This article is very long and contain a few visualizations. For better reading experience, please read this article in wider screen.

• Foreword
• Respondent Profile
  • Source of respondents
  • Age
  • Gender
    • Female/Non-Binary/Other Respondents and Where to Find them
  • Country
  • Japanese proficiency
• The Game
  • Actual Player
  • Playing Time
  • Main Character Configuration
  • Money spending
    • Definition of Spending level
  • Gameplay Style
  • Game Elements’ Ranking
  • Other games
  • Free Gacha Pull Currency
  • Translation
  • Read story
  • What-if
    • Buy-out games
    • R-18 games
• Character popularity
• Free form questions
  • What People Like
  • Improvement People Want to See
    • Notable Points:
  • Occupation
    • Popular Suggestions (Multiple Mentions):
    • Notable One-Time Suggestions:
  • Game Merchandise
    • Association rule by Confidence (Market-Basket Analysis)
  • Difficulty to Buy Game Merchandise
  • Extra Content
  • Feedback for the Survey and Wiki
    • Character profile, voice line not translated
    • Voice/BGM audio files, Spine animation on Wiki
    • Skill description are hard to read
    • List of XXX
    • There should be a way to jump from the game app to Wiki website
    • Discord role where we get notified that stocks get refilled
    • Gameplay tier list, recommendation and strategy guide like JP Wiki
    • Filter characters by buff / debuff
    • Survey question suggestions
    • More organized list of fan translations
    • Survey needs Traditional Chinese/Spanish translation
    • Story lore section
    • Comment section for gameplay
• Afterword
  • Data sanitization
    • Suspicious responses
    • Removing duplicate responses
    • People just don’t read instructions!

Foreword

We have achieved 606 responses in this year’s survey, more than twice the amount from last year’s iteration!

Thank you to those who have helped me spread the word on various social media platforms! Also thank you to those who helped to catch typos and mistranslations in the survey as this is the first time I added Mandarin/Japanese translations in the survey.

This report was incredibly hard to write due to the complexity to test the legitimacy of some responses and sheer volume of data. I also spent a lot of time trying to find data relationships that are worth telling, and coding up the visualizations for them.

Respondent Profile

Source of respondents

Majority of the respondents found the survey via Discord, 巴哈姆特 (a Taiwan game forum) and X (Twitter).

Age

Since this is a mobile gacha game, it is no surprise that the age distribution is skewed towards the younger side.

At this point, the oldest respondent (54 year old) can be the youngest respondent’s grandfather… (13 years old)

Gender

7.5% of the respondents are non-male and 5.9% are transgender. Both are higher than the previous year.

Female/Non-Binary/Other Respondents and Where to Find them

Country

Top 3 countries are Taiwan (153), United States (91) and Philippines (38).

It is clear that East Asia is the most important market for the game (being culturally close to Japan), followed by Southeast Asia and North America.

Region	Country of birth / 出身国	Count	Percentage
East Asia 226 (37.29%)	Taiwan	153	25.25%
	Japan	22	3.63%
	Hong Kong	19	3.14%
	China	19	3.14%
	Korea, South	11	1.82%
	Macau	2	0.33%
Southeastern Asia 145 (23.93)	Philippines	38	6.27%
	Vietnam	30	4.95%
	Indonesia	30	4.95%
	Thailand	25	4.13%
	Malaysia	16	2.64%
	Singapore	5	0.83%
	Laos	1	0.17%
North America 115 (18.98%)	United States	91	15.02%
	Mexico	13	2.15%
	Canada	6	0.99%
	Puerto Rico	2	0.33%
	Guatemala	1	0.17%
	Dominican Republic	1	0.17%
	Costa Rica	1	0.17%
Europe 61 (10.07%)	France	13	2.15%
	Spain	7	1.16%
	Russia	6	0.99%
	Poland	4	0.66%
	Germany	4	0.66%
	Finland	4	0.66%
	United Kingdom	3	0.50%
	Sweden	3	0.50%
	Italy	3	0.50%
	Romania	2	0.33%
	Portugal	2	0.33%
	Netherlands	2	0.33%
	Ukraine	1	0.17%
	Switzerland	1	0.17%
	Serbia and Montenegro	1	0.17%
	Norway	1	0.17%
	Monaco	1	0.17%
	Lithuania	1	0.17%
	Denmark	1	0.17%
	Belgium	1	0.17%
South America 40 (6.60%)	Brazil	15	2.48%
	Venezuela	7	1.16%
	Chile	5	0.83%
	Peru	4	0.66%
	Argentina	3	0.50%
	Uruguay	2	0.33%
	Ecuador	2	0.33%
	Colombia	1	0.17%
	Bolivia	1	0.17%
Oceania 9 (1.49%)	Australia	8	1.32%
	French Polynesia	1	0.17%
Africa 6 (0.99%)	South Africa	2	0.33%
	Nigeria	1	0.17%
	Morocco	1	0.17%
	Angola	1	0.17%
	Algeria	1	0.17%
Western Asia 2 (0.33%)	Turkey	1	0.17%
	Israel	1	0.17%
South Asia 1 (0.17%)	India	1	0.17%
Central Asia 1 (0.17%)	Kazakhstan	1	0.17%

I think the most surprising fact to me is how many more Taiwan respondents I have gotten after translating the survey to Chinese.

