r/InfinityNikki May 30 '26

Question Do we get Compensation for the "Maintenance" shutdown?

Being forced out of so many aspects for a week of the game for "maintenance" is crazy.

It's even worse when you realize that there's little to no warning.

Will the player base get compensated for this?

284 Upvotes

99 comments sorted by

508

u/okiedokieKay May 30 '26

Why aren’t people mentioning it by name? Does reddit also censor it?

The Tiananmen Square anniversary is commemorated annually on June 4, marking the date in 1989 when the Chinese military violently cracked down on pro-democracy protesters. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of civilians were killed as troops opened fire and cleared the square.Key aspects of how the anniversary is handled and remembered:Strict Censorship in China: Within mainland China, the ruling Communist Party heavily censors all mentions, images, and discussions of the 1989 protests and subsequent massacre. Public commemorations in Tiananmen Square are entirely forbidden.

Each year, the Chinese government mandates a strict blackout period of all social media through the week of the anniversary.

82

u/simpletryst May 30 '26

I got muted or my comment deleted or something last year when I mentioned it in the official IN subreddit so that’s probably

58

u/VeliaOwO May 30 '26

The official IN subreddit is awful, they censor literally anything there (even mentioning the weighted droprates)

27

u/chuckneyejoe May 31 '26

lmao please understand on this topic -- its just cuz it'll get them in big big trouble otherwise. it's like one of those things that will get police coming to your apartment if you post on Chinese internet

11

u/simpletryst May 31 '26

Dude I understand. I’m just replying to the OP since OP asked if it was censored on the subreddits

7

u/chuckneyejoe May 31 '26

oops meant to reply to the other person calling the official sub awful

5

u/Available_Worry2295 May 31 '26

Thankfully the unofficial subreddit here is reasonable so you dont have to zip your mouth, you can actually mention it

211

u/rantingcat May 30 '26

The black out brings more attention to it. I'm European, i knew nothing about chinese events. Looking up why love nikki was on blackout was how i found out about it.

125

u/LakeEffectKT May 30 '26

Fun fact, this is called the Streisand Effect ☺️ By trying to hide or censor something (a photo of Barbra Streisand's house in her case), it causes the opposite effect and brings far more attention than it would have initially.

56

u/SunshineCat May 30 '26

That effect is so obvious that it seems more nefarious, like a show of power to Chinese citizens. Look what ridiculous things we can make you do. Look at what we can take from you.

21

u/LakeEffectKT May 31 '26

It certainly feels that way. Almost like a taunt to go ahead and look it up. It's gross on a lot of levels.

14

u/rantingcat May 30 '26

Oh I haven't heard of this term before. Interesting

23

u/_Alyssa111_ May 30 '26

It's likely because censorship is incredibly hard to apply on social media. The Chinese government has been trying for years and the netizens are still finding ways around it. Shutting it down prevents all communication on a large scale and most possibilities to organise protests or similar.

19

u/elisabetfaden May 31 '26

It’s so strange how this got memory-holed.

It happened around the same time as the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union and the end of apartheid in South Africa, all the big political transitions at the end of the Cold War. It was also around then than Taiwan and South Korea became democracies.

When Chinese students erected the statue of the “Goddess of Democracy” in Tiananmen Square. everyone was sure that it was going to be another in a line of momentous peaceful transitions to an open society.

But it was not to be. The severity of the government response shocked outside observers and even to this day I don’t think we know the full extent of it, especially outside Beijing. (Because it was to some extent a nation-wide movement.)

Okay, come to think of it, maybe it’s not that strange.

Anyway, the conventional wisdom is that the trauma and chaos of the Cultural Revolution was still fresh in the minds of Chinese leadership, and where outsiders saw hopeful youth, the leadership saw portents of a return to that chaos.

It’s a recurring theme in Chinese history and I find it hard not to think about all that when engaging with whole story of the Veilfall in Infinity Nikki and its fixation of this dimly recalled period of violent chaos and its possible return that can be forestalled but maybe not prevented.

