Those hoping to own all Overwatch items in the shop must either endure a long journey of grinding or burn a sizable hole in their precious wallets.
Over the weekend, several members from the community did calculations to get a rough estimate of how many Loot Boxes are required to get hold of every cosmetic ware in the game. According to the maths, owning all Overwatch items means attaining around 1,465 Loot Boxes. In terms of hard cash, that amounts to $1,172 or £967.
Do note that the figure includes content from the latest Overwatch Uprising event and is based on an estimated drop rate from a sample of over 1,000 Loot Boxes. In addition, the calculations discard player icons since they cannot be bought. Also, Overwatch items attained through pre-ordering the game and BlizzCon are also ignored for the same reason.
Blizzard does use a “pity timer” for Overwatch, which increases the probability of a valuable drop if the player has gone a long time without one. However, there is no way to be absolutely sure of the algorithm behind the timer. Hence, it is not take into account for the aforementioned calculations.
Do you find it surprising that Blizzard has priced its shop over $1,000? In comparison, it is far cheaper to own every For Honor item. Last month, a similar round of maths done for Ubisoft’s medieval hack-and-slash game highlighted that it would take players $732 to unlock every item in the game.
It should be noted that in accordance with newly enforced Chinese laws, Blizzard must make public the odds of drop rates for all of its games on May 1. This not only includes Overwatch but also Hearthstone. However, since Blizzard is a global entity, there is no way of knowing if it plans to do so. We will know in a few weeks if it, and other developers comply.
