Fate/Grand Order may be the Nasuverse's biggest money-maker, but there are some features that make the task of restoring the Human Order harder than it needs to be.
- One of the most prominent and the most potentially fatal example is the usage of Transfer Numbers instead of a dedicated account. In order to continue the progress after changing to another phone or an emulator, the player must issue a transfer number and bind them with a password. This transfer number can be used only once, meaning you cannot use the same number for subsequent transfers. What makes things worse is that if the game is uninstalled before the transfer number is issued, the progress is permanently erased. While there is a way to recover the lost progress, it requires the player to memorize an enormous amount of detailsWhich includes... . This setup also creates the added "bonus" of making cross-play between phone and emulator (a common way for players to save up on phone battery life) practically not worth the risk as all it takes to lose everything is to forget creating a new Transfer Number. It is very telling that one of the most requested features is account binding to prevent the investment from being grinded to dust either by accident or events beyond the players' control, which the Chinese server has done so far.
- Increasing a Servant's Bond level to 10, a lengthy and grindy process with only occasional rewards after Bond 5, where no further profiles are unlocked, grants the player a unique CE for each Servant, which not only gives the player a nice piece of story content for them but offers a unique effect when equipped by said Servant. Unfortunately, the CE comes in at max level and cannot be improved, and only offers a +100 boost to both stats, meaning that virtually every other CE in the game, even the 1* ones, will outcompete it in those areas with minimal investment. Worse, with a few exceptions (Heracles's free three-use, unremovable Guts is considered one of the strongest unique effects in the game, and Arash's offers him some additional ability to capitalize on his main gimmick, for instance), the unique effects just aren't very good and/or don't synergize well with their roles on a team. Asterios, for instance, a Buster-based damage dealer with a strong debuffing NP, gets the ability to boost his party's Quick performance, while Beowulf boosts the party's damage against Dragon enemies, which is situational at best. Even those with decent effects, such as Raikou's field-wide Buster and Critical increase, struggle to compete with more general use CEs that offer better stats to boot!
- To make things worse, Using Visionary Flames to unlock further tiers of Bond after 10 is considered similarly grindy and lengthy at best. To elaborate, reaching bond level 11 alone requires at least 60% of the accumulated bond points required to get to Bond level to 10 from a scratch. The bond points requirement increases for subsequent levels, up to Bond level 15 which requires roughly the same amount of bond points required to get to Bond Level 10. Adding insult to the injury is that each bond level after 10 requires one Visionary Flame. The only saving throw of this system is that these bond levels reward 30 Saint Quartzes upon completion.
- The first Halloween Event introduced two different kinds of maps, one that opened at a set time every day, and one that opened at a time that was hinted at by looking around the map. The problem was however that both maps were only open for one hour, and the sheer number of players trying to connect at the same time put too much load on the servers. They eventually changed one of the maps so that it remained open but could only be done once, and changed the other map to do the same thing later.
- The only way to change the target of your attack mid-combo or break through Guts in one turn is to either have the next card be another Servant, or use your Noble Phantasm. In Brave Chains that don't include an NP, enemies that die in the first attack (maybe due to a critical) can be immensely frustrating. The only positive effect of this is the Overkill/Overgauge mechanic that applies additional NP charge or higher crit star generation on attacks on dead enemies.
- The "Starry Xuanzang Goes to India" event was a two-week event that involved farming for four different types of items: talismans, which were used in place of AP to play story quests (with a repeatable quest that dropped the other three materials after all story quests were done), three other items, which acted as the event shop currency. This isn't so bad in itself. However, the second week introduced two entirely new materials to farm for (one that acted like talismans and another which acted as shop currency for different items). Farming for these materials involved completing an entirely different set of quests, and the drops could only be boosted by a different set of servants and CEs from the ones that boosted the previous drops (and the CEs required either spending the new currency or completing the new quests and had very weak battle effects). So essentially, it was like having to do an entirely new event in one week (two events including the previous week for those who haven't finished farming for those items). Coming off the already grindy Ibaraki-Douji event, this left a collective bad taste in the community's mouth. Perhaps in response, the event's rerun made it so that players could earn the second week's talisman replacement using the quests from the first week so that they could build up a supply in advance.
