Not at all, I agree that GLTR cartridges are a tax on renters both in cost and in time. To preserve their yield, they will need to cover costs and labor to get the same yield they’re getting now. If the metric of reinvestment in the game is intended to show player adoption or “conversion” I think in practice we will just see renters subsidizing their earners.
I think part of the problem is expecting the team to do the impossible. Stop bots, preserve the current community and the value of their investment, keep attracting players and making the game accessible, keep yields high, while also building out new features for a game in its alpha stage, all in the highly adversarial blockchain environment… at some point, we have to be realistic. The game will not be ready to handle its present level of inflation until there are real game mechanics in place to absorb these tokens. And the development of those mechanics is slowed by the permanent war with bots.
In my view, that means if we want to deal with inflation and keep the value of your investment, the first priority is mitigating bots enough that devs can focus on building out features for the Gotchiverse.
I agree that a “reputation marketplace” would be a really useful UI tool for this system, both for scholars and renters. I don’t know how a new player would establish themselves enough of a reputation to receive a cartridge.
I’m probably missing something here - but would this mechanism exclude investoors that were airdropped their first cartridge for 30 days without paying themselves potentially?
I feel I would (selfishly) oppose a mechanism that forced longer term investoors who qualify for the airdrop to have any cost to continue playing during this potential 30 day gap between airdrops.
I’d also like to confirm asset owners would continue to be airdropped caartridges pretty much no matter what?
Or will there be two types of caartridges differentiable by whether they’d only been airdropped vs transferred to scholars?
The trade off between models seems simple:
Invite only = more guild/investoor control and reduced botting with a smaller player base (with some reduced value extraction) - and a larger impact on the open rental market
Invite+GLTR = wider player base and easier access but including many more bots (with more ongoing value extraction)
Key is which is more important right now? I’ve been hearing that bots are the bigger problem right now so maybe it’s worth sticking to trusted invite only methods for now and expanding through GLTR recharge option when things are more robust (in terms of antibot measures + more alchem sinks for value stabilisation => more attractive longer term investment)?
Without doing some more intense research I still doubt whether the bots are the main cause of value extraction - I suspect it’s also many (rational) humans.
I just want to chime in here because I feel it’s a vital issue. Spillover is not achieving its purpose right now and bleeding us dry. I like @coderdan suggestion and would be in favor of something like that, but somebody also suggested we limit usage of spillover to ingame spending and I think that is a great way to make it so scholars are incentivized to get some skin in the game before extracting value. The spillover is easy to identify since it not sent directly to the wallet and could be treated differently. The limitation I see with this is right now there is no way to spend alchemica to get land so we’d need a solution for that
Thanks for inputting so many efforts into proposing this solution. Even though I enjoyed reading your ideas, I think that such changes would be highly harmful to the Gotchiverse future. Why so?
First, I speak as a hardcore gamer. I think that Gotchiverse is exclusive enough due to its expensive assets. We, in @Metaguild, believe in open, accessible games. And your solution is a step in the opposite direction. I’m not against exclusiveness, but I think we have it enough in Aavegotchi.
Second, I speak as a guild leader and a person who built rental infrastructure with on-chain logic for Axie Infinity. Your solution would be a pain for any guild, even experienced in managing players like @Metaguild. Even now, it is a net negative for us because we focus on building a community around the game and educating players instead of maximizing value extraction. Implementing your proposed solution would make work for our Players Care team a few more times more challenging.
Third, I speak as a person whose primary interest in the last year was open game design. I understand how difficult to compete with bots in a web3 game. And I believe that your proposal doesn’t solve the problem. The only way to win bots is to make their operational costs more than their rewards. The apparent solutions I discussed with the brightest minds of web3 game design are in-game diplomacy and social interactions. These things make a game unsolvable for bots. I encourage all fellow frens to brainstorm in this direction.
Forth, I speak as a rational gamer. The proposed initial distribution of Caartridge NFTs among cosmetics items holders creates a dangerous precedent. How will market actors (players) participate in the game and build their in-game strategy after that? How will you model their behavior after rewarding them for items that weren’t supposed to bring any value? If you want to maximize value from implementing this solution, you could find a better way to make the initial distribution. It should be based on the members’ “reputation”, which could be measured by DAO voting activity or assets holding time. But not on cosmetic items.
