not sure if this is possible w/the contracts, but it’s an interesting idea!
1 Like
Yes, all the effects are our fault, but I’m not sure how that matters. Individuals acting rationally often leads to negative effects for everyone or even the destruction of the group. Tragedy of the commons, in short.
We have, in a sense, a treasury that we have committed to drop somehow. We can distribute it in ways that will build value in the game and encourage more investment and meaningful engagement. And we can distribute it so that value is drained for no benefit.
We have been giving out money for a couple months, and this pause caused by a bug is a good opportunity to evaluate what the project gained vs what it lost, what the purpose of drops is, and how we want to proceed forward.
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100% on board with pausing spillage until we can make some headway on the bot situation.
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@coderdan, on a follow up to the WAU numbers, is Aavegotchi still in ongoing evaluation from the Polygon team for liquidity mining 2.0? If so, I wonder how the possible LM incentives balance against the perceived outgoing ecosystem value by having the spillover active?
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Until we have stronger measures on bots like user flagging or other means of stopping, it’s a good idea to keep it on halt I think. This will discourage people from using them in future and motivate to flag them if the possibility is given. We could actually distribute rewards for successful flags on bots and penalize the bad actor’s false flags on real people not botting by slashing the alchemica pick ups, reducing carrying capacity etc.
I also disagree with concerns around stopping now would cause people to lose interest. We would still have events that scholars can participate and could make them to hold onto their tokens instead of constant sell-off for potentially saving on a humble for channeling and in near-future, farming.
I also simply don’t see an alternative to where these people can migrate to. So we can keep them engaged with events instead of every day interactions with alpha gameplay, there’s no progression in the game anyways at the moment.
I just think that people taking granted liquidity to be extracted is not doing much help. Especially considering how hard for new people to get a grasp on aavegotchi and what they can earn over time by being part of gotchiverse instead of extracting money everyday.
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Hey All,
My 2 satoshis:
I think making such a major change to a core mechanic without solid reasons is a bad idea. I will try and outline my thoughts with a response below. Also a little about myself. I run the 8bit Gamers Guild. Have been with you all since a little before haunt 2. I also created the 8bitgg Dojo which now has 900 members and over 400 fully registered scholars.
We only rent to players that have filled out a survey where they are asked several questions. The purpose of this is to prevent botters from borrowing our gotchis and also foster a sense of community and getting to know the players. Our players love spillover/loose alchemica collecting. We even do grp channeling sessions where a small number of us channel many parcels in a close area to create a spillover event. They love it. They show up, are committed and want a long term future with Aavegtochi. This includes constant education and teaching them about the game. Once someone fills out a survey they are then marked as a student or scholar and are eldigble to rent (this takes 12-24hrs). We dont do short term rentals and only take back gotchis from players who are not active. We pay our scholars 50 percent and at the moment cant keep up with demand. Yes it seems like a lot of work but its allows us to weed out bad uninterested players and elevate the good ones. Loose Alchemica collection is key to this as it provides a measuring stick.
I think ending spillover would drive many of these players away. They have put in the time and learned and now their involvement would be reduced to logging on 5min a day to channel. Why would we not want players in the Verse on often and for long periods of time. Like all good apps dont we want to capture and keep their attention?
The reasons I get from Cookies post are the following (I will state my response to each one):
1. The game is so smooth without alechmica spillover/gives us a break from midnight power hour.
A: Ok well it will be even more smooth with people logging in for one time a day. In fact it will completely kill concurrent use which I have no doubt PC is learning a ton from. Before spillover was ended I would rarely get complaints from scholars reference performance (anecdotal I know)
Is midnight utc power hour a rushed change to the system? Im also curious to who has the ability to automate channeling at that exact moment. I find it hard to believe all the scholars are getting on at the exact same time in unison around the world.
2. it is a pleasure to run around the neighborhood without the incredibly obvious teleport-botters coming in to leech some yield.
A: Overall in the discord chat today the main theme was botters. Can we get any data on this. How big of an issue it is? Our scholars don’t complain about collecting. It would make sense to quantify this if possible with more data to understand the scope/scale of the botting problem.
3. 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)
A: This is a core game mechanic that they wanted to nail in my opinion. Everyday they get more and more data to improve it. Heck its what’s got all the scholars so pumped about Aavegtochi. Unlike other p2e game which they call “passive” they love aavegtochi because its “active”(passive and active are there words). With channeling only its basically pegaxxy with a potentially highers pay out. Just login once a day extract and move on.
