Just a suggestion I’d like to throw out there, as have quite a lot of people before me, and hopefully a discussion inducer of the subject if all and any of you have ideas regarding the matter at hand.
Why would this be necessary? Judging from reactions at forums, in-game and personal discussions, current loadout system does bring both lucky happy moments but feelings of getting ripped off and disappointment seem to be more prevalent. Random factor is there, but it is there for a reason too as it’s a way for developer to gain more profits, when not everything is super easily accessible for free. Not anyone in their sane minds should think Cobalts and event cards should be obtainable left and right, soon making them not only dime in a dozen but also making no reason to buy Elite cases and such products which are necessity for developers. However with current implementation system also smacks paying customers in the face quite hard, as they too can have little guarantee of what they will be getting from their purchase. Let alone having real lack of rerolling…Ye, I think that’s about enough, we all know how flawed it feels.
Instead of trying to desperately come up with events with seemingly “everyone has a chance for free, buying stuff increases chances”- mentality I feel SD & Nexon combo should rethink how they build loadouts. What I propose, is separating visual looks of a loadout and functionality, the weapons and augments, into 2 separate instances. So default, lead, iron, bronze, silver, gold, cobalt, event skins, would be a “layer” one adds to set of weapons and augments. This merge could be done permament in order to people still having to grind or buy in order to “gain everything” so to speak, to get skins for multiple loadouts. Functional loadouts could be sold from in-game store like Bronzes are now, only difference being they’d be with default skin now. Some poor designer has worked for the original, native look of the mercs yet none of those skins are barely ever seen in-game 
With such change, probabilities of i.e Gold drops could be lowered from cases too since it wouldn’t feel so unfair anymore. As would you to be obtain even one skin, you can add it to any loadout you feel! So it’s not anymore both gamble if you get nice skin AND usable loadout, but only gamble of the first.
Perhaps 2 types of cases could be dropping for free; ones dropping functional loadouts and ones dropping skins, or they would be to drop from same cases. Elite case- type products would now have higher chances of giving (or skins like Cobalt could be bought right off the bat without case foolery) desireable skins that you can then merge with weapon & augment combination of your choice. No longer would player feel like being smacked in the face with a wet, sizeable northern-spawn fish, when cobalt does drop but has absolutely loathsome utility for them. Sure, it was never developer’s intentions to have “bad” loadouts to begin with and this is why we are about to see 2nd generation loadouts soon [tm], but still we have personal preferences and changes in meta happening, which will still give same result (some loadouts barely seeing the light of day) in the future even if issue of horrendous loadouts is addressed.
To have such system, not only could profit be made by straight selling skins (not giving a gameplay advantage obviously, as opposed how selling full loadouts now would), selling skin cases etc, would this allow for more, much more skins to be made in the future without making players feel like they have to “redo” their collection any time new stuff comes up. This could also be done so that player skin would be separated from weapon skin, making even more buyable / grindable products to be made. Want to inspect that smexy Swiss Gold weapon bling but outshine your opponents with Fragment garments? Could be possible with this, plus add more personal customisation options. From dev side this would just mean pure $$ doshdosh $$ as these would obviously be buyable from store either straight up, or cases, without the fear of getting something crappy tagged along with, making least in my hopes stuff much more appealing to be bought from store.
If anything, system could be either made so that skins are also merc specific rather than “get gold, merge to anything”- style. This way one would still be able to pick their poison, choose what they want to use and merge skin to their valued loadout.
Do you have different suggestion? Want to criticize / discuss / improve idea above? Post ahoy!
