Bounce Gate Priority Points Decay -- Request for Comment

Game Mechanics
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Before you read this post, please ensure you’ve read how the Bounce Gate will work!

Boucne Gates are charged by burning GLTR, which allows players to teleport to the gate.

In addition to GLTR, Alchemica can also be spent to increase the Priority Points of the event, which will increase its ranking on the Event Leaderboard.

Why would you want to increase your ranking? Because UI real estate is limited, and events with high Priority will be displayed at the top of the list (good for advertising).

However,. we have determined that without some sort of decay mechanic, someone could grief the leaderboard by spending a large amount of Alchemica, essentially cementing their position at the top, unless someone spends more than them.

This isn’t really ideal, as the leaderboard will get stagnant quickly, so we would like to propose introducing a decay mechanic.

A couple ways we have discussed:

1 pt Decay per minute – Points would decay linearly, at a rate of 1 pt per minute
0.05% decay per minute – Points would decay on a curve, at a rate of -0.05% per minute
0.01% decay per minute – Points would decay on a curve, at a rate of -0.05% per minute

@letsgobankless has made a spreadsheet to show the % decay per minute model:

Overall, we’re looking for something that isn’t too punishing to large spenders, while still allowing us to maintain a dynamic leaderboard.

Would love to hear some opinions from the community on how you’d like to see this implemented (keeping in mind the limitations of onchain data!).

We have roughly one week to brainstorm before we’ll need to wrap up the contract and prepare for deployment.

11 Likes
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I’m not comfy with the idea of a decay that is not a multiplier of the initial Piority Points paid.

-1 Priority Points per min might be a lot for someone buying 100 points, but that’s nothing for a whale buying a lot of those. Depending on how alchemica prices evolves and how much player are willing to sink in, we will likely need to adjust that constant frequently.

3 other options would be:

  1. Blue curve: a multiplying factor (ex: your priority points lose -0.01%/min). The red curve
  2. Red curve: set a decay period over which all points would vanish (ex: 1 week / month) and fit a linear curve
  3. Yellow curve: set a decay period and fit a slowly decreasing curve

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I think Option 1 looks a bit scary for investors, knowing your points will vanish that fast, while option 3 with a 1 month decay period looks reassuring.

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On top of the decay mechanism one could implement a multiplier for setting an early end time. E.g. if someone wants to promote a two hour event, they should not need to spend a huge sum to get to the top of the UI list. Then after those 2h are up, their UI listing and all their spent alchemica would be gone immediately.

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This will be our big topic this weekend at the meeting. Anyone who has an idea to present, HMU and we can either get you on stage, help you promote your idea, or connect you with someone who can help you with getting your point across or doing math

If you can’t be at the meeting, let me know so I can put extra care into presenting your info, and so i have a chance to show you beforehand.

I see we got letsgobankless in there tho… I’m giving two to one odds on their plan being brilliant, because I can confirm that there was some artfulness in the way the recipes remixes were done. Putting a lot of thought into the cost/reward/fomo inducement curves of these things is where we win or lose… Simply picking the min and max spend is the range of acceptability… what happens in the middle is what gets you to happily spend more when it is appropriate, but not feel taxed, for normal operations.

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We could approach this in a similar way you would think about paid advertising placements. The costs increase as you move up to more premium placements, and it’s not linear. The cost differential to go from 2nd to 1st should be higher than to get from, say, 5th to 4th. This is because typically the benefits increase in a non-linear fashion as you move up to more premium placements.

As an example, here are some clickthrough rates for Google organic search results. Source

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The same pattern typically plays out when it comes to other paid placements in media. The top spots receive an outsized benefit and the difference is diminished as you move down to less premium spots.

I think this would be an argument for having the rate of the decay be faster the higher up your position on the leaderboard. To hold the higher positions longer requires a much higher cost. The curve above could serve as a model for how severe the curve would be, depending upon how much of an advantage in visibility the top bounce gates offer via the UI. (If you rotate it counter-clockwise 90 degrees, you’d have a graph similar to @letsgobankless Option 1, but steeper at the top and with no cap on spending)

Questions (pardon if this has been answered elsewhere, I may have missed some details on the bounce gates and leaderboard over the past week):

  1. Can you pay more to boost your leaderboard ranking after the fact? Or is it limited to a one-time transaction? It seems like we want bidding wars to maintain the top spot.

  2. Are there UI mockups we could see? Are the results paginated? Are the top 1-3 placements given any kind of special weight (ie: a banner on the main gotchiverse page, bolded, etc)? Giving the highest placements more weight has the potential to drive more revenue.

  3. Is the revenue from these paid placements treated as “crafting”?

  4. What happens if a player does not purchase any priority points, or all priority points have decayed? Do they just have zero points and the secondary sorting of the leaderboard is to list the more recent bounce gates first?

1 Like
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Thanks for the thoughts. Furthermore option 3 could pose the problem of squatters. A higher decay as in option 1 would leave a chance to small players to get a high ranking once.

  1. Yes you can add as many points as you wish
    2.3. Hmm not sure i should spit out the alpha
  2. Yes you sum it up well, but probably would want to incentivize the oldest events first, as they’ve spent more GLTR. Altho with option 1 (-0.01%/min), if we don’t set a decay period or a minimum to be ranked, even spending 1 FUD will get your bounce gate ranked over no-spenders forever
1 Like
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Leaderboards are notoriously difficult to do onchain, especially those with decaying mechanics like this (as the decaying isn’t actual saved onchain until a transaction is made).

That’s why we were more focused on the decay rate, rather than the cost for moving up a position.

One way we could simulate this would be modulating the decay rate based on the # of points (i.e more points = higher decay rate) but with the %-based rates by @letsgobankless this is already happening (0.1% of 10,000 is more than 0.1% of 1000).

Yes you’ll be able to “top-up” your leaderboard ranking whenever you want.

UI is almost done, but it’s essentially an endless list with the top spots appearing first, and scrolling to load more results. You can also filter by various parameters such as name, district, etc.

We’re planning to burn the Alchemica. Another idea was to auto-zap Alchemica into liquidity pools, but to do that we’d need to sell half of it for GHST first. Does the community have any preference?

Yes by default the most recently-created events would be displayed first.

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Could Decay become significant only when there’s lots of events vying for attention? Simply, as more bounce gates are posted or as more alchemica is spent on priority points the decay rates increase.

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Have you ever modeled the effect of that action on prices? Between selling to LP and selling to rent gotchis, alch seems like it’s been running with a backpack full of rocks.

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I think with the option 1 curve, that should happen naturally due to market demand. The amount of points you’ll need to rise up the rankings will depend on how much competition there is, and the decay accelerates as the number of points increases.

It’s not the absolute number of points that matters, only the number of points relative to other events competing for visibility.

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This is why I think option 1 is the best choice

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Will players be able to filter specific listings? If they get tired of looking at the same things at the top, they could just remove them manually through the UI. It’s nonetheless good to have a plan like this ready to go if it ever becomes an issue.

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I just realized that the real utility of these will be during great battles and other events where you want to coordinate an army.

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good project in aavegotchi

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Love bounce gates, but still wistfully remember that one of the features I’d originally hoped for was a quick way to zap between parcels owned by the wallet of the gotchi currently in the 'verse, rather than having to exit and re-enter. This would be so handy for parcel maintenance.
Maybe a glitter spend per zap?

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Yes, this is needed for sure. Just add tiny alch or glitter fees to all new QOL stuff. We should make the game as manageable as possible by one person, so that its enjoyable, instead of bring something you have to farm out.

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Let’s keep exploring, even though it’s not easy to be 90% active

1 Like