Separate skins from loadouts without hurting anyone

(frostyvampire) #1

Note: I do NOT expect this to be released anytime soon. If it’s released it will have to be somewhere during 2017 when all the important stuff are fixed.
I use Halloween skins just as examples and possibly for Halloween 2017

Convert all special edition and promotional cards into skin cards
If you own a CW M62 Skyhammer (I don’t know if it’s a real card or not, it’s just an example), it will be converted into “CW Skyhammer” and this will happen to all loadout cards except obsidian and normal (lead-cobalt) rarities

Different skins will have different tiers
Tier 1: The very basic skins. This includes: Dirt, Galvanized and Woodland camos
Tier 2: Some of the better skins but still not great. This includes: Humble Bundle, Logitech, Alienware and all that kind of skins and the silver skins (Carbon Fiber and Urban)
Tier 3: Here we get into the more interesting skins. They include: the gold skins (Bamboo, Swiss and Crown), cobalt skins (Shard and Fragment) and all the event cards like CW, WTD and ReV
Tier 4: This is the highest tier of skins that can be normally obtained. They will be new cards which will change the player model (such as Halloween costumes that we all want and are waiting for). Like legendary rarity skins in Overwatch. They will also change your deployables’ look
Tier 5: All the obsidian card skins: Founder, Beta Tester, Culprit obsidian Proxy, Nexon/SD cards and etc. Tier 5 skins will be untradable

Obsidian cards will remain obsidian rarity but you will receive a bonus skin from that obsidian card
For example: If you own founder Vassili, it will be converted into regular obsidian MO11 Vassili and you will receive the “founder Vassili” skin as an item (which will be tier 5)

Normal cards (lead-cobalt) and obsidians will still have loadouts. The higher the rarity the more skins you can use.
You must own a specific skin to be able to use it as well as a loadout card for that merc. I’ll use bronzes as an example to explain it better

-Bronze cards will allow you using any of the tier 1 skins but in order to use any of the skins you must own the skins.
In this case: You must own a lead Aimee card to be able to use the Dirt skin with a bronze F82 loadout card. Your lead Aimee can be any loadout (doesn’t have to be F82 as well). If you lose the lead Aimee (trade or recycle or lose it in some way), you won’t be able to use the Dirt camo for Aimee until you get a new one
-Silver cards will allow you using any tier 1 and tier 2 skins
Note: You won’t be able to use the silver skin you don’t own. So if you have an Urban BL32 Fletcher, you will NOT be able to use the Carbon Fiber skin for him unless you own another silver Fletcher with Carbon Fiber skin (loadout doesn’t matter), this applies to golds and cobalts too
-Gold cards will let you use tier 1, 2 and 3 skins
-Cobalts will let you use skins from all tiers
-Obsidian cards will let you use any skin from any tier (as long as you have the skin for that merc). They will also add special effects and animations to most skins
For example: fragment skins will have sparks shining on the weapon and once in a while there will be a light thing passing by the gun showing how shiny it is
Another example: Bamboo skins will have leaf particles and once in a while drop coconuts which will stay on the ground
Please tell me what you think about the obsidian perks especially. I’m myself unsure about it so I’d like to hear some opinions

Then, we can have skin cases. We can have many new skins added (tier 1 will be the most common ones and tier 4 will be the rarest)
Note: Loadout card skins (like Woodland) will NOT be dropped from the skin cases. Same goes for special edition cards that are already in the game and you must be at least level 15 to unlock the skin cases (so new players can get loadouts before skins as loadouts actually affect the game)
Here is what the drop rates could be (they can change if needed):

Skinny case: 50% chance to get a skin case instead of an equipment case or you can buy them for 1,000 credits each.
80% chance to get a tier 1 skin
17% chance to get a tier 2 skin
2.5% chance for a tier 3 skin
0.5% chance for a tier 4 skin

Skin case: Cost 2.49$ in the store and can be obtained from Arsenal Crates (same drop rate as Expert Cases). They will also have A, B and C numbers like Expert Cases
85% chance for a tier 2 skin
13% chance for a tier 3 skin
2% chance for a tier 4 skin

Trade-up system
It will be expensive to make sure good skins cost a lot in trading and they will be rare
6x random tier 1 skins + 7,500 credits = 1 random tier 2 skin for a merc of your choice
8x random tier 2 skins + 25,000 credits = 1 random tier 3 skin for a merc of your choice
10x random tier 3 skins + 100,000 credits = 1 random tier 4 skin for a merc of your choice