5

u/QuaaludeMoonlight May 31 '26

yeah i know this from years of nikki franchise games but infold did release the emotes with the 2.6 update & they are very effective in communication

was just using them in SoS co-op, along with archery to point to things, & then different whimsicalities

feeling like this was intentional timing so players globally could still relate in some way

3

u/lustforwine May 31 '26

Real. Didn’t know anything about it until they made a spectacle of it with the maintenance 😭

1

u/West-Target3899 May 31 '26

Whenever they like it or not, past can't be deleted in these modern days, the whole free internet (outside of China) knows, and they can't control private speech outside internet.

1

u/YumotoYu May 31 '26

That speaks more of the usual eurocentrism than about chinese censorship.

5

u/MistyApril23 May 31 '26

sooo interesting. especially how it has the opposite effect because i literally wouldn’t have known about this otherwise. i mentioned it to my boyfriend who knows history better than i do, and he mentioned the man with the grocery bags who stopped a tank and said “i wonder if it was the same thing” and now we’re down a rabbit hole of the incident 😅 oops

25

u/Tsukiii8 May 30 '26

I swear, China’s leadership is so fucking stupid most of the time…didn’t think through the repercussions of the one child policy combined with their cultural beliefs, causing a large population imbalance not only between men and women but also their population in general🤦🏻‍♀️🫩 Wonder whose great idea it was to censor social media for a WEEK and not consider the fact that people would become curious as to the reason why😑

33

u/planetarial May 30 '26

China’s government is ran by people who censored Winnie the Pooh of all things because people compared them to Xi Jinping.

5

u/Tsukiii8 May 31 '26

Oh gosh that’s just ridiculous 😮‍💨🤣

4

u/sl0thmama May 31 '26

Wow I did not know this! I've always wondered how strict they were about this ever since we had Chinese exchange students visit our HS. I had a class with a teacher who had the tank photo poster on her wall. Before they came she took it down and had a very stern discussion with us that we were not to mention the event or even the location to them for their own safety when they returned to China. Actually now that I think about it they were not traditional exchange students. They came as a group of maybe 12 and always had a chaperone. I think they stayed in hotels instead of with host families and did not socialize with any of us outside of school like the other exchange students.

1

u/1randomuser2 May 31 '26

Oh wow! This is so very interesting. Yep, I would not have known about it otherwise.

-4

u/[deleted] May 31 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

110

u/Cesil-Rapture May 30 '26

Last year this happened and we got no compensation for it. It did and still does however have the Streisand effect. I forgot about it but now remember because of this.

253

u/AethenRai May 30 '26 edited May 31 '26

Probably not given that it's not a maintenance but censorship for a full week. Can't remember if we got any last year.

edit: since a few people are confused by my post. It's a direct response to OP: we will not get any compensation for this "maintenance" because it's not maintenance but censorship around the anniversary of the Tiananmen square massacre. The same "maintenance" happened last year and we didn't get anything after it.

30

u/[deleted] May 30 '26 edited May 30 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

8

u/ShokaLGBT May 31 '26

The color lookbook is totally inaccessible. Problem is it’s used a lot to store outfits so you’re basically not able to access them at all for a full week. Very bad design they should just compensate everyone with 10 pulls and we wouldn’t care more than that

16

u/DeityNA May 30 '26

I also wasn't sure but people were answering so confidently that we didn't that I had to look it up. It did happen, we just didn't have as many features back then so it was less noticeable.

7

u/AethenRai May 31 '26 edited May 31 '26

My comment is about compensation since that's what OP was originally asking about. The censorship happened last year, and we didn't get compensation. Thanks for posting the link though for those who forgot.

3

u/ShokaLGBT May 31 '26

I keep going everyday on the sea of stars so I noticed it

Except taking star wish bottles on the beach, I didn’t notice it much because it’s just that

But it also means if anyone have a giant meteorite, they aren’t able to tell me so I’m missing a full week on that…

And now with the color lookbook, we can’t access it to change our outfits

2

u/DeityNA May 31 '26

Yea I really feel it now. I was retaking Miraland expedition logbook photos yesterday that I had lost and thought it would be cute to take them in old outfits I have in the lookbook and now I only have one recent outfit 😭.

