Genshin fans are upset with changes to Raiden Shogun, leading at least one of them to try to sue miHoYo over “fraud”.

In a forum post, one user argued that they would try go to court over changes to Raiden Shogun’s abilities, no longer synergizing with Beidou.

“I am 100% sure that this is not over. Because I’m ready to sue. I’m going to file it this week”, the user writes. “I’ve been preparing for this all weekend, and the biggest difficulty I’ve found in the preparation process is how to get judges who don’t play the game to understand that it’s reasonable for players to expect a match between the two”, the forum post reads.

“Not surprisingly, my Moon Festival gift to Mihoyo is a subpoena”, the user continues.

At least one more user has also threatened to sue over the Raiden Shogun changes, showing off their legal license.

The argument goes like this- during the closed beta for Genshin’s 2.1 update, Raiden Shogun’s ability was said to work in tandem with Beidou, buffing the character. At launch, however, Raiden’s skill has no effect on Beidou.

The discrepancy comes from the nature of Raiden Shogun’s burst- which sees her change from a polearm user to a sword user. While behaving like a regular attack, the game reads these as counting as a Burst Attack, not giving her any synergy with Beidou. Worse still, miHoYo seems to have done a less-than-satisfactory job explaining the intent of the mechanic, and so have had to edit the skill’s description multiple times.

Of Balance Changes And Entitlement (Editorial)

Admittedly, it’s hard to believe the lawsuit has any merit. We’ve seen this happen before with Zhongli- who launched with one of his skills not working as advertised. Ethically speaking, you shouldn’t be able to sue a company for balance changes. Technically, you never paid for the character- you only paid for the Primogems which you willingly spent on a character that you may or may not have made assumptions on from leaks.

Things change, that’s how live service games work. Characters get balanced, and the developers don’t owe it to you to make a character’s abilities what you want.

To put it in another example: during the first Guilty Gear Strive beta, Leo Whitefang could combo off of his 236 H attack. This attack caused him to change sides, and if your opponent didn’t block correctly (you had to block in the opposite direction), Leo could endlessly juggle you. Now his design intent was supposed to be a character that forces you to guess his attacks- putting all the weight into only that first attack proved too good and it was then rebalanced so that it didn’t combo, so even if your opponent failed to guess they still had to deal with Leo’s actual tools (which are still excellent).

Were fans pissed? Yes. But that’s what betas are for- finding out if your character’s going to perform as intended. It’s likely that Beidou and Raiden synergy made the game too good and miHoYo didn’t want it to be too good, dropping it. Making the game play closer to how you wanted it isn’t a crime.

It gets even worse with the kind of obsessive fans that seem to play miHoYo’s games- just a few months ago miHoYo narrowly avoided a huge tragedy when a fan tried to assault the CEO on campus over not liking their favorite character in a bunny girl suit.

There are times when game developers actively deceive their audiences, but this ain’t it, chief.