Introduce XP for Wearables

Frens, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about wearables and how they will evolve with the game.

As it stands, each wearable will be equal to each new wave of items that are released. Aside from aesthetics and collectibility, the items themselves have no additional advantage to new ones.

In traditional games, the new items that are released are MORE powerful to scale with new endgame content. Older gear becomes cheaper.

In crypto, we want the opposite. We want our assets to appreciate in value over time. This is one of the big challenges with crypto gaming. In many ways, it requires us to completely rethink how to approach legacy systems.

I’ve been thinking on how best to approach this and what I’ve come up with is a levelling mechanism for our wearables. This is what I am proposing for discussion:

Each wearable can level up ten times from zero to ten.

XP can ONLY be attained through P2E methods (killing licks, PvP, etc)

With each level, the BRS of the item increases by 5%, up to a total of 50%.

Commons would gain a maximum of 0.5 BRS. A gotchi in full common could gain an additional 3 BRS.
Godlikes would gain a maximum of 3 BRS. A gotchi in full godlike could gain an additional 18 BRS.

The BRS needs to be significant enough to strive for while also not interfering with the natural order of things.

For context, a fully levelled up mythical wearer would receive an additional 15 BRS across their set, which is still 10 BRS less than the bonus difference from just one godlike. (50 BRS for GL and 25 for myth)

The BRS bonus would randomly boost pre-existing stats.

The levelling mechanism would require significant time to max out. I feel something like lvl 1 - 45 in WoW to get max level on wearables would be good.

A few notes I have:

A huge benefit of this idea is rarity farming now has with it a P2E element. It’s still heavily pay to win as it should be, but now there is some wiggle room in the ranks for those who dedicate the time into levelling up their gear. There’d also be far fewer ties in the rankings.

Rented gotchis could level up your gear.

A new market is opened for people buying low level items, grinding them, and reselling them for a premium

All items start at level 0 but older items have the advantage as they have had the chance to level up over time.

Again, the intention here is to find value appreciation for older items that would require some effort to achieve.

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I think it’s an interesting idea but a massive fundamental change and would be curious to hear some of the potential drawbacks or potential issues with it too though. Can you describe more on how you envision the wearables would level? Simply from time being worn in game? I’m not super familiar with WoW “lvl 1-45” reference and how long that would take. For example, if there are 20 levels to get to maximum wearable strength, how long do you think it would take to achieve level 1(5%)? Would the age mechanism work similar to the current Gotchi aging mechanism?

I think two approaches have very different consequences too.

  1. Wearables regardless of usage receive age accruing benefits(similar to Gotchis now)
    Pro: Achieves goal of providing greater value to older wearables
    Con: Doesn’t encourage increased interaction or gameplay
  2. Wearables being used in game receive benefits from usage over time?
    Pro: Encourages gameplay to boost wearables
    Con: Doesn’t necessarily reward older wearables, only those being utilized

I feel like with the Gotchi aging mechanism it works because it might incent someone to open a portal in lieu of holding it, however wearables don’t have this issue, so the mechanism that incentivizes the most gameplay and interaction feels like the better play to me and first brush, but i would really like to hear others take on this. Unless the wearables become completely diluted or there is another 1000 grass hats minted that look similar to straw hats, there should still be some value retained due to rarity of design. Additionally, other mechanisms that destroy wearables in exchange for some other game incentive could be introduced to increase wearable rarity or at least create a floor.

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I think i got a bit confused on the initial read. Your title says XP and you mentioned XP for gameplay, but then went on to talk about BRS boost. I think when i responded above I had BRS boost in mind instead of XP so I apologize if my response is off the mark.

In general though, I think some kind of XP boost for in game interaction is a positive though so I appreciate you kicking off the discussion.

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Thanks fren :slight_smile:

The major thinking point here I would like to bring to attention is how to allow for some power creep to exist in a way that rewards older items vs newer ones.

Without anything introduced, we are currently looking at the best items in the game that will ever exist. From a RF perspective, that will get stale quite quickly. Imagine the same BRS boosting items being dropped over and over again for the next two years.

I can see how it might be a bit confusing with the words XP. The idea is for in-game play to grant wearables xp exactly like a character would get xp in any other video game. These means could be through PVE or PVP or anything else we could think of.

The intention I am setting is very much to reward the BRS bonus exclusively through play and earn means. My hope is to have a more dynamic RF board as well as introduce some play elements in the RF leaderboards.

I am against an ageing type mechanism for wearables as that’s too passive and doesn’t allow for new items to ever catch old ones. An active player with brand new items could quickly outpace an inactive player sitting on old items.

re: the WoW lvl 1 - 45, I was trying to create a sort of perspective on how long I feel it should take to max your gear from 1 - 10. Obv the first few levels would be much easier than the final ones.

5 Likes

I kinda like the leveling-up wearable idea.
It can help grant boosts to one of the traits inside the wearables.
And also we need to how to set the leveling curve of the wearables and also max levels.
What about maxed-out wearables then ?
They just become the rarest wearable?
Shall we grant color-alternated versions of the wearables?

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Thx fren :smiley:
While I think some form of max level wearable would look dope to have a colour/design variant, I reckon that’d put a huge burden on the art team!