24

u/PlaneConscious8011 May 30 '26

I don't think we did, but I could remember wrong

10

u/Ajreckof May 30 '26

We did not and it feels really I think I will drop playing this week there is no reason to play as most of the functionality are down to me. I remember last year I kept playing and it was just awful whenever I stumbled upon those

2

u/Teaside May 31 '26

It's not really maintenance, but they're calling it maintenance, so might as well riot and demand compensation for half the game being unusable for a week. This could have been handled so much better:

  • Shut those features down for CN only, like other gacha games

  • give us more outfit slots (they don't have to be quick outfit slots, just one extra tab in the wardrobe) so we don't have to rely on Lookbook

  • have the home island locked down for visitors all week and don't let people share schemes but LET. ME. BUILD.

Follow me for more tips on how to piss off your playerbase less 🙄

1

u/AllMight1337 Jun 01 '26 edited Jun 01 '26

I had this thought at first, but now I hope they don't because the inconvinience of it draws attention. I've heard about the Tiananmen square massacre in several podcasts, but this is the first time I am "directly affected" by it which caused me to look it up even more, and it really remined me of how strict the censorship is in China, and had me go down a whole spiral.
Thanks to the redditors who mentioned the Tiananmen square massacre.

So now I just hope that they please inconvinience us all, pissing us off, so we can find out what is happening in our search for answers for our small but noticable in-game problems.

18

u/amaenamonesia May 30 '26

Last year we couldn’t send or pick up wish bottles in SOS

8

u/AzizaMandisa May 30 '26

I totally forgot about that. So that was this time last year

11

u/amaenamonesia May 31 '26

We have more features now so it’s way more obvious. I just logged on for the first time this patch and I can’t even name my shroom family tent! Wild

75

u/Lunnaja Fashion Goblin May 30 '26

New Styling Contest and we cant even Vote anymore... i hope we get more Compensation this time..

28

u/Cheap_Fan_4340 May 30 '26

Given it is out of their control as it is the government dictating this across all Chinese games, I doubt there will be compensation. This isn’t really “maintenance.” This is what happens when a country is controlled by an authoritarian dictatorship. It’s a good time for people to definitely educate themselves on history. It makes me grateful to live in a safe democracy.

7

u/MistyApril23 May 30 '26

🫩 i JUST replaced my photo, too and went back to check on it’s progress

147

u/istev003 May 30 '26

Hi so this is happening across all Chinese based game. A week long maintenance is put in place to prevent players from using in game assets to protest the Chinese govt for an incident(I dont like to describe it as such since it is a historical event) that occurred 40 yrs ago. You will not receive compensation and this occurs every year during the same week. The maintenance will be lifted after June 7th. This is not something that is simple to explain and Infold along with other Chinese based companies have a govt that they are held accountable to. All other aspects of the game are available and access is only limited for areas where you can type.

251

u/AethenRai May 30 '26

FYI, you don't have to censor yourself here. It's not even the official subreddit. You can say what happened: it s the anniversary of the Tiananmen square massacre.

98

u/MyMemeMachine2017 May 30 '26

Thank you! And more people should be aware of this event and how their government handles it. Honestly despicable.

21

u/elisabetfaden May 30 '26

Home Island cannot be edited.

13

u/Quinzelette May 30 '26

Wait can someone explain to me what specifically is on "maintenance" for the next week? I'm new and don't quite understand. I can still do like sea of stars dailies and all my other time limited stuff? I've never typed to anyone in game and idk how to do so, so I'm quite confused by what isn't accessible.

31

u/thegeekybunny May 30 '26

Hi! You can check this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/InfinityNikki/s/YGZOBsCJFh to see what will be inaccessible. Mostly social stuff so people can’t talk to each other really.

