Really? It seems impossible that Interrobang87 did not suggest that colours and crosshairs are purely cosmetic.
A useful, functional crosshair would supposedly be easy to see, does not obstruct vision, attract too much attention, visible across a wide variety of surfaces and backgrounds, and indicate important game mechanical actions such as recoil or spread. Several of Hawken's crosshairs (including the defaults) are very difficult to see and easy to lose in a battle. Crosshairs, incredibly, are not implemented on a per-secondary basis -- the default seconary crosshair is without a doubt worse for the Grenade Launcher and Rev-GL compared to the trajectory crosshair that provides distance markings to help a player learn and adjust shots.
Colours are also evidently, obviously, not purely cosmetic. I would recommend setting all HUD colours to the same variant of yellow -- the player will both be unable to differentiate between allies and enemies (and their respective chat messages without also opening the scoreboard to match speaker with team) as well as be unable to find precious repair orbs on the radar (because repair orbs, and similarly, EU, are yellow and green respectively and their colours cannot be customized to avoid blending in with the radar's colour, yellow or green).
Then this player should come back and try to honestly say that crosshairs, colours (i.e. readability) are purely cosmetic.
Why not also explain how colours can be "crazy/fancy?"
"a free game" -> Hawken? A "free game"? Selling readability? Okay then.
EDIT: A relatively simple suggestion would simply be to allow players to pick a primary-secondary reticle pair free of charge. I do not support any monetization of colours though. I would support a "colourblind mode" option but such an option would have to work for different colourblind conditions, or that there should exist multiple colourblind options for each condition.
At this point, I do believe that monetizing colour is evidently unfair. There are in-game items that sell for less than digital accessibility. What can the reader make of this?
Edited by WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW, 20 April 2015 - 12:01 AM.