A lot of land is underutilized causing oversupply.
With spillover turned off lower level farms are less attractive.
Spillover was too extractive
Solution
Turn spillage back on using vAlchemica which is soulbound and can only be used for minting/upgrading farming installations.
Allow fractionalized renting of land. Fraction sizes are 8x8.
Terms for renting a fraction of land are same as gotchi: Up front cost, duration, owner %, borrower %, other %. Additionally you can specify if borrower can channel, how many times they can channel per 24hrs and what time period (utc) they can channel.
Borrower can now start farming on their borrowed land which comes out of the parcels alchemica. The yield is real alchemica and any yield coming from that 8x8 fraction is split according to the rental agreement. Aaltars cannot be built by borrower but they can channel on owners aaltar according to the rental agreement, yield is split the same.
Once the rental period is over (expired or terminated by owner) the borrower gets a soulbound voucher for their installations which can then be used elsewhere on their next rental. For example, if you build a level 2 FUD harvester and a level 2 FUD reservoir and then your rental expires you then receieve 2 vouchers (1 for each installation) and can build those elsewhere. The vouchers will not instantly build though so will have to either use gltr or wait for the build times.
The owner can terminate the rental at any time. This allows longer lending periods but prevents griefing, if you borrower isn’t farming you can just terminate.
Outcomes
Utilises empty land
Incentivises scholars to actually play the game, build a farm and own land.
Gives extra utility to higher level altars (extra channeling income)
Turns spillover back on in a less extracting way and gives back to asset owners.
Questions/Problems
The big one - dev time?
Does this require cartridges as well?
Lag - is the gotchiverse ready, technically, for 100s of simultaneous players again?
There’s a lot going on here, it feels like 2 separate options, turning on spillover and land rentals. The main issue I see is that you can move installations from 1 parcel to another which is better than the current default option. Would people not just rent to themselves and start moving their installations from parcel to parcel?
Converting spilled alchemica to soulbound vAlchemica
Fractionalised land renting
The vAlchemica idea makes a lot of sense to me. I always saw the spillover + scholar interaction as an onboarding mechanism. Players can join for nearly free and begin to accumulate in-game wealth.
It does bring up some questions that need to be ironed out a bit first. Players who accumulate vAlch can use that soulbound token to mint, craft, upgrade etc. But how are they able to cross the bridge into asset ownership? If their soulbound tokens are only good for things within the game that already require land ownership, then there is still a chasm which must be crossed.
This must be where the idea leads into land rentals.
The path to progression under this idea would be:
Collect spillover
Convert the vAlch into installations on rented land
The rented land installations generate actual alchemica
That alchemica can now be sold and traded as per usual
I do think the vAlch idea is really solid it just needs some more brainstorming on how to execute if the fractional renting is not possible.
If scholars are able to build on rented lands (through approvals), then that might function as a way for guilds to pay scholars. ie: A scholar accumulates enough alch to build an L7 FUD harvester which costs 50GHST in alchemica. The scholar rents the land, builds the harvester, and the lender pays them back in materials.
One thing I wouldn’t want to see though is a race to the bottom where scholars harvest vAlch and then offer to build on people’s lands at seriously discounted rates as they want to get their liquidity out. It could cause problems and also doesn’t feel right.
Yeah that’s a really good point and wasn’t intentional. This would mean you could move your installation to different parcels via the vouchers. Good for GLTR as you’d have to go through the cumulative building time again but potentially bad for alchemica towards the end of the rounds as someone could clear their parcel and move their farm elsewhere.
Perhaps you could look at things like:
Not allowing higher leveled installations to be moved (doesn’t really matter for low levels i think as emission is so low?)
Limiting the amount of times a installation can be turned into a voucher?
This is exactly right ser, all the yield generated from borrowers installations is real alchemica. With the spillover rate so high for the low levels most of it will go back into the ecosystem. So for example:
A borrower collects 415 vFUD and 163 vFOMO from spillover
They then rent a fraction of land
Mint a level 1 FUD harvester and a level 1 FUD reservoir using the vFUD and vFOMO
Starting earning 4.2 real FUD tokens per day
67% will go back to spillover and the remaining yield is split
It’s a grind but definitely doable to build up a farm. With all those level 1 reservoirs out there they’ll be crazy amount of spillover to collect.