- Unregistered Spirit Origins are meant to be a way to buy available SSR Servants of your choice, but there are several crippling flaws with the system. You can gain an Unregistered Spirit Origin by summoning an SSR Servant if you already have the same Servant with a level 5 NP, and need ten origins to buy one SSR Servant. In theory, the system should reward a player for getting good rolls. In practice, the rarity of 5-star Servants makes it hard to get even a single origin, and ten are needed just to buy one new 5* Servant. Many agree that the mechanic would be greatly improved if the number of origins needed was at least halved or alternate methods of gaining origins were introduced (such as event rewards).
- The only way to obtain Rare Prisms (for buying past events' exclusive Craft Essences or Mystic Codes) is through burning gold Servants (and welfare SR Servants didn't count for some time until a later update, so no easy farming for non-whales). Worse is that players may have already used them as experience fodders prior to the 1.15 version update when this currency was introduced. This is made slightly easier starting with a rerun of the 3rd Christmas event, which made every unneeded copynote of a limited welfare servant give the player a rare prism, but it only counted for events afterward. Obtaining a Spiritron Dress for a certain character that you've already unlocked when the re-run of their quest happens will grant a Rare Prism too.
- The Sound Player. It's nice to be able to listen to all the Awesome Music in the game, but in order to unlock the music, you need to spend Ascension materials. Obviously, most people would rather use their materials to improve their Servants, and many of the materials are a pain to acquire outside of events. Not to mention that most people can find OST tracks on YouTube and listen to them there, effectively rendering the purpose of the Sound Player completely moot.
- 4-star Fou cards are used to increase a Servant's stat from 1,000 to 2,000. Each one only increases it by a paltry 20 points (for reference, this makes the stat increase of 4-star Fou cards equivalent to 2-star cards when 3-star cards increase by 50) and are in very short supply during events. If you want to buy just one from the Rare Prism shop, you need 3 of them which requires burning either one SSR Servant for 5 Rare Prisms or burning three SR Servants for three Rare Prisms, making the process of getting a Servant's stats to 2,000 long and tedious even for whales.
- Gameplay-wise, skills that activate based on the location of where one is fighting has been heavily criticized for Guide Dang It! levels of unintuitive criteria for what does and doesn't qualify for the required field. The main issue is that the game isn't very clear on what qualifies as the right location, such as Waterside terrain meaning any location with water or underwater, while Sunlight means any location that the sun is naturally out. It's to the point where Gawain's Strengthening Quest skill just flat out gives him the ability to activate his location skill as if it fulfilled the requirements, and after Avenger Nobunaga had one given to her that was later buffed, it seems the developers have started moving away from these types of skills.
- Shimosa introduced fights where, instead of simply being offered a story-related Servant that granted extra Friend Points to use for Support alongside your usual available list, the story-related Servant was mandatory as Support and had to be put on the front lines. This mechanic was hated by the community for not only robbing players of their Support List, but also making them use a Servant that may clash with their teams and are weaker than possibly your copy of the Servant. Musashi has the misfortune of being the most infamous example as she was also introduced in Shimosa, and one of her forced fights is against a very powerful Archer that puts her on the wrong end of Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors, not helped by her third skill (that gives Invincibility and Debuff Removal) being unavailable for most of them. It took until Yuga Khsetra (Lostbelt 4) for Forced Supports to finally get a unique Craft Essence to alleviate the issue some, but lacking the teams for them was still an issue until Heian-Kyo (Lostbelt 5.5) where the developers finally started gearing the Forced Supports towards the fights they were forced into.
- The story-lock. Basically, several Servants are treated as "locked" until you beat a certain story chapter, at which point you can roll for them in the story gacha. Unfortunately, they are only unlocked in the story gacha (even the 3*s that would normally be available in the Friend Point gacha), which is generally considered the least-desirable banner to roll in for never having rate-ups or event items, and they cannot be rolled in the rate-up gacha unless they are specifically stated to be a part of it. This leaves the player with two options: Either treat story-locked Servants as glorified limited Servants and wait for them to appear on a rate-up, which can be very rare for specific Servants, or spare some quartz for the story gacha, where story-locked Servants don't have higher rates than any other Servant. Do you want an Altria Alter? Well, you can either hope she picks up a rateup on the main banner at some point, or you can plunge a pile of SQ and hope the odds go in your favor, and those odds only gets worse which each new non-limited Servant is added to the game (which ironically made rolling on the story gacha more practical early on in the game's lifetime when there were far fewer Servants to bet odds against spooking). This is especially unfun for story-locked three-stars that you get for free, like Bedivere and Caster Cu, who tend to get stuck at NP1 while their fellows can get up to NP5 easily.
