Honkai: Star Rail’s Jing Yuan is so popular, he broke the payment system
Honkai: Star Rail introduced a new playable character for the first time since launch today, with players in the Asian server region already being able to pull for Jing Yuan – America and Europe have to wait a few hours longer. After massive earnings numbers in the first couple of days, you might have expected things to slow down a little for the second half of the version 1.0 banners.
It seems like that couldn’t be further from the truth, though: Minutes after the banner with Jing Yuan, Tingyun, March 7th, and Sushang became available in China, players noticed that the game’s shop was reacting very sluggish to new orders, grinding to an almost-halt.
Taking to social media, HoYoverse announced that it was investigating the problems and specified that the issues seemed to stem from the Oneiric Shards top-up feature in the shop. That’s the option players have to purchase to convert real money into in-game currency, with which they can then buy Stellar Jade and Star Rail Tickets to pull for characters.
That’s right, Jing Yuan’s banner is so popular in China that players threw enough money at HoYoverse to break the game’s payment system. Point to this incident the next time someone suggests male characters wouldn't sell in gacha games.
With even more highly-anticipated characters like Kafka awaiting in upcoming versions, the future of Honkai: Star Rail looks more than bright – not even Genshin Impact’s players have managed to break their title’s payment system when a new release went live, so this is a first even for HoYoverse.
