Thank you to those who have participated! We received 249 responses, which is only slightly higher than previous year despite me trying to publicise the survey via more channels.

Note: some charts below may show “250 responses” in the picture, but one row of data was manually deleted as it was found to be the duplicate of its previous row (likely caused by double submit). There might be more duplicate submits that I could not detect.

Before we start, be reminded that the data is by no means representative to the entire LAH player base, since it is a bit harder to reach out to the vast majority of Chinese/Japanese players that don’t consume English materials.

Respondent Profile

Source of Respondents

As I initially published the survey on Discord and LAH wiki, it is unsurprising that they account for the most for where the respondents found this survey.

This is the first year I tried to publicise the survey on Twitter/X: something I had been reluctant to do because posting LAH news on my NSFW art account just feels kind of weird. In the end, that was not very effective in getting more respondents.

Gender

90% of the respondents identify as male, 1.6% (i.e. 4 persons) as female, 6.4% as non-binary and the rest as other. We finally have more female respondents this time, woohoo!

Age

In terms of age, more than half are in their 20s, with 25-29 being the largest age group.

Japanese Proficiency

76% of the respondents have some degree of Japanese understanding, with 16.4% of them having studied Japanese at various N* level. 1 respondent is native speaker!

Country

In terms of country, the top 3 are United States (27.6%), Taiwan (8.4%) and Vietnam (8.4%)

Expand to see all countries

Country	count
United States	68
Taiwan	21
Vietnam	21
Philippines	15
Indonesia	12
Brazil	11
Malaysia	11
Mexico	6
Thailand	6
Korea, South	5
Australia	4
France	4
Germany	4
Singapore	4
Canada	3
Hong Kong	3
Italy	3
Peru	3
Poland	3
Russia	3
Spain	3
United Kingdom	3
Belgium	2
Costa Rica	2
Dominican Republic	2
Ecuador	2
Finland	2
Japan	2
Sweden	2
Argentina	1
Bermuda	1
Bolivia	1
Brunei	1
Burma	1
Chile	1
China	1
Colombia	1
Denmark	1
India	1
Norway	1
Panama	1
Portugal	1
Romania	1
Serbia and Montenegro	1
Turkey	1
Uruguay	1
Uzbekistan	1
Venezuela	1

The Game

Actual Player

94.4% of the respondents play Live A Hero.

Among LAH players, almost everyone (94.2%) have played “Tokyo Afterschool Summoners”, another gacha game developed by LifeWonders. This is then followed by “AnotherEidos Of Dragonvein” (Eidos) at 52.4%.

Like LAH, these games also have a large variety of gay artists with pretty good art quality, unique story writing (yes, I am saying that for Eidos too, with how the writer manages to build the entire story framework on top of sex), and have some form of translation (which is important since majority of the survey respondents can’t really read Japanese).

Next we have Crave Saga and Gyee at 30.2% and 31.1% respectively. Fantastic boyfriend is sitting at 12.9% while only 9.3% of respondents played Tamacolle.

Note that it is not appropriate to interpret this chart as “how popular these games are in the market”, and instead should be viewed as “how close are these games when compared to LAH”. Because I used the phrase “ever played” in the question, it is possible that some people may have already abandoned some of the games.

Playing Time

X-axis is the number of days played (end date is set at 29 Sep 2023). Practically half of the respondents started playing Live A Hero immediately after the game’s launch. Since then, the playerbase seems to be growing at a linear scale.

Main Character Configuration

Majority of the respondents choose male form for MC. Furry male is more popular than human male, while human female is more popular than furry female.

Gameplay Style

Only 22.55% of the respondents are more hardcore players and try to optimise for gameplay efficiency. 1/6 of the respondents do not login everyday.

Free Gacha Pull Currency

43.6% of the respondents agree that Live A Hero give less free stones/tickets than other gacha games that they play. In the latter section, we can see that many ask for more free stones/tickets and improve login bonus.

Translation

The percentage of respondents believing that we will get official translation (31.8%) is lesser than last year (34.9%), thankfully LifeWonders finally announced that official translation will be released one day.

Money Spending

I received feedback from some respondents that the options available do not fit their spending habit (e.g. buy event stone pack once but not new year grab bag), therefore I plan to change this question to MCQ next year. However, I do not plan to ask respondents about their actual monthly spending, as I think that it would be too personal and may bring up bad memory for some respondents.

Game Elements’ Ranking

Element	Average score
Character design	4.62
Character voice	3.89
Spine animation	3.72
Story writing	3.74
Game mechanism	3.80

Read Story

Majority of the players do read the story, with more than half of the respondents having to rely on fan translations. Let us thank all the fan translators that have worked tirelessly to make it possible to enjoy our favourite characters in stories that we otherwise cannot read.

Gays do in fact, read.

Character Popularity

Caveat:

Characters with zero vote are not included in the plot
Characters added after Chapter 2-2 are not included
Phein was accidentally left out from the survey for the first 67 respondents, I am sorry!

Once again, bara furries owned the popularity ranking

Character popularity 'all favourites' vs 'top 10 favourites'

I spent almost half a day making this slope chart, so please stare at the chart more to make my time worth it.

