Players have been complaining about Apex Legends‘pay to win’ skins for a long time now. The accusations are usually leveled at the Heat Sink and Heavy Metal Flatline skins from the Season 4 Battle Pass, as well as the Outlands Avalanche R99 skin that’s available to craft. These three skins all have superior ironsights to other skins, giving players a slight advantage when they aim down the sights of the weapons.

While this won’t turn a bad player into a good one, there’s a definite advantage to being able to see more of your screen when ADSing with these skins. The Death Ray and Merciless Wing Wingman skins also offer this, although not with the sights. The body of the pistol is significantly thinner on these skins, allowing you to see more to either side of the gun. This may sound small, but when every Apex Legends esports player is running the same skin on their weapon, you can see why it’s a problem.

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The Flatline skins are more of a problem in my eyes. The skins for the R99 and the Wingman can be crafted with Crafting Materials, meaning that anyone can get them - for free - just by playing the game and grinding. Yes, you can pay EA a huge chunk of money and open hundreds of Apex Packs to get more Crafting Materials more quickly, but you don’t have to. For both the Flatline skins, however, you had to spend real money on the Season 4 battle pass to unlock them. However, that could be due to change.

Apex Legends Needs To Do Something About Its Pay-To-Win Skins
Apex Legends Needs To Do Something About Its Pay-To-Win Skins

According to dataminer ‘GarretLeaks’, these skins will be available to return as recolours in the future. Skins from the Season 11 Battle Pass onwards (since EA added, “These items may return in a future event or promotion” line to the game) can return in any form. This method has precedent - skins from Store Events are available to craft for twice the usual number of Crafting Materials and have been for a while now. It allows players to buy out entire events if they want, or wait until the specific item they want is available to craft. Hopefully we’ll see something similar with the pay to win skins.

A lot of complaints about the Flatline skins come from people who didn’t complete that battle pass, for obvious reasons. Maybe they’re newcomers to the game, maybe they switched consoles (cross-progression isn’t a thing yet), maybe they couldn’t afford the pass or have a self-imposed rule about not spending money in exploitative free-to-play games. Or maybe they just didn’t have the time to grind 100 levels at that time. Whatever the reason, a skin that offers a competitive advantage - however slight - should not be locked behind a paywall, or else Apex Legends risks becoming Star Citizen with gay love triangles.

Maggie Apex Legends

Bringing back the skins as recolours is the perfect remedy. The ‘point’ of Battle Pass skins is that they are reactive - they let out a little steam or do a motion when they’re in your hands. While recolours would probably keep the reactive elements, they wouldn’t necessarily have to. Players can craft a skin with their preferred ironsights, it just doesn’t have all the visual bells and whistles. Skins are only meant to be aesthetic anyway, so it’s only fair that everyone can use the overpowered ironsights if they want to. Personally I’ll probably stick to The Lowrider because it looks metal as hell, but a little help on my aim wouldn’t go amiss.

Respawn messed up when skins changed fundamental elements of weapons, but it looks like the developer is finally changing things for the better and fixing the problems it created. Another recolour of the Heavy Metal Flatline won’t come cheap, but having it as an option is important for the integrity of the game. Start saving up your Crafting Materials now, and you might win more 1v1s in your future hot drops. Aim training would help too, but where’s the fun in that?

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