In terms of “extractor” gameplay. I think there needs to be some thought put into this. Our scholars dont see themselves or act like extractors. Imagine calling someone that plays the game you made all day an extractor. They are educated and want the game to be around for a long time because they like it so much. They are engaged, play everyday, learn, and many have even made tiles and hold alchemica.
What I see is “extracting” is services that:
- Dont take the time to educate new users or screen them upfront.
- Disincentivizes asset owner participation
- Disincentivizes community formation for new players
- Incentivizes short term mercenary rentals
- Overpay to these people that dont take time to earn there rental or learn about the game because there is a revolving door for upfront free gotchis. Even the bazzar has a cost for botters as most put at least a .1 upfront for rentals.
I always felt that the ethos of this game was to buy assets, manage them actively, create relationships, and community. Engage with players, create guilds, teach. Being an active manager was the game.
In my opinion you are going to be punishing players guilds who have fostered great NEW player bases. And rewarding people that want to work their own assets for max yield or services that are no correctly figuring out a way to find good long term players that care about the game. This care is on display in our Dojo discord for those that want to see it.
The final point I got from everyone is that they are concerned about the Alchemica prices.
Then why are people paying so much percentage? I dont get it. Not only that but why are we being so reactionary to a price fluctuation. The game has been out for 3 weeks. Is there some piece of data I am missing? Are we going to react with a major change in game mechanics every time crypto or alchemica prices plummet?
Over at our Dojo we’ve put immense amount of work getting these players educated and engaged. This change threatens to put a big wrench in that and undo much of the work in getting these player excited and active.
I just hope some more consideration is taken and more data is presented instead of just slamming this change through.
Im sorry if I offended anyone today in the disc. Never my intention I’m just trying to lay out the way I see things, share, gather new information, process, and think.
I hope we figure out what’s best. I can guarantee you though if we go channeling only the whole value prop and engagement will change drastically.
18 Likes
Value extraction and bots are two different problems. To combat value extraction, we need to make players, investors and bots want to reinvest in the game. Bots are not the only ones extracting value, far from it.
Regarding the value extraction of alchemica and gltr, just check the biggest daily tx and you will see that these sellers are aavegotchi investors. (some are notorious)
Why should someone who understands the economics of the game keep the alchemica and gltr if he knows he can buy it back cheaper later. If we solve this, the buy pressure will beat the sell pressure. If you block the spillover, many will still continue to dump the alchemica harvested by channeling and gltr (the yield rate is too high), the selling pressure will certainly be less important but you penalize the gotchi lenders.
So the problem is not the bots or the borrowers, it is that there is not enough incentive not to sell. What do you think will happen when the harvesters are launched? Will people just fill their lands with unmovable decorations or will they ape farm to get back the money they have blocked since the first land raffle ?
Because of this fear that prices will fall, I fear that landowners will be the future victims of either harvesters’ nerves or emergency measures.
This is a very complicated problem to solve for PC because developing a game is very long and on top of that you have to balance it economically or at least as well as possible to avoid death spiral. I have my own idea but it requires the game to be more advanced in its roadmap.
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Technical issues aside, the core problem has been power hour, which creates iniquity in the distribution of spillover. I think the idea of a customizable reset time is a good way to break this up, where a player can burn a craftable item at the moment of channeling to set the Aavegotchi’s 24 hour reset time (Hardkor’s idea of “burning incense” provides good flavor I think). But there will still be a lingering effect given that midnight UTC will still be the default reset time.
If spillover is retained as a mechanic, players should be able to play with it strategically (as the Dojo has done). This thread ultimately digs up questions we need to answer: What do we consider to be useful scholar activity? And how can this be incentivized without encouraging botting?
There was some discussion about this in the bubble-up thread, where we talked about paying for scholar activity that didn’t contribute to the competitiveness of the game. We want players to be engaged in competition over alchemica, that alchemica needs to confer a distinct competitive advantage if it is held/burned rather than sold on the market, and that competition needs to be hard to bot.
Right now, picking up spillover is the only gameplay mechanic, and there is no way to use alchemica to directly increase performance. Legitimate players are simply playing the competitive content that is currently available to them, but that content is pretty easy to bot.
We know that they are coming, but we don’t have a timeline on when Lickquidators or the Arena will be ready. It may be that, in the future, spillover can be deprecated in favor of a channeling-funded rewards pool that is used to subsidize scholar activity in Lickquidator-populated zones and in Arena battles. But until those features are ready and implemented, spillover really is our only competitive gameplay mechanic.