Final notes:
During special events, all skins unboxed will be related to that event
Using special event skins to tradeup, will increase your chances of getting a special event skin from the next tier (using 4x Halloween tier 3 skins and 6x normal tier 3 skins will give you a 40% chance to get a Halloween tier 4 skin)
All values are subject to change
Skins from tiers 1-3 will be the same skin for all mercs, and you have to get it for each merc to be able to use it for every merc (if you have suspect skin for Stoker, you won’t be able to use a suspect skin for Redeye unless you also have a suspect Redeye skin)
Tier 4 skins will be a unique skin for each merc - a tier 4 skin for Arty will be only available for Arty, Kira will have completely different tier 4 skins

Here are some of my own skin ideas
Tier 1 - Bee: yellow and black stripes over the merc and their guns
Tier 2 - Pumpkin camo: pumpkins all over the merc’s clothes and orange/black guns (Halloween special)
Tier 3 - Ruby: pure red gun (like shard cobalt but it will be red) and some red clothes

Tier 4 - Vampire Sparks (Halloween special): replaces your melee weapon with spooky long nails, left click attacks will be scratches and right click bites.
Her REVIVR will become black with some blood on it, the shots from it will look green for your teamamtes and dark red for enemies. The lightning around revived teammates will be red for everyone
Her guns will be mostly red with black
Change her look to be more vampiristic (fangs, a vampire cape, darker clothes and possibly black hair if it looks good, I can’t imagine her in black hair so if someone can draw it it would be great)
Upon a melee kill she will say “darkness falls”
Blood particles will fall from her teeth at all times and her eyes will glow red after reviving a player or after getting a melee kill

Tier 4 - Monkey Proxy (Halloween special): turn her into a monkey
After jumping a lot she will do monkey noises
Her mines will look more like fruits
Her weapons will have a tropical tree camo on them
Her blowtorch will turn into a banana and the activator phone will be upside down
Teabags will make you poop on the enemy corpse
After mines blow up they will create leaf and fruit particles instead of an explosion particle

Tier 4 - Overgrown Baby Rhino: give him a sumo diaper and get rid of all his armor on the model (his belly will be visible)
Melee weapon will be replaced with the baby toy thing and create that noise when hitting someone
His minigun will be made out of toys and shots will come out of a baby bottle
His weapons will have Teddy bears camo
After firing the minigun for some time he will do baby noises like “whaaaa” and baby laughs
If he has under 40hp he will start crying

Please tell me what you think about this. I’d like to hear some opinions, it took me a while to write it all :slight_smile:

(BananaSlug) #2

why?

(Nail) #3

no thanks

(Brycko) #4

Or just have a skins equivalent of weapon kits. Skin kits?

(frostyvampire) #5

@BananaSlug
So special edition cards will have a use and this will help a lot when trading is out because there will be more things to trade.

@Brycko
You didn’t read anything I said…
Skin kits would only let you choose a skin for the card rarity (like shard or fragment) and you can still get a bad loadout card with it
I want to make all the special edition retired cards useful again and have a lot more skin options and some special skins that make you look really cool.

People who don’t care about skins can still just use bronzes and as a bonus they get the option to use a lower tier skin if they want.
If you just want the cobalt skins (shard and fragment), you can still use them
This is mainly to make all the retired bad loadout cards useful again. Every player who played this game since the start of 2016 has at least 1 special edition card they never use because it’s bad
This will also help people who have obsidians they don’t want (like people who got Obsidian Culprit Proxy with Remburg when they really want Hochfir. They will be able to get a cobalt Hochfir Proxy and use the obsidian skin)

(bontsa) #6

Appreciate the effort behind thought process of all this, but it seems overly complicated for what a separation system could be. Me alongside a few others have thrown possibly easier to handle (user and dev side) systems in the near past.

One thing specifically caught my eye here. Owning a lets say Bronze card allows one to use Dirt/Galvanized/Woodland camos as long as they own them for that merc. Oright, lets say I own all. Can I swap between these 3 at Barracks any time I want? If I choose to run Galvanized when I earlier used Woodland, do I lose the Woodland?

Systems like these need something to be irreversible or very costy so that its not too easy to obtain everything. If nothing is lost in the process of switching appearance, card costs would have to skyrocket to balance out the fact people can hop between rarities at will.

I also dont agree on obsidians. Those and HumbleB skins are something that could just as well stay “pre set” loadouts as they’re more promotional than event stuff. However separation systems overall would indeed help out with the whole event skin gate with obsolete Gen1 event skins around. Future events could be made easier more playerfriendly, as then people would see effort in obtaining the skin and slap it on a weapon&augment combo they like instead of rolling the dice twice; first whenever they get even an event skin and then whenever its desireable card.

The skin suggestions you gave…dear sheeshus eugh lets not go the way TF2 went. Just no.

