Alternate Economic Proposal – Introducing Altaar durability

Introduction

After much thinking regarding the current issue with alchemica price dropping, here are my conclusions and then the draft of a solution I would like to propose.

  • As many have said Altaar lvl 1 + gotchi has been too easy, investment is low, profit might be low, but risk is zero compared to those that invested more heavily into harvesting installations and higher level altaar.
  • If you look at the ratio between alchemica harvested and channeled, things get spicy. It goes from 1.6 for FOMO to almost 4 for KEK, always in favor of channeling.
  • Apart from aesthetics installations, main alch sink remains upgrade on altaars and harvesters / reservoirs installations.

So my main conclusion is that channeling remains more interesting short term than harvesting.
Channeling is generating more alchemica than harvesting, which was not the plan. To me the axes to enhance the current situation are:

  • Lower the inflation of alchemica created by alchemica
  • Incentive owners to upgrade altaar instead of staying lvl 1
  • Incentive owners to start building harvesters / reservoirs

Introducing Altaar durability

Durability is a well known mecanism used in many games, with many different flavors. Here is the implementation I propose. Regarding all numbers and formulas I propose below, I tried to fine tune the values. The actual numbers are tuned so owner will get enough alch to upgrade before durability goes below 0 (except for upgrade 8 to 9).
Anyway, describing the mechanism remains the most important. If the mechanism is pertinent, numbers can always be fine tuned later again.

Initial value and upgrade mecanism

  • All altaars have a durability value.
  • Initial value is 100 + (altaar level * 9). Altaar lvl 1 has 109 durability points. Altaar lvl 9 has 181 (100 + 9*9) durability points.
  • To be upgraded an altaar must have at least 100 durability points.
  • When an altaar is upgraded its durability value is reset to its new initial value. Ex: if I upgrade my altaar to lvl 6, its durability is reset to 154 (100 + 6*9).

Decreasing durability & profit mecanisms

  • Everyday every altaars lose 1 durability point.

  • If your altaar has less than 100 durability points, channeling reward is negatively affected in a linear way.

    reward = base reward * durability points / 100

  • You can restore durability points up to 100. Repairs are paid in alchemica. Here is the formula to calculate the cost of a durability point. I break down the formula for better explanation

    • First, if altaar durability < 20 then we will use a durability value of 20 in the formula.
    • I calculate a base daily profit that takes spill and level into account, we call it bw
      • bw = base_profit * (100 - spill_percentage) / 100
    • Goal is to introduce a coefficient, in order to decrease the price of repair points compared to profit the higher the altaar level is. The divider value (15 here) allows us to adjust how much we want the altaar level to alter the final result.
      • lm = 1 - (level-1) / 15
    • I used a simple base multiplier to make some adjustments and test variations. Basically this value defines how hard we want to hit the inflation overall. I did some tests from 5 to 25. 20 is already a high value.
      • A = 20

With all that in mind, price of a durability point (p), calculated in fonction of altaar level, spill % and current durability value is

p = bw * lm * A / durability

Keep also in mind that for a given altaar level, repair point price increase when altaar durability decreases, as durability is a divider in the formula

Pros:

  • Change is progressive, nobody loses a big chunk of revenue from one day to another.
  • Low level altaars will be incentivized to upgrade fast.
  • Overall revenue per altaar will be lower in the long run.
  • Could mean more people starting to build harvesters.
  • All altaars are affected by the mecanism.
  • Bit of an alch sink….

Cons:

  • This is certainly only a part of the overall ‘long term’ solution, gotchiverse is here to stay frens !
  • Mecanism is not immediate at all. Especially for high level altaars. Lvl 9 will start to lose profit if they are not repaired after XX days. Mecanism is slow, but by design I wanted to try something that leave people enough space to adjust their current strategies and be ready to upgrade in order to avoid having to pay durability cost.
  • Will need a lot of Dev bandwidth, not even sure all is realistic
  • Maybe my numbers are too gentle / too bad and implementing this won’t change the current situation.

