Spending gems on your favorite waifu and ending up empty-handed is every player’s worst nightmare. To solve this, the popular mobile game Blue Archive announced a complete overhaul of its student recruitment system. However, the sudden announcement caused so much confusion that the game’s general producer, Kim Yong-ha, had to publicly apologize to fans.

The major update, effective after maintenance on July 29, eliminates the permanent standard recruitment and old point system, implementing the new call charge mechanism. Now, each pull adds a counter that doesn’t reset between banners until you get the featured student. At 100 attempts, the gacha guarantees a 3-star character, with a 50% chance of it being the banner girl, while 200 pulls guarantee the promotional student.

Although the development team aimed to reduce user stress by accumulating pull progress and giving ten-recruitment tickets for milestones, the notice came just a day before implementation. Kim Yong-ha admitted the lack of advance notice caused distrust in the community, acknowledging poor prior communication. The producer promised to prioritize service stability and provide more timely notices to regain fan trust.

Since carrying over the pull counter between banners is something many mobile gamers could only dream of, do you think this new format benefits non-spending users, or did the lack of prior notice ruin your saving plans?