so after digesting the latest update, these are strictly my thoughts on three major things I hope to see the game add
Making the Idols Matter:
This may just be due to how ambiguous a single's sales calculation is, but as far as I can tell, you can essentially swap out an entire formation of established girls for freshly-hired idols and not suffer any perceivable consequence. (To test this, I put my 15 idols with the lowest fame out of a roster of around 25-30 in one single, most of them having been in the group for around a year or less: the previous single in that save sold 490k, and was composed entirely of the top 10 of that year's election. This test single sold 470k+, becoming my second best-selling single. The single before had the same marketing strats as the test one. Test single's center had 5k fans, with the rest of the girls reaching up to 10k at best: The previous center had 33000 fans, with the rest of the formation being 15k and up.)
I guess this test reinforced my belief that there should be consequences and benefits to important things like deciding who should be in a single. People have noted the idols are slowly moving away from being "money-making robots", but in some aspects they still seem like dolls who contribute their stats to singles and nothing else.
Additionally, the graduation system, while neat and definitely improving with each update, doesn't have any impact by the time you start hitting major graduations (OG members, important idols and frequent centers.) other than "well, can't use this high-stat idol anymore, time to swap her spot out for the next platinum idol!" By that point, a few clicks of the promotion tool or a single release will easily replace her lost fans. With AKB, the graduations of the establishing members was a HUGE deal and something AKS STILL hasn't completely recovered from. Something mirroring this would help making the mid/lategame engrossing and alleviate the "huge pile of money with nothing to do" problem.
I think the root may be that it feels like an individual idol's fans are tied to her only for election results, but the game looks at the group's total fans for a LOT of things. A scandal is huge for an idol (appropriately so, I had a fun scenario where one of the idols I was prepping to easily place in the election got into a scandal and didn't even place in the end due to how many fans she lost.), but not for the group as a whole, really. I could see some tweaks:
1. Capping/adding a soft limit on fandom growth as time goes on
While the promotion tool is VERY helpful for getting off the ground at the start of the game, it either becomes useless as you do more (What good is 10k additional fans when your singles sell 500k already and make 100M yen?) or takes out any challenge (Idol caught dating and her 8000 fans abandoned the group? Promote a few times or release a single and you'll be good as new.).
In reality there's max saturation, where everyone is aware of a product and if they're ever going to consume it, they probably already have. The system right now is following the singles problem of Beta 9 where you can get 490% appeal with adults or hardcores and proceed to sell 3M, as if there's an infinite supply of fans. It's causing a runaway effect where releasing more always makes the next release gather more sales/fans. There could be a point where pretty much all of your group's relevant target audience knows you exist, and then your fan gains via singles and the promotion tool become less effective and start approaching zero.
2. Using set demographics?
For example, say 10M people live in the game's setting, and 2M are teens, with 500k being girls. In this fix, your total amount of hardcore+casual female teen fans can never be greater than 500k. As you approach 500k, the game starts limiting how many female teen fans you add with each release/promotion.
3. The participating idols' fanbase contributes to a single's success
For example, an idol with 8000 YA hardcore female fans is put in a single. The appeal of the single to YA hardcore female fans goes up and it's likely her fans will buy it. The game could look at the total group's fans and makeup for assigning gained fans to newer idols, but the idol makeup of the actual single should have more influence over the sales.
4. Fans could lose interest in the group over time and leave for good
This is a phenomena in real life that I think could add longevity to the game: With the AKB OG graduations, while some fans switched to newer idols, a lot went with their fave when she graduated, and transformed from hardcore fans to casuals, at best (if they didn't stop following the group entirely). When the girls graduate (Or threaten to), it could be made impactful by her fans being SERIOUS assets who can't be replaced: If they leave, their sale is gone, and it'll take clever play to garner new fans to replace the supporters of your OG and critical idols. Adding in some of the above tweaks, it may require targeting a new, untapped audience entirely because you've already saturated hardcore, adult males, for example.
Making the fans matter
(As a tie in to the point above, I think the fan opinion/appeal mechanic is ambiguous right now. I think that fans of the group as a whole and individuals getting upset over your choices and threatening to withhold support would help spice up gameplay.)
Intrigue:
The game's tagline is something along the lines of "bring your group to the top by any means necessary", which I found exciting, but I really don't think there's anything in the game as of now that piques interest like the phrase "by any means necessary" does.
I've seen people suggest making the game grittier/darker/edgier/more realistic by adding things like suicide/assault/exploitation etc. but I think that's adding realism at the consequence of fun. I do think the blackmail angle is good, but could be implemented more.
