This week the Genshin Impact community has been confused by tweets about Elon Musk, nonplussed about the news of a streaming partnership program, and sent into full simp mode by the announcement of Arataki Itto. Oh, and version 2.2 dropped somewhere amongst all that.
The week started on a high with the official unveiling of Arataki Itto, an upcoming Geo user and Claymore wielder that has the community counting their primogems. His reveal attracted a lot of thirsty tweets as players expressed their err… excitement at the inclusion of a new contender for the most desirable Geo character. He already has his own NSFW corner of Reddit, complete with fan art, as well as a huge number of interactions on his announcement tweet. Zhongli will have to watch his back because based on the community response there’s about to be a new Geo god in Teyvat.
In contrast, Mihoyo’s next announcement of the week failed to get any pulses racing at all. While the news that Genshin Impact is getting a partner program for Twitch streamers may be exciting to some, for most it was news that flew under the radar.
While the partnership news passed many people by, an announcement Mihuyo probably wished could be so easily swept under the rug, was Mihuyo’s Ella Musk account announcing that they wanted to hit some Twitter milestones, and start annoying Elon Musk.
In a series of swiftly removed tweets, the account renamed itself from Paimon to Paimon2themoon and set out its goals. At 500 thousand followers, it would rename the account back to Paimon. This seemingly pointless exercise feels weird enough but it was followed with increasingly bizarre goals relating to Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk. At one million followers the Genshin Impact account intended to follow Musk, and at three million they offered to invite him to stream Genshin Impact. If the account hit the incredibly unlikely goal of five million followers Musk would be invited to Mihoyo HQ.
Usually, follower goals reward a community with prizes but Mihuyo, despite still recovering from being called out for offering terrible rewards to players, upped the ante with its random desire to annoy a tech billionaire.
Elon Musk isn’t known for his love of gaming, nor has he ever had anything to do with Genshin Impact. The only link is that Genshin’s Hilichurl whisperer Ella Musk has a similar name to him. Presumably, Mihuyo felt he was the key to getting Paimon to the moon but we’re still not entirely sure why Paimon would want that. Surely once they realized it isn’t made of cheese they’d abandon the idea? That’s before we even get to the likelihood of them becoming emergency food on the trip.
Given the Ella Musk account currently has less than 60,000 followers these goals were unfeasible to start with but now they’ve just served to annoy an already agitated community. Players don’t care about Elon Musk, don’t understand why Mihuyo seems so keen to interact with him, and are just fed up with the company asking players for support and offering little to nothing in return.
The timing of the tweets was particularly disappointing since things were just starting to calm down, after the release of version 2.2 on October 13. This update revealed the final island of Inazuma, although it requires a lengthy quest chain to fully unlock, as well as some new mobs, a domain, and the promise of new events. We’ve also got a re-run of Childe’s banner for anyone who wants to bring the weekly boss into their party. Aloy graced our inboxes and we had some more Primogems because of maintenance.
The community was just calming down and then Mihuyo managed to mess it all up, again. It seems to be somewhat of a pattern.