- Similarly, starting from the CCC event, some events, even some of the much loved holiday seasonal ones, are now locked behind story progression, which many feel is unfair to new players since it can take months for them to reach that point even with permanent AP costs down and the Follower System. The major reasons for this appear to be "plot spoilers" since several events canonically take place during or after major Wham Episodes from the main story which requires the prior context to fully appreciate as well as to anticipate the average skill of a player in order to craft more challenging fight scenarios for more developed accounts. This was especially egregious in 2018 where, with the sole exception of the Summer event, the Apocrypha crossover, and the rerun of "Da Vinci-chan and the 7 Counterfeit Heroic Spirits", every single event that year required the player to have cleared at least all of Observer in Timeless Temple, with the Christmas and Halloween events in particular further requiring the completion of Lostbelts 1 and 2, respectively. This reached ludicrous levels with Shouwa Kishin Plan GudaGuda Ryoma’s Close Call! ~The Mystery of Nobbu Head’s Disappearance!~, which required the player to clear not just the above, but also up to Lostbelt 5.5, which includes, you guessed it, Olympus.
- The February 2020 Livestream announced "Main Interludes" — effectively the ability to play through the story sections of past events that the dev team no longer wishes to run, also including the ability to obtain the free servants associated with said events. Sounds great, right? Well, with the exception of the first Main Interlude to be released (the popular Christmas 2017 event), these are only available to unlock via the Rare Prism shop for a whopping five RP per event unlock. Additionally, only the first copy of the welfare servant will be granted to the player upon finishing the story — for the remaining four copies needed to max out the servant's Noble Phantasm, the player will need to buy those from the RP shop for two RP per copy. This effectively means that to get the most out of the Main Interlude mechanic, a player will need a total of 13 RP per event, making it extremely unfriendly to newer players or those without money to burn in the gacha. The developers likely recognized the problem and made some of the events free to purchase, and refunded those who already brought them with RP.
- The inability to replay Story nodes. Want to test new meta-breaking Servants against older bosses with cheating gimmicks like Goetia? Outside of the annual Memorial events or Main Interlude events, you have to create a whole new account, breeze your way through the game and hope that you get the Servant you want to test before the gacha expires. Players who had to do this are noted to have multiple accounts on a single server that could have been a single super account as a result, something that could have been avoided if the ability to replay was available from the start. Some players had worked around this by simply having their alternates be friends with their main account to access the Servant but this doesn't change the fact that you still have to replay the story and quickly quit before the battle results got saved.
- The way critical stars are distributed. Each class has a built-in crit star absorption modifier, meaning some classes naturally soak up more stars than others. For example; Riders and Archers have among the highest, while Berserkers have the lowest. The issue with this system though is two hidden details: star absorption rate is affected by the characters Luck stat, and each turn three cards are randomly given extra crit star absorption. Neither of these factors are things the game tells you exist, meaning certain combinations of classes and stats will result in crit stars going all over the place. For example, Berserker Kintoki will almost never get crit stars due to his class and low Luck stat (C) unless you get lucky or have at least fifty stars (which would mean every single card has 100% crit chance), while any Caster support with him will inherently soak up more stars even if their Luck is worse then him (Merlin, for example, has D rank Luck, but due to class modifiers will soak up more stars). Combined with the random crit star absorption per turn, this makes it where a player has almost no control over the flow of crit stars, creating situations where a player's primary damage dealer isn't able to get any crit stars because of outside factors like their Luck stat, class, and random card chances. Worse yet, skills that increase crit star absorption don't inherently mean the character will gain all the crit stars, instead, it means they just increase the chances of directing the crit stars to them, meaning if you don't have enough stars, other cards will still soak up stars. It's one of the primary reasons players sometimes solo certain bosses, as ensuring crit stars go to the intended target is more important at times, or rely on Archers and Riders as their main damage dealers, as both have the highest star absorption.
