Video Games

Honkai: Star Rail’s Jing Yuan is so popular, he broke the payment system

Chinese gamers threw so much money at HoYoverse that the system went down

Marco Wutz

Honkai: Star Rail’s Jing Yuan is so popular, he broke the payment system
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.

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Marco Wutz
MARCO WUTZ

Marco Wutz is a writer from Parkstetten, Germany. He has a degree in Ancient History and a particular love for real-time and turn-based strategy games like StarCraft, Age of Empires, Total War, Age of Wonders, Crusader Kings, and Civilization as well as a soft spot for Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail. He began covering StarCraft 2 as a writer in 2011 for the largest German community around the game and hosted a live tournament on a stage at gamescom 2014 before he went on to work for Bonjwa, one of the country's biggest Twitch channels. He branched out to write in English in 2015 by joining tl.net, the global center of the StarCraft scene run by Team Liquid, which was nominated as the Best Coverage Website of the Year at the Esports Industry Awards in 2017. He worked as a translator on The Crusader Stands Watch, a biography in memory of Dennis "INTERNETHULK" Hawelka, and provided live coverage of many StarCraft 2 events on the social channels of tl.net as well as DreamHack, the world's largest gaming festival. From there, he transitioned into writing about the games industry in general after his graduation, joining GLHF, a content agency specializing in video games coverage for media partners across the globe, in 2021. He has also written for NGL.ONE, kicker, ComputerBild, USA Today's ForTheWin, The Sun, Men's Journal, and Parade. Email: marco.wutz@glhf.gg

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