Concept Discussion: Shared Toons

locochoco

Pretty straight forward concept.

How I see it working in summary?

You and your friends pay a small fee to go on a buddy program where you get 1 or two shared slots that have FreeForm logic. Instead of the lightning bolt icon, it's two heroic arms clutch hand in comradery or something.

Now. You can create a new toon with that slot, "upgrade" an existing toon to Shared, or leave it open to await a share request.

You can request to share a toon with any friend who has an open shared slot to accept into. The requester and creator is the Owner. At any time the owner can cancel their person's access, at any time this person can drop their access to it.

When being used by one person, the Icon at main menu would show in a different way, such as light up green instead of metallic gold to show your friend is currently using the toon.


Immediate concerns emerge surrounding abuse, of course. The idea is that if you and a friend both paid to, probably create a character together, or share one you've both loved and talked about co-oping in fantasy, chances are you can trust that person. Chances are it will enrich your experience so much you may buy more slots for other friends.


I feel like the option to build characters together and share the experience of crafting builds is a pretty, although not new thing, new to the studios and game makers. But I feel this is coming, soon. And it will revolutionize the studios that happen to see the potential in it.

Again we're talking about a paid feature, not anyone being able to share a toon with anyone, cause mass abuse and outrage.


What do you think of this?

historiphile

The part of the idea that I like is just the ability to more easily share costume data to a friend, or the ability to maybe gift Zen store unlocks to friends. Tangentially related, I would love to be able to generate custom NPCs for RP to help my friends' immersion in a scenario.

But I can think of a few reasons Cryptic would never do toon sharing, and they pretty much all come back to 'lost revenue'. For example, a new player could just play on a veteran player's shared slot, apparently benefiting from everything the vet has unlocked, requiring no investment of time or money from the new player to earn those things themselves, beyond maybe the cost of buying a share slot of their own--effectively, getting it all at a fraction of the cost. The only way to offset that loss of revenue for Cryptic would be to set the price point of a toon share slot high - which becomes self-defeating because then dev time went into programming something that few people would buy, thus low ROI.

You touched on the social issues that could arise, which does have a cost in CSR time to address. Or if someone quits the game forever because of an unfavorable split over a shared toon, that is not good for the community, or the game as a business.

locochoco

Except toon sharing wouldn't really give that new player any advantages of their own. If anything, it gives them a live window into the endgame content, but at the same time, it belongs to the Creator. You can't run back to your individual main and start using all of those costume part, hideouts, emotes, auras, giving yourself keys and items from that shared toon.

Clear restrictions would be in place. If CO were new and thriving, I'd fully understand paranoia surrounding business model hiccups. This can ONLY generate profit right now and interest in a decaying community. People are already quitting for life over less than a split over shared toons.