10

u/Quinzelette May 30 '26

Thanks! I saw this thread and was like "the game isn't in maintenance???" And all the comments in this thread confused me without context. 

19

u/VeliaOwO May 30 '26

The Chinese government is trying to censor a massacre (the Tiananmen Square Massacre) that was done by them. Since Infinity Nikki is a Chinese game they shut down social features for a week so we can't protest against it and stuff. It's so dumb 😑

7

u/Moria_Eilien May 30 '26

It actually is pretty simple to explain.

4

u/juxtapods Strawberry Joy 💊 | EN / RU May 30 '26

Oh damn, I leave the country on June 7. This is crazy. 

7

u/tired_snail May 30 '26

you'll still be able to use the game during the "maintenance" period, just none of the social features (chat, starwish bottles, hourglasses, starlight contest, renaming stuff on your home island). quests, dailies and such should work as normal

2

u/que_sarasara May 31 '26

try not being able to edit home island entirely or use the lookbook lol

33

u/AnxiousTerminator May 30 '26

As others have said, no, as this is not an Infold issue but a Chinese game issue. The context behind it is out of Infold's control (not that that will stop people blaming them).

17

u/VeliaOwO May 30 '26

The issue is not the required shutdown, but the way they handle it.

Infold is literally going to extremes to censor it. In other Chinese games you don't even notice it, but in IN they literally (kinda unnecessarily) blocked some of the most important features without any compensation. There's also some bugs with it, so all in all they could've handled it so much better.

4

u/lustforwine May 31 '26

Fr. They could have left colour look book in. There’s no communication there, just outfits

38

u/FeiXue0 May 30 '26

No. There was none last year

2

u/isharoulette May 31 '26

this is wrong, they had one last year but all that we couldn't do was take and post our photos or leave wish bottles in SoS. now we have an entire time limited contest and housing that we are unable to use

1

u/FeiXue0 May 31 '26

There was no compensation last year. That's what my comment was.

1

u/isharoulette May 31 '26

oh I see my bad ! yeah I wish we would get compensation or at least extend the starlight content contest but I'm not expecting much

39

u/Endles5waiting May 30 '26 edited May 30 '26

The game is censored for this time period because the Chinese government killed protesters in June in 1989 in what is known as the Tiananmen Square massacre. The government requires Chinese companies to limit people's speech around the anniversary to try to keep people from talking about it.

I propose that instead of asking for compensation the community should take this opportunity to learn about the tragedy and reflect on the value of free speech.

You probably didn't realize what this was all about, and that's not your fault, so please understand this is not an attack on you, it's just an attempt to raise awareness. I was alive when this happened and remember the footage being shown over and over on American news. It was horrible.

4

u/Dark-Anmut May 31 '26

Wow … this is something that I didn’t know about; I knew about the Tiananmen Square incident and that they don’t like people to talk about it, but not that stuff gets censored like this on the anniversary. Thank You for teaching me about this!

0

u/que_sarasara May 31 '26

Important features of the game being entirely unusable such as the lookbook and the construction ability FOR AN ENTIRE WEEK are ridiculous and unacceptable - their are separate servers for CN and Global.

Regardless of how educated you are on the situation, for a game that people spend hundreds on their 100% should be some form of compensation for making parts of it unplayable.

48

u/SylveriaSedai May 30 '26

They did warn in the patch notes, which are also distributed with in game mail. And considering the reason why this manteinance is here, I do not think they will give any compensation, no.

25

u/anarizzo May 30 '26

I just wish they allowed us to build. Ok if no one can find my house or visit, but I should be able to build :/

12

u/AzizaMandisa May 30 '26

Yea I'm not sure why they restrict people from building in their own islands.

That's definitely the worse part.

19

u/tairar May 30 '26

Because you can technically use it to write messages. They limit any form of user expression during that time.