Despite the largest expected player base of this game being Japan, this survey still was not able to capture the same proportion of Japanese players (only 22). I just don’t know where these Japanese people are lurking.

China should also be a pretty big player base of this game, but because the survey was conducted via Google Forms, people living in China cannot access Google websites unless they use VPN. It does not mean that there are very few China LAH players.

Japanese proficiency

31.4% of the respondents cannot read Japanese at all, while slightly more than half of the respondents can read some basic Japanese words.

All in all, those who has the ability to read the in-game Japanese story is still less than a quarter.

After using the same question setup for the fourth time, this was the first time that I realised that it was not well designed. Many people who self-taught the Japanese language but did not sit for standardised Japanese language exams like JLPT report “Zero knowledge” instead of estimating the JLPT level that is close to their current ability.

The original purpose of this question was merely to estimate the overall Japanese reading ability of the player base (to highlight how much market share LifeWonders is missing for not translating the game), rather than really wanting to know the formal qualification of the respondents.

Therefore, this question will be revamped next year, which mean I also have to remove the “fundoshi” option (sob).

The Game

Actual Player

Despite having more than double the amount of respondents for this year’s survey, the percentage of actual players remains pretty high.

Playing Time

X-axis is the number of days played (end date is set to 30 Sep 2024). Slightly less than half of the respondents started playing Live A Hero immediately after the game’s launch. Since then, the player base seems to be growing at a linear scale.

There are small bumps near every 360 days, likely due to the anniversary bringing more players than other times of the year.

This probably is not the actual overall market growth rate of the game, since by right the actual player base should be predominantly Japanese, and the sample group of this survey has very few Japanese.

This linear scale is likely more for oversea players, whose growth is limited due to language barrier. We shall see again if the trend changes next year when official translation is finally implemented.

Main Character Configuration

Hiroki Goto (first male voice) took nearly 50% of the male voice’s market, the other two are about 25% each. For female voice, Yui Toita is slightly more popular than Orie Kimoto.

Since Hiroki Goto and Yui Toita are the first male/female voice in the order listed by the game, I think many users choose them partly due to the default effect.

Interesting points:

• Female respondents (cis and trans) mostly only choose human body types.
• There are cis-male respondents who choose female body types (straight players?!)

Money spending

• It seems that those who do spend money in this game pretty much will buy all other types of in-app purchase (but we can’t know how frequent they do so via this question).
• We also don’t know how many players bought both the small and large event limited stone packs.

To help make other visualizations easier to understand, we will introduce the concept of spending level here.

Definition of Spending level

• Medium-Heavy: those who had bought the event-limited stone pack and/or regular-priced stones
  • Because the question did not ask how often people bought stone packs, it is hard to further differentiate “those that buy stone pack(s) in every event” vs “those that only spend once or twice in their entire experience”.
• Light: those who only bought the anniversary pack and/or new year grab bag (i.e. spent only once or twice a year)
• Minimal: only bought the ten paid stones for fourth Sales slot
• No: never spent a single cent in this game

The criteria for each spending level may be a little arbitrary, but it is enough to get a sense of the general trend.

More than 50% of the players actually spend at least some amount of money in Live A Hero. Completely free-to-play players are less than what I originally thought.

East Asia has the highest percentage of Live A Hero players that spend money in-game. Given that, you can see why LifeWonders advertise a lot to East Asia countries like Taiwan.

Gameplay Style

• About 75% of the players login at least once a day.
• About 55% of the players will make sure all AP are used.
• Those who play the game in the most earnest way (last tier) are more likely to be paying customer too.

• Among non-male players, slightly more only play the game occasionally compared to the male counterpart
• Female players are less likely to optimize their game play to the maximum compared to other groups.

Game Elements’ Ranking

Unsurprisingly, character is the most important aspect of the game according to the players.

Once again, my original word choice of “rank” in the question had confused some people. I actually just want people to give a score to each game element (which mean two game elements can both be scored “3”) instead of really ranking each game element by different rank

This means that some people might have answered the question in a way that did not align with my original intention.

Other games

268 LAH players have played Gyee before but most of them have abandoned it. 242 LAH players have heard of the game, but probably got scared by the testimonial of past Gyee players that they never bother to try it.

