Overwatch 2’s MO has always been to clumsily copy fortnite’s business model in a way that doesn’t work for a hero shooter, but now they’ve done some bold innovation and clumsily copied Valorant’s business model in a way that doesn’t work for a hero shooter (Valo is a hero shooter but its cosmetics aren’t hero specific)
So what do I get
- Nutcracker Pharah
- Monkey Business Winston
- Inarius Pharah
- Black Swan Life weaver
- Punk pharah
This seemed very strange to me since pharah isn’t even in my top 10 most played, but the I remembered that the last time I played Overwatch, I played 2 matches of pharah, a match of winston, and a match of lifeweaver, so it decided based just on that to flood my catalog with Pharah. So immediately I know roughly how their crude recommendation system works which destroys ruins the illusion they’re trying to sell that Maxmillian himself hand picked these skins for me
Of course the opposite can be a problem too. Lifeweaver is a hero I play quite a bit of, but because of that I already own all the skins I like for him when they came out, so it’s kinda redundant using up any slots for him. So I guess it makes some sense trying to recommend to heroes you are just starting out on, but its taking it way too far using over half the space on a hero I only somewhat play.
Then also a lot of these skins are just junk, like nutcracker pharah where they took a halloween knight skin, colored it green and red, and called it a christmas skin. I wouldn’t pay $1 for this, let alone $13
Then the discounts themselves go as low as 15%, this level of discount is meaningless when the base prices are often so ridiculous to begin with. It’s especially dumb when that kinda discount is offered on the Winston skin, which is permanently available to begin with
Just really poorly thought out trying to implement this system in OW. Thing is even if you had every skin in Overwatch available to buy at the highest discount rate I’ve seen of 37%, there’s only a handful I’d buy, and I think most players would buy even fewer. So trying to pick 5 skins out of the hundreds they have is terrible odds of making a sale
Here is how I would improve this system
- First 2 slots are randomly picked from the player’s top 5 heroes in the past year (maybe guarantee one goes specifically to their main if they heavily play one hero over others)
- next 2 slots are randomly picked from the player’s top 5 heroes in the past season
- Final slot is a wild card, can be any very popular skin for any hero that the player plays at least a little bit
- Minimum discount of 25%
- Each hero is assigned a curated list of top 3 best skins, and only those ones can be recommended unless the player owns them all
I still think it’d be a somewhat poor system, but I don’t think it’d be as bad for the current one where it will likely take dozens of attempts to recommend me anything I want
