Well, today got a bit heated, but I'm here to explain everything I managed to find out and put together. So I'll explain it the way I understand it myself. I can't vouch for accuracy at all, but in times like these nobody can.
The main thing we should all take away from the latest patch regarding Valko:
The expensive part (integration) is alive and being updated: scenes, lighting, effects, participation in new events, the outfit series, the slot in the numbering. Nothing has been deleted even once across seven snapshots.
The cheap part (assets) is completely absent: no art, no cards in the pools, no wardrobe icons, no physical files in the bundles.
So if someone tells you "well, his assets aren't there, that's it, he's deleted for good" - THEY AREN'T SUPPOSED TO BE THERE RIGHT NOW!
This is exactly the profile where a return stays technically cheap: adding assets is routine patch work that needs an announcement and a single patch, whereas restoring a stripped-out integration would be slow and expensive. It wasn't stripped out, and that's the key point for us.
At first sight this looks bad, but I'd urge some logical reasoning. Nobody in their right mind would keep a cancelled character around when half your playerbase has rushed to datamine because of him. All his material would simply have been pulled within a couple of days, it's stored on their servers and computers, not in the game client. It's a delicate topic and Infold is trying to be careful even about this... or so you'd think. But not quite.
Banners have no full staging phase inside the live client: activity 70/71 (Zayne's Birthday) appeared in their entirety in Zayne's patch, not ahead of time, and 72 (Caleb's Summer Surge) was cleaned out in that same patch. Incidentally, the ID of Caleb's card is further confirmation that the schedule got knocked off track.
There won't be any early signal on Valko from banners until we get a patch and before a patch we'll get an announcement one way or another. So sitting around guessing from files is pointless. What you can do: keep an eye on the integrity of Valko's files.
Yes, right now some UI icons for a multi-banner really did leak, the pull-count rewards for activity_69, covering five characters. The banner itself isn't in the files: in the table of 93 gacha entries there is no number 69 at all, no dates, no cards. But here's the key thing: its setup, like everything concerning Valko, looks identical whether you read it as "for" or "against."
Valko is present in the new event (NightGlow), where he has 11 scenes against 10 for the others LI, a unique Cheer emotion, 5 emotion icons, his own set of items for the mini-game. He has his own background and icon in another event (Bladerunner). He has a base portrait and nothing more in a third event (Timedtraining14). He also got a collection wall, and purikura: 3 new poses in Zayne's patch, while the other five got zero (maybe because they already have it). Outfit series 806: in the scenes he has XL806C_Card, _EA, _H_Card meaning structurally he's set up along with everyone else. But the wardrobe icons are only published for the five, and his assets are absent that's still a fact.
I read this as caution on Infold's part. Even though things do keep appearing, it can just as easily be interpreted either way. They could hold him in this state indefinitely and keep topping it up for exactly one reason: maybe, once things settle down, they'll release him but that's not September. It could be a year.
Or it could be preparation for his release. As before, the conclusion stays the same: the decision is Infold's, and they have everything they need to release him. I'd like to say that's precisely why they're still maintaining him, but I've learned not to trust corporations.
By and large I haven't changed my view on the banner sequence. The only thing I'd add is one more possible version of events: they'll postpone the multi again, to a date after Xavier's birthday, and Valko's debut will land at the end of September.
Against that backdrop, I'd like to add one last thing.
If, after these two months, Infold still decides to go the OG5 route even just to "test" the strength of our boycott that only shows how pathetically they calculate risk and how poorly they understand their audience. Because after these two months, after everything we've all been through, releasing a five-person multi-banner is the harshest slap in the face to their own community. And it means they're prepared to go bankrupt, given the collapse in their revenue over these two months. Do you see any point in defending a company like that, in putting your money and time into it? Personally, no. But that's a choice everyone has to make for themselves.
I hope my conclusions were helpful. I'll be keeping an eye on the situation.
#NoValkoNoLogin #Reject5LiMulti #ValkoWasPromised #ReinstateValkoNow