No, zero-cycling endgame content isn’t the norm in Honkai: Star Rail

Despite internet loudmouths making it seem otherwise

HoYoverse

Discourse in gaming communities can be funny. A large part of it is generally generated by a minority of a game’s player base – the most committed minority. This often leads to debates, perspectives, and opinions online being skewed a certain way, namely to represent hardcore players much more than the average. While this is not always a bad thing, it has its pitfalls.

A good example of this is the online discourse around Honkai: Star Rail, its endgame content, and its playable characters. One of the game’s endgame modes, Memory of Chaos, regularly gets refreshed, and very soon after this refresh, the biggest community spaces get flooded by screenshots of players “zero-cycling” the challenges. 

This means that they defeat all enemies and bosses of a challenge without the turn counter going down even once thanks to the high and fast damage output of their teams.

Naturally, this regular influx of triumphal stories can make it seem like zero-cycling is easy and everyone does it. It leads to the impression that anyone who can’t zero-cycle this content is bad at the game or needs to invest more time – and perhaps money – into it to catch up.

Likewise, this phenomenon has a negative impact on discussions around characters and their abilities. Some parts of the hardcore community call characters dead or useless when they’re not able to zero-cycle endgame content, and since they are most likely to share their opinions online, they quickly dominate public perception.

Jing Yuan was probably the first victim of warped public perception. / HoYoverse

This can make players feel bad about themselves for pulling for certain characters they like or even lead to users getting insulted over their preferences. All in all, these are not great things – and if left completely unchecked, they might well turn into toxicity.

And that would be a shame because the communities for HoYoverse games are generally incredibly welcoming and friendly for new and casual players. This is why it’s good to remind yourself from time to time that the people who are zero-cycling endgame content are a tiny, if loud, minority of the total player base.

There are no official statistics from HoYoverse on this, but we can take a look at the PlayStation trophies for Honkai: Star Rail’s sister game, Genshin Impact, to get a feel for this – unfortunately, HSR itself does not have any trophies giving us relevant information for this topic.

A trophy awarded for getting all stars on the first eight floors of the Spiral Abyss mode (basically the equivalent to HSR’s Memory of Chaos mode) is owned by a bit more than 25% of all players. Another trophy, which requires clearing the twelfth floor of the Spiral Abyss (that’s the part that gets refreshed regularly), is owned by around 10% of all players on the platform – and it has to be noted that this only counts the floor getting cleared, not winning it with all three possible stars, which requires beating it in a certain time limit and is our closest comparison to zero-cycling. We can assume that the number of users managing a perfect clear is lower by another magnitude.

So if you’re seeing discussion around zero-cycling, please remember that this is relevant only for a one-digit percentage of the player population.

Take a look at my latest run in Memory of Chaos – I put quite a bit of time into the game, have lots of limited characters, and even got some of them on higher Constellation levels, which is probably putting me above the average in terms of investment. And yet I only managed a clear time of eight cycles in the final challenge and seven cycles in the penultimate challenge.

My Stage XII and XI results for the latest Memory of Chaos rotation. Far from a zero-cycle, but the job got done. / HoYoverse

I did manage a zero-cycle on floors VII and IX this time around. Sure, that felt good – but what counts at the end of the day is having fun and, secondarily, getting the maximum rewards by achieving three stars (which requires beating the challenge in ten cycles or less). This is not to disparage a min-max play style by any means. If the fun in games for someone is to strive after those perfect zero-cycles, that’s totally legit.

Sometimes it’s just good to take a moment and recognize that it’s not the norm. So if you ever felt pressured or bad by this online discourse, please don’t be – you’re in good and plentiful company. One of the wonderful things about the HoYoverse games is that they provide a space for everyone, so let’s keep it that way.