Overwatch Loot Box Opening – Case Study

Ever wondered what your chances where of receiving a Legendary item when opening a Loot Box in Blizzard’s Overwatch? Or your chances of receiving a skin compared to a highlight intro? Look no more! We conducted a 50 Loot Box Opening to see the results and provide them to you.

Infographic results

I put all of the results from the Loot Box Opening into an infographic. However if you’re wanting to go more in depth and look at some key facts and statistics, scroll down!

Regulations in China

Earlier this year, Chinese regulations forced Blizzard China to reveal the chances of receiving certain items in their loot boxes. Which they did, and posted on the Overwatch China site. They stated that each loot box would contain at least one rare item in every box. On average, you could expect an Epic item in every 5.5 Loot Boxes, and a Legendary in every 13.5 Boxes. Although Blizzard may use different rates for different countries.

If we wanted to convert this to percentages, we can expect an Epic item around 20% of the time, and a Legendary item around 8% of openings. Now we can take these statistics and look at our own Loot Box opening. We can expect on average 4 Legendary items and around 10 Epic items.

Upcoming changes to the Loot Box system

In a Developer Update at the end of June this year, Jeff Kaplan mentioned changes coming to the Overwatch Loot Box system. Jeff stated that the amount of duplicates received from Loot Boxes would be drastically reduced.

When it comes to earning credits from duplicates, he said the amount of credits received from the boxes would be adjusted to compensate for the reduced amount of duplicates. At the time of doing this Loot Box Opening, I was Level 34 and had a good amount of rewards under my belt already.

As of July, these changes are live on the PTR and players are encouraged to try them out. They’ll hit the live servers within the next few weeks.

Case Study results

Now we’ll dive deep into the results. Hopefully if you’re reading this, you’re like me and you love to look at statistics and data. I’ll split this section into multiple areas such as item type and rarity.

As 50 Loot Boxes where opened, and there are 4 objects per box, that means we will be receiving 200 items. This is a pretty handy number, as it will be easy to work out percentages.

Item type

When you open a loot box, you have the potential to open one of 9 different objects for Overwatch. These objects consist of Sprays, Icons, Credits, Voice lines, Skins, Emotes, Victory poses and Highlight intros.

Let’s break down what we got item wise, sorted by the amount received. As mentioned earlier, we would be receiving 200 items total. So we can take the number of total items below and half it to get the percentages.

• Sprays: 80 (40%)
• Voices: 34 (17%)
• Skins: 23 (11.5%)
• Victory Poses: 22 (11%)
• Credit Drops: 20 (10%)
• Icons: 14 (7%)
• Emotes: 4 (2%)
• Highlight intro: 3 (1.5%)

The results are interesting. We expected to receive a tonne of sprays, as that’s the object with the highest quantity in Overwatch. However we only received 3 Highlight intros and 4 Emotes out of 50 cases, or 200 items. Making the total percent at 3.5 for these two combined, or 7/200.

For our Loot Box Opening, the object we most wanted to receive was skins and credits. With the chances of receiving either or these items at 22.5%, that’s good odds. That means we received one of these items in almost every Loot Box.

Item rarity

Now we’ll look at how many items we received of each value. There are 4 different values of objects in Overwatch, corresponding of 4 colors.

1. White = Common (Sprays & Voice lines)
2. Blue = Rare (Skins, Victory Pose, Icons & Credits)
3. Pink = Epic (Emotes, Highlight intros, Skins & Credits)
4. Gold = Legendary (Skins & Credits)

As mentioned above, in Overwatch China at least, every Loot box opened will contain at least one rare item. Meaning we should theoretically expect at least 50 rare objects. Below you’ll see the percentage of objects we received for each category.

• Common: 114 (57%)
• Rare: 64 (32%)
• Epic: 17 (8.5%)
• Legendary: 5 (2.5%)

Looking back at the statistics that Overwatch China provided, we expected around 4 Legendary items and 10 Epic items. We got 1 up on the number of Legendary items, but a huge 7 up on the expected 10 Epic drops, bringing it up to 17.

• 114 Common items consisted of 80 Sprays and 34 Voice lines.
• 64 Rare items consisted of 22 Victory Poses, 17 Skins, 14 Icons and 11 Credit drops.
• 17 Epic items consisted of 8 Credit drops, 4 Emotes, 3 Intros and 2 Skins.
• 5 Legendary items consisted of 4 Skins and 1 Credit drop.

Credit Drops

When opening Loot Boxes in Overwatch, there is also a chance of receiving credits. A highly sought after reward as they allow you to unlock items yourself in the Hero Gallery. Opening Loot Boxes is currently the only way to obtain them.

There are 3 different amounts of credits that can be obtained from Loot Boxes.

• Rare: 50 Credits
• Epic: 150 Credits
• Legendary: 500 Credits.

Credits can also be obtained from duplicate items, however we haven’t observed this factor when doing the case study.

In total, 20 out of 200 drops contained Credits, equalling out at 10% of total drops containing Credits. Out of these 20 Credit drops:

• 11 where of a Rare quality, totalling 50 Credits each, finalising at a total of 550 Credits.
• 8 where of an Epic quality, totalling 150 Credits each, finalising at a total of 1250 Credits.
• 1 was of a Legendary quality, totalling at 500 Credits, finalising at a total of 500 Credits.

That makes a total of a whopping 2250 Credits! With this amount, in Overwatch we can purchase any 2 Legendary Skins (apart from event skins) and any other objects such as Emotes, Voice lines and Victory poses. No other items in game cost more than 250 Credits.

In retrospect, I’d much rather receive credit drops than legendary skins. At least then I can make my own choices!

Skins

We already know that out of 200 drops, 23 where skins (11.5%). However what we don’t know is how rare each skin was. In Overwatch, Skins can be of three qualities. Rare, Epic and Legendary.

In total, 17 Skins where of a rare quality, only 2 where Epic and 4 where Legendary. So out of 23 Skins, the percentages for each quality are 74% for Rare, 9% for Epic and 17% for Legendary. Maybe we just got unlucky when it came to Epic skins.

If you want to know the percentage for receiving each skin type out of all 200 drops. Then the overall chances for a Rare skin are 8.5%, an Epic skin being 1% and a Legendary skin being 2%, putting us back at the chances of receiving a skin at all at around 11.5%.

If you’re really interested to know which skins I actually received, click the tabs below.

If you made it all the way to the end, thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed my first ever case study. If you have any feedback or any suggestions on what study I should conduct next, let me know!