Take Supports for a Test Drive

professorplum9

Here's an idea that might help Supports gain more traction. Make it possible to retrieve your Red ISO from them (at least once) aka Test Drive.

In light of announced changes to Supports, it seems like this is a feature they'd want/need to implement anyway. Just like when a character is reworked they offer players the ability to recoup some of the sunk ISO, covers, etc.  Folks who have been giving supports a shot shouldn't have to have their RISO locked away when new more powerful supports are on the verge of being released.

RISO is so rare there are a fair number of folks out there who are hesitant to invest it into any support. Imagine though if you could put RISO into a support and try it out for a while. Then let's say you happen to get a better support or a higher level support that you want to pump more RISO into. You go to your existing support select the option to withdraw your RISO. Maybe they make it so you can only do this once and the next time you put RISO into that support it's locked. This way rather than have a bunch of RISO sitting around doing nothing people would feel some degree of freedom to at least give some supports a shot knowing they don't risk wasting this rare commodity if the support fails to deliver a benefit commensurate with the cost.

Not every player is going to log onto the forum and scour the data to see what kind of damage, %chance, etc a support at a particular level will do. Even those that do might discover that paper analysis often pales with real world experience. Much like buying a car you may peruse the specs online, but you're still going to want to take it for a test drive before committing any hard earned cash to it.  So why not give players the option to put RISO into a support, see how it performs with an option to take the RISO back out again and try using it somewhere else if they aren't satisfied.

The win from a business perspective would be that after being able to try out multiple supports at different levels they might find multiple supports they feel useful and worth leveling and this will incentivize them to chase more RISO either with money or event engagement.

If RISO extraction were to be limited to one time per support it would be nice to have this flag reset if a support were to increase in rank (as additional powers would be unlocked and need to be test driven).

I know the temptation might be to just charge a RISO tax vs having to implement this one time flag logic, but I would argue that again given how rare of a resource it is (and if ISO buyback rates are any indication taxes tend to be steep) you wouldn't want people thinking I've got to give up X weeks worth of RISO just to test this new support out.

Any rate, just an idea. I think a try before you buy could really help get the ball rolling here. Thoughts?

udonomefoo

I was just thinking this morning while looking at the "what is your highest level support" thread that the people who said from the beginning that they were holding Riso because more powerful supports would probably come out later were right.  

It would be nice to be able to re-allocate once the stronger ones start coming out under the new system they announced.

supergarv

I like this. Another way would be to have a daily/weekly crash where you can pick from a few maxed supports which rotate every week, like boosted chars.