As you all know, recently we’ve disabled the spillover of alchemical channeling to give our servers a much needed break from the midnight power hour.
I have personally been experiencing extremely impressive performance in the gotchiverse compared to my playtime with spillover being enabled, building is super smooth, reloading into different gotchis goes without a hitch, and it is a pleasure to run around the neighbourhood without the incredibly obvious teleport-botters coming in to leech some yield.
That got me thinking, wouldn’t it be nice to keep on this course for a while?
I feel like we’ve done our alpha tests and scaled up our server backends, to varying degrees of initial success, but to an impressive first launch no less.
Wouldn’t it be nice to focus on small scale feature rollouts and getting our core asset holder gameplay loop fully functional with haarvesting and communal channeling, before dedicating so much time, effort, support bandwidth and server bandwidth to extractor gameplay that doesn’t offer very much of a net benefit to the ecosystem at all (apart from cool high DAU numbers and a p2earn headline or two)
Just my two cents, would love to hear what the rest of the gotchi DAO thinks!
lol love it but you know those players with alot of gotchis they are itching to rent are not gonna like it. Personally i am in favor of a more metered approach to spillage as a whole. 10-15 min drops should be the standard IMHO
Just to clarify…you’re saying continue as we are now with no alchemica drops but we’re still channeling? That’s intriguing. Would allow PC time to focus on building w/o so much putting out of fires & bot squashing.
In regards to haarvesting, how would you want to treat spillover from Reservoirs in this scenario?
We are tracking each spillover event and adding the amount to a total of stored Alchemica, so it would be possible to know how much is “owed” when the time did eventually come to release the Alchemica. But maybe you have other ideas about that?
re: the spillovers I had floated the idea during the DAO meeting call to construct a fountain in each District. After X amount of alchemica fills it, then it erupts all over the District like a geyser. Players could see the meter, too.
It was initially squashed as it wouldn’t alleviate the midnight channeling dilemma, but if we all have unique channel cooldowns, then this is a nonissue.
I think this would be an incredibly fun and rewarding gaming dynamic for all players.
Could we solve this and the bot problem at the same time?
What if instead of raw surface alchemica getting dropped we dropped chests. Chests are rarer alchemica drops but each chest contains multiple alchemica crystals. When opening the chest you have 5 seconds to solve a simple human puzzle, if you fail the alchemica goes back into storage to get reallocated in another chest.
Might go more in-depth in a different reply, but I want to hear other people’s opinions first. One thing we should be monitoring until spillover comes back is Alchemica price action compared to the previous ~10 days. I don’t think we’ll ever get such a good indication of buy/sell pressure from renters vs. owners ever again, and it’ll be interesting to see how the market reacts to “spillover farmers” not getting any tokens anymore. Don’t want to get ahead of myself, but the current DAU we’ve incentivized with easy money might not be as cheap as we first thought.
Personally, I feel like the game is missing some excitement without the spillover. If a concentrated high rate spillover is causing some technical issues with the game, it might be that now is the time to figure out how to solve that, and not later… I’m not sure. Would we be better equipped to solve the problem later than we are now…? I’d be concerned we’d just be kicking the can down the road (maybe PC could speak to whether there would be a dev benefit to this idea).
Wondering also if increasing the denominations of the spillover (0.1, 0.5, of the tokens, etc) would help solve the technical issues, since I assume it’s the quantity of game objects that poses the technical challenge. Granted as we saw in the playdrop, this would take some excitement away with fewer qty of pickups - but the dynamics now are very different than the playdrop given that players are much more spread out and it’s much easier to collect spillover alchemica than the bloodbath that was the playdrop
We can’t just give away money & that’s kinda what we’re doing right now.
We need to grow our player base, but there’s a lot of truth to the web2 = you’re the product & web3 = you’re the yield meme, especially in Bearville. We need to stay cognizant of that and avoid making our new players the yield.
Our decisions about the game economy need to focus on what is sustainable in the long-term, rather than on who can extract the most money / amass the most power. With great power comes great responsibility and all that. We all want to profit, but in the big picture, do we value max profit more than the success of an incredibly innovative & unique project?
I like the idea of building mini-games that are connected with the Gotchiverse. That pinbaal game drew in a bunch of community members. If we charge 5 $FOMO to play or something like that…burn some, put some in a prize pool…it’s a small thing, but might increase that DAU tally. There are talented people in the community…would be great to inspire some of them to build fun games as passion projects.
I have very little view on the technical side of alchemica spawns and server load, but I think there could be a way for us to still have drop events, without having constant drops - we already have a mechanic where alchemica is funneled into the great portal and then blasted out for great battles down the line, so perhaps adopting that functionality as sort of a stop-gap fix or a test could be interesting? It would make server load a predictable event that’s (possibly?) easier to scale for, and it’d be a headline event for sure if the gotchiverse were dropping say 500k worth of alchemica over a weekend or a week.
We could have our channeling and haarvesting spillover be held in a great portal-like contract, and it could be popped out at set events or celebraations, much like the playdrops and great battles rolled into one event (possibly a good alpha test for the great battles and server load of those too?) I am just spitballing here mostly, but it’s great to see all our community galaxy brains thinking along - thank you
for all the input so far frens!
