A cosmetic store is coming soon to KeyStone! In this post I’d like to share how cosmetics will work, and why I chose to build the store as the next big feature.

About KeyStone Cosmetics

Cosmetics will be broken into three categories: trophies, pets, and decorations.

Normal cosmetics will be purchasable with credits, not essence, so save your credits! Some exclusive cosmetics will be for crowdfunding backers only, like the ones already in the game now, and these will never be purchasable with credits. The new cosmetics menu will allow you purchase, enable, and disable cosmetic items.

Trophies will be the most common and varied of the cosmetics. Each player can choose one trophy to display behind their team’s spawn area. Some trophies will be affordable for most players, some will be quite expensive, and some will be somewhere in-between.

Pets will be a slightly rarer cosmetic, due to being expensive or being exclusive for crowdfunding backers. Players can each choose one pet to enable. Pets can be commanded around the battlefield, but will have no gameplay effect. The Lab Bot given to some Unnatural Experiments backers is an example of a pet.

Decorations will be the rarest cosmetic. They will be modifications to the battlefield that are shared by your entire team. Players can enable or disable any number of the decorations that they own, but if you disable a decoration and one of your teammates has it enabled it will still show up. The Xel’naga Foundation and Xel’naga Crystals given to many Unnatural Experiments backers are examples of decorations.

Why Cosmetics?

There are a lot of factors I consider when deciding what to add to KeyStone next. The game is still at a point where I feel new features must be aimed at fixing systematic issues, rather than just adding whatever seems most exciting.

The two issues at the top of my list right now are:

Veterans complete their collections too fast, leaving them nothing to work towards. The new player experience isn’t great due to a lack of tutorial/introductory content, and it will only get worse as more sets are released.

There are a lot of ways I could try to address issue 1. Most card games address it by ensuring you can never have a complete collection; compared to KeyStone their rare cards are rarer, their packs are more expensive, and their sets are larger and more frequent.

As a consumer I find that model extremely frustrating, and following it would make issue 2 much worse, so I’m trying to do something a bit different with KeyStone. I want it to be feasible to earn a full collection just by playing the game for a while. I also want expansion backers to get enough credits to complete majority of the set they are backing.

But this leaves me with an awkward problem: what do veterans have to work towards once they’ve unlocked all the cards? And what should they do with their tens of thousands of unspent credits?

Adding a more robust and competitive ranking system would partially solve the problem, and it’s something that I would ultimately like to do some day. Ranking up can keep a competitive-minded veteran engaged for years. But this direction wouldn’t solve the unspent credits part of the issue, and it focuses on competition in a game that can never have true matchmaking due to the StarCraft Arcade platform.

The cosmetics store addresses the problem in a more robust and casual-friendly way. By “casual” in this case I’m not referring to new players, I’m referring to players who play a lot, but are in it for the laid-back experience.

Because the cosmetic store is mainly aimed at giving really dedicated players something to spend credits on, most of the items will be pretty expensive. My goal here is to set prices so that it’s nearly impossible to earn everything, but very possible to buy your favorites if you’re one of the players sitting on tens of thousands of credits. And I also want to make sure there are always a few cheap items for players who haven’t played much yet but want to participate.

So, to summarize, the cosmetic store was chosen as the next big feature in order to permanently ensure that veteran players will always have something to work towards.

Shiraq and I have been working hard on the store, and hope to be able to set a release date soon. If you have any questions about how the store will work, or any other related feedback, please share in the comments below!