Fantastic Boyfriends (F彼) being a buy-out game developed by LifeWonders, you can treat “abandoned” the same as “still playing”. It is not surprising that plenty of respondents said “they heard of it but never played it”, since the majority of the respondents do not understand Japanese and the game has no hope of ever getting official translation.

66.8% of LAH players are still playing Tokyo Afterschool Summoners, which is also another older game developed by LifeWonders, while 23.9% have abandoned it.

Tamacolle has the highest number of respondents who have “never heard of” the game and also the lowest abandoned / still playing count.

Sizable number of respondents have at least tried playing Another Eidos and Crave Saga (372 and 303 respectively), but the former seem more able to retain players. They are gay gacha games that have R18 content. and provide some form of translation, but from what I have seen, Another Eidos’ translation quality is much higher than Crave Saga.

Maybe next year I should add questions to rate the story, characters and general satisfaction of these games too.

Free Gacha Pull Currency

55.2% of the LAH players think the game gives less free gacha pulls than other gacha games, while only 9.8% of them think LAH is more generous than other gacha games.

Let’s hear players that have tried other gacha games have to say:

It seems that only LAH players that have tried Another Eidos have some different patterns between the “less” and “more” group: in the “more generous” group, higher percentage of those from “more generous” group have abandoned Another Eidos than that of the “less generous” group (but we do not know if they are indeed using Another Eidos as the comparison).

(Tamacolle also shows a different pattern between the “less” and “more” group, but since the game does not require spending money to pull characters, I don’t think it really matters).

It is clear that even among players that have spent money in this game, we still have more of them feeling the game is less generous with free gacha pulls than other gacha games, this opinion is not just limited to those free-to-play players.

Translation

Once again, we celebrate another game anniversary without official translation, which means 27.2% of the respondents made the correct prediction.

LifeWonders said that they are still working on it and implore us to wait a little longer, but what “a little longer” really means may be up for debate.

Half of the people (median value) believe that LifeWonders would translate at most all the Main Quest stories till 1st anniversary.

Read story

More than half of the respondents need to rely on fan translation (which are only available for some quests).

From the feedback I have received after publishing the survey, I should have added one more option for “Yes, I read the story in-game with the help of machine translation and some guesswork”.

What-if

The next two questions really stemmed from my frustration that despite having a few more new games entering the space of gay gacha games over the last 2 years, none seem to really threaten LifeWonders’ market share in a meaningful way, so LifeWonders seems very comfortable about not improving their monetization strategy.

Therefore, I want to use these two questions to see if the market are willing to explore other kind of game format and monetization.

Buy-out games

Other comments in no particular order:

• Need translation
• Must have hot men/furries
• I thought that is literally what LifeWonders main brand about
• R18 content
• Must have good gameplay
• Diverse range of game illustrators
• I don’t play the game if it has the no catharsis ending
• A more in-depth character customization that cannot be done (can only be simplified) in a non-gacha game
• If LifeWonders makes it, I will buy it
• See, LifeWonders brand does invoke some confidence now
• Less/no female
• Playable on iPhone X

In case LifeWonders is not convinced that this statistics is not representing those who actually spend money in game, let me create another chart with only Live A Hero Players that spent money in-game.

It is clear that LifeWonders will still get real money if they release buy-out games. Most paying players are willing to give buy-out game from LifeWonders a try.

R-18 games

Other comments in no particular order:

• Hot and sexy men
• Need translation
• Less or even completely without censorship
• Need good writing to develop relationship with characters before going R18
• R18 is only a good to have, other part of the game needs to be good too
• Characters need to be have personality that are more than just their dicks and asses
• Plot needs to follow common logic
• No underage characters
• Auto play/skip stages
• Settings to disable certain kink content
  • I think this is totally reasonable if we want diverse sex kink (even hardcore ones) but still accommodate to different kind of players
• If main character is meant to be self-insert, need settings to specify player’s sexuality
• Furries should not be minority in the selection
• Must no catharsis ending and No tragic, grotesque, cruel ending with no reason
• Also have CGs that are not R18
• Can only choose furries
• Old men
• Playable on iPhone X
• No female characters at all, cannot choose female main character, cannot have sex with female characters
  • I am totally not surprised to see this comment
• Don’t end up in a situation where certain characters have way less arts than other, don’t hire artists that has known bad history
  • We all know which artists they are referring to…
• BomBom main character
• Main character customization
• More brain rot comment about Sadayoshi

Character popularity

Global

Before we start, I realized that once again some people misunderstood my intention for setting the “top 10 favourites” question. Many people who have less than 10 “all favourites” thought they still need to choose exactly 10 characters for “top 10” question, but actually I wanted people to choose “at most 10 characters among their all favourites”: if you have chosen less than 10 characters in first question, you should just choose the same set of characters for the second question.

