Gear...? Why not?

Killmaster_9

Okay, so I'll be honest. I really do think the relics in the game are really cool and all. They are extremely helpful on the right champs and the striker feature is cool. But I think (And hopefully other summoners out there) that having specific gears, maybe even like 1 or 2 possibly up to 10 would be great. They could boost PI and specific stats of said character and I feel like they would be a good opportunity to make some bad champions decent and good champions even better. Just food for thought, I was playing Injustice 2 Mobile and I thought it might be cool in MCoC since it's a better game overall.

DNA3000

A couple things. FIrst, the gear system in Injustice 2 is not conventional gear. It is character-specific gear, which means most of the gear in the game is designed to work specifically with one specific DC character. So you aren't so much collecting and assembling gear as you are unlocking abilities analogous to a skill tree. Injustice 2's system is a very specific implementation of gear that has pros and cons.

Second, gear isn't just gear. You can't just spend all that time making up a gear system and stop. Injustice 2 doesn't just allow players to assemble gear, it also customizes the character appearance depending on the gear being used. This isn't a "free design decision" in the sense that you can take it or leave it. The decision to use gear affected the appearance customization in the game to allow players to show off their gear and see what other players were using in a fight. If you don't do this you have a blind gear system that can become very problematic in certain combat modes.

Next, we have the IP holders. Warner/DC owns and controls the DC universe games, while Disney/Marvel controls the IP used in games like MCOC. Marvel has traditionally been much more tight-fisted when it comes to character customization than DC has been. DC allows Injustice to turn Batman into a one-man band of walking machinery, but Marvel is much less likely to allow Kabam to dress up Winter Soldier in a powered exoskeleton and an ISO-8 powered fog horn. Out customization options come in much more "invisible" or at least static forms.

Finally, there's a player culture element to this. Injustice launched with its gear system. If you don't like gear or don't like the concept of gear, you wouldn't play Injustice. The players that do play it are okay with it, because otherwise they wouldn't still be playing it. But MCOC has an established playerbase that has a very different attitude towards gear. Not only did Kabam have to navigate Marvel's limitations when it came to relics, Kabam also had to navigate the fact that various surveys and feedback channels consistently told them that the existing players (or at least the subset of them that respond to such things) did not want a typical gear system to be added to the game. Much of the limitations of Relics probably trace to the fact that a) Marvel probably did not want them to allow for wild visual customization of established Marvel characters and b) MCOC players had consistently told them not to add gear to the game.

Relics were not created in a vacuum. They were an attempt to add a level of customization and extra capability to champions in a way that would be simultaneously acceptable to the existing players and to the IP holder. There's often a lot of features that other games have that players think would be good to add to this game, but such features have to survive being adapted to serve a different game, a different IP master, and the desires of a completely different group of players. Not all good ideas can survive being transplanted in that way.