(Jul. 31, 2021 6:10 AM)Dracieleone Wrote: "Allowing more customization options ruins customizability."
Another surface level attempt to undermine it without giving it any real thought huh? Consider this: Many Hasbro buyers will not have access to TT compatible drivers for this to even be a feature, short of those that Hasbro didn't release through Pro Series. This means one of two things:
1: You get access to a rather small handful of drivers you couldn't before (Hasbro Pro Series), at the cost of driving up complexity and the price to build
2: You have to rely on TT to provide any meaningful amount of extra driver options
1 itself is why there's no real payoff to doing so, you're making things harder and more expensive to build just to allow a very small amount of Hasbro released parts to be usable. It's a lot of effort to do almost nothing, and goes against their existing advertising of these Pro Series beys being incompatible with the mainline.
2 is why it's possibly even a bad thing to attempt, as relying on a different brand to fill in holes in your releases is bad form in so many ways it's not even funny. It encourages people to spend their money on overseas beys if they learn about the cross-brand compatibility, and if they only have so much money to spend and spend it there they're not supporting Hasbro as much and may lose some sales from the change. It's not the biggest risk ever, but it is risking a small amount of monthly sales to provide a feature to a more narrow segment of buyers, plus the added costs of getting you there.
tl;dr It's not good on a business decision level, and simply adds more cost to the line (designing costs, added production costs) with no real way to make that money back from it without driving up the costs to the consumer. Add that to the fact that there's no way to simply adjust heights to get it to work and it becomes even harder to do. You're so focused on "more customizability" that you failed to realize that Hasbro as the producer gets absolutely nothing out of this deal, utterly no bang for their buck. They're not gonna do something they can't profit from in some manner, even if it's as simple as free advertising on their boxes like the painted disks are.
(Jul. 31, 2021 6:10 AM)Dracieleone Wrote: You could just redesign the slopes in a manner that accommodates both drivers, but that would require Hasbro to actually think.
Speaking of actually thinking, I'm not sure you realize how difficult this would be on the engineering end. You can't just "redesign the slopes", the incompatibility is built straight into the drivers themselves so that what is compatible with one is incompatible (or stupidly loose) with the other. Mainline Hasbro drivers have a lower base for their drivers, and mainline Hasbro layers have thicker slopes to fit that extra bit of driver in. TT drivers fit in a smaller space, and squeeze the thicker Hasbro layers to death when applied because they're supposed to have thinner teeth to fit around instead, literally crushing the softer plastic underneath them until literally everything is loose on them. There is no way to account for this change in both height and the necessary thickness of the slopes without having two different sets of slopes entirely with two different thicknesses to account for the two different types of drivers. Possibly doable via a flippable system, but it'd still require total disassembly of the bey to pull your slopes out, flip them, and put them back in... and if whatever holds that in place wears a little or there's too much clearance it could just make things more rattly.
And on top of that you'd have to do this while also adding in the two different heights for the QuadDrive system and other gimmicks like Spriggan's dual spin and possibly Valtryek's spring (if they bring that back).
That means you have to build 2 slopes for 2 heights and make sure it can work with both, plus leave room for bonus features. If anything I'm surprised to hear that QuadDrive may actually have those two heights, it's a bit unlike Hasbro not to just strip out gimmicks like that for simplicity... but I suppose it's such a big deal for Belial/Belfyre that they couldn't cut it out of the anime. This still makes it far more difficult to be able to adjust and flip a piece 4 different ways. It may be technically possible, but would likely require removing and flipping the slopes around (which itself is undesirable, it generates a smaller part than previous chips have and makes the line less child safe and therefore less attractive to parents with really young kids).
Oh yeah, and even if they did do this, I'm pretty sure the reason why Hasbro slopes are thicker and their driver plates lower to compensate for it is so they don't break so badly with their softer plastic. Making them TT level thin could make them more fragile or prone to denting (and if it dents, then you have a damaged and maybe unusable layer), and softer Hasbro plastic isn't really good for ' driver level wear either (as earlier Pro Series has proven). There's reasons why their drivers are built so that the layers can have thicker support structures, and I don't think messing with that is a good idea in general.
THE REALLY BIG FRIGGIN' TL;DR:
-This change would add to costs to a line they're trying to make relatively cheaply
-There's no way to recoup those increasing costs short of pushing them on the buyers, making them pricier and less desirable for some
-It would go against existing and continued advertising of Pro Series being incompatible with the mainline
-The number of Pro Series driver releases is so small that you get very little out of the change anyways
-It could entice people to spend their money on overseas beys to get the most out of this feature, actively reducing sales for their own brand
-It's not TT's job to fill in holes that Hasbro makes anyways
-This change would require two different sets of slopes and a way to disassemble your layer to flip between them
at a minimum
-I've already gone ad nauseum that just having "Pro Slopes" would make anything prior to their introduction (Hypersphere, Speedstorm, e.t.c.) so loose that they wouldn't work as intended on new layers, so there's no getting around having one side for each
-The most likely way to do a double-ended slope piece generates small parts and makes it a less child-safe brand
-Such a change could also make the beys perform worse, letting their parts wiggle and rattle more
-You still have other gimmicks to work this change around (e.g. Spriggan's dual spin and the QuadDrive system's dual heights) which only makes it harder to design for in a limited amount of space
-The "Pro Side" slopes would likely be more fragile and wear-prone than normal mainline releases would be as the plastic is thinner and easier to bend
-There's already reasons why Hasbro's mainline slopes are designed the way they are that contribute to the above
Yes, I've thought this through that much. The idea is simply untenable for Hasbro to attempt. Were it at the beginning of the Burst line I might've said "Well, they could pull a Pro Series with everything now and just declare everything earlier like some sort of prototype", but that doesn't work when Pro Series is but a tiny fraction of their line and ignores the hundreds of things that came before.
It is way too little way too late. If you really want TT compatibility in your Hasbeys, just wait for the Pro Series releases. It's the only way Hasbro can reasonably do it at this point in time.
Cincinnati-based Organizer, and owner of every single currently released TT Burst bey part in at least one color. Hard to think of anything I don't have from MFB either...