I just opened a loot box that was all duplicates. This should not happen. Honestly, I feel like the loot boxes ive opened lately have been filled with absolute trash. Is this okay? Why so many duplicates? What of a world with no duplicates, or wear one skin was guaranteed per box (sort of how one rare is guaranteed when you open a pack of magic cards). Thoughts?

I get alot of loot boxes with nothing but whites and blues. I feel your pain. I don't know why anyone would pay for loot boxes.

I don't understand the complaints about loot boxes at all. I'm level 68, have gotten several legendary skins and enough credits to buy pretty much every skin that I REALLY want(that I didn't get from boxes), along with some other stuff. And now with the new patch it's even easier to get loot boxes. Maybe I'm just lucky, but I think it's a fine system. I could see guaranteeing a skin you don't own, or guaranteeing a purple/legendary for a purchased box, but beyond that is asking a bit much.

Loot boxes dropping duplicates is a terrible system, but it's good business for Blizzard. People still buy them and sadly that tells Blizzard 'Hey this is ok!'.

Valve have made this somewhat better by letting you sell or trade the duplicate items you acquire on to other users, or to use them to craft a new item. Valve also have it where you can skip the roulette of loot boxes if you really want, as most of their in-game items can be bought on the marketplace if you're willing to pay for the certainty.

It gives you something to do with duplicates. Is there anything you can do with duplicates in Overwatch? If not that's pretty lame.

I stopped caring about the skins and emotes. The loot box system in overwatch is atrocious

@paulmako: for each duplicate you get about 5 pieces of in game currency (for context a legendary skin costs 1000). So you pretty much you get nothing.

Condolences.

id say some of the rhetoric here is a bit extreme, but yeah that's odd and probably needs to be fixed, or at least more currency for breaking them down.

The real Overwatch starts here.

I only I could sell the shit I'll never use for some coins...

Or at least better chances of getting something for the guys I use more, I barely used Reinhardt and he's the guy with most stuff

Yeah, any skins I've gotten so far are for characters I don't play at all.

@jdizzlefoshizzle: Not exactly true. For common duplicates you get very little, but for rarer duplicates you get substantially more in-game currency.

I honestly don't mind the system. Sure it sucks sometimes when you don't get anything particularly exciting, but no matter what you are getting something valuable. It's a fun loot chase that Blizzard has ensured will last players a long while. There's nothing wrong with that.

Paying a dollar per random loot box seems insane to me considering the game is not free to play, but they are making tons of money so whatever I guess.

That's one thing that I really like about the Titanfall 2 loot system. You level up, you get an "advocate gift," and you open it. If it contains a weapon skin or a Titan skin, it's pretty much always a skin for a weapon or Titan that you've actually been using. It's a really nice way of handling loot.

at the very least, duplicates for the timed items/legendaries should not happen. The only cool skin I got from the Halloween thing was the Mercy Witch skin, which I unfortunately got twice. And the currency it provided me was the same as a normal legendary skin, despite it costing 3x the currency to purchase (which you can no longer do).

I bought ten loot boxes at the end of the Halloween event in a last ditch attempt to get some of the stuff I wanted. I got two Halloween skins, one of which was a duplicate, and a skin for Ana. The rest were sprays and voice lines. The progression system in Overwatch is straight fucked, I'd put it about on par with how shitty Legacy Evolve's progression was. You'd think if you at least pay for loot boxes that it would guarantee you a better draw or something, but, nope. Lesson learned, never buy loot.

As a guy who doesn't play Overwatch, it's still real weird to me how much people give a shit about character outfits in a game where, while playing it, you'll never see your outfit.

I'm level 181 and I only get duplicates now. And I don't mind it at all. Because all those duplicates generate in-game currency, and if there's a thing I actually want, I just buy it with currency.

You can see it while you emote, at the end of every match, if you get Play of the Game and after someone kills you.

It's cosmetics so who really cares. At the end of the fay you get enough credits to buy the things you really want for the characters you primarily use.

In a game with 20+ characters each of which have 60+ things to unlock it's super frustrating to get a loot box with 3 dupes and a bundle of currency.

@whatshisface said:

Also the parts of you character that you do see while playing look different. And then some have different voice samples, Like Witch Mercy and I think they added it for all the Halloween skins.

It's cool.

As a person that needs goals to work towards to in most games this was one of the reasons I stopped playing Overwatch. It's really deflating, for me anyway, to keep getting duplicate skins for characters I don't even play over and over again. Also I just got tired of the game but the loot boxes definitely didn't help in making me stick around.

@humanity: I feel the same. A game like Overwatch will get stale for me after a while unless there's a good sense of reward, and Overwatch just lacks that. The frustrating part is that there's so many skins and highlight intros, even victory poses, that you could guarantee one per crate and it'd still shake out better than it currently does.

Your experience isn't the same as me, which is why people have problems with this system.

Jim Sterling sums up my thoughts perfectly:

Cosmetics is something that I personally care about a great deal. I have no problem working towards or even paying for the specific items that I want, but fuck all this random bullshit. I could theoretically level up 1000 times and or dump $1000 into this game and still not get the items that I want. That is my problem with this system. That is one of the big reasons I stopped playing.

