Can you guys mix up the random rewards a bit?

[Hellmeat]

I have a ton of hours in both PC and Playstation, 99% of the time when I get a rando reward at the end of a match I end up getting a crate I will never open. The other 1% I get a ski mask or some variation of the woodland weapon skin. Ditto for the gold boxes from the vault, it's almost always a face paint, pajamas, or a tiger weapon skin.

I thought when the loot boxes were introduced a dev indicated that all items were a potential reward (I think, possibly I'm wrong) but if so it seems players have a better chance of developing super powers or finding a space ship in their basement than getting something other than a Woodland skin...

 

[Maxotaurious]

I have a ton of hours in both PC and Playstation, 99% of the time when I get a rando reward at the end of a match I end up getting a crate I will never open. The other 1% I get a ski mask or some variation of the woodland weapon skin. Ditto for the gold boxes from the vault, it's almost always a face paint, pajamas, or a tiger weapon skin.

I thought when the loot boxes were introduced a dev indicated that all items were a potential reward (I think, possibly I'm wrong) but if so it seems players have a better chance of developing super powers or finding a space ship in their basement than getting something other than a Woodland skin...

I've recieved 3 masterclass skins in total and they're decent but yes I agree. Crates that are pay to open ? That sounds a bit unfair since loot is so rare

 

[Hellmeat]

I've recieved 3 masterclass skins in total and they're decent but yes I agree. Crates that are pay to open ? That sounds a bit unfair since loot is so rare

I just Prestiged to Rank 4 Last night, got enough Vault Dosh for four Golden Crates:

Precious Skin for a weapon, this was the 3rd duplicate.
Pajamas for Rae, the 4th duplicate.
Precious mask for Mr. Foster, 2nd duplicate
Another skin for the MP7 and I've honestly lost track of how many times I've gotten this skin.

During play over the last two days I've gotten 2 Loot Boxes and (you guessed it!) another Woodland skin. While I understand that TripWire might be counting on people buying items from the store or opening their lootboxes to fund their future products, it feels like there is either something drastically wrong with how the rewards are weighted in terms of being awarded as a reward, the pool for available rewards is ridiculously small, or the entire system is geared to just shove as many loot boxes in your face with the hope of someone, somewhere, buying those keys.

 

[Yoshiro]

So a few things to clear up here.

• The dosh vault crate/loot pool and the paid crate/loot pool are separate and work differently.
  • Dosh vault crates give you a random item based on chance and
    • As of this time that pool of items is not expanding
  • Paid key crates give you an item you do not yet have from that crate until you have received every item from that crate
    • At this time the crate loot pool is also not expanding
  • Due to changes in player interaction with crates, we have shifted away from them and moved towards a more direct purchase and Arsenal Season Pass system to continue helping with post release support.
    • As part of this the crate system has not been updated or depreciated as work going towards this would take away from work going elsewhere (it is not a minor undertaking).

 

[Hellmeat]

So basically once you have all the ski masks and woodland skin variants, and all the pajamas and face paints and Precious weapon skins, you're done unless you want to spend more money? There is really no need to Prestige further or worry about Daily or Weekly dosh or loot? What I gathered from what you cleared up is that there is no interest on Tripwire's part at this time to make this better.

Due to changes in player interaction with crates, we have shifted away from them and moved towards a more direct purchase and Arsenal Season Pass system to continue helping with post release support.

Then how about an option to turn off the loot crates all together? If all I have to look forward to by recycling crates and items are more duplicates, just let me turn this off.

 

[Aleflippy]

Thinking about this topic, I realize how far we've come in Killing Floor 2's lifecycle and the number of things we've debated on these forums... How fast does time fly !

The monetization of Killing Floor 2 is a case study. It's an incredible mess that you have to see to believe, and something I've never seen anywhere else. They pretty much tried everything in the book :

-Microtransactions
-DLCs
-Season Pass
-Lootboxes

And that's laughably bad. No matter what you think is the best option (I would say it's the Season Pass, or at least the "least worst"), no game should have ALL FOUR. It's confusing and not consumer-friendly at all. If you add crafting into the mix, it becomes even more of a broken patchwork of ideas that don't really work together. It just doesn't really make you giddy to spend some cash... Or to keep playing.

Because, as you said, another issue is precisely that... Not spending a dime is poorly rewarding in itself ! Duplicates are super common, and you need a lot of them to actually craft something more valuable. Not to mention that a lot of the rewards, duplicates or not, aren't really worth it either. It's even worse for the Vosh items : sure, they're "free" and more common than regular drops, but I really don't need some tacky gold paint jobs, or pyjamas for every characters... One could say it's a matter of taste, but honestly, I would like them to at least be more diversified.

So what could be improved, at least for KF3? Well, in my humble opinion...

-Have an in-game shop, using in-game currency. Either Vosh or something else. That would incite players to keep playing (in order to farm some money) and be rewarded with whatever they like. It's arguably better than getting things at random.. Because there's nothing more frustrating that working your ass up only to get an item you don't care about. MAYBE all items could be purchased with real money too (if you're impatient) but that's how far microtransactions should go. That, or you can simply exchange real money for in-game money.

-A slider that allows you to choose how you want your paint job to look (we don't need three separate skins for mint or battle-scarred... It just makes the drop list AND inventory needlessly cluttered )

-Season Passes for newer content (it's arguably the least worst paid method that the industry found out. That way, Tripwire would still get paid for the extra effort they put out, and players would still have new things to play with)

-Ditch the craft system (since we can pay for what we want with the in-game currency anyway)

-If we keep looting, it should definitely be improved in order to get less duplicates. Not better items (as I said, it's a matter of interpretation) but at least less duplicates. And since we got rid of the crafting system, duplicates or unwanted items could be recycled into in-game currency. The higher the quality of the melted item, the more money you would get.

 

[Hellmeat]

While I 100% loved KF1 and KF2, and did want them to succeed and make more KF games ... turning KF2 into a toilet of MTX and Loot Boxes really killed a lot of the respect I had for TW and drastically reduced my inclination to buy further Tripwire games (like Maneater. This sounded fun but was honestly sick of seeing DLC and MTX constantly shoved in my face so I never bought it).