Open questions / options:

  • What happens to the alchemica paid for repair ? Burn, Store in the gran portal … no real idea.
  • Will it solve the issue ? My main idea is to incentivize users to level up to avoid paying repairs for some time. Altaar upgrades and repairs are the new sinks for now….
  • Allow only 1 repair per week. So as soon as you reach below 100 you have to go down to 93 before repair (you can’t repair above 100)
  • My formula to calculate repair cost lower the cost of repair when durability is lower itself.(Repair cost from 99 to 100) > (Repair cost from 98 to 99) and so on to 0. Maybe that’s a bad idea and should be linear instead.
  • My formula to calculate repair cost lower the cost for higher Altaar levels. That’s part of the strategy to incentive players to level up. Here too, it should be discussed. I felt like people that build high level altaar are less likely to be doing a altaar only strat but who knows….

Now all of that is just a framework. Using the google sheet file i provide below, almost all numbers and formulas can be tweaked.

Google sheet with basic calculations / simulations

A more aggressive alternative

Could be something like that :

  • Enforce the “allow only 1 repair per 10 days”
  • After the release, all altars starts with durability = max_durability based on their level - duration since last upgrade.

With those 2 rules applied we would see instant inflation reduction.

I ran the numbers.

For altar lvl 1, harvested by a 700 kinship, we reduce inflation by 15%
For altar lvl 9, harvested by a 700 kinship, we reduce inflation by 13.3%

Again the goal is to strongly incentive land owners to upgrade so they get a new “grace” period.

4 Likes

Thanks for the proposal and the work done. There is a consensus about the price of alchemica just dropping. It’s quite easy as we can all see it. :slight_smile:

I agree with the fact that we should take care about having a good balance between channeling and farming ROI in order to have a higher interest in building on its parcel rather than just installing 1 altaar.

In order to fine tune any proposal, it could be interesting to check the detailed ratio of alchemica really generated by the different altaar levels before taking decisions. Indeed the alchemica price drop may not come from altar lvl 1 channeling.

Aside the channeling/farming balancing, I wonder whether the current price drop is not “normal”:

  • The economic system is quite new, has anybody worked on projections based on what is planned by the team other the next years?
  • The whole market is down
  • People who built right from the beginning lost a bit more than 80% on their investment so I guess some are just cashing out what they’ve farmed/channeled si far
  • The entry cost of the game remains a bit high so not sure we attract new players, especially during a bear market. With few new players, few installations and few alchemica spent in building.
1 Like

This sounds cool! I want to play with the math/scenarios when I get time. If not impossible from a coding standpoint maybe add the durability to reservoirs as well? Daily is good but maybe per use? A lvl 9 altar can be used 24 times a day? Whereas a level 1 can be used once a day.

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Yes some people I talked to while writing the article had the same idea regarding reservoirs and harvesters ( some even wanted tiles to have durability).
To me we have to go one step at a time as It’s hard to forecast properly the impact, kinda “butterfly effect” of such economic changes. Because it’s not just number, it’s mostly what people will decide to do with the verse when any of the economic proposal is implemented
As I wrote before i’m not 100% sure my idea is feasible (I guess it is but only PC can say).

Good idea… and maybe golden items could have more durability

2 Likes

If its golden you paid upfront. I’m 100% down with letting golden stuff be free from decay. I don’t own any, but the people who do, paid in proper on the upfront. No need to penalize them for other people not participating.

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Golden installations were adverttised as purely aesthetic when released. I don’t own any but I ge the point. Maybe golden installations could be considered a bit more robust. Makes sense as they are… golden.

At this point, what was advertised is out the window. There’s not a lot of these out there, its a small thing to give the LE items immunity to decay. In fact, moving forward, it would be a superb way to support their value over time.

1 Like

As I told you it could make sense for golden altaars to be more robust than normal one, I mean XX% more durability point initially or less expensive repairs or slower durabilitty loss…
But I agree it would help to give those a bit of in-verse value