"but but but we have more PS sales! its true and real!"
Who would've thought making pedo baiting with these loli girls and then sexualizing them would alienate your shrinking player base even further? Who would've thought that?
They’ve been alienating the male-collector players for months, every time a 5 star male agent dropped it was right before the super busted kill-everything-instantly-die unit (in the case of Banyue, Hugo) and multiple male characters got pushed down to 4-stars to make room for whoever they’re pushing now (primarily Manato). Part of the appeal at first was that there really were characters for everyone. And slowly the game started pushing them out for the waifu hunters and loliniggers because Waterkuma wanted to push four banners of child idols
Also the game forced you to go on 4 story-mandatory dates with the character they fucked over Banyue for, which left a bad taste in a lot of people’s mouths (including me)
Edit for more thoughts:
Zenless has largely run into a problem due to this, which is that patches either fall into skip for next Void Hunter (the super fuck you die units) or splurge on Void Hunters. Does this banner support the VH in my account? When is the next one? Etc. Because patches fall into one of those two categories, you see months of super intense spending, followed by revenue falling off a cliff.
In the case of Banyue’s banner, poor guy never stood a chance. They put his banner a patch before the most busted unit in the game, with a spending event for that busted unit (basically spend money -> extra stuff) so people were even less incentivized to pull for him, even in spite of his cool kit and banger design.
Each Void Hunter power creeps the last as well, partly by numbers and partly by skill. Miyabi was the best unit in the game because she had defensive skills and crazy damage in a time where most teams had to pick one. YiXuan cliffed Miyabi by being able to ignore defense when bosses had inflated HP and DEF. And Shunguang cliffed YiXuan by being able to pop ult THREE TIMES MORE OFTEN than everyone else
TLDR: patches for ZZZ are either free puppies or they spit in your mouth