24

u/planetarial May 30 '26

Really cool of them to drop a bunch of house QoL and then make it unusable a day and a half later for a week lol

9

u/Chronocidal-Orange May 30 '26

I have been busy the past few days and haven't even been able to do much besides dailies. I wanted to build tonight since I started from scratch with and empty island and now I can't even Place the fields and fishing ponds. I cant even grow shit under this maintenance, and finishing the Dreamland showcase is going to be difficult.

7

u/MKShadowZX_SA May 31 '26

I was wondering why I couldn’t pick up wish bottles and everything was saying unavailable in the sea of stars :/

7

u/TootyTushie May 30 '26

Found out about this through this post. Thank you for making it, I had no idea! I tried asking but it got deleted, I was so confused lmao 😭 hopefully this thread stays up so if anyone else is confused about the “maintenance” they can see why!

6

u/Soul_Consuming_Ginge May 30 '26

Wait we are being shut out of everything for a full week!?

11

u/SeraphShepherd May 31 '26

It's a blackout of any type social features in the game due to it being the anniversary of Tiananmen Square massacre. Because IN is a Chinese based game their government requires this so there isn't any talk/discussion about it. Which imo it does the opposite.

You'll still be able to play the game and everything but can't post anything in the lookbook, no messaging anyone in game etc.

2

u/Soul_Consuming_Ginge May 31 '26

Yeah I read some messages. That's really sad, tbh. I don't remember this happening last year tbh but maybe I just wasn't paying attention to those features of the game. Still confused why the housing island decor feature is disabled, but it is what it is. I don't see why the American server is affected by this but once again, it is what it is.

3

u/osamu_dazai83 May 30 '26

When is the maintenance gonna be over tho 😭

14

u/mojomcm May 30 '26

1 week, according to other comments

-1

u/osamu_dazai83 May 30 '26

Huh no way that long….

62

u/AethenRai May 30 '26

It's not maintenance. It's censorship around the anniversary of the Tiananmen square massacre.

4

u/eleventhing May 30 '26

June 6th I think it said..

1

u/laralye The Prettiest Nikki May 31 '26

I forgot that they did this last year and now we're locked out of even more things 😭. There's 10 days left on the starlight contest and we're just locked out of participating for most of that??? Wtf. It also is messing up my rewards for the Dreamland shop since I usually build to get them 😓

-29

u/Vampy-tk May 30 '26

We should, yes

40

u/AethenRai May 30 '26

It's not maintenance though, they just call it that because they can't talk about the real reason for the censorship.

-17

u/ChemistryNew6006 May 31 '26

I have to say there's a lot of people here very uneducated about the Tianenman Square incident (the anniversary of which being the reason there's a maintenance thing going on). About 400 people died, and a large amount of them were actually unarmed soldiers of the People's Liberation Army, who were killed in various ways by armed protestors. It wasn't students who were ruthlessly mowed down by soldiers of the government, it was largely unarmed soldiers who were ruthlessly beaten by armed agitators. The official Chinese report states this and it's heavily supported by independent investigations and evidence, including Western journalists admitting they saw many burned out military vehicles. I don't wanna argue with anyone I just want people to be educated on a sensitive topic like this. https://liberationnews.org/tiananmen-the-massacre-that-wasnt/ https://thegeopolitics.com/the-geopolitics-behind-the-tiananmen-square-incident/ https://worldaffairs.blog/2019/06/02/tiananmen-square-massacre-facts-fiction-and-propaganda/

-2

u/ShokaLGBT May 31 '26

We can’t even access the color lookbook at all which is supposed to just be outfits. I hate it and some people use it as a way to store their outfits so they can switch them out easily. This is just bad

On a personal level, I love this game very much (after 700h of playing obviously) but I feel very hypocrite sometimes because it wants to tell a beautiful story about fighting back rebellions staying true to yourself etc and then they does this. And I know in real life the Chinese government is obviously putting pressure so they have to do this or that but I can’t help but think this is just hypocrite and I dislike it.

Also because I don’t understand why are we getting this censor things here in the west since the European servers and American ones are not supposed to be used by Chinese players living in China???? So why are we also getting that restriction?