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Sounds really good my fren!
I would like to add a few toppings on your great cake:

We might need also to think about two other mechs that can be combined with wearables earning XP:

  1. Merging the same items to give it a power up, need to use Blacksmith* and pay some GLMR or GHST to do so.
    Merging can be made only 2 times (based on godlikes) = same item but +1\2 of brs of that item (+ (additional idea - for this item need to have a conditions to be merged, for example to merge it for the first time, you need to reach lvl 3, for the second time you need to reach lvl 7, then each time you merge it, it’s dropping it’s lvl by the half, but gain a power star*) )
    Also, merging might bring some visuals, like a shiny effect, aka aura around the item.

+*OR to get a power star - different items will require to merge other items to that, for making it to go up, godlikes will need myths, myths will need legs, legs will need rares, rares will need uncommon, uncommon will need common, and only common can be merged with it’s selvs.

Pros: deflationary way for wearables + powerUPS
Cons: might be expensive and take long time to do so.

  1. Durability and Blacksmith* where you can fix the item (some % of it, or fully if possible) with, for a example different alchemica - fud for common and uncommon, fomo for rare and leg, alpa for myth and kek for godlike.

Pros: + one more building for gotchiverse and durability makes the items to have some life + giving a curve of prices of the items, if there is no way to fix, but only to merge.
Cons: Headache

Very cool idea. In terms of allocating where BRS points go I would think a player could choose to allocate the points however they like. Similar to how we allocate ageing and xp points. Want to make a stat stick even stickier? You got it. Heard more NRG means you can run faster in the Reaalm and you wanna add some NRG to that Sus Butterfly? No problem.

The market dynamics would be very interesting if this were implemented. As an example you could potentially find cheaper items of the same type that suit your gotchi just because they’ve got 3 different stats on them (that suit your gotchi) rather than the original 2.

What duration of play would you envisage to max out items? And should higher rarity items take longer to max out perhaps?

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I like your take fren. Allowing for players to decide would be best. People could level up their set to best suit them which may or may not result in a higher valued item depending on market dynamics

Another possibility would be for players to respec the items points in similar ways being discussed for spirit points. It could serve as yet another potential alchemica sink

For play duration to max level the items…that’s hard to quantify without in game experience. But I’d say a max level item should take considerable time. A few weeks of hard pvp action would probably do the trick. We could also discuss different rarities needing more or less xp. A max level common item should be easier than a godlike, for instance.

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I love the idea.

For implementation, I was thinking keep it simple and make it so every time its used, it gets experience, and make it slow, but sure, so that it’s more of a tie breaker than a jump from one bracket to another.

This encourages a use it or lose it mentality and would streamline the economy a bit so that those of us with large pockets really DO want to kit out their top gotchis and play the game and it gives a nice little nudge to encourage renting your gotchis out and actively managing who you rent to. I think there’s a bit of a disconnect between how much you’ll earn from renters who are playing for fun and ones playing for alch, and this might be a nice way to reoup the ‘loss’ when your awesome adventure party gotchi set keeps just going out and having fun instead of grinding.

When I say used, I mean this…

When a gotchi joins the realm, the wearables equipped generate a slow trickle of stat boost. that just makes it marginally better. These boosts might be the difference between win and loss in the Aarena, so, this will have lots of value, without fundamentally breaking the market.

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Excellently said my fren.
Need to encourage more participation in other corners of the economy besides GHST staking and floor trading.

Also, the overall idea of innate “growth avenues” for wearables proposed in this thread is amongst the very few out there that are mindful about the issue of wearable dilution, and offering something to counter it.

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Yes :smiley:
This was my primary problem to solve when I thought up this idea:

How do we increase the value of older items to fight dilution while at the same time ensuring new items are still of equal power and base value?

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Bumping this thread for more input as we are going live soon

An idea to deal with the semi-fungibility of wearables would be the ability to convert them with alchemica. Ie the katana could be imbued with 20k Kek and become a dread katana which is unique, can gain xp, and be imbued with other boosts

Thoughts?

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Sounds like pay to win, unless… you make it so the option isn’t available until you do a bunch of killing, and not killing of scrubs. Hopefully the Aarena has some sort of ELO system for ranking, so XP can actually mean something. Farming bunnies should have no value, but an item that someone uses to rank up to high ranks… that should gain value over time.

It isn’t pay to win. If you read the proposal it is the opposite. No way to buy your xp through potions etc. However if someone wants to grind items to max level and flip them, then that’s cool.

I reckon the xp would function like most mmorpgs. Once you hit certain thresholds you can’t gain xp. So no grinding bunnies with bots to max level.

Maybe bunnies only grant you xp to lvl 2.

It definitely is a mere seedling of an idea and needs a lot of refinement. And certainly there are many unknowns at this point that we can’t build this idea out, but I wanted to bump it to refresh it in peoples minds. That way as we move forward we have groundwork laid out already as we encounter the inevitable power creep and fact that the best items already exist in the game.

We simply cannot adopt classic mmorpg mechanics wherein new items get stronger and stronger. We have to find ways to make the originals the best so they grow in value while also keeping the game interesting and fun.

Ope, sorry, forgot there was an OP :smiley: Was responding to ‘add 20k to a katana and its dread katana’

I love the idea, as long as it’s actually difficult to level things. Way too many things have become ‘gimmes’ you grind with repetition and money and bots… I wanna see items earn their status by bathing in the blood of worthy foes.

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My axes r hungry for blood! :crossed_swords:

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