New Rarity Colours: A Way To Salvage The Work Done Productively

jesterkind

It's no secret that the new rarity colours are bad. Not that they look unappealing - I actually quite like the blue shade, myself - but that they're bad for the game by increasing confusion and decreasing fidelity for players with colourblindness. There's no feasible way forward where they just become the new norm without significant downsides and zero upsides.

That being said, full reversions are typically something to be avoided for a game company because they represent a time and money sink. The work was done, so ideally, the work should be used somehow: go forward, not back, I've argued in favour of this myself. With that in mind, I suggest the following:

Revert the default rarity grade back to what it was prior to this patch - brown, yellow, green, purple, pink - for bloodweb/loadout items only. I'm not interested in criticising the cosmetic rarities, I don't pay enough attention to know for sure if that's good or bad. From there, the following two adjustments should be made:

• Add a toggle in the options for using a more traditional rarity grade, for players who want it.

Purely subjectively, some players like and prefer this rarity grade. That's obviously not enough reason to keep it as the default, but having it be an option would be nice and would preserve the work done to create the new system.

This framework, a way to select the colours for your UI outside of matches, would also allow for extra sets to be created with the specific aim of aiding colourblind players going forward, changing this from a step back for accessibility to a potential step forward.

• Use the blue colour exclusively for map offerings.

While this still will cause some (much, much more minor) issues for colour blind players (until such time as the above extra sets of colours are implemented), for other players it'd be a nice way to differentiate them in the bloodweb. It doesn't matter in any meaningful way, but the colour is pleasant and it'd be nice to break up the bloodweb a little bit.

Some work would probably have to be done behind the scenes to ensure map offerings are all grouped together in the inventory, so there isn't green on either side of the blue, but I'm guessing that won't be that hard?

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That's it. I'm sympathetic to the goal of trying to make the game more accessible to new players, but this will backfire, it will make the game less accessible in meaningful ways. No matter what else, these changes should and must be reverted for the health of the game.

I just think things can be spun into a way forward, still, instead of just wasting the work already done.

SoGo

Yes. This is a good suggestion.