Maybe something like an intrigue system? Right now idols' wishes are sort of passive and must be initiated by the player, but what if they were more elaborate in their ambitions and personalized to the girl?
For example, the one dance practice event that exists right now: One of your idols feels the dance would look better if there was a costume change, and asks you to talk to the Choreographer about changing it, and that can result in conflict with the idol, conflict with the choreographer, conflict between the idol and choreographer or with other idols. All resulting because one idol asked you to make her look good. There's also the "Idol A thinks Idol X isn't deserving of center/gigs" events. I'd like to see more of this, and I feel like they wouldn't have to have super-scripted story beats, either. Right now the wishes sorta hint at what I would imagine intrigue to be, but they're really passive and just seem like whims randomly assigned to idols, rather than steps in their goals. What if all idols in your agency essentially had the wish to be the top idol within it, but their definitions/methods of how to get there varied slightly and scaled up as you played?
To draw up a scenario, we have five idols: One has an "ultimate goal" of being a TV host, another being a solo act, another as an actress, one more of starting her own group as a producer, and another wants to be a top girl in your group. All five are idols in your group not to simply grow it, but to benefit somehow. So they ask for favors to help themselves get to their ultimate goal, which incidentally helps you grow your agency.
- One thinks the group should do elegant dances
- Another asks you for center
- Another wants you to take someone out of center, or out of the single entirely
- Another wants to have your top media show, which will require replacing an existing host/cancelling her show
- Another asks you to blacklist Idol B out of business dealings
- Idol C asks for Idol A to be fired/transferred to a new group
- Idol D asks to transfer and center a sister group, or for a captain position
- etc
Perhaps even other characters could take part in this? Fujimoto asking for a say in musical direction/pushes and lineup in exchange for assistance with assets?
Franchise-building:
It seems like a major goal of a lot of idol groups is to take a the success of a singular group and build it into a franchise (AKB>SKE, NMB, HKT, Nogi>Keya, Hina, =LOVE>Not Me, etc.). Subgroups seem to have been a popular feature request (And I know I've suggested it as well!), but now that I think about it, I believe they could offer a lot of new aspects to gameplay:
You start out as usual with just your single group "ABC46". For one reason or another, due to your success with ABC46, you have the opportunity (or are encouraged/tasked) to establish a sister group "XYZ46" and make them popular as well. Your current fans won't drop ABC in droves for the unknown XYZ, and won't all have the money to support both, so you need a way to attract attention and new fans to XYZ. I could see several gameplay scenarios that build off of it, like trying to garner fans at first by giving an XYZ member a major position/center in an ABC single that she can take back to boost the XYZ group (Like AKS did for Jurina in Oogoe Diamond), transferring a major member of ABC to XYZ to give a quick boost to the fanbase, trying to boost sales of a single by combining distinct fan demographics in adding sister group members to the main ABC group's singles (Like AKS does nowadays), weaponizing the system to get rid of bullies/cliques and punish problem idols by "demoting" them to a more obscure sister group (Like Sashihara's move to HKT), rewarding/gaining influence over idols by promoting them to the main group or adding them on the main's singles, etc.
I could see this feature leading to girls within one subgroup having a rivalry with other subgroups (Maybe the original ABC girls will resent the player/sister group if XYZ becomes a trending group, or two sister groups will develop resentment if they have similar identities and feel like the player/group is trying to "replace" the original.), or better relationships/fiercer resentment within their own subunit depending on how well it's doing/how recognized individual girls are within the franchise as a whole (ie girls who are always in XYZ singles have a good relationship but are resentful against girls who get to do XYZ AND ABC singles). Perhaps even fandoms could fit into this system? (Such as questioning the group if two sister groups have similar concepts or feeling alienated if the flagship ABC girls has its members phased out in favor of sister members, like is happening with the real AKB franchise.)
I could also see this system having good synergy with the "backdealing" nature of intrigue and helping individualize idols+characterize their fandoms. (Unhappiness upon getting demoted to another sister group after the request of an ambitious rival idol?) Maybe there could even be options in how transfers are organized by allowing some Team Shuffle event, which would be more palatable to fans and would build interest, rather than a quick and sudden notice of an idol being sent to a different group.
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Well.... that was a lot, and a post that took me three days to finish. These are just musings/ramblings of mine, but these are basically the only additions I think would make the game completely fleshed out to me! thanks for reading, haha