One big takeaway from this visualisation is that, “top 10” ranking tends to favour older popular characters, as we see characters like Polaris Mask, Kyoichi getting a big upgrade. The only outlier is Obsidius, actually upping his ranking by 1 despite being very new (this bull is unstoppable).

Pubraseer holds strong as 1st in both rankings, he is gonna be a wallet destroyer when he gets his limited variant.

Player experienced the biggest downgrade, but to be honest, MC being at 20th in “all favourites” ranking is surprising enough. I guess that means most people like the MC’s appearance enough ~~(unlike some other gacha games~~).

Top 5 characters for each category (all favourites)
Male furry		Male human		Female/Non-binary/Other
Pubraseer	165	Akashi	109	Sensettia	53
Monomasa	151	Gammei	92	Cerastium, Sui	39
Barrel	147	Shaft, Yoshiori	73	Melide	37
Toshu	142	Gomeisa, Lilac	69	Flamier	36
Ryekie	140	Exio, Nessen	66	Hitomi	29

One interesting fact is that, almost all of the top 5 popular male human characters have gotten their limited variants.

Free form questions

I have pretty much given up on doing analysis for these longer-form questions, because I really don’t know how to efficiently handle natural languages. I did a lot of hardcoded token counting last year, but in retrospect it is still not as accurate as I would like to.

Therefore, I decided to only make some high level comments on what I see, and then publish the Google Sheet data (Webpage version) so that other interested parties may analyse the data further if they wish too (CSV version). Please contact me if you are able to make some interesting data visualizations!

What People Like

(In no particular order)

Characters:
- Hot men/bara
- Sexy apparel designs, spandex
- Likable personality and backstory that makes them charming
Gameplay:
- Casual game, not time consuming
- Can be automated
- Unique VP game system
- App is generally smooth running
- Has gacha sparking
Story
- Hero theme
- Space lore
- Slightly adult-themed
- OST

Improvement People Want to See

(Other than the first one, the rest are arranged in no particular order)

Official translation
Cheaper stone pack
Increase the suggestive level even more (including story writing)
More free stones/tickets, improve login bonus
More frequent main chapter
Faster farming (full auto, sweep ticket)
More ways to interact with characters in office like virtual pet
Romance with character
Sidekick spine model
More game campaigns (many praise about Roguelike and wish to see more of it)

Game Merchandise and Extra Content

(Too lazy to summarize since they are pretty repetitive, just see the published Google Sheet data) yourself)

I want to take this opportunity to say: I want more official books in digital form, because the oversea shipping fee from Japan is outrageously expensive!!

Feedback for the Survey and Wiki

Sincere thanks for all the positive feedbacks from you guys.

There are also suggestions and criticisms, I will try to answers the more common ones here. Questions/feedbacks repeated from last year which I have nothing more to add this time won’t be addressed again here, you can read them in 2022 survey result.

10 Favourite Characters are Not Enough!

It is intentional. ~~I want to see how y’all have to look at the face of your husbandos/waifus and make the tough decision of letting them go~~

Monthly Popularity Ranking

I don’t think I have the energy to organize such thing that frequently, let alone publishing result as Youtube video.

If there are volunteers to help compiling data later (please contact me on Discord), and people actually feel like answering surveys every month, then “maybe”.

Dark Mode

I… might actually do it. Maybe.

All Things about Search and Filter

First of all, let me list all the existing lists that we already have:

List of Heroes/sidekicks
List of character with/without variant
List of Hero basic statistics at rank 5 and rank 6
List of Sidekick basic statistics at level 50 and level 100
List of Sidekick skills at level 50 and level 100

There are people asking for a list of hero roles and skills, the former is easy to implement, but the latter is almost straight up impossible, given how complicated hero skills are these days with tons of weird passive skills (and LW programmers’ code design isn’t always the easiest thing to parse).

Element/rarity/role filter in the main character page may be considered.

Japanese Version of Skill Description and Voice Line on Wiki

Actually, they mostly already exist.

Skill description (desktop)
- Mouse over english skill description to see japanese version as alt text
Voice line (for the ones that have actual Japanese transcript in game)
- Click the english voice line to toggle to japanese’s version

Make skill description easier to understand

Recently we have decided to manually write skill descriptions for some of the more complicated skills that are just too hard to simplify by code. We also made tooltip works on mobile browsers.

Skill tree translation is still WIP, that thing is too troublesome to parse, and I still don’t have a good UI idea to display it. UI mockup/suggestion is always welcomed (preferably not too complicated to implement in a web page).

If you think a particular skill description is too difficult to read, please send feedback to #lah-wiki channel in Discord (server link can be found in home page).

Display Hero Spine Models on Wiki

Github Pages (the host of this wiki) only has 1 GB free storage and I already don’t have much wriggling room, adding spine models will immediately blow up the storage. ~~Also I don’t think LW would be too pleased with it either~~

Same goes for other game assets.

That’s all for this year’s survey! This is quite an exciting anniversary, everyone surely can’t wait for the official translation to be released now that it is officially confirmed, ~~and then I will have to work overtime to adapt wiki to the new translation…~~

If you are interested to get the full data of the survey, you can always find me in LAH Discord server.