The "Just For You" shop should be modified to solve common issues among players

General Discussion
1

An issue I have encountered twice is that I have wanted to purchase a Shop Exclusive skin which is not in the shop. The first time I regretted that I didn’t buy the Witch Kiriko skin a week after it left shop rotation during Halloween 2023. But by some miracle, shop exclusive skins, highlight intros, victory poses, emotes etc. from season 1 and 2 were available for purchase in the hero gallery, which included Witch Kiriko. Whoever came up with the idea of this and implemented this into the game, I greatly thank them, you’re the goat. I became extraordinarily happy because I could buy the Witch Kiriko skin. I purchased the skin without hesitation. I had fears that I would have to wait a whole year to buy it again. But today I face the same issue. I have had my eyes on the Infinite Ace D.Va skin. The issue is that I can’t buy it and I never know when it will come into the shop again. It feels as if I have been punished for not playing the game when it was released season 4. I am hoping for another miracle similar to my experience with the Witch Kiriko skin, though I am not expecting one. I believe the shop exclusive skins are too exclusive which makes players, like myself, who yearn to purchase certain skins feel hollow when playing the character the skin belongs to, because the players lack hope for the ability to purchase the skin. After searching up for any possible information about the return of a particular skin, I realized other people have the same issue. There is no reasonable amount of patience a player can have to wait for the skin they want to return to the shop. It is better to give up on waiting.

There is another issue. The “Just For You” shop is pointless. It displays “offers” for skins the player can purchase at the same price in the Hero Gallery. I had seen this section of the store as a source of hope when wanting to buy the Witch Kiriko skin. I quickly realized it was pointless to check the shop rotation each day since the “offer” I got were of skins which are always available for purchase in the hero gallery or to characters I never play. Recently, I have seen a change made to the layout and offers made to the “Just for You” shop. I don’t know if I will contradict the statement I will make later, but it seems like it gives offers for skins I can already purchase in the hero gallery. If the “Just For You” shop disappeared tomorrow, I would not notice.

There is a single solution to both issues: “two birds, one stone”. The solution is for the “Just For You” shop to display offers for ONLY skins, highlight intros, emotes, player icons etc. NOT available for purchase in the hero gallery. This includes shop exclusive cosmetics from season 3 and newer. A request I have would be to also include cosmetics like Doomfist Thunder in the “Just For You” shop, though I under no circumstances anticipate those kinds of limited skins to return in the shop in a such frequent rotation as the “Just For You” shop.

Nevertheless, I would suggest a round-based where all skins and other cosmetics the player DOES NOT HAVE would rotate in a random order in the “Just For You” shop. The contradiction this suggestion might have shop exclusive skins that the player does not have is in shop. However, it doesn’t seem like this is in effect as well as I have not seen enough proof that is is (like seeing actual shop exclusive skins like Infinite Ace D.Va being in the Just For You shop). There should be a daily rotation of 4 cosmetics including, but not limited to, hero skins, highlight intros, emotes, name cards, player icons. The cosmetics should have been released more than a month ago, similar to Valorant’s shop system. There should also always be a single hero skin available in the “Just For You” shop. All cosmetics should be displayed once in each rotation. Once all cosmetics have been displayed once, the round resets and a new order of rotation is initiated. This ensures that the same cosmetic does not appear just a couple days after its previous appearance (unless a round reset has taken place during those days and by pure chance the cosmetic appears among the first of that round). Depending on the amount of unowned cosmetics a player has, a round might take a month.

In this way, the player is rewarded for having patience. The player would only need to be reasonably patient in waiting for a particular skin to come into shop rotation. Then there is hope. There would be hope for me to wait for the Infinite Ace D.Va skin to return. I would kindly request for the developers to at least consider my suggestion because you hold the power to solve the issue I, and many others have. Thanks!

2

The Shop in general is pretty “meh”. They could make so much more money while making the community happy at the same time. I have a thread on that… if you scroll down abit.

3

k thank you for your help

4

blizzard marketing is particularly clumsy and shameful in too many ways. I’ve seen a lot of situations where something is wrong with monetization. I’ll make a long list of little things, which when added together make a greedy monster. Most of it is something which didn’t concern me… but I noticed them all, and they are always unfair.

