UPDATE: Results
NOTE: What you’re about to read is a very in-depth look at the results of these polls. There are two or three new polls that have come out of this (for possible changes or replacements) but if you don’t feel particularly strongly about which specific skins get added, changed, or cut, then reading this post probably isn’t worth your time. It’s rather long. But if you do care, or if you just get excited by numbers like I do, then read on. Maybe grab a cup of tea or a cookie or something first though. 
How To Read This Data:
The three bars on the left-hand side represent the percentage total votes. These votes will
not factor in the “default” votes (those are relevant in other ways) - in other words, it’s the
relative popularity of the three skins in comparison to each other. If you add them all up you will reach 100%, unless there’s some minor rounding errors, of course.
The skins will be listed vertically in order of most popular to least popular, with rarity recommendations next to each.
IMPORTANT: I am not in support of a rarity feature as I believe that all the skins should ultimately endeavor to be equal in quality and desirability. However, in the occasion that rarities were to be implemented, these would be my personal recommendations based on the gathered data.
See information on the pink bar regarding an objective analysis of how suitable rarities are for implementation with these specific skins.
If a skin has it’s name listed in red (like fictional skin three above), it means that this skins was less popular than the default skin. I will cast a particularly critical eye over these skins as it means people may not want to buy them very often, and changes should be considered.
The orange bar on the left-hand side represents the relative popularity of the default skin. Any value higher than, say, 10% is a concern here - perhaps the reskins are not of a high enough quality for this weapon if people would rather use the plain one, although a small value should always be expected as some people just like the classics. This will be skewed for certain weapons, I suspect, as some have default skins that may be percieved as “cooler” than others. There is no objective way to account for this.
The pink bar represents a rough estimate of how suitable a rarity system would be for this weapon. In other words, if all three reskins were hypothetically equally popular, this will be 0%, as assigning rarities would be a completely arbitrary decision to make here. If there is obvious favoritism, it will be higher. (For those who are interested, I’ve calculated this by taking the standard deviation of the data set and calculating it as a percentage of the maximum possible standard deviation for three reskins - with a bit of rounding for easy math.)
Having a high orange bar for a certain weapon is objectively bad - it means the skins are unpopular.
A high pink bar is also bad in my opinion, as it represents inequality between the skins, but it’s a good indicator as to whether or not assigning weapon rarity is appropriate. At the end of the post I’ve put the total average rarity skewing, too, which I feel is a much more significant consideration.
Data Limitations
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All data is taken from the CIU forum. We’re fairly involved fans, and probably don’t represent the masses of CIU players. Some of these weapon reskins would hypothetically be more or less popular in practice for a whole multitude of reasons. This cannot be calculated with a simple poll.
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All the data sets are (relatively speaking) small, so there’s definitely margin for error.
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Corn Shotgun had it’s poll added much later, and has less votes in total than the other weapons. This will skew its poll even moreso than the other weapons.
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Some of this data may not line up with the polls above - other than in the event of some sort of massive popularity shift, I have no plans to update the below statistics after the date of this post.
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I haven’t counted my own opinions here, if anyone is wondering.
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There will be no immediate changes to the library as a result of these polls. I will raise a few propositions below, but will leave plenty of time for people to voice their opinions on them before I consider making any changes to the library.
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Please remember that just because I’ve posted a very in-depth hypothetical analysis here, it’s no guarantee you’ll be seeing these skins in game. iA may choose to replace some, create entirely different skins, or not add reskins at all.
This is just an analysis because I feel as though if I’m going to suggest a big cosmetic feature like this, I might as well do it properly.
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Also, just because a poll option is most popular in this post, doesn’t necessarily mean I will make the suggested changes to the library. It’s just for me to gauge public opinion.
With no further ado:
Not the strongest of starts. Of the three Ion Blaster skins, only
one was more popular than the default skin. 31% of voters would not use a skin for this weapon by preference - that’s nearly a third, and substantially higher than any other weapons.
That said, the difference between Classic Ion and Retro Blaster is very small and not a particularly significant gap - it just so happens that the default texture falls in between.
Flash Blaster is one I’ve seen requested before I even made the Library, so I don’t have any intention of getting rid of it, either. I feel like these skins are safe to stay, despite having some of the most concerning results.
Much more solid results here - one of the best results of the entire set, in fact. The most notable thing is that is has the least deviation of all weapons, so all three skins are almost equally popular, which is good. It does have a slightly higher than average number of people who would prefer the default skin, but all the skins individually were more popular than it, so that’s not a concern. Definitely no need to change here.
Hmm. Well, people like Lunar Laser.
Still, this doesn’t just show a skewing - the other two skins seem very unpopular indeed, even compared to the default skin. Alien Phaser, in particular, got very little attention - was this because people just preferred the other skins, or does almost nobody like it? Please comment with your thoughts on this particular skin.
