As I’ve been thinking about the amount of people worried about the games current loot box system in which you get duplicate cards and that therefore upgrades your cards in very minor but pretty effective ways during combat I have come up with a variety of potential solutions that I think might possibly be decent enough ideas depending upon how far you go down the rabbit hole with the first solution being…
- Don’t have weapon leveling what-so-ever just remove the whole loot box system to begin with as it kind of doesn’t exactly belong in this type of game
However, understanding the current nature of where video gaming is, loot boxes are cool and people seem to be into them to a point to where…
- Keep loot boxes but, do not for the love of god have keys to open them, do not put them behind paywalls, do not have timers on when you can or can’t open the boxes, and do not have a limited amount of boxes that you can have at any given time
However, I’m assuming at least one of these things will be implemented because just based upon the games current UI it seems like they’re going to possibly do at least one of these things so…
- Keep loot boxes but, don’t have any duplicates as any game with loot boxes that allows me to get duplicates is infuriating, therefore again removing leveling of any sort on weapons/abilities
However, this would mean that an absolute ton of things would need to be produced in order to keep up with people always opening and unlocking boxes, so that they’d never run out of that constant feed of new things to potentially unlock so…
- Keep loot boxes and also keep duplicates but, remove all weapon/ability leveling to keep everyone on an even playing field regardless of skill, how long you’ve played, or how much money you’ve sunk into the game.
However, this would mean that when getting a duplicate you’d get absolutely nothing in this circumstance so…
- Keep loot boxes and also keep duplicates but, allow for weapon/ability leveling, but each time the weapon/ability levels that unlocks a mechanically minor change to that weapon/ability, like a variety of small mods that you can pick or choose to alter that card very slightly in your load-out and I mean very slightly. So you can add a 3% slow, or a short duration wall-hack, pretty much whatever you could think of as a very minor alteration or passive.
However, this could lead to a ton of potential balance concerns in which cards with certain mods could be more or less powerful not to mention how long it may take to unlock some of them so…
- Keep loot boxes, duplicates, weapon/ability leveling, but instead of changing the weapon mechanics you have the weapon/abilities change cosmetically in a variety of ways. So as a card levels up it instead becomes a more appealing looking version of itself and this applies to every card meaning there is a kind of incentive to get more and more of the same card, because at a certain level it unlocks an alteration for that card that appeals to you as a player cosmetically.
This I think is the best way to go about this problem keeping pretty much all things intact that are currently in the game. Remove all incentive to level cards so that they become stronger, but, in it’s place there’s an incentive to get a high level version of one of your favorite cards because you like the way it looks more. Imagine it as a system in which you unlock pure cosmetic upgrades from chests in other games, but also, when getting a duplicate it’s like a step on the ladder towards getting a cooler looking version of said card either through FX or the model itself changes in little ways.
For example, each weapon in the game currently could have it’s projectile’s FX change in color, the weapon itself could change in color, the model of the weapon could change ever so slightly, and this all can be applied to abilities as well, human flame the flame could be a different color, sentries bullet trails could have different effects or the sentry changes physically. There are a ton of things you could do to alter everything currently in the game in just tiny enough ways to make them customizable and in a way that it shouldn’t take too much effort to implement.
The only thing I can imagine where it gets a little too out of hand is reading what was is being used in front of you for example, railgun’s current FX is purple if you change that color it could be confused for a tesla possibly in the split second it’s fired. So, the simple way to solve those instances where things would get hard to read? Just have it be several different shades of the same color. So railgun would be a variety of purple-like colors that you could choose from, tesla would be a variety of different blues, etc.
I know this was a long, possibly over complicated way to get my point across, but hey, I thought this was a pretty creative way to solve this problem and I wanted to put the work in so there you go. Feel free to let me know if this seems like a dumb idea or not.