No..it's not new. You just may never have noticed it.
The great thing about it is that you can determine what skin you will see in the arena. If a guy likes to use all the darkest colored 109 and 190 he can to hide himself, you can counter that by deleting all the dark skins and make the default a brighter color.
This way when you see one that is not in your skins folder it will default to whatever you set the default as.....get it?
works on tanks too.