- Limited SSR Servants can be obtained outside of their dedicated banners through the GSSR banners during Anniversaries and New Years, giving players who missed them another chance to obtain them. Limited SR Servants, however, have no such luck, meaning if you missed them, too bad. As of July 2020, several limited SR Servants like Fujino and Miyu have only had one banner, so hope you got them if you wanted them! Fortunately, the 5th Anniversary GSSR proved to be the first GSSR to contain limited SR Servants (including the aforementioned Fujino and Miyu), but only time will tell if this will become the new norm.
- With very, very rare exceptions, you must enter a battle with a team of at least three Servants (two of your own and a Support). While it's clearly meant for balance purposes to ensure that the player will always have a full front line at the start of a fight, it becomes a problem for players who want to solo battles because they are not allowed to start a quest with just a single Servant. The closest thing to a solution is to pair your desired solo Servant with a level 1 Servant of your own and a level 1 Support (and given how most Masters logically set their strongest Servants as their Supports because they want Friend Points from people using them, good luck with that) and then hope that the enemy kills them immediately instead of focusing their attacks on the one you actually want to use.
- There's a great deal of Guide Dang It! regarding Servant stats. For instance, Skills and Noble Phantasms will always have descriptions, but never exact numbers (i.e. Mash's "Transient Wall of Snowflakes" says that it increases the team's defense, but it doesn't say that the skill reduces damage by 10% at level one or the percentages for every level after that until it hits 15% at level ten) or even exact functions (i.e. "Imperial Privilege" is a set of several chance-based buffs, and the description says "apply random effects to yourself" instead of specifying the set list of buffs you can get). Additionally, the Attributes system is unexplained in-game, which can hurt the effectiveness of Servants during certain quests. Be prepared to do a lot of looking up information online to determine what a Servant is actually capable of.
- The lottery events only allow you to redeem one or ten items out of a 300 item raffle at a time. While they later implemented the ability to redeem faster by allowing you to press the redeem button immediately again, there is still no option to redeem by the box. This results in many overloaded gift boxes and even more sore fingers, as the more active grinders, can easily breach 100 redeemed boxes. Christmas 2021 alleviates this by adding an option to redeem 100 items at a time. However, it will only appear from the 11th box onwards rather than right from the start, making it still a pain to obtain the event CE.
- Inflicting the Death status will kill the enemy before damage is dealt, and, crucially, then stop dealing damage at all, preventing Overkill/Overgauge. This doesn't sound bad, especially for single target Servants, but since many Arts-focused Servants like Erice, Nitocris and Ryougi Shiki depend on dealing large damage numbers to refund their NP gauge, inflicting Death will serve as a hindrance. While this isn't a problem for enemy Servants since they will have their Death Resist cranked up to impossible levels, despite them still being able to inflict the Death status to you, the same can not be said for Mook enemies.
- Starting around the Babylonia singularity, players are unable to play free quests for a story chapter until they completed the main story for that chapter. This wasn't much of a problem until the Avalon La Fae chapter where due to the sheer length of the chapter, it was divided into three separate parts. Because of this, people were unable to grind for new materials for the new servants when the chapter first came out.
- Command Card Enhancement. The concept of increasing the power of a Servant's Command Cards sounds good, but it turns out the materials needed are 25 of the rare Beast's Footprint, and 52,500,000 QP to enhance just one Command Card by a measly 500 points. It's not surprising to find players who forget this mechanic even exists due to how underwhelming and impractical it is.
- The Servant Coin system. This new type of currency introduced in the 6th anniversary unlocks Append Skills and is used in Palingenesis to further increase a Servant's level to 120 after reaching Level 100. How do you get them? Well, the easy (but very expensive) way is to roll through the gacha. While any Servant available in the FP gacha avoids this problem due to being rollable from FP (except Aŋra Mainiiu due to how rare he is, though he's considered a Lethal Joke Character even without Append Skills at best), any Servant that only exists in the paid gacha tends to be more frustrating to get Servant Coins for, and while they compensate with larger Servant Coin values, this isn't enough to compensate how rare some of them are. And since this was introduced after a long time, this means that paid gacha Servants and welfare Servants need to rely on the other method, which is slower and more grindy, namely through increasing Bond. Given the problems with grinding Bond Points as stated above, even if you don't mind the grind, you would still have to grind at least up to a certain bond level to even unlock an Append skill (and in some cases, having to even reach Bond Level 15 to take full advantage of the Servant Coin system, which is a problem of itself). Adding on top of that is that fully developing an Append Skill costs the same as if you were leveling up a regular skill, all the way down to requiring a Crystallized Lore, an already very rare material to begin with, to max it out. Oh, and the Holy Grail Casting System requires you to spend 2,000 Servant Coins for a single Holy Grail, though thankfully, it can come from any servant.