(frostyvampire) #7

@bontsa
You will be able to select the skin you want in barracks and swap at any time as long as you still own the skin
So if you have a bronze BL41 Bushwhacker (it doesn’t matter if it exists or not), you won’t lose the Woodland unless you sell/recycle your bronze.
Choosing Galvanized skin will NOT transform your bronze into Galvanized. It will just be shown as your selected skin and if you sell/recycle all your iron Bushwhackers, it will change back to Woodland automatically because that’s the default skin for this card

You are probably right about it. I’ll change the drop rates and remove the big cases with 25% chance to get tier 4.
I’ll make tier 4 skins very rare and explain how the tradeups will work

About obsidians: I just thought it would be nice if they added some animations and effects to skins because of how rare they are. But this thing can be removed and they can become just the same as cobalts
About Humble Bundle idk. The skin is so basic and most cards are bad there (at least in the 1st edition)

(bontsa) #8

Instead of fiddling with the droprates on your suggestion you should think of something else to introduce sort of ‘healthy drop in value’ or irreversibleness into process of applying skins. It wont be profitable for developers to give too easy access to skins and specifically multi-access (the rarity you have + everything below it) in such cheap method you have here. Otherwise you’d need to create humongously unfair cases which will be counterproductive as the one reason behind these system suggestions is to make RNG less ball/ovary- crushing.

(frostyvampire) #9

@bontsa
Well it would suck if having a cobalt wouldn’t let you use skins that gold cards can.
But the cobalt value can always be increased for that (higher cost in crafting and lower drop rates from cases)

I don’t really understand what you mean, could you please explain me or just write it clear and I will copy paste it into my post : 3

(BananaSlug) #10

thats not a reason to spend resources. The game needs fixing not another useless cards

(frostyvampire) #11

@BananaSlug
Sorry, I forgot that after the game is fixed updates will become banned

(The_N00Ba) #12

This idea is very similar to mine involving the different rarities allowing certain skins to be unlockable dependent on the rarity. The main difficulty I have with both those ideas is the additional coding that will be needed for such ideas as well as the overall added complexity of the ideas. I have doubts such ideas fit well with the current time table Splash Damage is following.
Making such changes after the official launch is possible but I do not know if it is really a possible goal. The over all goals of those in charge of this project are still not obvious to me. i doubt they will ever be. That is their right.
I really do like both ideas because I think they really help add actual increasing value to each kind of rarity rather than simply an increasing cost. I have found increased costs don’t always mean increased value.
I do also like the ideas presented by bontsa and others like them. granted there is really no one like bontsa.
is it possible both ideas could work together some how?

(BananaSlug) #13

[quote=“FrostyVampire;205715”]@BananaSlug
Sorry, I forgot that after the game is fixed updates will become banned[/quote]

yeah, because the game will be fixed until Halloween
sorry i totally forgot

(frostyvampire) #14

@BananaSlug
Who told you I want it to be released until Halloween? I used Halloween skins just as an example.
Even if they start working on it now I highly doubt it will be done by October

I’ll just add it to the thread to make it more clear

(bontsa) #15

You still have that tone that you expect this to be released at some point. It would give more credibility and movement to discuss to just stick to discussion instead of even remotely thinking these ideas are going be grabbed as they are from here. And overall just lot of less cringe you know.

Me and couple others have given our share of ideas for systems to separate loadouts from the skins, this thread as an example.

You system is simply as it is now overcomplicated. You have Cobalt but want to use the skins below it? Your inventory will be cluttered by 1 Lead, Iron and Bronze, 2 Silvers, 3 Golds for each merc in the end of the day, and you’re only using those for the skin, basically letting the functionality of theirs gather dust. I give your system that it doesn’t at least give our freebies as if you got BL41 in Cobalt, you cant slap the Cobalt on that Silver A31 card you have, correct? You can only use A31 on Silver and below as far as I understood?

However as said this’ll just lead to inventory clutter and hard-to-grasp system. Why to go so over the board when you could simply roughly divide the skin cards and loadout cards (3 augments with just default skin) and make them merge-able together. You have Carbon Silver Rhino and a Ahnuld Nitros functional card (default skin)? Merge together, you get a card just like a card we have now. You want Hollunds Nitro Rhino in Carbon Silver too? You need to get both the Carbon Rhino again and now the functional Hollunds Nitro Rhino card to be merged together. Grind has to be there because no profit will be gained from a system that hands out freebies.

That way the difference between functionality and vanity is clear, it’s easy to communicate how Cobalts and such are just skins, it allows people to have more freedom of choosing on what functional loadout they want their merc-specific skin into thus the price and value of the skins could be put considerably higher. Grind would still be present for the free-way of doing things in order to make the real money purchases a proper shortcut but now that %'s of skin droprates can be lowered without denying anyone functionality in the process, RNG in purchases can be considerably lowered.

