Lili Sheer

Save yourself, don’t go to The Arcade. I normally skip rounds and avoid gacha events, but I saw something I wanted this week. Even though I told my friend I’d play maybe two or three times for these Rift Eyes from Avi Glam, I ended up playing 69 times at L$75 per pull. It’s five times more than I’d normally pay for an Avi Glam eyes fatpack, and honestly, I don’t even think I would’ve paid for a fatpack if it had been sold normally.

The thing with gacha is that it can be very addictive, especially if you want to win a rare and you don’t have a set budget, so you don’t have to stop. You can just keep playing until you win. I gave up on winning the Rare 2 pack on the first day after about forty or fifty pulls and decided to buy it second hand on Marketplace. Then the next day, when I didn’t see anything listed, I played some more. I haven’t played a machine with this much intensity in a long time, so it even surprised me how quickly I lost track of my spending or how fast I was hitting the buy button.

In hindsight, I should’ve stuck to my rule of playing only two or three times per machine, but I ended up going all in on two machines and playing way too many times to collect all the pieces.

Even though I find gacha frustrating, I get the dopamine rush it gives. If you win something you really want right away, it feels amazing. If you find yourself on the losing end, try to remember that you can always buy it later on Marketplace for a fraction of the cost of playing.

Eventually, I did see a few sets listed on Marketplace, but by then, I’d already spent nearly L$6,000 on one machine. Oops.