A Few Words (and Numbers!) on Loadout Card Crafting & Recycling

(Exedore) #1

As promised, I wanted to take a moment to discuss the philosophy behind the new Crafting and Recycling systems for Loadout Cards as well as the values behind it, so that you can dig into them yourselves before the feature is released.

So, why the change? Our main goals of removing Trade Up and Trade In in favour of this system are:

[LIST][]To increase convenience for you all by reducing the number of transactions
[]To make the system more intuitive, while reducing overall costs
[*]To give us more types of rewards that we can populate throughout the game
[/LIST]

So, for example, if you traded up from Leads to a Gold, in total you will have performed 69 total Trade Ups, consumed 144 Lead Cards and spent a total of 52,000 Credits. We’ve used Trade Up rather than Trade In as a basis for our new values, as it has lesser Credit and card requirements. The one exception to this is Cobalts, where we used the direct Trade In value instead as this was slightly cheaper overall.

The New Recycling and Crafting Systems

With the new Recycling system a Lead Card is worth 15 Fragments when scrapped. The equivalent of the 144 x Lead Cards cost for a Gold Trade Up is then 2,160 Fragments. That would make the relative total cost of a Gold Card 2,160 Fragments + 52,000 Credits in the new Crafting system.

In the new system, 1 Fragment is worth ~16.23 Credits. This is calculated from the relative Credit value of Loadout Cards and the number of Fragments they provide when Recycled.

Since existing players are more likely to have lots of spare Cards than Credits, we decided to offset some of this Credit Cost and allow users to burn extra cards in place of those Credits. So for the new Gold rarity Crafting Cost we reduced the 52,000 Credit Cost by 27,000 Credits to 25,000 Credits.

Those 27,000 Credits are then converted to Fragments, which comes to 1,663 Fragments. That would put the cost in the new system to 3,823 Fragments + 25,000 Credits, which we round down to 3,200 Fragments + 25,000 Credits. The reason for the significant rounding-down here is that we have also accounted for the fact that not ALL current Trade Ups are performed entirely from Lead Cards, a smaller number have come from Iron, Bronze, & even Silver cards which were dropped from cases.

After all that, we decided to be a little more generous with the new system so we’ve added in a 10-15% discount to the overall costs for Silver, Gold and Cobalt Crafting, ending up with a Gold cost 2,500 Fragments + 25,000 Credits.

Recycling Loadout Cards

Individual Loadout Cards can now be Recycled for Fragments, which are then in turn be used to Craft different Loadout Cards. They can be Recycled individually, but there are group options for duplicates, Lead and Iron Loadout Cards.

Limited Edition Loadout Cards and Obsidian Loadout Cards cannot be Recycled.

Crafting Loadout Cards

As with Trade Up, you’re able to select your target Merc and rarity, and the system will Craft one of the 9 possible Loadout Card configurations for your Merc, with one of the available skins at that rarity. The Possible Contents window displays all the permutations of possible resulting cards.

Crafting Kits

Crafting Kits are items that can drop or be bought in the Store, and can be used in the place of Credits while Crafting.


Weapon Kits

Weapon Kits are very rare drops that allow you to narrow the possible resulting Loadout Card for a Craft to a particular primary weapon for that Merc. Weapon Kits are essentially vanity-only items, and can therefore only be used on the “bling” tiers of Loadout Cards: Silver, Gold and Cobalt. We plan to provide other ways to acquire them going forward, so stay tuned!

Changes to Arsenal Crates, Equipment, Expert and Elite Cases

We have added Crafting Kits and Weapon Kits to the possible contents of Arsenal Crates, and made some slight adjustments to the drop percentages to Equipment, Expert and Elite Cases to reflect the costs associated with Recycling and Crafting.

We’ve also added the much-requested option to buy 5 and 10 bundles of Equipment Cases in the Store!

We hope you find that this new system simplifies managing your Loadout Cards and makes setting goals for getting the sort of cards that you want easier. This system is much more flexible than the previous one which should make tuning it much easier, so please let us know what you think!

#playdirty
[SD]Exedore

(Orivar) #2

And that is another reason why I am not happy about dirty bomb. You guys messed up badly on this one. (edited it on 8/7).

(solace_) #3

This looks like a great new system, cant wait to try it out myself! Also, by the looks of it, fragments and the various kits could be utilized in events in the future as a means of crafting special edition cards and possibly other items.

(frostyvampire) #4

So anyone who traded up their cards basically got screwed? So if I had 9 leads and crafted them into 1 bronze I lost 1,500 credits? RIP credits.

Btw if I currently have an equipment case, will the new drop percentages apply to the case I already have when the update happens? Or does it only apply to new cases which are dropped/purchased after the update?

(Trestos) #5

Weapon Kits won’t be sold in the shop?

(Smooth) #6

Current cases will get the new drop rates, we’re updating them all rather than rolling an entire new set out.

Initially Weapon Kits won’t be available in-store, just as drops from Arsenal Crates and perhaps event-based items. We’re also looking into giving players other ways of obtaining them.

(Trestos) #7

You could insert the function to recycle Special event cards for weapon kits. I would be fine with that option :slight_smile:

(MilkyBear) #8

So now we need 10 gold to get a cobalt, and then another 50k, oh geez i’m not sure if i should be happy or not.

