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Pretty simple proposal, whenever new,sources become available, allow retraining for a discount to the new feats, spells, traits, and mebbe even classes. Unchained got me thinking of this. Letting people retrain will get the casuals more interested in new books, which is the lifeblood of this industry. The usual gripe of power gamers can plan to retrain is lessened in this case, as it is only available for new stuff, and therefore very hard to plan for. the retraining should only be a short window, mebbe a few months, but I honestly cannot see a downside for this for paizo.
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i realize that the economic benefits of doing this bay not be immediately obvious to some people.
right now in pfs there is essentially a "no refund" policy. players spend time (which is meant to be rewarding for sure) as well as money for source material to enjoy their time. if a player has a bad session (whether because of gms, bad players, or just an emergency that pops up) they currently cannot later get a replay (or refund) on that scenario. if they spend money on a sourcebook and in game resources on a feat or trait they end up disliking, they cannot get a refund.
i feel it is well established that the organizers are against flat out retraining for various reasons, and i am not trying to argue against that. i am arguing that if a new source comes out, and a player has a feat/trait/spell or whatever that they would like to switch out for the new ability, they not only have to buy the book, but also spend in game resources (which they also have worked for, it might be fun work, but it is still work) in order to change to the new ability. i am sure that both costs together present a significant enough reason for some players to avoid purchasing the new book.
however, if you remove a cost (a cost of time that does not involve actual revenue for the company) you could potentially entice more customers into purchasing new material.
of course i am not saying that this amount of increased revenue would be overwhelming, but think of it like this; if there is a soda machine in the back of my store that you have to walk up a flight of stairs to get to, less people will go to that than the one right at the entrance. the extra cost of time spent loses potential sales.
additionally, if the window was limited to 1-3 months, people would be potentially more excited to see material that they could immediately use, and the fear of missing the window would result in some sales to people that might not want the book otherwise.
the costs of this action would most likely be talking about the rules change at a meeting (im not sure how much that costs paizo honestly). the costs to gms and organizers (volunteers) would be moments of their time verifying that the retrains are being done properly, which is part of what they do already and should not result in any sort of negative publicity or anything.
this could potentially also slightly counter the problem that all rpg systems have: new rules are a way to make money, but only if people are willing to buy new rules. i think if you ask around you will find that sales for pathfinder unchained were increased by people buying it just so they could retrain their barbarian or rogue.
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I think a major issue is the difference between retraining and rebuilding. Retraining in its current form is more of an investment in improving yourself since it can be used to replace certain features that you selected at early levels with new features that you qualify for now but didn't meet the prerequisites for at the time. When you rebuild a character you need to be able to hold up to a GM audit and your selections must be viable at each level. Additionally, full rebuilds generally include resale of affected gear at full price whereas retraining is feature specific. I was quite happy to see the rebuild option that was made available with the release of unchained myself, and it would be nice if full or partial (no gear reselling) rebuild options were more available as faction journal or scenario rewards.