Therefore, I fixed those cases by filtering out “top 10” characters that are not present in their “all favourites” response.

Top spots for “All favourites” popularity ranking for each category

Male furry	Vote	Male human	Vote	Female/Other	Vote
Pubraseer	397	Akashi	273	Sensettia	110
Barrel	350	Gammei	231	Melide	107
Monomasa	349	Lilac	220	Flamier	79
Obsidius	334	Roudin	190	Sui	77
Ryekie	324	Astar	181	Cerastium	75

Player is not included in this table because they fit in all categories

Comments:

• Muscular male furry characters once again dominated the popularity ranking, with Pubraseer being the top, while Barrel and Monomasa taking the second and third place with just one vote in difference.
• The gap between first place and second place is much more significant.
• Tsuneaki and Sterio are pretty high on the ranking too, perhaps due to recency biases as they are featured in the event when the survey was running.

As we move on to “top 10 favourites” popularity ranking, we can see that it often favours the older characters more. Tsuneaki and Sterio’s ranking somewhat dropped, while Gaius experienced the largest ranking boost this way.

2023 vs 2024

• It seems that characters that gotten their variant forms between the time when 2023 and 2024 surveys were carried out (such as Polaris Mask, Lilac, Kalaski and Tsuneaki) have their ranking boosted quite significantly
  • This further suggests that the amount of character appearance in story and recency biases do play a role in their ranking.

Japan

• The sample size is not large, but I think it is not wrong to speculate that Japan players are also mostly furry-lovers.
• Alchiba gets the biggest boost, jumping from 37th place to 12th place in “top 10” favourites ranking.

Female / Non-binary / Other respondents

The number of non-male respondents is small to begin with, so there are a lot of ties in votes.

Pubraseer is not the number 1 among these respondents, but still in the top 3. This character is just really well loved in all segment of the player base.

For female respondents, Sensettia is number 1 in “All favourites” ranking when they can choose as many characters as want, but Flamier overtake her by one vote in “top 10” ranking. Tsuneaki is number in “Top 10” ranking.

Barrel is only at 17th place in “All favourites” ranking, but shot up to 3rd place in “Top 10” among female respondents. This is quite aligned with what I observed in social media, where most Barrel fan arts are paired with the main character in the female human form.

reXer, Grigory also saw significant ranking boost in “Top 10” ranking.

People with less than 10 favourites

In this gacha game that is full of baits for thirsty players, let us applaud these people who can limit the amount of characters they devote their hearts for.

Gaius, Canes and Player are ranked much higher by those who chose less than 10 favourites.

Association Rules Analysis

The popularity poll clearly shows that the game has successfully captured the market that likes muscular male and furries, but has the game captured market that like other kind of characters? We are going to find out with other metrics.

Analysis 1: Lift value in Top 10 popularity poll

• Wikipedia definition of Lift: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lift_(data_mining)
• How do we use this metric in our analysis:
  • If Lift(Canes, Gaius) > 1, then it means that the number of times that Canes and Gaius are chosen together in Top 10 popularity poll is higher than what can be expected from their individual popularity.
  • Due to this property, characters that are already very popular individually won’t show up in this heatmap

Pairings whose Lift values less than 2.5 are filtered out to keep the heatmap small.

Groups that have exceptionally high Lift values

• Esperdica and Vulpecula (sophisticated foxy vibes)
• Victom and Danzo (mecha hunks)
• Yuhang, Santetsu and Grigory (plus size men)
• Gaius and Canes (cute shy boys?)

Metric 2: Association Rule by Confidence

• ScienceDirect definition of Confidence: https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/computer-science/confidence-measure
• How do we use this metric in our analysis:
  • Confidence(Kyoichi, Lilac) tells us the probability of people liking Kyoichi also like Lilac in Top 10 popularity ranking
  • There is a line going from Kyoichi to Lilac in the chart below if Confidence(Kyoichi, Lilac) > 0.6

To keep this chart small, pairings whose Confidence value is less than 0.6 are not included here.

• There are clearly some sort of clusters formed by “Muscular male humans”, “Muscular male furries” and “Chubby male furries”.
• Characters on the right are more popular than those on the left
• Obviously most male furries point to Pubraseer on the right: anyone who likes some male furries almost always like Pubraseer too

Free form questions

For the next three questions, the volume of the feedback is simply too big for me to go through one by one, so I used ChatGPT to summarize them (and even then I had to do it in a few batches because the total text length exceeds ChatGPT’s limit…)

The “number of mentions” should be treated more as an estimation rather than absolute value. Words coloured in blue are my own.

