who are praising the game for its fun and its proactive and engaged developer constantly staying on top of it. Several people I know have already literally rage-quit the game, uninstalling it outright, having boiled over with frustration at just how obtuse the game is to actually pay out periodically.
In all fairness, I have gotten a fair number of five-star characters. However, none of them are really rare characters, and the vast majority of my lucky five-star draws have been primarily red swords and healers, the most common and the most useless of classes in the game, because by the time you get to lunatic battles, AI opponents are often blue, seldom green, negating the effectiveness of red class characters, and they all kill you in one-shot, making healers completely redundant.
I would gladly take any one of the aforementioned good/want characters if they were even available at a one-star rating at a higher percentage. Gladly! And then I could grind them up to their maximum potential myself, and not have to rely on a paltry 3% chance to hope to get them. Feathers, the currency in which characters are upgraded, are a pretty rare commodity in their own right, but I’d gladly grind out 80 levels and plunk down 28,000 feathers to theoretically get a one-star character to a five-star, as long as they were one that I actually gave a shit about wanting.
The game is undoubtedly flawed in a horribly unbalanced way, and the thought that most everything is based on luck and random selection is depressing and kills my enthusiasm just a little bit more. But I keep coming back, because I still hope that I’ll eventually get characters I want. Math says on a long enough time line, everyone eventually will, but the question is then, by the time people actually get shit they want, will anyone actually still be playing the game? Will the developer still be proactively releasing content and maps and keeping the players engaged? Will anyone care?
At a 3.25% chance of success, I’m going to wager no. But I’ll keep playing for a little bit longer, because I’m OCD like that, and nothing else has come up to take its place in the inane app to consume my attention when I don’t want to look around at the world around me or I’m actively trying not to look up at other people. Because insanity.