- The long-coveted pity system arrives at January 2022 and it is considered practically non-existent due to various shortcomings. First, to trigger it you need 330 rolls. That is 900 Saint Quartz or 300 tickets at minimum if you use the 10-roll gimmick. Second, the timer resets once you get the SSR featured a single time, or if the banner rotates the featured SSR out for someone else, the latter effectively forcing players to only do their rolls on a single day. Third, the pity level doesn't carry over between banners meaning that if a banner switches between multiple SR's then you only have one day to roll. These cons make the pity system inaccessible to all but the biggest of whales, making it practically useless for general F2P players.
- The developers trying to mitigate the issue of the banners switching out to give single rate up for SR's ultimately created its own problems as their initial solution was to not do the SR rotation meaning that if there was an SR you wanted, and it wasn't the only one on that banner then tough shit it's now about as rare as an SSR. Then by summer they tried to alleviate this by increasing the amount of SSR's in the event so they and one SR servant can be on one banner. At this point it's debatable if the pity system costed F2P players more in the long run.
- While most events make it easy to obtain all five copies, some events lock the final copy of a Craft Essence behind one dropping from the farming nodes rather from the event shop or however the events primary progress is handled. Not only does this mean the player has to farm and hope it drops, but it can result in the event CE being unable to be Max Limit Broken and making the CE essentially useless. The Valentines Day events in particular are infamous for doing this, with the player often needing to spend a ton of AP just to get one copy to MLB said CE. It doesn't help the drop chances are very low, and that some of the CE's have not been re-released in any way, so if you fail to get that last copy, you potentially will never be able to finish it, since the Valentines Day CE's are often not put in the Rare Prism shop. And your chances of getting that fifth copy drops even further if the node's possible drops also include CE exp ones.
- Raid bosses can be this depending on how many lives the devs give to each boss. Raid bosses always give lots of item drops at reasonable rates, making them lucrative to spend apples on. This means that most players will immediately pounce on the bosses and farm them to death in short order, if they themselves didn't get disconnected due to server overload first. If the devs give the raid bosses a low number of lives, expect the bosses to die in an hour or two at most. If you happen to be working, sleeping, or otherwise busy for some reason when the boss is opened? Too bad, you're out of luck. Better hope that the devs give a runback like with Barbatos in the El-Melloi event or god forbid, the event reruns next year at a better time. The Tunguska Sanctuary event got the worst of it since it was composed entirely of raid bosses, leaving players to with nothing to do but twiddle their thumbs until the next boss came along. Most players wish that rather than giving raid bosses lives, the devs instead make it so the bosses are free to farm during a set period of the day as many times you wish so everyone has a chance to fight them.
- Any event that ties the event currency bonus to servants tends to get flak, because issues aside with the gacha, this tends to be notorious for wrecking team composition that relies on farming methods, and sometimes, the event tends to gate the best currency farms behind enemies that tend to put the servants with the event bonus at an disadvantage (we're looking at you, Tesla from Saber Wars). Some events compensate this with an event CE that is additive with servants with the event bonus to compensate, but other don't have it, forcing players to use the servants with the event bonus to get the currency to purchase the event items, some which have absurdly high costs.
- To win in the Grail Fronts, you must either kill the enemy Master or defeat all their servants. The problem is that the battlefield is littered with various materials and if you are too good at your job, the enemy servants will kill themselves fighting your forces, causing the whole battle to prematurely end before your can grab the loot on the floor. While you can keep any materials you did manage to get, this also means that you need to fight the enemy all over again and purposely hold yourself back to get that pesky last chest in subsequent runs. Sometimes, the space where the chest is occupied can taken up by an enemy servant or even worse, the enemy Master. It speaks volumes that the players generally consider this to be the real reason behind the Grail Front's difficulty.
