Other Gifting Feature

Let’s hypothesise a bit further and see if we can think of a fair and balanced way to implement this, though.
I think that a specific gift store could work, but in the case of sending items from your own collection, it would probably make sense if all of the levels were reset to one in the interest of fairness, a bit like kill counter attachments on the Steam Community Market. There should also be an account level requirement. 20 would be sensible for consistency with Origin Stories being unlocked at the same time, but that could be a bit late so perhaps a slighter lower experience wall could be even more appropriate. What would the limits of the gifts be? Would it be possible to distribute some Canopy Coins to all of the people on your friends list, or could you send a particular person something more valuable, like a gold move or a bronze fighter? Or would there be an option to do both?
There’s a lot the developers will have to consider before they can throw such a massive feature into the mixing pot.

 

There's not really a reason to get so complex about it. Just have them be able to buy relics as gifts for other players or buy theo and send it to other players/coins. That's all it needs to be. We'd need a social feature that lets people connect to each other first like friends lists though.

 

It’s not that simple, either. There need to be measures to stop a veteran spoiling the game for a newbie that they’ve just introduced to the game by throwing fighter relics at them, and the limits on how much currency or how many items can be sent in a certain period need to be considered. I’m not trying to make it more complex, I’m trying to lay out all of the procedures I predict the developers will have to go through before they can even begin to think of adding this as a feature.

 

Well you are, because those don’t need to exist. You don’t need to open relics, they’re gifts. You don’t need to limit money, they can say no. This isn’t hard.

 

By “spoil”, I meant that the experience of playing the game would altogether be ruined because Story mode would be far too easy and would not offer an entertaining challenge, while a lack of true experience would discourage playing specialised Prize Fights. A new player may not know any better and go ahead with it anyway, breeze through Ascent of a Woman with a gold fighter their SGM veteran friend donated to them and then leave a negative review of the game complaining that it is too easy, having not been engaged enough to bother unlocking Origin Stories. If implementing the gifting mechanic is really as simple as you describe, I will be expecting it to ship with whatever social platform update that builds its foundation as it obviously doesn’t take much effort or consideration at all.

 

This is a actually a solid point. I didn’t think of this, thank you.

 

"Gift" relics/gold/theo should only be purchasable by real money. Honestly I think its way too early to implement this, but in the future perhaps? I don't really know other mobile games that have such a function.

The reason gacha games don't have a trade or a gift function (outside of gifting your friends set things as a daily event, like 1000 gold per friend per day, and at 10 gifts given you can claim 10 theo per friend etc.) is because you can easily abuse this by creating multiple accounts and gifting your main. There's no real way to prevent this outside of limiting trades/gifts to "x" amount of resources a day or just not allowing important resources (fighters/theo) to be traded.

As for the point of "spoiling" the game, as long as you make gift purchases only possible with real money, its no different from whale skipping points in the game by spending a bunch of money. I doubt anyone would spend money on others though, maybe make it a cheaper deal so you can gift each other stuff for a cheaper price? This does have the problem of people scamming by promising to gift a player but not following through though.

Personally I'd happily hold like a discord/forum event (console skullgirls mini tournament?) and gift the winner a hypothetical gift pack, but again the community functions haven't really developed enough to do so. Could be fun in the future?

 

You could limit gifts to be given only if you reach player level 40, or maybe 50.
And I don't think you could really discount any of the real money purchases, or else like you said it could be abused by sending them to your main.

 

Ah right didn't think that far haha. Restricting gift giving and receiving to level 50 doesn't seem like a terrible idea, it takes a good while to grind to level 50.