Nice! I like the thought of these cartidges having algorithmically updated crafting formulas based on certain variables- such as too many people online or too much alch getting dumped (LP imbalances) making the recipe update itself to now require more alch.
I like your idea but wouldn’t make them ONLY alchemical based. Maybe your standing in the community as derived by certain metrics @coderdan proposes, POAPs etc. will lower your own personal cost of crafting these caartridges.
Feeling out of my depth with all these big brain posts but can’t help myself.
At the risk of not adding anything new:
all imho
-I have no gauge on how big a problem bots really are - love to see more concrete data on this to be better informed. I don’t experience (or recognise) bots as hugely impacting my 1hr-ish daily game play (are these the invisible alchemica snipers?)
-I’m not sure limiting play to a smaller group is the answer - I can’t imagine the minority of “bad acting”, “value extracting” scholars or bots have collected enough spillage to move the prices down as much as we’ve seen - has to be bigger players involved who would not be excluded by Dan’s proposal - again would love to see the stats! If I’m wrong surely a larger investment in the liquidity pools by PC or the DAO should protect against low liquidity price vulnerability?
-bots and value extraction seem quite distinct issues. Value extraction seems rational in this phase of the game where I see nothing worth reinvesting my alchemica into for another 4-8 weeks. I think even labelling channeling as a “UBI” encourages dumping - what else is a UBI for? - it’s free money by definition and was advertised as such. I think many players were not anticipating quite as big a delay between the gotchiverse launching and farming coming online - fantastic idea creating sinks with tiles etc in the meantime - but it’s no surprise the moment tile minting ended kek and alpha in particular dumped significantly. Could we tie in a use for alchemica into the upcoming decorations raffle somehow?
-I love that the community is so quick to jump on potential issues in a collaborative and respectful way but is freaking out over the price of such new tokens too overreactive? If upward price action is what people demand there needs to be incentive to spend it.
Halting spillage to achieve this from the other end sends the wrong message - like a CEX blocking withdrawals when market action is going against them - twitter blows up with furious ppl, it’s not a good look and would be a major back pedal on a core element of the game
-The idea that caartridge holders determine who is allowed to play is fine with me - it continues the theme of community lead evolution in the project as long as we get to vote on a fair distribution method
I’ve been bot-catching full-time for the past month and it’s definitely a big problem.
We’re working on a dashboard to help give more visibility into this, hopefully will have something presentable by next week.
The main issue we have right now is that literally anyone can join the game with just 0.1 GHST and a Discord. If we don’t address that head-on, we’re going to be fighting a losing war.
This is so important! Our lead dev is spending a large % of his time just fighting bots instead of developing the game. That’s crazy from a resources perspective and has to change asap.
I really like your invite-only proposal, Dan, and hope we can move forward with it. It will be important to assure guilds that exclusivity will not equal exclusion.
Hey Dan
Thanks for taking the time to put together these ideas.
The idea of a cartridge is interesting. I will digest and come back with more specific opinions once I think and sleep on it.
The one reaction I have immediately is in reference the distribution.
I think giving it out to LE holders only could be unfair to many people that have put a huge amount of time, effort, and capital into the game but did not purchase much LE. I personally chose to take the route of saving the Alchemica for staking and also mass upgrades to Aaltars. I’m sure I’m not the only one that took this strategy. I also think there are some whales in this game that took the opposite route and instead of saving for upgrades chose to mass LE. I think these people probably had far less Alchemica to upgrade and haven’t been building making their parcels baron and unused in the verse.
Some suggestions:
Evaluate built out land. And distribute to people that have spent a ton of Alchemica upgrading their Aaltars. These people should be rewarded for building out the verse. Not just holding on to LEs to play the market etc.
If you go LE only I think it should go to those who actually deployed the LEs in the verse not just those that crafted them and are waiting to flip. Which coincidently your current distribution model would drive the price up for those flippers before the snapshot is taken.
I also like the notion of the cartridges being a sink for Alchemica. This makes a lot of sense if the main concern it the dumping of Alchemica.
These are my initial thoughts. If the gating is going to happen I think its essential to get the distribution right and to those who are investing in the verse not just attempting to make a quick flip/extract. Guilds with scholars who are actually playing and not just channel farming should also be considered in this initial distribution.