- Time locks on events. To prevent players from blitzing through an event, events lock progression by making it where new nodes/chapters unlock after a set point in time, usually about two days after the newest node at reset. On paper it doesn't seem like a bad idea, but many events suffer from having the best farming nodes locked until either near the end of the event, or after the main story is done. Furthermore, the time lock causes Arc Fatigue issues, since it forcibly drags the story out rather than allowing the player to engage on it at their own pace. While later time gates were eased up by having two, meaning more progression is possible, it begs the question of why it needs to exist at all. This was noticeable when Salem was released, as despite being a story chapter, the use of time gates to prevent players from finishing it quicker caused a lot of people to sour on the story, and this became a very prominent issue when the 5th summer event and its two timegates per day rolled out in NA.
- Similarly, the timegating of Lostbelt 6, Avalon le Fae, was largely disliked. Instead of locking off individual chapters, the entire story arc was split into three parts and each was released like previous full story arcs had been. The problem is, previous story arcs were released with a fair amount of extra time, to allow the player to approach the story at their own pace and give them some time to complete the new area's free quests. But those arcs ended on conclusive notes as self contained chapters, whereas the Avalon le Fae's first two parts ended on cliffhangers that left the player waiting weeks to progress. The aforementioned issue involving the free quests of the chapter didn't help matters. Adding in the dearth of events around this period to avoid competing with the story quests, and many fans decried this as an obvious case of Padding.
- The lack of a dedicated and consistent way of leveling up Craft Essences is an annoying aspect of the game that has basically been untouched since launch. Unlike Servants, which have several ways of getting Embers used for leveling, the game doesn't provide any consistent ways of leveling Craft Essences save for occasional events where EXP Craft Essences are available that are meant to be fed to the Craft Essence you want. These rewards are incredibly rare though, effectively requiring the player to throw unwanted Craft Essences at them to level them, which takes a huge amount of time and QP to do so. Unless the player spends a lot of time creating "CE Bombs"note , then expect to have Craft Essences be stuck below level 20 unless lucky.
- While a minor issue overall, the game only allows you to download all new data at once in the options menu and not at the title screen. This was mostly a issue right at the launch of the game, but it became much more prevalent during the Chaldea Boys Collection series of events, which played cutscenes after the player got past the title screen but before going into the options menu, resulting in the scene taking longer to load than expected, and making it annoying for players due to the lag.
- With the release of Ordeal Call, its nodes are revealed to provide over 2500 bond points at base and provide more EXP than any node that came before. To prevent the previous other nodes from being made obsolete, entry requires a resource called "Storm Pods" which is only given at a rate of three per day. What undercuts it is that it is capped at a measly nine, meaning that you can only accumulate only up to three days worth of entry tickets before you have to start spending them. What's worse is that they consume 40AP, meaning that during events and new story releases, you often find yourself having to stop whatever you are doing to quickly make room for at least 3 "Storm Pods". This small cap turned what is meant to be a rewarding bonus level into a grind fest and distraction. Also, since the Ordeal Call nodes are the only way to get Stellar Sand alongside the Challenge Quests, expect it to be very tedious fast.
- The game lumps together all Extra Classes in the same category for Support lists. This was fine during the game's early days when Extra Classes were extremely rare in size and variety, but several years in the game's life and with all the Servants from eight Classes packed together under one tiny umbrella, it is bar none the most crowded category in the Support lists, and finding the Servant you want from that crowd is a gacha unto itself. The most common suggestion is that the devs split off the Ruler-Avenger-Moon Cancer and Alter Ego-Foreigner-Pretender Class triangles to give it some breathing room.
- While mostly due to events, players who want to farm from other materials in events more efficiently have to find a friend who has the servant equipped with the corresponding Craft Essence. Seems simple, right? Unfortunately, due to players preferring to stack their servant with the highest-rarity CEs in the event, this means that trying to find a servant equipped with a different event CE is extremely tedious without looking for friend IDs. And to make matters worse, the game lists the support servants by those who have logged in recently and showing only 29 support servants at best. One could use the filters to find the support servants they want, only to be met with a page that is blank due to not being able to find the criteria. This problem is further exacerbated if the banner was proven to be unattractive, further decreasing the chances of finding a servant with a certain CE the player wishes to utilize.