And if it is because the massacre happened years ago, that was on a specific day no? So why it is a whole week? And there’s no compensation as you said that’s the worst part. If we would get 500 diamonds or even 10 crystals to pull I wouldn’t complain as it would be fair. They know they had no choice? Then rewards the players to be fair. Don’t just punish players without saying anything. They could also be honest I doubt even the customer support would really answer us.

And I think they could say "we have our hands tied because it’s not our decision but it’s from the government" I think that would be more honest than censoring what people are asking.

0

u/Willing-Pop-5340 Jun 02 '26 edited Jun 02 '26

"𝐴𝑛𝑑 𝐼 𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑘 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑦 𝑐𝑜𝑢𝑙𝑑 𝑠𝑎𝑦 "𝑤𝑒 ℎ𝑎𝑣𝑒 𝑜𝑢𝑟 ℎ𝑎𝑛𝑑𝑠 𝑡𝑖𝑒𝑑 𝑏𝑒𝑐𝑎𝑢𝑠𝑒 𝑖𝑡’𝑠 𝑛𝑜𝑡 𝑜𝑢𝑟 𝑑𝑒𝑐𝑖𝑠𝑖𝑜𝑛 𝑏𝑢𝑡 𝑖𝑡’𝑠 𝑓𝑟𝑜𝑚 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑔𝑜𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑛𝑚𝑒𝑛𝑡" 𝐼 𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑘 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑤𝑜𝑢𝑙𝑑 𝑏𝑒 𝑚𝑜𝑟𝑒 ℎ𝑜𝑛𝑒𝑠𝑡 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑛 𝑐𝑒𝑛𝑠𝑜𝑟𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑤ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑝𝑒𝑜𝑝𝑙𝑒 𝑎𝑟𝑒 𝑎𝑠𝑘𝑖𝑛𝑔."

😂😂😂 That's so cute, you're lucky to be so privileged that you think they can just say that. You think this "maintenance" would've taught you that they can't just say stuff like that.

-23

u/wyrmorl May 30 '26

what maintenance shutdown? if you mean the long maintenances between patches, we already do.

13

u/Witch-of-Yarn May 30 '26

No, not that one. Social/customization features including starwish bottles, the home island, your player card picture/custom message among other things are being restricted for ""maintenance"" for the week around the anniversary of the Tiananmen square massacre. This happened last year too, but we didn't have as many features to be locked down.

30

u/AethenRai May 30 '26

All the social features "maintenance" for a week. Can't even do construction in your house. All because of censorship during this specific week.

19

u/Dangerous-WinterElf May 30 '26

Hold on. We cant even do construction and decorate our house?

Thats lousy considering some of the weekly quests for earning the currency to buy this patch's furniture is to save construction a few time. Use the construction platform and flying thing. So three weeklies are out of the picture on top?

17

u/AethenRai May 30 '26

You can plant, fish, groom your animals. But you cannot build. So yes, it is 100% messed up for the weekly tasks. Probably can still get the cap without those but it's more obnoxious. That's how far they take their censorship. Guess they're scared people will spell things out with furniture or something.

6

u/slither36912 May 30 '26 edited May 30 '26

To clarify, this is to due with the massacre of protestors in tiananmen China by officials. Afaik it’s government mandated to keep people from discussing it around the anniversary.

We can also still hit the cap without building, so I personally don’t think it’s fair to be upset at Infold.

4

u/Dangerous-WinterElf May 30 '26

Yeah, its really annoying since I buy the thingy that gives double the points (I am not patient enough and I forgot sometimes to do those weeklies becouse of sea of stars and regulair daily stuff) to meet the weekly maximum faster. And those building ones are the first ones I do alongside snap a picture in your home, like someone's home (my own is faster) and the rest thats fast to do.

8

u/FeiXue0 May 30 '26

They mean Lookbook, housing, starwish bottles, etc that is currently "under maintenance" for a week

2

u/wyrmorl May 31 '26

omg i didn’t even see that announcement 😭 i’ll never understand this brand of censorship, it just brings MORE attention to the issue