What People Like

1. Character Design & Appearance (170 mentions)
   • Key Point: The standout praise goes to the character designs, with players admiring their originality, diverse appearances, and non-stereotypical portrayals, especially compared to other gacha games.
   • Furry/Bara Fans: Many appreciate the furry/bara representation and highlight the presence of hot male characters. Tight suits are also a frequently mentioned characteristic that the players are attracted to.
   • Inclusivity: Positive mentions about the non-hypersexualized female characters and the inclusion of female MC and diverse body types.
   • Voice Acting & 2D Sprites: Several players also love the voice acting and the animated 2D sprites. Many noted that the bulge physics, suit ripping to represent damage are visually satisfying.
2. Art, Animation, & Visuals (25 mentions):
   • Players like the dynamic animations, character sprites, and visual effects, noting the quality is higher than in other gacha games.
   • The inclusion of animations, battle effects, and how damage is represented on characters’ clothes (e.g., clothes ripping) were highlighted as visually satisfying.
3. Story and Lore (80 mentions)
   • Key Point: The storyline is highly praised, with players noting its depth, unique lore, and how it makes events more engaging. Some find it even more compelling than LifeWonders’ previous game “Tokyo Afterschool Summoners.”
   • World-Building: Players enjoy the heroic setting and the inclusion of superhero live-streaming mechanics.
   • Character Development: The progression of relationships between characters, and how they evolve in the story, is a popular theme. There is also excitement for well-written event stories.
   • Story Depth & Serious Themes: Several appreciated how it addresses serious topics like racism and death, and others praised the story events and main quest. The game’s willingness to explore heavy topics, paired with strong character development, resonates deeply with its audience, making it feel more mature compared to competitors like Housamo.
4. Gameplay & Mechanics (84 mentions)
   • Key Point: Players are drawn to the turn-based gameplay with simple controls, which is engaging without being overly complex.
   • Sparking (Pity) System: The pity system gets a positive reception, allowing players to have a guaranteed chance for rare characters after a set number of pulls.
   • Special Features: Some appreciate the unique combat mechanics like armor/stun meters, scenario requirements, and temporary level boosts during events.
   • “Unique gameplay & base mechanics where view can be a blessing & curse at the same time, encouraging players to make it count or else the enemy will take advantage.”
5. Music & Soundtrack (10 mentions)
   • Key Point: The soundtrack is well-received, with appreciation for event-specific songs, making the experience more immersive.
6. Accessibility & QoL Features (15 mentions)
   • Key Point: Players value the game’s low time investment and easy-to-earn resources, appreciating that it doesn’t require excessive grinding to enjoy the experience.
   • The turn-based combat system is appreciated for its ease of understanding while offering depth in team-building and strategy for harder quests. Some enjoy that the game isn’t too grindy, making it easy to play casually.
   • A number of players liked the balance between auto-battling and manual input during fights.

Improvement People Want to See

1. Official Translation (187 mentions)
   • Most frequent request: Players overwhelmingly want an official English translation for the game.
   • Requests for additional languages such as Chinese and Thai。
2. Improvement to Pity System (67 mentions)
   • Players want the pity system (guaranteed high-rarity character after many pulls) improved, with lower thresholds or more accessible systems.
   • Suggestions include accumulating pity across banners and lowering the pull threshold.
3. Better Gacha Rates/Currency Acquisition (54 mentions)
   • Players want more opportunities for free pulls such as through daily missions or events, and many suggest that Live A Hero is more expensive compared to other gacha games.
   • Some want cheaper currency packs and higher chances to get featured units.
   • Players feel it’s difficult to earn enough resources for a spark (pity) system without spending real money.
   • Suggestions to make stones more accessible during downtime between events.
   • Battle pass or reward systems to provide more consistent resources.
4. Gameplay Mechanics (13 mentions)
   • Players want more diverse gameplay mechanics, less grindy content, and new permanent game modes (e.g., tower, survival, or co-op modes).
   • There are also calls for improving character synergies and combat formulas.
   • Improved Combat Mechanics: Players want more depth in gameplay and better explanations of in-game mechanics to enhance understanding. Some ask for improvements in auto-battle and skill animations, as well as more intricate battle strategies.
   • Character Progression: Players find it challenging to upgrade characters or progress without spending a lot of time or money. Easier access to promotion materials and quicker progression through content is a popular request.
     • I think this might apply more to new players, because old players tend to hoard a lot of resources over time and be selective in which units to upgrade. Crave Saga provides a lot more beginner missions and paid packs to help new players to catch up, so I think LAH can learn from that too.
5. Stamina System Improvements (9 mentions)
   • The stamina system is seen as restrictive, with slow recovery times and high stamina costs for grinding stages.
   • Players suggest more ways to obtain stamina or reduce the stamina cost for certain content.
6. More Frequent Events and Content Updates (8 mentions)
   • Players feel that events and main story updates are too infrequent, leading to periods of inactivity.
   • Some want more daily and weekly missions with meaningful rewards to keep players engaged.
   • They request more frequent updates and event variety, with less downtime between content.
   • We officially have “more than a year gap” between two main quest chapters 😭.
7. Hero/Sidekick System & Dupe Shop Improvements (8 mentions)
   • There are calls to improve the system for hero/sidekick duplicates, with better shop rewards and more useful items from dupes.
8. Additional Content (11 mentions):
   • Requests for additional content such as hard mode for story stages and boss fights.
9. Old Character Updates (14 mentions)
   • Older characters feel more static compared to newer ones.
   • Requests to update older characters with new animations, skills, or cosmetic options to match newer units.
10. Quality of Life (QoL) Enhancements (6 mentions)
    • Many suggestions revolve around UI improvements, faster loading times, and more streamlinedsystems for managing inventory and items.
    • Other suggestions include auto-battle systems and customizable main menus.
    • Some players also ask for customizable options to enhance gameplay, such as freezing backgroundanimations or character motions to reduce lag.
11. More Diverse Characters and Content (5 mentions)
    • Players want more diverse characters (more women, trans characters, and more varied body typeslike chubby or muscular).
12. Character Interaction and Story (12 mentions):
    • Some players want more interaction with favorite characters, including features like a relationship system (similar to “Housamo”).
    • Interest in a protagonist with a more active role in the story.
    • Suggestions for UI improvements such as character animations during dialogues and moving sprites.