(MilkyBear) #9

[quote=“FrostyVampire;192748”]So anyone who traded up their cards basically got screwed? So if I had 9 leads and crafted them into 1 bronze I lost 1,500 credits? RIP credits.

Btw if I currently have an equipment case, will the new drop percentages apply to the case I already have when the update happens? Or does it only apply to new cases which are dropped/purchased after the update?[/quote]

Well, i guess we should stop trading up from now on until the next update.

(konakona) #10

RIP dirty

(MilkyBear) #11

RIP dirty[/quote]

It is really beneficial for the new players, but veteran who already spent alot of credits and cards for trading up is not. Well i guess it is for the better future of this game, i’m okay with that. But still … my credits :frowning:

(ImSploosh) #12

The credit cost seems really high. I understand that if you were going from leads using the current system, as compared to the new one, it would cost more money. However, let’s say you’re trading up for Cobalt. You have 6 spare gold cards from cases or maybe a couple from previous trade ups; you then need to spend 10,000 credits to get a Cobalt with the current system.

However, with the new system, you’d need 10 Gold cards and 50,000 credits???

Now let’s use Leads—>Cobalt trade-up.

Current System:
864 Cards/322,000 Credits

New System:
1334 cards/50,000 Credits

Now this doesn’t seem as bad, but the issue that I see is that as the card rarity goes up, the much more expensive it is to trade up as compared to the current system. I do see how the new system is cheaper “in the long run” if you’re trading up a bunch of leads, but it seems like a lot more if you just want to trade up your Golds for a Cobalt.

I may just be interpreting it wrong. I feel like I am and I’m not looking at it the right way. I really do like the ease of trading up though. It’s definitely nice to see a much more smooth system rather than tons of clicking.

Speaking of clicking, how about adding the option to buy more than one case at a time???

(MisterBadmin) #13

[quote=“Sploosh;192758”]

Speaking of clicking, how about adding the option to buy more than one case at a time???[/quote]

Details!

(dlux) #14

So if I get this right, we need to pay 40$ AND a ton of credits AND shards to get the cobalt weapon we want, but still only have a 1/3 chance to get the actual loadout we want.

Seems worth it. :smirk:

EDIT: Mistake, I thought you needed to buy weapon kits, but it’s the crafting kits that are 8$ for 10.

(Chris Mullins) #15

“We’ve also added the much-requested option to buy 5 and 10 bundles of Equipment Cases in the Store!”

:wink:

(Chris Mullins) #16

Corrrr Delukz did you read the post? :stuck_out_tongue: Weapon Kits are not going to be available in the store.

“Weapon Kits are very rare drops that allow you to narrow the possible resulting Loadout Card for a Craft to a particular primary weapon for that Merc. Weapon Kits are essentially vanity-only items, and can therefore only be used on the “bling” tiers of Loadout Cards: Silver, Gold and Cobalt. We plan to provide other ways to acquire them going forward, so stay tuned!”

(dlux) #17

Corrrr Delukz did you read the post? :stuck_out_tongue: Weapon Kits are not going to be available in the store.

“Weapon Kits are very rare drops that allow you to narrow the possible resulting Loadout Card for a Craft to a particular primary weapon for that Merc. Weapon Kits are essentially vanity-only items, and can therefore only be used on the “bling” tiers of Loadout Cards: Silver, Gold and Cobalt. We plan to provide other ways to acquire them going forward, so stay tuned!”[/quote]
Okay, you guys had me worried. :slight_smile:

(Yoma) #18

I can see it already coming, you will have to drag every card manually with the mouse towards the “recycle” field… and press “yes youre sure you want to recycle this card” and after that another field with “are you sure” will appear…, solely for the convenience naturally. :smirk:

PS:Well, Cobalts getting more expensive by quite the big margin. Only thing which may balance it out a little are the improved drop rates of irons+ from cases… . Can’t tell how i feel about this but i’ll keep my salt for myself since it’ll likely change before it’s final release.

(Exavidos) #19

Will the new case drop rates apply to old cases as well? Even gen1 and special event cases (WTD, CW Equipment cases)

(Drac0rion) #20

I’m not that great with math, so it would be really interesting if anyone would bother to calculate the total costs of old vs new:
using only
iron cards for trade ups/recycling + fees
bronze only, silver only and gold only with lead card having 1k value = equipment case price.

If someone were to only buy elite cases and trade up from there, would it be more expensive with the new system or old, assuming all cases drop silvers?

I’ve been collecting golds so far expecting to slowly turn them into cobalts, but now it seems I should keep investing into my swiss gold collection instead bothering to trade up to cobalt which might become more expensive than buying a new merc.

I’m not sure why exactly cobalt is so far up in value compared to other cosmetics. I mean if there ever will be new skin variants, will all of those be added to cobalt? Because I get it how highly SD values rarity when looking at cobalt prices and the event skin drop rates so far.

Also with the new system, couldn’t we have skin specific trade ups instead?
Like instead of silver we’d have: urban/carbon. Or how does SD intend to add new skins within the new system that aren’t limited to event drops only? I mean Bronze rarity would be the easiest to add skins to as it would only affect the gun camo.