I don’t think this is a reaction to token prices at all… The bigger problem is simply that the current way we are fighting bots is unsustainable, ineffective, and somewhat drifts away from web3 first principles. For example, having to link a discord to an address to verify your identity is just… kind of… meh? And there’s a lot of developer resources that are dedicated to fighting bots that would be a lot better spent making the gotchiverse better.
IMO this is a good first step to moving combating bots on chain. This is ultimately a more neutral way of doing things than for example using captchas or verification forms (which is unfriendly to the international community).
I think this is an awesome idea as it both incentivises scholars to take a more active role in the aavegotchi eco system and deals with bot extraction that is obviously a big problem. We can’t have our lead dev spending any more time on this issue. This bear market isn’t going to last forever and when the bull returns we want to hit the ground running with a complete game.
I guess I was sharing thoughts on a few different things mixed up in my head from previous posts.
I’m 100% a big fan of freeing up dev time from bot fighting.
What if we have different cartridge levels.
For example:
No cartridge = player can collect only up to 0.1 gems
Cartridge level 1 = player can collect up to 0.5 gems
Cartridge level 2 (and gotchi/land owners) can collect any sizes
EDIT:
Imagine there is a full KEK in front of you and you can’t collect it because you have a cartridge level 1
Absolutely agree with Mori’s post. We have multiple problems to address. In addition to being a big problem itself, the bot war plays a role in the devaluation of our game tokens. Keeping with the spirit of defi + freeing dev resources seems like a breath of fresh air. We all need that.
Outside of the closed Alpha and/or Beta with the requirements of have a cartridge, I am especially happy about the thoughts of rewarding ppls that keep investing into the ecosystem, in this case, it is those that minted the NFTs. I wish we had more such rewards for the ones who participated in the events and reward more if hold the longer.
On the other hand, this change, if comes, definitely affects guilds as well as independent gotchi lenders. Guilds are extremely valuable to the gotchiverse and the ecosystem in general, as someone suggested, discussions with guilds should happen. To me, the concern is how guilds get the share of the cartridges. For both guilds and independent lenders, the end results would likely mean less gotchis lent out in round 1, but could gradually increase in subsequence rounds.
I feel like if gotchi owners (or land) were excluded from the cartridges would be somehow unfair
I myself sold most of my alchemica for GHST and didnt mint any tile or golden aaltar…on the other hand increased my lands from 4 to 8 and my gotchis from 3 to 6.
I dont consider to be a person who is not commited to the project and would love to have invites for people who Ive been trying to increase bonds in the chat, where I actually started to spend a lot of time to try to meet good people to play with, while also spent a lot of time teaching the project aswell.
If gotchi owners had the power of those invites, we could select who we want to play with maybe even better than guilds as we dont have so many requests.
I also feel that would be unfair to give to someone who minted a tile or two, which costs like 20 ghst (and many minted to sell later at a profit), and not to those who have gotchis which costs 50x more and have been the essence of this project so far (also if you had to choose between someone who only minted tile and another who owns a gotchi, who would have more long time interest in the project?)
Finally (or not hehe) editing for the third time. Why not reduce spillover even more with aaltar upgrade?
I mean, if we manage to spill around 30%, we will squeeze free players, which will make purchasing a land much more attractive (and also playing with a guild that allows channeling much more attractive) and also making upgrading aaltar much more attractive.
In the current form, aaltar upgrade is not attractive for the spillover reduction, maybe only for channeling time, but if instead of 5%, we go for:
1 - 50% (we could aswell start from 40% instead of 50%)
2 - 45%
3 - 40%
4 - 30%
At the currently alchemica prices, it already have an accumulated cost of 180 usd to level 4 (which is why i opt to buy more land than increase aaltar level)
Edit 4 to one more thought. If we manage to squeeze free players into buying land to increase profitability, land prices would in theory increase and the relative price to upgrade an aaltar would decrease and make it a suitable option.
Also the issue is that there is almost no risk for a player to play aavegotchi and the one grinding a couple of hours have almost the same profitability of those who grind and have 1 land.