Thank you ser. I understand and agree with many of your points. There are many potential ideas floating around, and we are looking for the best option that fits the principles of our community, while also being effective.
One point that many have brought up that we have not yet experimented with implementing would be an initial “review period” for all new wallets coming to the game.
Basically, they could play as normal, but would not be able to withdraw Alchemica from the Vortex during the review period (maybe a week).
The review period could be a set time (7 days, for example) + an amount of play time (first 40 hrs). The player would need to meet both requirements in order to graduate. That would prevent players from creating accounts, going away for 7 days, and then coming back.
This solution would likely not deter any extractor-type players, but it could be effective against botters, who would find it difficult to play for 40 hrs/7 days on all of their accounts without being spotted.
Would the Onboarding Quest be a better alternative to the review period for detecting botting? Forces people to actually collect alchemica for at least a full day whereas a review period they could just log in for 5-10min a day.
They would need to achieve a certain amount of playing time to graduate from the review period.
In addition, we could even have a stipulation that they need to collect a certain # of Alchemica (maybe 50, to make it fairly easy).
So three requirements:
Days since first login (7)
A certain # of hours logged in-game (20-40)
A certain # of Alchemica picked up (50)
They would need to reach all 3 requirements to graduate and be able to withdraw Alchemica. Note that #2 and #3 wouldn’t need to be completed within the 7 day period. But all 3 requirements would need to be satisfied before they could withdraw.
This would be reaaaally annoying for botters to get around, as they would need to essentially waste computing power running around the game picking Alchemica up, which would increase their chances of being caught.
We could even highlight the “review period” gotchis with a yellow name to indicate to onlookers that they should pay attention for botting behavior.
I love this and agree with many things that @Egor said as well. As unpopular as it is, I think token locks/vesting/limiting withdrawals for a period of time is something that would effectively buy us some time till a more robust gameplay/social aspect is in place, or to catch bots before they withdraw as you suggested. Presales and DeFi use it all the time to stop/delay mass dumping, I don’t see why we can’t. With some brainstorming and the right formula, we can probably even stop extractors for now.
As others have said, maybe we can even gamify this review period by adding daily achievements or something like that? (although there is very little to do TBH and this might require some more development).
I see this would be easier to build than the onboarding quest (which may well mean it’s the way to go!) but it does lose the following imo:
Lacks the onboarding info for new players (lore and ecosystem info)
It’s less gamified and friendly to legit users. If they log on each day and collect the alchemica it feels like a real chore to then spend another X hours and may also feel intimidating to see a requirement of 40 hours playtime.
Doesn’t burn any alchemica which felt like a nice sink and “payment” for new users looking to extract surface alchemica.
With all that being said I much prefer either option to invite only/cartridges and because it’s such a pressing issue dev time plays a huge factor.
We could start the process of designing an onboarding quest, by building the basics of it in discord. When new users join, we could give them a quick how to and tour of the discord and associated sites. This will be less bottable than simply verifying, if we do it correctly, and it will reduce redundant questions and improper use of the discord.
I definitely think the quest idea is great and worthy of being implemented, but it’s not something we can do in 1-2 weeks. We’ll need to spec it out, design everything, code everything, test, etc.
A simple review period could be coded in a few days and deployed, and we’ll see immediately whether it’s effective or not.
Ser this is blockchain…literally everything that can be monitored is monitored. And banks, Paypal etc monitor accounts for fraud all the time. The Gotchiverse is not just a game – it deals with money, which means that fraud and botting will be involved, whether we like it or not.
Can you elaborate on this? I must have missed where that was discussed in the onboarding quest.
New address has to collect ~10 GHST worth of alchemica
Hand the alchemica into an NPC or the great portal to be burnt
I think he point @JG1 is making is that whilst yes all companies are monitoring you, they never tell you that! By packaging this “review period” into a quest you’re gamifying what essentially underneath is a bot prevention method.
If we want to keep it super lightweight MVP build wise I’d recommend something like a simple modal that pops up the first time an address enters the gotchiverse saying something like: “Welcome fren, please report to the great portal at the center of district 1 to receive your first quest.”. Player goes to great portal and interacts, this starts the quest. Another modal saying something like “Prove your worth… blah blah blah… bring X amount of alchemica to the great portal to obtain your vortex license”. Player collects the alchemica bring it back to the portal and as long as no botting has been detected then withdrawal vortexes are enabled for them.
