olive rivet
I think one thing the game sort of 'lacks' is giving players an incentive, or 'reward' for reaching certain Social Credit thresholds. At the moment, Social Credit is essentially just a tally of how many cases a player completes until "beating the game", with no other mechanism or reward involved.
I feel like this is a major wasted opportunity for keeping players invested in the game beyond strictly gameplay mechanics. Granted this is still Early Access, and I'm sure there are plans to improve it.
With that said, my suggestion is:
With that said, my suggestion is to essentially restrict access to certain items, or mechanics until reaching a certain threshold. This idea also partially stems from how the game gives you immediate access to a fairly large pool of items that a brand-new player would be unfamiliar with.
Instead, conceptually the player would start with access to the bare minimum items in City Hall to solve cases, and as they gain more "reputation," they gain access to more ways to solve cases. This also would make players curious about using their newly awarded items to solve cases, instead of relying on a one-fits-all solution or mentality to solving cases
Just a few examples of how it could be implemented:
Bloodhound Tracker could be awarded to players upon reaching 1000 social credit threshold
Weapons could be restricted such that they are slowly allowed to purchase "stronger" weapons upon reaching certain thresholds. This also would help the player understand which weapons are subjectively superior than others, such as Sword > combat knife > Tonfa > kitchen knife > fists (or however they go, I myself am still not fully sure what is better than what)
bronze glade