Notable Points:

• There is also frustration about the game’s slow progression and limited free-to-play (F2P) opportunities, with calls for it to be more F2P-friendly.
• A few comments suggest adding romance and marriage mechanics with gacha characters.
• Visual improvements, like new CG or splash art for characters, are desired by some.

Occupation

Popular Suggestions (Multiple Mentions):

1. Artists/Animators/Graphic Designers (8 mentions)
   • Occupations like animators, cartoonists, and other creative roles were frequently mentioned.
2. Healthcare/Medical Roles (6 mentions)
   • Players expressed interest in seeing roles like psychologists, doctors, and therapists. There were also mentions of specific roles like a vet or mental health professionals.
3. Police/Detective/Enforcement Roles (6 mentions)
   • There is a strong interest in police officers, detectives, SWAT, and anti-bomb squad members, with some wanting more heroic law enforcement representation.
4. Farming and Agricultural Roles (5 mentions)
   • Roles like farmers, ranchers, gardeners, and eco-organic farmers were a popular suggestion.
5. Villains/Criminal Roles (5 mentions)
   • Players suggested roles such as bounty hunters, villains, assassins, mercenaries, and mafia members for more antagonistic characters.
6. Magicians/Wizards/Occult Roles (5 mentions)
   • Several players suggested roles related to magic, such as wizards, summoners, or occultists.
7. Construction and Engineering Jobs (5 mentions)
   • Suggestions included engineers, electricians, plumbers, janitors, and carpenters.
8. Chefs/Culinary Experts (4 mentions)
   • Multiple players requested professions like chefs, bakers, sushi chefs, or other food-related occupations.
9. Pilots and Aerospace Roles (4 mentions)
   • Occupations such as pilots, astronauts, and other space-related roles were requested.
10. Combat Sports/Athletes (4 mentions)
    • Players wanted to see more roles like MMA fighters, sumo wrestlers, boxers, and other athletes.

Notable One-Time Suggestions:

• Linguist/Translator: A few mentioned a focus on linguistics or translators.
• Programmer/Tech: Some players suggested programmers or tech-related jobs in tribute to game developers.
• Time Travelers/Explorers: Unique suggestions like time travelers, cartographers, or interplanetary explorers were mentioned.
• Undead/Overworked Corporate Workers: Some humorous and unusual suggestions, like an overworked corporate zombie or undead/mortician, stood out for creativity.

Game Merchandise

Other comments in no particular order:

• Food, snack and drink (collaboration with existing brands)
• Food recipe book of my favorite characters
  • LifeWonders kind of did make a Christmas dessert recipe during Housamo 2022 Christmas event. Making enough recipes to make a book probably is too difficult
• Character scent (e.g. story-accurate perfume that the character uses)
• Bad dragon toys
  • I think the person meant dildo
• Enamel pin
• Official books/comics but with translation
• Bedsheet
• Animated computer/phone wallpaper
• Will consider buying if LW come to Taiwan event to sell
• Some brain rot comments about Hydoor, Sadayoshi, Gaius

Association rule by Confidence (Market-Basket Analysis)

Since we are literally asking our respondents to add merchandises into their imaginative wishlist, let’s see what merchandises are often wanted together. This will be important to plan potential bundle sales opportunity.

We will reusing the Confidence metric introduce in Advanced Analaysis section before.