Since the original debate over power hour was centered around iniquity, it seems counterintuitive to take away that mechanic entirely, while still allowing channeling to take place at all. I also don’t think a general nerf to channeling is a good idea, since we will soon be implementing haarvesters which will vastly increase the rate of inflation.
The most important focus needs to be on getting some Alchemica sinks in - giving reasons to hold alchemica rather than dump it. If we need to place a general halt / overall reduction on Alchemica inflation until those sinks are in place, then let’s think about what that would look like for everyone, not just spillover-gathering players.
5 Likes
"Technical issues aside, the core problem has been power hour, which creates iniquity in the distribution of spillover. "
This is really the issue at hand, the distribution is concentrated around a specific time, any other changes made require some very deep thought and the data to back it up.
The effects of turning off Alchemica spawns will impact scholars who are genuinely excited about the game. Many of these players also gain a sense of community hanging out with us. Its an opportunity for the player to have a reason to stick around once they join a Guild. This is what this Alchemica spillover was intended for, the player who owns no land but is willing to spend hours roaming the verse to pick up loose Alchemica. Give this player guidance and we can create content like “Channeling with my guild, bought my first parcel”.
To address the root: there is a lack of co-ordination with and between guilds to create such an experience. We need to continue fostering the Gotchigang vibe and also be mindful of the scholars joining today. Rugging them over the active incentives they get is bad for the long term imo. Perhaps co-ordination tools can be used for better planning between Guilds, perhaps a “Guild Summit” every now and then to make sure we are on the same page with our scholarship management programs.
By having vetting processes in place through monitoring of guild channelings, the managers themselves are able to find the active players and weed inactive ones out. If there are no real reasons to roam the Gotchiverse aside from showing up to 1 Channeling a day/ per Gotchi we can expect the Gotchiverse to look quite empty. I know for a fact that no asset owners will be spending their time looking for loose Alchemica when they got their harvesters doing all the work.
There is no way you can prevent botting when there is such a large financial incentive at hand. Squashing bots turns into a zero sum game which has lead to a worse gameplay experience in other mmorpg’s. If you can’t beat em’ you join em’. Better identification methods for identifying bots, allowing bots to be squashed by bot hunters is one way to address this. Perhaps the Aagent outfit finally gets the ultimate use case for the Mission grinders back in the day.
If we want to see the game grow beyond a few thousand people we need to take the leap and have SOMETHING to get more people through the door. Its unlikely the main entry point into the game for the average player will be buying an Aavegotchi and a Parcel for a few thousand dollars.
If we do move forward with something like this, there has to be a replacement as equally as convincing for someone to log in and spend a few hours here. Right now the Alchemica Channeling makes the most sense despite the shortcomings imo.
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As I mentioned in the DAO discussion forum. I’ve been pondering a few ways we could potentially keep channeling going, but make it much less available for botters or pure extraction players.
- An invite system whereby Gotchi and land owners could give out a limited number of invitations per week / month.
- A one-time donation in DAI or MATIC to AavegotchiDAO / Pixelcraft for new accounts that have not received an invitation, but still want to play. Would help solve our fiat woes
- An upfront deposit of a certain amount of GHST (say $50) that can get refunded to a player after a certain amount of gameplay time, if they are not flagged as a bot.
All or none of these options could be implemented to ensure that new, untrusted accounts aren’t getting free access to the game. They would take a bit of time to setup, so in the meantime we would have to decide how to handle the spillover.
I agree with the sentiment of @Hefe and @MasterYang that any changes we made should consider the spillover effects (
) of scholars that genuinely enjoy playing the game.
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A combination of 1+2 sounds great.
Enable a whitelist system to allow specific addresses to channel a wallet’s parcels. Also institute a flat matic fee charged when a whitelisted wallet channels (for PC & DAO), while allowing the parcel owner to charge (or not charge) an equivalent matic fee to channelers. Lets say .25 matic per channel (0.5 total if owner also charges the fee).
Maybe… parcel owners could also do public listing of their lands for channeling, and this option could be for an even higher fee, or “extractor tax”, if you will.
The only way to channel without this fee… is to own a parcel
A larger one time donation or deposit as you suggested in options 2 and 3 seem unnecessary and restrictive of overall platform growth to me.
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This is a very interesting discussion thanks for bringing this up.
I think calling spillover farming extractor gameplay is unfair.
Yes, botting is definitely extractor gameplay, and I support efforts to address that but I think turning off spillover farming altogether is a pretty extreme solution to this.
It is unfair to scholars that have been putting in the effort and grinding.
I have scholars in WAGMI that regularly show up to guild spillover farming events we run in the Gotchiverse. Where gotchi owners channel in specific districts to maximise scholar earnings.
