We all know that feeling: you’re crawling through your favourite Overwatch character’s skins, and you notice a padlock next to a seasonal skin. Roadblock!
Blizzard has introduced the ultimate tease for cosmetic perfectionists, with snazzy Halloween, Winter, and Lunar New Year skins locked for each character unless they’re randomly gifted during themed loot boxes. Lunar New Year event skins and other cosmetic items, for example, can only be earned during the actual event.
If you don’t get the skin you want — and don’t have the credits to purchase it outright — you’re completely out of luck.
Some may argue this is a good thing, as the events are supposed to be unique, one-off annual events that gift special items. They wouldn’t be very “special” if anyone could purchase them at any time of year.
One Overwatch player just can’t deal, however, and has reached out to Blizzard about missing out on a seasonal Winston skin.
Blizzard customer support reached out to the frustrated gamer, confirming that they’re unable to manually give skins and other items to certain players.
They did let loose an interesting tidbit, however, and it points to players maybe one day having more control over the items they have in their character inventories.
“We’ve had a lot of suggestions about ‘skin trading’,” technical support member “Volkexas” said. “As in, you can trade away your skins for other ones, or maybe a crafting system to collect lesser ones and combine them all to create a legendary skin.”
You have our attention, Blizzard!
The email stated that ‘MasterJeff’ — as in, game director, Jeff Kaplan — will “at least consider” the trading and crafting idea.
It would be silly not to: while the point of the seasonal event is to keep certain items unique, there is still the dilemma of having played many, many hours of an event and potentially never coming across a Legendary skin.
The problem with the idea is that Blizzard makes many millions of dollars on lootbox purchases with real money, and introducing a trading and crafting system would probably cannibalise additional revenue.
Blizzard has done a good job of minimising microtransactions, leaving them exclusively to cosmetic items while making all DLC, events and maps free.
As a community we probably shouldn’t be too demanding of a feature that stands to dig into a game’s one and only method of monetisation … although if Blizzard were to introduce some sort of trading and crafting system, I assume it would come at a cost.
Perhaps they would charge a small fee to craft a Legendary skin from 20 or so common skins, as a means to offset potential revenue loss from the player no longer purchasing lootboxes.
Anyway, it would certainly stand as a great way to allow players to unlock seasonal skins that are locked away once an event ends.
What do you think? Would a trading and crafting system be something you could embrace? Sound off in the comments below!