I really like the idea of rewarding built out parcels.
For the 2nd point, I think we should reward those who minted but not bought. Due to features not available to actually install the LE aaltar onto the parcel at the beginning and at this moment, we still cannot remove the installed regular one and deploy the LE one, it is not reasonable to based on this criteria you proposed. For me, as an example, I installed the regular aaltar on all my parcels on the first day. And upgrade them as much as I can. I will decide hard on which parcel(s) to deploy my LE version one. There are lots of discussions on recipes, strategies. I want to wait till more things settled down before I deploy the LE ones as they are scarce.
Personally, I think we definitely need to be exclusive with who we let in, but exclusive doesn’t mean being super limiting, necessarily. I think one of the main concerns being brought up is that people won’t have enough invites for the scholars that deserve to be playing the game, and that shouldn’t be an issue we need to have. The main problem we’re trying to combat are bots getting in. We could double, or even triple the proposed 15k invites, as long as the invites are A) soulbound after being given out, like you said. And B) being distributed to and by the correct players.
One of the main problems with stopping botters is how to stop someone from just making a new account and starting over. This would prevent that, regardless of if it’s 15k invites or 50k. As long as the people handing out invites are known (we could see that the same person keeps giving bots invites over and over, for example) and bots can’t just keep popping up, I don’t think we should be super restrictive on the amount of invites we allocate. I think we could include Gotchi Owners and Realm Parcel owners without much issue.
This may not have any bearing on our solution, but I’m curious, are bots able to channel by transacting directly through the contracts? Or are they forced to go through the Gotchiverse?
On my first read, this is a very good solution.
It helps Gotchi Lenders become more accountable for picking renters that have a more long-term focus on the game.
I don’t think limiting foot traffic is a wise decision, it’s not the source of the problem. If necessary, I think facing the problem head-on and addressing the selling pressure is the right decision. For example, choose linear withdrawal when restricting the withdrawal of alchemy by non-asset users. For example, you can only withdraw 5% or more of the total amount you charge per day. This also takes the place of the deposit once you break the rules
Restricting the movement of people will cause the loan market to shrink and hurt lenders, I just want to keep enriching my rentable quality assets and provide me with passive income, I’m not going to be a part-time realtor
I prefer to use the mechanics of the game itself against bots. I hope to set traps in my land, lure them with fake alchemy, capture them and get all their alchemy
I would like to see other game mechanics than just channeling and collecting. The current player retention is based just in “free money”, which just encourage some players to dump it.
Players don’t have other use case for the alchemica than upgrading until certain level, and the idea of having LE NFTs didn’t help a lot.
We should focus in finding other ways of expending alchemica or just other game mechanics, I proposed at some point enabling a district where people can continue testing the pvp, I heard somebody proposing a gladiator arena, maybe the winner gets 70% of the loot and the rest is burned?
We can also introduce potions made by types of alchemica, a red potion made of FOMO recovers your health during battles in the gladiator arena or a blue potion made of ALPHA gives you a temporary boost of speed in the gotchiverse, or maybe we can made Kinship Potions made with KEK, ALPHA and GLTR too? We can think about infinite receipes if we want.
What about also the chat? I think nobody is using that, why we don’t create Quests events where you need to communicate with people and you can enter by expending some alchemica, or crafting a pass to play, and the winners get some kind of LE badge.
My point is that we should create other games mechanics, even before releasing any other installation that would just increase the alchemica supply (harvesters), that would put just more market pressure and we can see the price completely crashing.
Also, bots are created because collecting and channeling is a programable behaviour, let’s introduce other ways to get rewards, where people really needs to use their abilities, that’s why is so important to create othe game mechanics.
Holy crap.
I love you guys so much.
This is so well thought out and hits every angle.
Open alpha IS a crazy thing to do, looking back on it. I’ve been on a lot of closed betas over the year, and those projects would have tanked if they had shown the general public the game when it had 30% of the planned features…
5 stars, how soon can this be real?
Also, please keep it exclusive
exclusive is a feature, not a bug, and adds value.
No-one goes to nightclubs that don’t have a line out front.
“I know a guy” is fun to say. “I can get you in” is even more fun to say. People love this stuff.