A lot of scholars do cash out but we have also have scholars that are staking GHST, or even just holding Alchemica and instead of insta-dumping on the market.
The Gotchiverse needs to have these sorts of events or the gameplay of asset owner logs in, channels all gotchis, then jumps out will get old, really fast i think.
I think it’s a matter of improving anti-botting systems (maybe longer escrow periods where alchemica can be slashed). Coderdan also has some good ideas above on this.
Also Gotchi Lendooors just need to be a bit more cautious about the scholars we choose to rent to. Because we are only hurting ourselves (assuming we are also land holders, GHST holders, GLTR farmers) if we lend to botters or people that always just dump on the market.
Maybe we need some tools on this. Have the ability to look up a scholar’s address to see their history in the game and what they do with their Alchemica before renting to them.
We also could improve our education of scholars on how they can get started investing in the game. It’s definitely something our guild has room for improvement on.
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you bring up very good points fren.
My guild is full of gathering scholars that reinvest into the game. They know and love the lore as well.
Calling someone (or a dynamic or a behavior) an extractor doesn’t need to have a negative or evil connotation to it.
The way I see it, our concern is whether we design a platform that invites further investment into it, or cashing out. The crux of the issue is when we make cashing out the best choice, turning rational participants into extractors.
Many times in the past we have made cashing out and/or flipping the most rational choice.
we are witnessing other behaviors now… such as people selling their own NFTs and exploiting free rentals and/or channelings because they’re available out there. Ultimately… we cannot fault anybody for doing this if we design little incentives to ownership and diamond-handing vs extracting.
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There are definitely scholars who show up and play hard, but we cannot ignore the huge value extraction happening from the bots. I just marked the charts for each key event and it’s pretty clear when there are spillovers, number go down.
Literally the moment spillovers were re-enabled, we have a huge red candle.
And until we have a counter-measure, this will be the trend.
The invite only idea really sounds interesting and does bring that level of exclusivity (look up how gmail and facebook became so popular).
Really good discussion and I’m enjoying all sides different stances.
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Some ideas with veTokens that could mitigate these problems:
- veGLTR: lock GLTR for 1 year, get x% APY + no-tax on rentals. On rentals, a DAO tax could be added, ex: pay 1 GHST / day extra if you don’t have enough veGLTR.
- spillover is turned into untradable/untransferable tokens. These tokens could only be spent to craft/upgrade. Platypus Finance did something similar with vePTP (https://cdn.platypus.finance/Platypus_Liquidity_Mining_Paper.pdf)
Both of these options would require a fair amount of technical work, but i especially like the second one. Get in the gotchiverse, farm alchemica & craft NFTs. With future tiles, decorations & limited editions, it may be compelling enough to get a fair amount of players.
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That’s actually a very interesting idea. I’m curious what Guild owners think of this idea? Would your scholars still be interested in picking up tokens if they could only be used to craft or upgrade?
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I’ve been working on some very powerful tools that utilize BitQuery to analyze previous tx history and help detect bot funding. If you’d be interested in working together on that I could share the queries with you.
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Yeah I’d love to learn more about that.
This is the most well-constructed comment about this topic that I have read in the thread and I agree with every point that Master Yin has made.
I believe that many of the native Aavegotchi guilds are onboarding scholars, teaching them how to play and looking after them. From my experience, these players are generally net contributors to the ecosystem and I feel it’s incredibly disingenuous to call them extractors. Almost all of the scholars that I’ve talked to are staking GHST, some of them are providing liquidity for alchemica pairs, and almost all of the ones that I work with personally are saving up to buy their own land parcels. They’re not pumping tens of thousands of dollars into the game each, but when there are hundreds, or thousands of players injecting a few hundred dollars THAT THEY WORKED FOR, that’s how the game will scale.
These players are the next generation of Aavegotchi asset owners and we need to recognize that and encourage it. Spillovers need to stay. They are a core facet of the game and in my opinion it makes no sense to change that right now.
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I dont think the community can make an informed decision on such a topic without knowing:
- How much total alchemica is farmed by asset holders vs non-asset holders from:
a) channeling only
b) spillage only - How much alchemica is sold to non-GHST or alchemica assets on quickswap (i.e the value leaves the ecosystem) from:
a) addresses also holding parcels and gotchis
b) addresses that do not hold parcels and gotchis
That way you could see the % of value that is extracted by which portion of the playerbase as a lot of claims are made about this or that portion of the player-base being net extractive. I’ve never seen any actual hard data other than people reasoning about how they think the ecosystem works and what ought to be the case.
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