Love it or hate it, everyone has been a victim of the 50/50 system in Honkai: Star Rail at least once, working so hard to reach pity but ending up jump-scared by another Eidolon of that same character you’re not using. But it turns out that maybe, just maybe, the game was rigged from the beginning. To your side, I mean.
According to extensive research conducted by Bilibili creator 一棵平衡樹 (OneBST), the supposed 50/50 chances for getting a rate-up character in a limited banner are closer to 56.4/43.6 instead of what’s told. Yup, you do have a way higher chance of getting the character you want!
Better Chances Than Stated
Limited banners work, in theory, with the same system implemented in Genshin Impact. When you pull for a 5-star, you have a 50/50 chance of getting the rate-up character. If you lose this chance, you get a random standard 5-star. On the good side, your next 5-star is guaranteed to be the rate-up character. This carries over to the next banner, as well as your current pity count (when the game is forced to give you a 5-star).
Star Rail uses the exact same system. You can get any of the seven standard characters when losing a 50/50. Maybe you’ll get that Himeko you were missing for your Pure Fiction team, but sometimes you’ll just get another Eidolon for that same character you’re already not using. But according to this new info, you always have better odds of getting the limited character you were aiming for.
A post by X user hxg_diluc brought a translated, resumed version of his original video’s content on the Chinese platform Bilibili. To summarise, 一棵平衡樹 went over 15 million pulls registered under his own analytics site GGanalysis and conducted numerous tests and analyses before getting concrete results. With that, they concluded that you have a slightly higher chance of getting a banner character than not.
Related: All Honkai Star Rail Codes (April 2024)
They also mentioned a theory from the creator themself, which would explain why this happens exclusively to Star Rail, given how similar tests were previously conducted to Genshin Impact but resulted in true 50/50 chances. Reaching soft or hard pity counts doesn’t seem to influence, and they are also exactly the same in Star Rail.
So Why Do I Keep Losing My Characters?
Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on the case), everyone has their own individual experiences in the game. Maybe you lost almost every single 50/50 since you started playing, but there’s also a chance that others never lost theirs. There might be a statistically higher chance of getting the characters, but that doesn’t mean you’ll always manage to get them, nor that you’ll always get them more than losing.
Maybe you’re, unfortunately, part of an unlucky crowd that mostly loses their characters. Sorry, no way to change one’s luck. I personally found more success in Star Rail’s 50/50s than Genshin’s, but also had some bad strokes of luck from time to time. The overall result is mostly positive though, especially in the Light Cone banner (which also seems to have even better odds than the stated).
However, nothing has been confirmed by Hoyoverse just yet, and while these tests seem convincing, there’s no way to truly know if the bigger odds are real until they do. And since this doesn’t look like the kind of thing a company would say out loud, I wouldn’t bet on a confirmation any time soon.
For now, I prefer believing that the better chances are indeed real. This won’t give me any more luck on future rolls, but “knowing” I’ll win more than I’ll lose feels better than having equal stakes for both. On the flip side, losing might feel worse from here on out. Ignorance is bliss, I guess.
For more on Honkai: Star Rail, we’ve covered whether Aventurine is a must-pull and all Robin Ascension materials.