Thanks! I had a scholar ask me if they are still welcome in the ecosystem after reading the word extractor being thrown around in several places. I proceeded to look her up with the tool knowyourscholar , to see her flagged as a “player” which is just shy of “extractor”. In reality she has converted her alchemica to ghst and purchased tiles
So we are monitoring, but not doing a good job of it, worried about “extraction” where the real extraction happened ages ago through dilution, raffling, bazaar botting, auction botting and flipping. None of these activities were (publicly) monitored… but we are now micromanaging where/how scholars spend their pennies worth of alchemica?
We can continue arguing this but it seems that as much as a starting quest is the best way to go… it would not be deliverable within a reasonable amount of time to address the bot problem, so the review period is what we will likely see.
I feel like this entire botting/extraction discussion is taking up much more time & resources than initially anticipated, and I’m not sure if we’re really focusing on the right thing. Yes, over 50% of the players in the Gotchiverse are probably bots right now. Yes, a lot of them are probably selling their Alchemica. No, that doesn’t mean it’s the #1 issue we have to solve in the next couple of months.
Let’s think this through from the ground up. What can players currently do in the Gotchiverse? They can:
Channel their parcels once to 24 times a day. Assuming most people don’t upgrade further than lvl 4 that’s roughly 3-4 minutes spent inside the game everyday (per parcel).
Collect spillover, in other words mindlessly wander around the map and run towards shiny crystals.
Number 2 is the only activity you can do consistently for longer than a few minutes everyday, and is currently taking up a big part of the distributed Alchemica. However, this is a) super boring b) very unrewarding (unless you’re doing it as a job) and c) easily bottable as it’s an extremely simple mechanic. With the current numbers this results in a huge chunk of all distributed Alchemica going into the hands of bots, while we’re just playing catch-up and annoying people who want to play normally.
So are bots our biggest problem right now? No, I don’t think so. They are just the logical consequence of what the Gotchiverse currently is. The thing we really need are activities that are complicated to automate and/or worthwhile for real players. The harvesting release with Harvesters, Reservoirs & Guild Lodges will definitely help with that (so it should be top priority), but we should make it a theme for all mechanics inside of the Gotchiverse.
And I’m going to be honest here, but I’m not really a fan of the spillover mechanic as it’s implemented right now. It was a decent method to fairly distribute some tokens during the Playdrop, but I personally don’t think almost 50% of all Alchemica should be allocated towards this dull, low-skill mechanic. It’s simply not feasible to expect people to go collect their own spillover as the radius for channeling is way too high and there’s really no gamified component to it - it’s more like an airdrop than a game mechanic.
So one actionable improvement the DAO could think about (since getting the Harvesting Release out mainly lies in the hands of PC) is reducing spillover rate & radius. Remember the spillover clip in the OG Gotchiverse Teaser? That looked fun and would 100% encourage a closer relationship between borrowers & lenders, while shrinking the advantage bots currently have.
i love this idea, even if it would be only as a “trial” period of one week to see the results, i believe this would be very much a game changer, making it much more social where you need to gather a team of players to quickly harvest any spillover before teams of bandits can react to your channeling
It removes profitability from bots since they have an upfront cost for renting (assuming gotchi owners arent botting ) and wander aimlessly
removing the mini drops of 0.1 fud and fomo like in the playdrop might also work help create a better experience.
The only issue i see is that the actual number of players online would be lower as well as the number of alchemica present in the map , making it feel a bit empty , but then again, it is an alpha version and we shouldnt really expect thousands of tokens at every moment.
I agree with everything you stated. Harvesting Release should be the primary focus, not Bots. And while the PlayDrop was an awesome way to kickstart things, in retrospect it introduced too many parasitic users to our ecosystem. And I felt we bent the knee to their demands already by reducing the amount of alchemica per cube to make it an “everyone gets a trophy” environment.
Also, the Spillover mechanic is indeed broken. For one, the spillover radius needs to be reduced dramatically. Secondly, the Hot Spot should be significantly increased at L1 and get substantially smaller with Aaltar leveling. At a L4 Aaltar, the spillover should primarily go to my neighborhood. And at L6, the spillover should only be going to my neighbor’s parcels.
I think we can iterate much further on the spillover to make this more tenable and beneficial to owners and renters, and less towards Extractoors.
) and wander aimlessly