Gifting covers

mischiefmaker

I would love to have the ability to send covers to other players. I realize that this is potentially disruptive to the economy, enabling people to smooth out randomness in their pulls and thereby complete covers faster, but there is also big upside potential for increasing engagement and stickiness.

Gifting covers would require an additional button in the cache. Perhaps something on the right side, underneath the little star, would work. This would open up a screen where the player could specify a username to send the cover to. To reduce the effect on the economy, there would be a cost associated with sending the gift. I'm thinking it would be something significant, so that you'd only send gift to real friends or people you trust to return the favor at some point: say 1000 ISO for a 1* cover, 200 HP to send a 2* cover, 500 HP to send a 3* cover. I picked these prices as I'd be willing to pay them to send the occasional cover to a friend, but I wouldn't do it on a whim. Also, if people want to use the gift system to trade, they can, but at significant risk (the other player may not gift back) and cost (most players won't have enough HP to do it).

Once sent, the cover is removed from the player's inventory permanently. When the gift recipient logs in, they get a popup saying "You got a gift from <sender>!" the same way you currently get a popup when someone sends shared rewards. The cover goes into the recipient's cache as with any other cover.

Benefits of gifting:
- opens up huge avenues of player interaction. High-level players would be able to run their own tournaments, we could send newbies 1* covers as a welcome to the game, etc. This gives high level players a reason to continue playing, low level players an immediate introduction to the community, and could even lead to things like unofficially organized clans.
- ISO and hero point sink. Not as effective of a sink as leveling up powers, but given that dedicated players will likely max out their covers faster than the dev team can produce new characters, it's an additional option for giving players an incentive to acquire more hero points.
- a meaningful interaction for sending push notifications and potential reactivation for lapsed players. Who wouldn't want to open the game to find out what their friend sent them?