• How to interpret this chart:
  • Confidence(item A, item B) = how likely someone who want item A also want item B
  • If there is a line from item A to item B in the chart, then Confidence(item A, item B) > 0.6

Difficulty to Buy Game Merchandise

It is clear that various shipping issues are the biggest factor that deters potential buyers.

Other comments in no particular order:

• Merchandise update is too slow, favourite character does not yet has merchandise
• Character badges are always out of stock
• Come to Taiwan event to sell
  • Probably more likely than any other overseas countries, Taiwanese are so lucky.
• Shipping to US, Europe and other countries 
  • If you want less hassle and don’t mind the shipping cost, then I believe you can just buy on Alicebook. However, the pricing model that is based on volumetric weight often will make the shipping cost more expensive than the item itself…
    • https://alice-books.com/m_feature/lifewonders
    • https://alice-books.com/help/user/oversea_shippable
  • The other way is finding a proxy service with better pricing model, but more hassle
• I hate taxes and especially import duties
• National law and sanctions
  • Some countries have tighter border control and/or ongoing war, impossible to solve
• Too shy to enter a group buying programme
  • Group buy certainly can help reduce the shipping cost that each participants have to bear individually, but it is hard to find such group unless you have offline friends who also like Live A Hero content.
• Lack of budget

God, I feel I am becoming LifeWonders’ customer support.

One thing is that, with supply chain disruption and global conflict, international shopping will only be increasingly more expensive. For for some countries, it is completely impossible to ship physical items to them currently. And then there are some countries who ban materials related to gay culture, so custom check is a problem.

This is why I always advocate that we need digital format! You can focus on paying for the item itself instead of shipping cost, and don’t have to worry about national law and sanctions.

Once again, in case LifeWonders think it is just F2P respondents spamming the question, here is another chart that only have Live A Hero players that spent in-game.

Extra Content

Other comments in no particular order:

• Tons of comments about wanting anime/animation
  • Anime is very expensive…
• Videos need english subtitle
  • Cannot agree more on this
• Official livestream with game producers
  • Among games of similar genre, so far only Crave Saga has official livestream where the game producer showed his face along with some Gogo boys.
  • I think LifeWonders can consider inviting a few official illustrators to join the livestream. Maybe everyone would just use Vtuber model instead of showing their real face (Kinoshita Jiroh sensei does that a lot)
• Gameplay livestream
• More voice actor’s performance like podcast
• R18 content
• Idol pop/ rock song with Hitomi and Sensettia
• Make april fools content into reality
• Some brain rot comments about Hydoor, Sadayoshi, Loren..

Feedback for the Survey and Wiki

Thank you for all the kind words about the wiki and the survey. There was also one person from Japan who apparently is a contributor to the LAH JP Wiki. Yeah, sometimes wikis just copy stuff from each other don’t we.

And on to the other feedbacks and suggestions

Character profile, voice line not translated

We used to have a few more contributors to work on translation, but now we are just down to one. We just need more contributors…

Voice/BGM audio files, Spine animation on Wiki

Firstly, this Wiki is hosted on Github Pages with only 1GB free storage, so I don’t have a lot of leeway to work with. Secondly, LifeWonders don’t really like people sharing audio files widely (this is in their Terms of Service).

If you know where to look, you can already find voice/BGMs in certain websites, but I cannot tell you where they are as the owner of this wiki.

Skill description are hard to read

Many people complain that the skill descriptions in Wiki are more wordy than the original Japanese game text, like [base skill] Deal 60% of damage to target enemy/100% instead of just Deal 60% damage to target enemy.

To explain that, here is a bit of history:

1. The early contributors of this Wiki (myself included) were the same people that contributed to Housamo wiki (and later the Housamo Skill DB). We had the tradition of generating skill description by parsing game data and output description in a certain format to expose the most intricate details of the game mechanism
2. That method worked well with Housamo even till today, the Wiki can auto generate most of the skill descriptions with minimal human intervention when game maintenance hasn’t even ended.
3. However, LAH’s game mechanism evolved more wildly than Housamo. There were almost always new mechanisms added to LAH after every game maintenance.
4. We began to see more and more crazy “system status counters”, “various types of skill triggers”, “one skill adding a new skill to another target”, “weird skill timing” and so on. Trying to maintain the algorithm to parse this kind of game data to generate human-readable descriptions becomes more and more infeasible.
5. We obviously received a lot of complaints about the readability of the skill descriptions, and no good solution to fix, to the point where one day I just decided that some complicated skills will just be manually written by human contributors instead. However, we still wanted to keep most of the old machine-generated descriptions there, because at that time, we didn’t have that kind of manpower to rewrite those too manually (remember that all these works are unpaid).