  1. Old players who had not opened the OW1 lootboxes would have found the value of those skins in credits upon logging in to OW2. but in season 1 the credits were useless (you couldn’t buy the legacy skins like now, only through shop rotation and in coins) and to make matters worse they were valued with the prices of OW2: if you were unlocking an OW1 skin (1000 credits) ow2 gave you 1000 credits, but theoretically today skins cost 1900 credits. and the same for icons (25 legacy price vs 300 OW2 price), sprays (25 legacy price vs 100 OW2 price), etc. you had the poorest price conversion of OW1… with zero purchasing power in ow2. :money_with_wings:
  2. obviously the scandal of the non-divisible bundles in season 1. Do you know what made Blizzard change its mind with Kiriko witch? a reddit in which he stated (and it was true) that in countries like Holland and Australia it is strictly forbidden to offer bundles with the name of “discount” on things that are not sold separately. before the thing went viral (surely someone threatened to contact consumer protection associations) they changed the shop: bundles and separate purchases available. Just a small disclaimer warning that you can buy the items separately (but still today, no buttons that redirect you to observe the price difference of the individual content); :shopping:
  3. if many people found the “legendary” rating of Kiriko’s standard skins (with a little jacket on) indecent, we hadn’t yet seen Moira Mime: the first LEGENDARY skin with all the features of an epic skin. No special effects, no warnings about no effects, once again a limited time item. Damn, the shop has demonstrated how important it is to describe a product well, we have taken a step back in marketing. And we resolved this feedback from the fake legendary skins in 2016 with the Mei-rry skin, which at least had some special effects too! :clown_face:
  4. Bastion gingerbread, the “Christmas gift for Overwatch players”. a beautiful epic skin… at the cost of 1 coin. yeepee, do you know how many people still struggle to buy objects today because of that difference? :gift:
  5. Finally the revolution arrives: we can buy legacy skins with credits. but you cannot earn credits. Then they finally introduce a real way to obtain credits (battle passes)… but the legacy bundles continue to be offered with cois prices. there was only ONE time I saw a legacy bundle sold in credits, and it was for emoting and other little content for reinhardt. Were they learning their lesson? had they finally understood that legacy content shouldn’t be sold in coins even with bundles? ha ha ha… no. exactly two weeks later they proposed a bundle of Mercy Legacy skins… which you could NOT purchase in the gallery with credits. their price was in coins there too! :coin:
  6. Valentine’s Day, what an amazing event, and with a skin available in the Hanzo cupid bundle. what’s not to like? that inside there was a highlight available for FREE by playing the very short dating sim loverwatch online. and the bundle didn’t have the foresight to specify it, and therefore some users who were too hasty didn’t know that they could save a little less from that bundle. :cupid:
  7. The fantastic offers outside the game also begin: prime rewards, PS, Microsoft etc. What? they proposed that OW2 skin of Torbjorn captain?! does this mean that whoever bought it in the shop spent $2 and they won’t get it back? Yes exactly. The only case where there was compensation (guess what) was the community’s angelic waifu, Mercy Owl. NEVER make the shop’s best customers angry, right? :angel:
  8. The d.va ace skin you mentioned? was part of a special OW2 anniversary offer: available IN CREDITS outside of any super premium bundle. And the same with other skins that until then were in a limbo of “but will they come back?” (like Sigma’s beekeeper skin). surprise: monetization has once again failed to offer coherence! :shopping_cart:
  9. Do you know PVE? the one that only costs $15? after a month from season 6 it was immediately discounted, it’s a truly ridiculous timing for a dlc. really points to a problem in replayability that now leaves that mode completely empty. :face_in_clouds:
  10. Moira Lilith, perfect exclusive on the topic. please, they are only the price of the most expensive premium battle pass bundle, zero other options available. they will correct this thing only from seaosn 8, but it’s already late, they already took their money. :moneybag:
  11. winter fair: let’s call it “premium” and everyone thinks you can take everything, right? wrong: it doesn’t really give you the power to get everything as happens with the battle pass: it only gives you a substantial currency that can be unlocked weekly so you have to be really careful about how you spend the tickets and do your calculations on how many you earn. Or you can also buy the expensive holiday bundle with tracer which is ABSOLUTELY not discounted for those who had at least purchased the winter fair premium, with the consequence of having other useless credits at the end. and take a charm as gift, merry christmas :christmas_tree:
  12. oh wait, I forgot another holiday gift: winston’s ugly sweater skins? if you went to the bundle it obviously cost a lot but if you went to the shop it cost 1000 coins like all ow2 skins, right? WRONG: it cost 1500 coins! and it wasn’t a mistake, because all the other OW2 epic skins correctly cost 1000 coins. However, if you calculated the discount applied, you could see that they did it by calculating that that skin cost 1000 coins. a silent scam that when you go to buy the single skin… has a 50% surcharge! do you like this sweater? :coat:
  13. last shameful offer: recently you can find the Blizzcon collection (only offers you the Sigma skin) discounted for Valentine’s Day. among the offers indicated it specifies “battle pass season 7”. go and see the small specifications at the bottom of the page: “Overwatch® Premium Battle Pass is only available for Season 7.”. you understand? they still sell a bundle that is already wrong that has in the window the advertising of a battle pass that is no longer available. and in reality it is a VERY SERIOUS thing for consumers, because not everyone knows that blizzard battle passes are not like in other games where you also buy the possibility of getting some content afterwards. if you read the display case that has BP 7 in it, some people think you can still get them. It’s shameful that a story is being publicized that should have already been present since the beginning of season 8! :japanese_ogre:

they are all very small things, and which we can very well ignore :+1:. but you can see how blizzard marketing so far is particularly careful to hide from you the extras that it will make you spend compared to how it is shown on the shop window :warning:. A sentence handled in an ambivalent way, a price shown differently depending on where you view it, a warning written in small print, there is ALWAYS a moment when you stop and have to ask yourself "ok, where’s the scam, here? ", and all this is frustrating… this sending a very clear message to everyone:

Whoever buys first will always be the one who spent too much. :money_with_wings:

I’ll see you when they say “we have revolutionized the monetization of gaming”, which they say will happen during 2024: if they are really convincing, fine. otherwise… no thanks. :wave: