Though I’m sure much of this has been discussed already, I would like to share with you my views on Dirty Bomb’s loadout card implementation and how I think it affects players and Nexon/SD itself. I think the current system does not offer enough control to the player to reach the desired result, regardless of whether or not he or she is willing to spend money on the game.
This, I believe, has a huge impact on both player incentive to interact with the system, as well as seriously harming the income potential of this F2P model.
In this current situation, players receive a fairly gratuitous amount of equipment cases that most commonly drop lower tier cards. These can be traded up to receive a random loadout card for a given mercenary. These cards cannot be traded, and in this current situation there are only one or two cards for each mercenary that are desirable and augment that merc’s playstyle, where other cards give bonuses and loadouts that would rather harm the merc’s potential. There are 9 different (full) loadout cards, meaning that each attempt has an around 11 percent chance of achieving the desired result.
The F2P model usually involves spending money to add ‘bling’, or to skip or speed up otherwise tedious grinding to get to that ‘bling’. In Dirty Bomb however, spending money means getting a high chance of a rare loadout card for a small set of mercs. Unfortunately, the randomness still means you only have an 11% chance of receiving a card you’d actually WANT to use or would be able to trade, and a much smaller chance of getting that single card you like (Cobalt Vassili with the ghillie camo would be a 0.0347% chance). For €5, - a pop, that’s not desirable at all and likely deters most players from ever spending money on a crate.
Looking at other games with a successful F2P model, we see that Team Fortress uses crafting recipes to keep demand for less popular items up, and in paid ‘gambles’, still has a high chance of dropping something that is valuable enough to be traded or used. In Dirty Bomb however, it’s a small chance of getting something valuable, and a high chance of getting something that’s only good for trading up.
Ideally, Dirty Bomb shouldn’t have such a bipolar difference between good cards and the rest being terrible. I assume that there is no budget left for a complete technical overhaul of the current loadout system and that we’ll need to make the best of what we have. I can therefore only plea that:
[list][] Less desirable cards are either entirely removed or revamped to be at least an upgrade to the base merc card. Phantom and Sparks cards are great examples of problematic card sets.
[] More methods become available to influence the end result of trading up.
- Add cases with cards that can ‘lock’ things like camo, primary weapon etc. similar to Team Fortress’ class/weapon slot tokens?
[] Price shop items to be more in line with what you get. Introduce cheaper options. Microtransactions are a thing, but not currently in DB.
[] Bite the bullet, realise that the current system severely limits options, and just let players create their own loadouts. Make weapons and perks unlockable. RNG acceptable.[/list]