The build time will be done twice right? So if you’re max GLTRing a level 9 installation then moving it to another parcel you have to spend all that GLTR again so it’s double the GLTR spent.
Ahhhh, ok yeah gotcha. I don’t think it’s an exact comparison as building another farm now means you can farm in two parcels at once whereas with this it’s only in one place at one time but 2x the GLTR spent. But I get what you mean, “Good for GLTR” is a subjective term based on whether you think someone in that situation would build a whole second farm or not. Either they build a whole second farm as things are now and it’s neutral for GLTR or they wouldn’t build a second farm but would move an existing one if that was available in which case it is good for GLTR.
The renting to yourself is definitely a complication as it’d be more profitable to just strip mine everything on “rented” lands and then to port over the L9’s to new lands.
Spitballing here, but what if there were harvesters that were built with vAlch which would eventually break? ie: A scholar builds an L7 FUD vHarvester. Once it extracts something like 150% of its value in alchemica, then it breaks. It can be moved around as mentioned originally. In theory the return would be lower to the point where it would you couldn’t port it enough times to be worth more than building new ones.
Yep, that’s definitely a possibility. The farming equipment mintable from vAlchemica could be different installations entirely - different costs, yields, spillover etc and have a max harvest property. Only problem with that though is if asset owners want to collect some of their hotzone spillover then they need to be able to use it too, right?
I think another main issue that would need to be sorted out is how the land rentals in terms of the agreements. In your original post you said that the owner can terminate the rental at any time, which is the opposite of how gotchi lending works, so there couldn’t really be any upfront costs if that’s the case because people would just rent out their land then end the rental right away.
I think a combination of your 2 ideas above could be a solution to the whole issue. These temporary installations could have completely different harvesting rates/capacities/costs than the current installations and they disappear after a certain amount of alchemica collected. I think having a harvester/reservoir 2 in 1 would be ideal for this.
I think you do need a smol up front cost though or people could just grief you by renting out everyone else’s land for the cost of a transaction. Maybe there’s a minimum time period and a standard upfront cost?
Yeah that could work. Or you could just do short rentals and if someone is good you let them stay on for longer or boot them out after that time, kind of like gotchi rentals.
I don’t think it needs to be designed to be soulbound, just make sure vAlchemica cannot be traded on dex and only be used for minting/upgrading farming installations
I’d be more than happy to buy vAlchemica at a discount from them
Unless it’s soulbound then it will end up in a liquidity pool or sold on the market at a discount, like you said, and put downward pressure on alchemica prices.
Mine is not a well thought out response except to say I don’t like the idea of vAlchemica.
To me this is a web3 game and a major focus is the use of real ERC20s. Retreating back to a web2 style in-game currency that’s otherwise useless and likely not on-chain, and can’t be traded is a real philosophical step backward imo.
This proposal while technically feasible is also over complicated and as the OP suggests, likely very dev time intensive.
The caatridge idea that we were told back in June would take 3 weeks to implement, to allow real spill over, is a much much preferred option imo.
Hi @eMM, on an philosophical level I totally agree with you. However, I just think the reality of the situation is that this is the only way the economy could sustain turning spillover back on right now. I do also think that the current idea of spillover, pick up a token off the floor and cash it out, is going to attract the wrong type of player. Remember, the goal of free-to-play is convert into paying users and asset owners, not to hand out free money at the expensive of current asset owners.
We now have a proper building/farming game to play, we want free-to-play users to actually play the game in the hope a % of them stick around and reinvest rather than cash out. That’s not going to happen (or at least far less often) if they have the option to just collect spillover and instantly cash out.
Hi @Garuga, I kind of answered this in the comment above but the goal is to give them a piece of land so they can actually play the game and (hopefully) enjoy it enough to reinvest and stick around as opposed to cash out.