the game starts and shows me the enemy team for a second, i'm going to be looking at their weapons not their gear.
Pretty much this for me. Unless if the gear really stands out or it's the same one i'm using, i'm usually not on the look out of gear. But this talking from a not so competitive aspect.
So based on this recent discussion about knowing gear before a match starts (And i could be wrong, so feel free to correct me on somethings if it needs correcting). For those competitive players, knowing gear before a match starts is better sooner rather than later, you might see a popular Ninja squid clothing and know that you're going to be more weary of your surroundings and keep your guard up as that squid can swim and not make a trace in his own ink.
If we were able to change our main ability, then that popular Ninja squid clothing could now become cold blooded. Lets say a Squid from Team Ninja uses this clothing that was previously Ninja squid, but now Cold blooded.
Now for people (lets say hypothetically they're same skill level as the aforementioned squid) on the other team (Team Echo) saw this "Ninja squid" They would implement Ninja squid tactics and their Echolocator/point sensor user would try and use these Sub/special more frequently in order to flush out the Ninja squid (this is based on what i think the strategy would be for countering Ninja squid). But, since the main ability would have been changed, Team Echo would only be able to track this squid for two or so seconds and then the tracker would dissapear, now that could lead to some serious confusion for the Team Echo, the worst case being that this cold blooded user flanks the team entirely getting multiple surprise splats putting Team Echo at a disadvantage during the first minute of the match and Team Ninja could get the head start on them.
I know, the situation is hypothetical, it could or could not happen, but the fact remains that is has a chance to happen. You never know what could go wrong or right in the scheme of things so it's key to be as best prepared as possible in the competitive side of things.
The only way to prevent this confusion from happening is having some sort of indicator that the main ability has been changed. There would be a number of ways to do this, and really, Nintendo is able to do this. The "Sticker" idea is just one example of probably countless other ideas for Main ability indicators.
And that's just for main abilities, as it stands now, unless you get splatted by the entire enemy team, you wont know what the other team has for sub abilities Which is pretty important too i guess but i'll let someone else handle that.
Concluding on this, in my opinion i can assume that changing main abilities are going to be a bad thing UNLESS they also add an (noticeable) indicator of some sort indicating to everyone in the match that they have changed their main ability during the start of the match. Having said that, just because you might run certain abilities doesn't mean that you'll play to that specific style, some one could assume that because a squid runs at least Quick Super jump Main, that they'll be more likely to super jump out of a dire situation when really, the squid's only using it to get to the battlefield quicker
But casuals don't have to worry about any of this at all. If a change to main abilities were allowed, they'd pick what they like, Ninja squid "Oh yeah I'm a ninja now!" Run speed up "Sanic speed!" etc It'd just allow them to customise their ability on their favourite clothing. The only thing they have to remotely worry about, is the price of the Main ability. And the price itself could deter them from changing it in the first place.
So in a main ability aspect, Nintendo has the potential to add changeable Main abilities that would positively affects
everyone equally. Granted that when changing the Main ability, an indicator of some sort appears for the competitive side. And the pro would out weigh the con with no real downsides apart from complaining about prices, grinding AND how the competitive side of Splatoon interferes with the"casual" aspect of the game. But there's ranked and turf war so that is pretty much already the separation that the game need.
Me personally i reckon if they made it so we could change main abilities, they should have Spyke suddenly become rich enough to have his own store selling main abilities and what not xD