[ChicletPrime]

i logged in this morning and yay! the game has updated and the new banner has arrived for me.

but there's this weird new re-run/Promise thing that i've never seen before. it looks like it has three options (can you only get one, not all?) that has a blue diamond purchase, a real money purchase and a "free" thing.

what is this? is it worth getting? can i only choose one? they seem to be 4 star memories which, okay, but it has some cosmetics attached and a bunch of silver tickets.

laoshi, help!

[Coldsaturn]

They changed a bunch of things with this mini-update.
First of all: so many things are behind an actual paywall, instead of behind a game-currency (like chocolate). Many fans are mad.
Second big change: When you go to the With Him page and click on the magnifying glass on the top left of the page, you get the list of all the affinity levels and their related rewards. Well, now, FINALLY, you can tap on each affinity number and see the message you get when you unlock it. Before this update, fans had to ask other fans if they had saved those screenshots, and we had to rely on notion pages where fans put those messages up.

Now, onward to the promise.
You've already seen a few Promise events (remember when I told you about Raf's promise card Banquet Ablaze that's lore relevant but stuck behind a paywall?), and they usually work this way:
You have 2 LIs together per promise event, with 3 tiers. 1 is the free tier, it will get you upgrading resources but no card. Tier 2 will give you more resources and you can choose the card of 1 LI, which you will get 4 times during the event so that you can rank it to the max. Tier 3 adds just a couple of bonus items, but most importantly will give you the second LI's card, fully ranked.

What you're seeing now is the rerun of a past promise. I've seen another couple of reruns in the past, most notably the oracle of scam (stars) when you were already playing the game. This is a new version they're testing out I guess.
I don't know how it's going with your currency, but let's say the price is 9.99 dollars to buy 1 of the 3 LIs' cards. Once you have it you'll get the corresponding free item (Raf's has fluffy bunny, Xavier has Infinite Future glasses - they're the ones we use to glitch the hair, if you were to get it you'd need to use another item to trigger the glitch, and for Zayne Floral Melodies). Say you also want the reward box in the middle which gives you 3 titles and 10 empyrean tickets: you have to pay 6.99 dollars.
Say you want to rank the card you just got: you need to pay 200 purple diamonds for each rank (600 purple diamonds in total).

Say you're done with 1 LI and want the promise card of another: do it all over again. Pay 10 dollars for the card, then 600 purple diamonds to rank it. Additional 7 dollars if you want the 3 titles and 10 emp tickets.

Is it costly? Stupidly so.
Is it worthy? I can only say: depends on if you like the cards and if they're in a stella that you care about. For me, for example, the great doubt is that it's a green 4 star so I wouldn't need it (I already have a full team of 6 green stella for Raf thanks to the beach banner), but I do like the story in it, and my completionist ass is trying to push me toward getting all the Raf cards I've missed.
So check out the card stories on youtube and see if you vibe with them to the point of spending 20 dollars to obtain 1 card fully ranked.


You also have the current Summery Promise event with 2 tiers. The free one gives you upgrading resources, whereas the paid tier at 6 dollars will give you one of MC's beach outfits and then more upgrading resources.
If you were to buy the outfit from the shop, it would cost you 6 dollars in purple diamonds, so it would make sense to pay them for the promise so you also get the added resources. But in case you gathered purple diamonds through the aurum pass, you would have already paid for them, and paying for the promise would be an additional cost.

[ChicletPrime]

it's times like these where i am proud of myself for having an actual job that gives me a paycheque because dropping $20 on something is more a case of me being stingy about it, than an actual financial decision.

re/mad fans -- yeah, i get it. but this is a gatcha game. to be brutally honest, while this game is not exactly the best example of a free to play model by a loooong shot, its really not all that bad in comparison to some and at least for me, it hasn't tripped my anger-o-meter. could they be less stingy with the diamonds and offer fairer pricing in the real money store? hells yeah. will it eventually cross over some internal line inside me where i drop the game like a hot potato out of sheer aggravated disappointment? oh, probably. is that day going to happen before Abysm Sovereign drops? probably not!

that was a great breakdown, thank you, i have grasped those basics in a chokehold. i'm going with Summery Promise for sure, because then i don't have to chose between the two swimsuit options. one of them just comes with if i mark it down as "resource purchase" to fool my inner accountant and I can just flat out purchase the other by telling myself i deserve 'a little treat'. that's two different budget allocations; as long as the two streams never cross, nobody will be the wiser.

i'll look at the stella for the re-run promise - the pricing strategy does seem pretty egregious and i should probably not encourage Infold to think this is a viable strategy going forward but... i don't have to rank them necessarily and $10 (or whatever it is in my money) is, again, coffee and a cookie money. i'll get some tea and check them out for story and see what i want to do there.

since you're just focusing on Rafayel and not spread all over like whimsical me, you should definitely get that card. you know you'll kick yourself if you don't even if you just chuck it into the great card pile of stuff you never touch.

[Coldsaturn]

Oh yeah, that's for sure. But fans are getting mad because the more time passes the more infold seems to be moving toward the next financial step, where they've already secured their players with shiny stuff at the start, and now they can start milking them dry and testing just how far they can take things before someone snaps.
This promise event+banner being so heavily p2p rubbed people the wrong way after the drama with KoD Xav's false advertisement.

You're dangerously enabling me but you're also totally right, I would regret not getting the card, especially because it's not available in any other pool. I don't have any reason to rank it, so I'll probably just get it and be done with it.

[ChicletPrime]

channel your inner Sylus, kitten. why deny yourself?