Soft Pity, Hard Pity, 50/50 and Sparks: Gacha Guarantees Explained
Why does everyone talk about pull 74? What does 'losing the 50/50' mean, and why did a Japanese game add a 300-draw spark in 2016? A plain-language guide to how modern gacha protects, and prices, your luck.
Here is a number that explains a lot about modern mobile games. In Genshin Impact, the base chance of pulling a five-star character on any single wish is 0.6%. With that rate and nothing else, a player who made 90 pulls would still have about a 58% chance of getting no five-star at all. Nobody would play that game for long.
So nobody does. Instead, almost every big gacha game now runs on pity: rules that raise your odds, or guarantee a reward, after a run of bad luck. Pity is why players count pulls, why forums argue about "pull 74" and why Korea, China and the US now care so much about how odds are shown. Here is how the system works, in plain language.
Hard pity: the ceiling
Hard pity is a guaranteed reward after a fixed number of pulls. In Genshin Impact's character banners, a five-star is guaranteed by pull 90. Honkai: Star Rail uses the same 90-pull rule for characters, and both games guarantee at least one four-star every 10 pulls.
Because of hard pity, the official "consolidated" rate in Genshin, which counts the guarantee, is 1.6%, almost three times the base rate. Your pity count also carries over between banners of the same type, so 60 pulls on one banner are not wasted when the next one starts.
Japanese players call the ceiling tenjō, literally "ceiling", and it works like a price cap: if you know the maximum number of pulls, you can save enough currency to guarantee the result.
Soft pity: the ramp
Soft pity is a quieter rule: after a certain number of pulls without a top-rarity item, the odds start climbing with each pull. Most games do not announce exactly where it begins, so players work it out from huge shared datasets of their own pulls. In Genshin Impact, those community studies point to the odds rising sharply from around pull 74, which is why so many five-stars seem to land in the mid-70s rather than at 90.
Soft pity is a design trick as much as a kindness. It makes the experience feel less brutal, since most players get their reward well before the hard ceiling, while the published guarantee stays the same.
The 50/50 and the guarantee
Getting a five-star is not the same as getting the featured five-star. Many games add a 50/50: when you hit a five-star on a limited banner, there is a 50% chance it is the featured character and a 50% chance it is one from the standard pool. "Losing the 50/50" means you got the standard one, but your next five-star is then guaranteed to be the featured character.
That makes the true worst case 180 pulls in Genshin Impact: 90 for a lost 50/50, then 90 more for the guaranteed featured character. In version 5.0 (2024), Genshin added a system called Capturing Radiance, which gives players who keep losing the 50/50 an extra chance to receive the featured character anyway.
Weapon and equipment banners often use different rules. In Genshin, five-star weapons have 80-pull hard pity, and a system called Epitomized Path lets you choose which featured weapon you are aiming for.
Sparks: choose your reward
A spark is the most player-friendly guarantee: every pull earns points, and once you reach a set number, you can simply pick the featured item you want.
The best-known spark came out of a scandal. In January 2016, a Granblue Fantasy player streamed spending a large sum chasing one limited character and failing to get her. The outcry led Cygames to apologise and introduce a spark at 300 draws, a rule fans still call "sparking". Our Cygames profile tells the full story.
Many Japanese and Korean-style games use similar exchange systems. In Blue Archive, for example, players can exchange points from 200 recruitments for a featured student.
Why it matters
Pity systems are a compromise between players and publishers. For players, they turn pure luck into something closer to a known price, which makes budgeting possible. For publishers, they keep players spending by promising that the next pull is always a step closer. Regulators have noticed: disclosure rules in Korea, China and Japan now cover not just odds but how guarantees work, as our gacha law explainer explains.
Our take: before you spend, find the banner's hard pity, check whether there is a 50/50, and multiply. If the worst case is more than you are happy to pay, wait for a character you love more, or for a spark.