I spent way too much at the Fantasy Gacha Carnival,which has been a pattern this month. I was joking with a friend that I needed to open some kind of store to raise my spending money, because I can't continue this way! I was inspired by deviousMind to try shifting to another race again, and soon a lot of this will be winging its way to a newly-designated Harpy Alt (who has been a second mermaid, so she's just as happy to have a whole category to herself). Thankfully, the Gacha Gods were with me and I landed a few of the gorgeous rares - not the brightly colored one I was hoping for, but this Golden Nightingale is completely gorgeous and a ton of fun. The feet are rigged to the legs, and the wings are rigged to the arms, with flexible attachments for the proper feathery effect. The tail is not rigged, which is nice since you can move it around a bit to fit up with your clothing. There is, next to the Harpy Gacha of Shiny Doom, a Gacha of vague-bits-of-leather-and-feathers-which-pass-for-clothing. The belt is rigged, and unlike a lot of rigged things demands a bit of belly to fill it out. The top is unrigged, and came with a variety of shades of feathers in a textured top. It does not come with panties, so I added my own; the belt does not over things from all angles, so mind the rating of your sims when you wear it solo.
My harpy is clearly of the warrior cast, diving and guarding the nests of her family, and she wears horns around her neck - some kind of trophy perhaps? - from Enfant Terrible, and someone strung some apples around her wrist as a sort of mobile snack (both commons from the same gacha). The Enfant Terrible gacha has a variety of different things in a few colors - including my new bane, the Ultra Rare. Keeping with the inspiration of jewelry from natural items, this Mini-Staghorn Crown from ieQED means she must have spent hours hunting wild jackolopes in order to weave it together. There is a wild number of colors of crowns, and while the rares are.. well, rare, they are not impossible to get. Finally, having lost an eye in the wars, Harpyia Deoridhe shows her feminine side with an eyepatch made of flowers, a pretty gacha prize from la petit morte; I didn't land a rare from it, but given how lovely the commons are, I didn't mind. The army of flutterbyes, though, bright and sparkly and deadly if they touch you, are a release from aii, aka The Ugly & Beautiful. I landed a small army, and sensibly their creator set them up so that they stagger themselves around you if you have several - something which really comes in handy for the blogger on the go.
The number of gacha events are proliferating these days, which leaves me with really mixed feelings. On the one hand, I love gathering up a small army of things to give people, and gacha is perfect for this purpose. On the other hand, there are a few trends of high prices and low rarity statistics which are leaving me a little concerned about my own spending, and so I've been thinking of a series of rules to try to rein in some of the profligate spending, especially considering that I often end up with piles of stuff I rarely use (though really, that's most of my inventory...).
- Only spend in gacha where I like everything I might get. One growing trend in gacha is that instead of the items all being variations on a theme, with the cooler ones more difficult to get, a few different things are placed in a gacha. This means I often only want a few items, and often the more difficult ones to get, which leaves me feeling dissatisfied about the other items I end up with in pursuit of the elusive White Stag. From now on I'm going to try to end this problem at the root; if I don't like everything in a gacha, I don't give it money.
- Be satisfied with commons. Sometimes the rares are really cool, or there's one rare I want more than the others, and I really need to learn to step away at that point.
- Be cautious with gacha over 50L each. I know that seems like a small amount of money, but it adds up very quickly. To get the entire common color range of a pair of shoes I like, for example, can be 600L if there are no duplicates on a set of twelve, and very likely more. The higher price gacha, while often understandable given the complexity of the items being gachaed, are even more of a money sink and so I need to be careful.
( More pictures here. )
Credits:
Skin: Fallen Gods, Materica
Hair: Wasabi Pills, Kiki
Crown: ieQED, Crown Stag (Fantasy Gacha Carnival)
Ears: Illusions, Seelie Ears
Eyes: De La Soul, Rainbow
Eyepatch: la petit morte, Eye patch (Fantasy Gacha Carnival)
Eyelashes 1: SLink, Mesh Lashes
Eyelashes 2: Flugeln Brise, 05-A
Hands: SLink, Rigged Mesh Hands
Jewelry: Enfant Terrible, Midsommer Dream (Fantasy Gacha Carnival)
Nails: A:S:S, Gold Thread
Outfit: deviousMind, Harpyia Belt & Bra Ensemble (Fantasy Gacha Carnival)
Panties: Blacklace, Kimiko
Harpy Bits: deviousMind, Harpyia (Fantasy Gacha Carnival)
Pixie Army: The Ugly & Beautiful, Pixie (Fantasy Gacha Carnival)
Poses: Long Awkward Pose
Location: Grendel's Children
Light Settings: AnaLutetia - outdoors
Water Settings: Mirror Water
Photographed by Deoridhe Quandry
Post processing: Cropping, only
Thank you so much for letting me know about your post and the amazing review!! Really appreciate it :D
ReplyDeleteOne thing I wanted to let you know in case you missed it in the notecard: the belt rezzes at first on medium size, and it has a resize option menu included. However, on rigged mesh you can't just click for it to appear. Right-click the mesh, and chose "touch" from context menu. If you are on firestorm and use the pie menu, it's right-click > more > touch, or right-click touch on the item in inventory. Size of the legs can be adjusted the same way, and you access the color menu of the rare belts this way as well.
Have a great day and thanks again so much for this post! :D
♥chandra
PS: those gacha spending rules work! been handling the craving pretty good that way for a while ;) sometimes you just need to accept that you'll not own a piece same like you would if it had a 5000USD label on it right from the start :D
laChandra - thank you so much for the details about touch resizing. I totally missed it in the notecards, so having you talk about it here is so helpful.
DeleteGood luck keeping up your gatcha control methods. 8D
Deo - a lot of your concerns are part of what is really not appealing to me in the whole gacha thing. The higher the prices get, the more it's just not worth it at all to me. The whole process actually feels deeply insidious, manipulative, and greedy to me. Much like slots at a casino (where the odds are ever stacked in the house's favor). I also find it deeply frustrating when parts of a set are separate gacha pieces and you have to just hope you are absolutely guaranteed to spend a huge amount of money just to get a matched set. When I can see that's what it is, I avoid those too. I would rather pay the 600L for the fatpack than hope I will like whatever color I get. Bleh. Fuck that.
ReplyDeleteI can remember one case recently where a required item for the commons to work was a rare - and there ended up being a big outcry about it, which ended with the person setting the rare item to common because so many people weren't getting it.
DeleteI think creators are between a rock and a hard place with gacha because it usually contains such different things than they make, so people try to just spread out their usual thing in it - like they used to with fishing. It doesn't work as well with gacha as it did with fishing.