In the weapon reskin topic, there was a suggestion to add the Island Wars 2 Laser - it’s basically a slightly gold hue shift, so at the time I didn’t think it would be worthwhile.
Given the results here, however, I would be interested to see if remastering this laser in place of one of the two less popular skins is a good idea. I’ll add a poll:
- Keep Laser Cannon skins the way they are.
- Replace “Light Cannon” with Island Wars 2 inspired design.
- Replace “Alien Phaser” with Island Wars 2 inspired design.
The reason why I’m keeping both as options here is that I worry the IW2 skin is really similar to Light Cannon, but in gold, so it would be kind of boring to add both and my instinct says that if one’s got to change, it would be that (we could still call it light cannon, though - they’re almost identical. It would just change from white to gold, really).
But I’m not going to ignore Alien Phaser’s dismal performance, either - against my better judgement, I’ve put it here too. I worry that if it were replaced, all three laser skins would look very very similar…
Not much to comment on here - this is a pretty great turnout. Almost everyone like at least one of the skins, and there’s enough variation where they would work both at various rarities or in equal standing. No changes here.
Results here were not unexpected, but still interesting. There was another very skewed result, with huge favour towards Rainbow Blitz. However, it’s not quite as extreme as Laser Cannon - likely owed due to the fact that not many people voted for the default skin.
Regardless, Classic Vulcan is definitely thrown into question. It’s not like the other classic skins - it’s a pretty similar design to the current one, so I’m not sure if people will miss it. Here’s a poll:
- Keep Classic Vulcan
- Replace Classic Vulcan with another design (To be determined…)
Plasma Rifle is interesting, as there isn’t a huge gap between the most and least popular skins, but there was also a lot of votes for the default. I imagine this is in part because the default is really cool, but I’m still not convinced that that’s the only thing at fault here.
Plasma Discharger still has enough votes where I kind of don’t want to replace it entirely - I’ve considered even merging the “intense glowing” effect it has with the blue, eerie glow of “Ghost Plasma” and fusing the skins together, basically.
As for the new spot it would leave available, wellm there’s another skin that’s been suggested for this weapon before, and I’ve figured out how to do it without making it look like garbage, so… @kokokokos
- Keep Plasma Rifle skins the way they are
- Merge Plasma Discharger into Ghost Plasma, and add Pasta Rifle to replace Plasma Discharger
- Replace Plasma Discharger with Pasta Rifle, but leave Ghost Plasma untouched
There’s a skew in favour of Ice Boron here, and False Moron was kind of an uninspired skin so perhaps it ought to be replaced, but nobody liked the classic design very much here so I’m more hesitant too. Plus it may get a colour shifting effect in V.48, so I’ll hold off any propositions until then, I think.
Another pretty strongly skewed weapon. Again, all these skins were more popular than the default, but there’s been a number of alternate suggestions for this weapon. One was a black-and-white skin, but black has visibility issues unfortunately so that’s a problem.
The other idea is the IW2 Bubblegun, which is cool but doesn’t quite match the gameplay of Photon Swarm because it has no trail. So if I were to make this, I’d give it a trail in order to avoid making a skin that’s blatantly more beneficial to use.
- Keep Photon Swarm skins the way they are
- Replace “Stinger Trails” with “Bubblegun”, but modified with a trail effect.
Hmm. Positron is one of those weapons that’s got a vastly less popular default skin, but clearly skewed toward certain skins (or one in particular, in this case). But I don’t have any great ideas for a better skin, so unless someone does and it’s clearly more popular than the Doom Ray, I’ll leave this one for now. People seem to like all the skins - they just like one more than the others.
This one turned out better than I expected, actually. Ionized Crimson and Goldshot are very close, while Intense Focus takes a big lead - I wonder if that indicates a more general trend of “different aesthetics” being more desirable than “different colours”?
This one is fine, I’m not changing it.
So there’s some skewing here, but also,
nobody said they preferred the default skin in preference to any of the reskins, which I consider to be a job well done. So people in the minority have nothing to fear here - I’m keeping all three.
Also, Riddler skin concepts are hard.
Remember, corn has only fifteen votes, so take this with a spoonful of salt if you were taking the others with a grain.
Big skewing here, but also largely preferred to the default skin. And again, this is one that’s hard to make good skins for (and I, like, just made them ) so they’re not going to change, at least for now.
Very uninteresting results. Everyone likes at least one of the skins, so by that measure, I don’t believe I should change any.
…well.
I mean, they’re all more popular than the default, but… that’s a very popular skin at the top there. I’m going to put it down to the idea of Gold-Plated Cutlery being very well liked, rather than the other two being disliked (I’ve had positive feedback on all of them, so…) we’ll keep these as-is for now.
Also, as a final note - the total average rarity skewing for all weapons (the pink bar) sat at 37.7%, which does make me feel as though my inclination to have them not tied to a rarity level is justified. But I’d like feedback on this too.
Congratulations! This is the end of the post. You’ve made it. Well done. Thanks for reading!