Around October this year, I made a bold decision to abandon the old system to generate skill descriptions automatically, and instead develop a new system to translate skill descriptions in a way that is more aligned with actual game UI. Fortunately, a few volunteers joined the effort, so now newer characters’ skills should have more readable descriptions, and the new system will be more prepared to welcome official translations when it happens.

List of XXX

I think many people didn’t know these pages exist:

• Misc lists
• List of statuses that ever exist in game
  • We might prepare something better for list of common buff/debuff in the future
• List of game items

There should be a way to jump from the game app to Wiki website

… Do some people actually think that this Wiki is operating in an official way, and I am a LifeWonders’ employee?!

Discord role where we get notified that stocks get refilled

I think you should just follow the official X (Twitter) account

Gameplay tier list, recommendation and strategy guide like JP Wiki

Since LAH JP Wiki kind of has it (like clarifying mechanism of certain unit, what hero/sidekick is good for this unit and why), I am not totally against having gameplay guide in this wiki. It is just that there are no volunteer who would write it.

Filter characters by buff / debuff

We might implement such thing in the future for a few common buff/debuff statuses.

Survey question suggestions

• Top 1 favourite question
• Favourite human / furry / female / costume / variant / event / artist / voice actors
  • New question for human / furry / female will require repeating that long list of characters in the survey. I am afraid that will increase the respondents’ fatigue. There are already people complaining that the list is too long to navigate in Google Form
  • People may have very different standard when judging best costume / variant, most will ended up just choosing their favourite characters, so the questions become quite pointless
  • Proof: X/Twitter Fashion Poll
    • Sadayoshi is somehow top 5 fashionable characters, despite the fact that “not knowing much about being fashionable” is kind of coded into his personality (excluding his variant costume which was partly thanks to Maculata’s design).
• Characters pairing
  • Right now I can’t think of how to set up this kind of question on Google Form since this is “one question that has two inputs”. I also cannot trust that everyone can spell names correctly. If I were to make it as one text input, enforcing text format and fixing typos would be a nightmare.

More organized list of fan translations

We collect what we can on the wiki, but to be honest there really aren’t that many English fan translations for this game to begin with.

• For event/main quest translation, see https://housamosummaries.blogspot.com/.
• For event special quest fan translations, they are usually listed in the event info page.
• For character quest fan translations, see Character Quests

Survey needs Traditional Chinese/Spanish translation

Unfortunately that is just not practical. With just three languages (English, Simplified Chinese and Japanese), the survey already looks very cluttered, adding one more language will further impact the readability of the survey.

Story lore section

Contribution welcomed. We also need the origin of character names.

Comment section for gameplay

I would suggest you to just ask help in LAH Discord (unofficial), there are many good players that give you better advice more quickly.

Afterword

I hope you enjoy reading this report, because the whole process took me months to prepare. Many times the thought of “I should be paid for this work” flashed in my mind. It really is not easy to conduct a survey of this size, and then write a report about it!

For a lGbt game that we all know caters more towards gay players, I think LifeWonders’ success in attracting more players from other demographics is pretty commendable. If they can grow the group of paying players to keep the business running while still staying true to their original mission, I think that is good for everyone. (Ironically, “serving global market is also in their missions).

While waiting for the ever elusive release of official translation, this wiki will still be here supporting oversea players.

See you in next year survey!

Data sanitization

I put this at the end because I know most people will find this boring, but given the sample size, it is not surprising that we might have responses that look suspicious. I will talk about some of the measures I took to sieve the responses.

Suspicious responses

• A transgender girl from Antarctica, has JLPT N1 level but does not play the game, and requested an English translation for the game.
  • What is the probability that this combination actually exists in the world?? How many people were born in Antarctica, some more being a transgender? If you have achieved JLPT N1 level, you probably can play the game and read its story without English translation. This response was submitted after I had already added clarification on JLPT levels and other standardized Japanese language tests, the person clearly did not read the questions properly.
• Someone who found the survey via “Atlantis”, born in the Philippines but claiming to be a Japanese native speaker, and the person’s “Top 10” and “All favourites” have no intersection
  • This response was also removed

Removing duplicate responses

Majority of the responses I had to remove fall under this category. Usually they are detected when I see the same set of comments/favourite selections appear in multiple responses.

There might be even more duplicate responses, but eliminating them all is beyond my capability. I believe there are not that many duplicates to affect the overall result significantly.

People just don’t read instructions!

For optional questions, please leave them blank if you have no comment, and I specifically said “don’t write N/A”, yet I still get some “N/A”, “No”, “None” and their equivalent in other languages for those questions.

For the “when did you start playing Live A Hero” question, despite already stating that the game launched on 30 September 2020, there are still people who claim to have played the game before this date, some even as far back as the year 1998.

And then we also have someone who claims to be 500 years old (maybe he was trying to type “50” instead).