Why Loadouts?

## Why did you add loadouts to the game? Several Reasons

The primary mission of Loadouts is to be a tool for highly customized play in Custom. We are experimenting with it in quick play and it's a fundamental component of the Game Modes system for managing and controlling what is possible based on its specific needs and requirements.

### **The questions:**

* How can all players have a similar level of access to all the weapons?
* How can players earn this access without having to spend real money to get it?
* How can you also reward players that have been in the game for a long time but not break these other things?

### **The problem:**

With the old store purchasing system, players that had been around for a long time had already purchased all of the equipment and enhancements. They had access to all the best weaponry in the game. Anyone new to DA2 had to suffer through the grind, regularly competing against overpowered players, or be forced to PAY $$ for access to all the weapons more quickly. This scenario means that the game is not fun for new players and requires players to avoid experienced players (which they have little control over), put the time in slowly grinding, or skip the grind and "pay to even the playing field ~~win~~." When 90% of our income comes from new players, the retention trends we saw in 2018 made this situation very clear and not sustainable long term, but we’ve been thinking about this problem since 2013 when we looked at adding more weapons and equipment.

### **The loadout solution:**

All players have access to all guns in the game. The point buying system (battle coins) is a metric used in other gaming systems to ensure that all players have access to the same level of equipment, but they choose the strategy of how they spend their points. This makes the focus of the game on both the skill of spending your coins wisely on your equipment and how well you can use that equipment in the game. The focus of rewards for long-term players is being moved to less game essential aspects like subscription services (avatars, no ads, game creation, server access, etc.). There will be a small discount to your loadout costs as you level up in rank, but the loadouts (with access to the more powerful weapons) will never be limited like the old DA2 game.

### **These are the features we feel loadouts offers:**

* Power-curve management - New Ideas get to be tried and adjusted in a loadouts managed game world.
* No more pay to win - A points system limits the influence of external money on in-game abilities. Pass holders and long-time players will receive discounts to the loadout costs, but they will never be free.
* Get rid of the grind - Access to items is managed by coin spending instead of spending your time.
* Highly customized play/Player agency - With the addition of specials, game play strategy is now even more versatile because you can select a different upgrades on each life. Especially in custom games, it's a fundamental component of the game modes system for developing a combat strategy that can be flexible during a game.

## **What if I don’t like loadouts?**

We have a couple of different ways to play games without using loadouts. You can play the CV4 game type or play a custom game with the loadout spend limit set to 0 (this is the default setting).