(frostyvampire) #16

@bontsa
I know it’s not taken straight from the source and it will be tweaked and stuff.
Most players won’t have all those skins lying around if they don’t like the skins. Maybe leads and irons because they are cheap but nobody is gonna get 3 golds for each merc just for skins they will never use

You won’t be able to use the cobalt skin on a silver A31. You will have to get a cobalt A31 for it. But if you get a cobalt A31 in fragment, you will be able to use shard A31 because the BL41 is shard

The idea to turn all cards into default and give you the skin is not bad. It’s just that anyone who spent ages getting the card they want in cobalt will get completely scre wed up. My idea is to prevent this from happening since the only thing that you might lose are good special edition cards (like my suspect SM41 Nader if I got the name right) but nobody actually spent ages trying to get good special edition cards so the harm is nothing compared to what would happen if cobalts were converted to skins.
If this thing happened since the release of cards, I see no problem with it. But at the current state it’s too late

(A.S.F.S) #17

Then there will be more skins

(bontsa) #18

Not gonna delve deeper into the rest of the quote as nothing said there changes my opinion: this system you suggest comes out quite lot more complicated than it should or could be.

[quote=“FrostyVampire;205750”]
The idea to turn all cards into default and give you the skin is not bad. It’s just that anyone who spent ages getting the card they want in cobalt will get completely scre wed up. My idea is to prevent this from happening since the only thing that you might lose are good special edition cards (like my suspect SM41 Nader if I got the name right) but nobody actually spent ages trying to get good special edition cards so the harm is nothing compared to what would happen if cobalts were converted to skins.
If this thing happened since the release of cards, I see no problem with it. But at the current state it’s too late[/quote]

I never said one was going to lose their inventories. There are 2 different ways of making the change I’ve suggested on existing loadouts.

  1. Everything stays the same. Because the product of merging functional loadout and a skin is exactly the cards we have at the moment, nothing has to change in players inventories. Call them “pre-merged” if you will. However loadouts they gain in future would be separated and can be merged at will.

  2. For every single loadout player has in their inventory at the time of change, they get equal amount of functional cards and skin cards. So if someone has BL31 Cobalt Shard Fletcher now, at change they’d have Cobalt Shard Fletcher and BL31 Fletcher.

Now the problem that would arise with this is everyone getting practically a “free roll” so they can craft even “lousy” Cobalts before the change and then just merge them into actually desired functional cards after the change with no effort. While this sounds good and player friendly, it’d drop value drastically as we’d have huge surge of lets say Cobalt Fragger M4 cards with Explody and such (or any card that is considered “above the rest” in current meta). Which is why theres another possibility, option…

2.1) Every “normal” tier card from Lead-Cobalt stays “pre-merged” like in option 1), but all special event cards become split into the merc-specific skin and functional card that they previously represented. This allows the long-wished reroll of the obsolete event cards to happen without fiddling with in-game balance or such. As now players could take their merc-specific event skin, and slam it on any functional loadout they wish. Oh, also there is obviously a credit / possibly fragment fee on these mergings so it could somewhat easily be done so that event loadouts require tons of more of credits and/or fragments to merge together in order to make the reroll more meaningful and not “on-the-whim” decision.

Oh and yea.

That’s kind of the point here m8. Skins sell like hell in games like Dota2 and TF2, so they’re definitely a good profiting opportunity for a f2p game. So yes there should damn well be more skins.

(frostyvampire) #19

@bontsa
This could work, but then what about the normal cards?
If new cards that are crafted won’t be pre-merged (separate skins and loadouts), it will still hurt the economy.
If new cards will also be pre-merged, it will be impossible to get un-merged cards at all anymore which makes it even worse

My idea makes sure this won’t happen. I could change it so event cards are split into skin + bronze loadout but I don’t really see a point in doing so (especially because bronzes are so cheap).
I also don’t see a reason to require payment for merging skins with a loadout since you already need to get lucky/grind a lot to get the cobalt and then you also need to get the skin you want

Again, I like your idea. I just think it’s too late already. If it happened, it should’ve happened before the loadout release

Actually skins in tf2 was a horrible idea (I don’t play Dota so I can’t say about that). But in Dirty Bomb it will actually be a good thing.
Just had to point it out. Don’t reply to this specific thing :tongue:

(SnakekillerX) #20

Its an interesting idea, but I could certainly do without the extra effects. (Bamboo drops coconuts, electric arc on weapon, shiny shiny.) I like the game how it is because it doesn’t throw a bunch of nonsense at you.

But if there was ever to be a way to separate the skins from loadout cards, but still make them usable this would be a good way.

Instead of trying to roll that perfect cobalt card with the loadout you want and skin you want, you are basically just rolling for the loadout and you can apply whatever skin you want (up to cobalt rarity) on it.

So really for collectors it would become a goal of getting every loadout card in cobalt, without worrying about the skin it comes with.