Just adding this in case some people are shielded from their renters and don’t know the end results of our actions… the 24/7 grind is seriously affecting the health of some players. I don’t know what the answer is, but maybe its NOT good to be able to go to work continuously
edit: per actaeons comment below - I fully agree that numbers of players mean nothing at the moment. They are 95% bots or extractors. There is not enough game to go around, with just channeling, so not only are we giving away the farm(literally), we are having people play for 12 hours to make very little, and it might be doing more harm than good.
Yes, fren! Scholars are great, accessibility is great, daily active users can be important for a project–all in the right context. But let’s not get confused by goodwill from extractors or the inertia of the status quo: the vast majority of renters to this point are never going to contribute to the project financially or with their manpower. We (meaning anyone who put in their own capital + Pixelcraft) are draining our value with every batch of spillover dropped from the sky, and that expenditure needs to be worth it (not to mention the huge drain on human resources by having to provide support on a large scale).
As I see the state of the game, it’s not in a place where having high DAU numbers is worth it. The gameplay is not held back for lack of users, and in fact a new potential investor coming in because of high DAU numbers may be turned off when he sees that the world is full of grind-n-dumpers, not full of fomo-inducing collective citybuilding with rich emergent gameplay.
We are paying for something–what is it? What are we getting? I have the sense we are greatly overpaying at the moment, but am open to other views!
Regarding the technical issues associated with large alchemica drops (whether they be for channeling or some other future event)- wanted to put this idea here as well:
Can we scale the denominations of the spillover drop according to how much is dropping… so all of a sudden if the game needs to drop say 30x the usual amount of alchemica, the denominations will go up to say 1x, 5x, etc… instead of 0.1,0.5,1. So the game could have a more consistent quantity of drops, but scale the amount dropped by increasing the denomination after it hits some predefined limit.
Maybe PC can speak to feasibility or execution of that, and if it would indeed help alleviate the stress on the system.
Those that have been around since launch, know that the demographics of the user base have wildly changed since then. Many of you know just how opposed I’ve been to our relentless move from an investor centered economy to an extractor centered one. Scholars picking up alchemica is not the only way of extracting, nor is it the first we have experienced - we had MASSIVE dilutive events prior to this, based and justified on notions which this bear turn has proven entirely wrong.
I feel a sense of unity with those members of the community that remain among us, but also lament all the great people gone and the brain-drain we have had along the way.
Maybe as a community we are growing and beginning to see that long term investors in the project aren’t all bad, and random extractors don’t bring all the glitter (pun intended) we thought they would.
I couldn’t agree more with the arguments presented above. It’s exciting to see a lot of new people getting involved with the Aavegotchi ecosystem, but we should have more to offer than economic incentives in exchange for repetitive hours of walking around. As an alpha launch, we are having a taste of the great potential to attract users. However, IMHO we should incentivize events that can attract players willing to invest and grow within the community. As suggested, sporadic alchemica drop events, mini-game competitions, and even guild contests, could introduce alternative fun ways to distribute the spillover alchemica and, at the same time, enhance the desirability to play and spend time together in the Gotchiverse.
I am in full agreement and support of disabling spillover at least through the debut of farming installations. It is imperative that we attract NFT investors as well as F2P scholars, and this period can be used to underscore the earning potential and inherent values of Aavegotchi’s native assets. Most of us are gotchi-pilled and diamond handed which will help sustain if not further appreciate the values of alchemica and the assets needed to farm it.
My proposal:
Pause spillover at least through the debut of farming
Use spillover alchemica for playdrops or other promotional events per PC’s discretion to continue and grow the Aavegotchi community and allow a high-yield P2E entry point for current scholars.
I feel like if the rewards we can offer for play, are not good enough that owners are playing, then its pure extraction.
Getting IN to the gotchiverse should be a privledge, not a race to the bottom, so someone can get their rental money.
We should find a balance, where you are renting, because you dont have the time to use it, not because only a bot or a person in a 3rd world economy would find the money valuable.
edit - Wagmi posted at same time… I agree with what he’s saying there completely. We’re in a weird place, economy wise. Channeling is 15% of the alch pool, and we’re giving away 40% to extractors, while giving ourselves 3000% APY on glitter, and we’re mostly out of stuff to build, so we need to close this loop until we have the rest of the sinks and economy in place.
Glorious impulse wave caused by turning off spillage…
But if we’re overpaying, isn’t that just based on upfront GHST costs and percentage splits being offered? If they’re able to extract so much value from being F2P, it’s our own fault for offering 80%+ splits.
Would it be possible to Make it so that only alchemica that is earned via UBI or Harvesting can be sold in the open market. And any collected via spillage has to be spent on in game assets. So scholars have to work there way up to owning a humble and then would have to rent a gotchi to extract value from the game. Would incentivise scholars to get involved in the eco system and not just leach from the ecosystem. Just an idea not a clue how to implement this… obviously they would need to exchange the spilt alch for ghst to buy a humble in the first place… haven’t really thought this all the way through yet…
but you know those players with alot of gotchis they are itching to rent are not gonna like it. Personally i am in favor of a more metered approach to spillage as a whole. 10-15 min drops should be the standard IMHO 
