Fans have taken to Twitter to voice their disdain for Genshin Impact ‘s recent community event, which wants to feature Elon Musk playing the gacha game.
Before it was deleted, the announcement for the event has 19.7k quote retweets, almost universally a sign of fans speaking out against the event.
For context, the purpose of this event was to follow a secondary Genshin Impact account based on the NPC Ella Musk, named as a nod to the egocentric owner of Tesla corporation.
At several milestones, fans would be rewarded with the following:
Needless to say, a lot of the quote retweets for the challenge have been urging people not to take part in the challenge, partially motivated by the fallout of the anniversary fiasco as well as just the fact that at no point does this campaign ever actually help the community.
“We really don’t give a fuck, give us primos???“, says Twitter user 7thsense127.
“i [swear to god] everytime (sic) mihoyo makes a community event it feels like “Dear Travelers, Fuck you” “, says Twitter user fkkinnoodlehead
Of course, some of the community aren’t just mad because they’ve mad a vapid, clout-chasing exercise and pretended it was for the community. Some fans also expressed their disdain for Elon Musk himself, who covers up his anti-union reputation by pandering to the anime community and gaining a cult-like following.
“and we should want to stroke this self-obsessed, anti-union’s tiny little man meat because…?”, writes user delusionx, equally perplexed at what miHoYo are trying to accomplish other than fortify their new second account.
It’s not just Elon Musk haters either- even Elon Musk fans themselves have come out to mock the campaign, saying their space meme God-emperor is too important to play Genshin Impact, no matter how much he posts about anime.
“Elon Musk is busy making spaceships do you think he has time to play your little video game”, writes sy4kurajima, seemingly unaware that Elon Musk spends pretty much 0 hours a week physically assembling spaceships.
miHoYo And The Community Management Woes (Editorial)
Although it’s largely considered settled for now, there’s still a lot of tense air between miHoYo and the Genshin community following the anniversary rewards debacle some weeks ago.
A big part of that was that the community didn’t feel listened to- miHoYo was told repeatedly in the leadup to the anniversary what the community wanted, but was treated to sub-par rewards that felt less like a thank-you for the one year of fun and more like getting your girlfriend a coupon for 10% off your next fries at McDonalds as an engagement present.
To a lot of fans, this new “Community event” is just more of the same- literally none of the rewards benefit the community. The Genshin Twitter changing back to Paimon is cute, but what does it help the average Genshin player?
Having the next tiers be pandering to a mainstream pseudo-celebrity is just another slap in the face: like Spider-Man 3 when Gwen Stacy realizes her date was all about Peter Parker showing up MJ, at the end of the day this “Community event” wasn’t about the community- it was about getting a big named celebrity to play miHoYo’s game for an hour.
The fact that the highest community reward was giving one of the richest men in the world a trip to China is pretty obviously gonna ruffle some feathers- and it’d probably be better if miHoYo just thought of some new way to engage the community before things spiraled out of control again.