Like was said in the video, it's fine if you like the loot system or you don't care or whatever. More power to you. That's ain't me though. I would much rather play something else that I actually find rewarding...which is what i did.

It's pretty cool that they took the time to do the art for the arms and hands that are on screen. I guess what I'm saying is that it surprises me that people are paying money for these lottery crates when primarily it'll be your opponents seeing them.

I don't think it's the game's problem if all you care about is unlocking the next thing while actually playing the game takes a back seat on your priority list. That's your problem. You're not playing a shooter, you're playing "gotta catch 'em all!"

But it's OK because cosmetics aren't important, and all the people buying thousands of loot boxes proves that.

only solution is buy more loot crates!

I kind of don't care what I get in a loot box, because I don't care what my first person character looks like, but I DO like to open them. There is something satisfying about those things popping open.

It's one of the big reasons I hate the chests in League of legends. There are a couple of skins (specifically the Hextech ones) that require you to not only buy or earn chests but then what you get out of them is completely random. You need 10 gemstones to forge it or you can unlock it from the box itself. People spend hundreds of dollars for one skin.

What surprises me is that they're making so much money on cosmetics and they still haven't bothered to come up with a decent Zarya skin.

so if i undersand correctly, that you can't get like 1% of the cosmetics the game is not worth it or fun for you as a while? i mean if it's a thing you're doing out of principle/protest then fine i guess? but it sounds like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Summer Games skin says What up

Let's put it this way then: There's a bunch of other babies that I like just as much if not a lot more with less shitty bath water...so, seeing as how there are only so many hours in a day, I'd rather spend my time with one of those more awesome babies.

@hatking said:

If you think about it, this is true for your real life appearence as well. It works because it's a multiplayer game and what you look like to other people can be just as important to you as how you look to yourself.

I feel like I should also clarify that while I'm totally into getting cool skins in Overwatch, I don't want to entirely defend it as a fair or non-scummy system. It's designed to keep people playing by having a possible "big win" just around the corner, as well as a long term alternative in the form of its currency which you build up over time, but it also wants people to feel like spending more money on the game is a tempting proposition.

In the end, I personally feel like the end justify the means. As them making more money on it will enable and encourage further development of characters and maps etc. which is something I like to see. Even if how they get there can get pretty exploitative.

@atomicoldman: as embarrassing as it is to admit I do need that basic carrot on a stick approach to retain interest. Titanfall 2 doesn't have a whole lot of maps and quite frankly despite the great gameplay I probably wouldn't be playing it still if there wasn't so much stuff to progressively unlock through skillful gameplay rather than a random lottery. Every game is working towards some goal and I like that feeling of progression.

Honestly, if they gave full, or hell, even half value for duplicates I could see myself being fine with the system, but the 1/5th they give now is just ridiculous. And what's really cynical is that Blizzard knows this, because from what I hear they turned it down from what it was in the beta.

I don't think it's embarrassing at all. It's why reward systems were ever introduced in the first place: to help retain interest. Different people have fun in different ways. Some people derive enjoyment specifically from going after that carrot on a stick. When there's a better carrot on a less shitty stick (I feel my analogy fell apart pretty quickly there...), it's only natural people would gravitate towards that because they're going to have more fun.

i thought the whole progression thing was pretty novel in the early modern warfare days but now i would rather just have a game that's fun to play to eat up my time (i.e. overwatch imo). guess the cosmetic stuff is just a neat extra for me and i don't really have a horse in that race or feel like getting too political about it, and i wouldn't miss it that much even if it went away.

I'd much rather have a Heroes of the Storm method of purchasing the skins I want with IRL money than a random chance of something at a progression point. I hate randomness as it can be incredibly frustrating when you have no end goal to when you can receive the item you are most wanting.

Maybe i'm just old, but it's odd to me to care about skins in a game where you're in first person.

I've opened well over a dozen or more that were all duplicates. I don't mind but the gold you get for duplicates is insanely low. If something takes 1000 in game gold to purchase but you only get like 50 back for a duplicate, that is insane. Like others users have said, I'd rather just pay $4.99 for the skins I want for the characters I actively try and play then get random loot boxes. Looks like Titanfall 2 will be doing that soon.

I've opened a ton that were all duplicates. I actually prefer that. I'm selective with what I actually use, so currency will always serve me better than a new blue thing I'll never equip

@drflapjack: I'm ussually with you, but something about Overwatch makes me feel compelled to get skins. I think maybe because so much of the game is spent in character select menus, waiting for people to choose heroes during the assemble your team phase, watching highlight play of the game videos, victory pose screen, etc. in all of which you see your character's skins. Also they do a lot of nice work with the little details of the skin that make it into your first person view. For example: the character Roadhog uses a hook to reel in enemies as one of his abilities, and in one of his islander themed costumes the hook is replaced with an anchor. One of Reinhardt's skins replaces his trusty hammer melee weapon with a more sinister looking red battle axe. That along with the ability to look at a cool character model during the game's extended character select/assemble your team sessions befor each match make overwatch skins more appealing to a lot of people than they would be in something like call of duty.