Implementing this through guilds is very subjective, you will spend tons time coming up with balanced distribution. But the benefit of guild-based distribution: we will have more like alpha club where we build and test the game mechanics. It will be possible to move faster and invite global audience on beta release. Additionally it will develop guilds more
if we would allow to purchase a cartridges via GLTR we will simply commodities automated actions which bots will do for us.
I like it. Though, many exercises may end up with unexpected challenges, we will deal with them. I just have one question:
Can lender/managers recharge for scholar if truly believe in the scholar and try to help? It is sort of against the spirit of this proposal as we want scholar to invest or spend into this ecosystem. I assume, the lender/manager can always send GLTR to the scholar. If not allowed to recharge for scholars, do we plan to track GLTR transfer if that transfer is help the scholar to recharge?
The big elephant is inflation. Being in the alpha stage, I think the reality is that the game just isn’t quite ready to handle the incentive layer it wants to have. Now that alchemica is minting, turning off or slowing emissions is the only way to get that genie back in the bottle. This thread began with an urging to keep spillovers turned off, which would roughly halve the rate of inflation. But it was pointed out that this would hurt guilds and scholars, and that even without spillovers, channeled alchemica would still be dumped by players and botters alike.
The conversation turned from there to the subject of bots. Creating alchemica sinks through game mechanics and balancing the emission rate is what ultimately will stabilize the Aavegotchi economy, but if bots are chewing up such an outsize part of dev time, dealing with them becomes the priority. I think trying to come up with a gamepass distribution system is a fair and reasonable way to try and select for human players over bots, but it won’t stop inflation and it comes with the problems you’ve described.
I agree that long term, subscription fees and permissioned entry is not attractive to new players. Pay-to-play is not the goal here, rather the idea is to create a mechanism to disincentivize bot activity. It’s a tough problem because so much of the game is easily bottable in ways that are not easy to fix. Cartridges may not have any effect on inflation, but if it works as a short term solution to ease botting, it can at least preserve the work already done to build the community without nuking emissions.
With this idea, we can give it a few months; successive rounds of cartridge distribution will allow current scholars to keep playing while guilds onboard any new players who want to join, and Pixelcraft can focus on building out game mechanics instead of constantly chasing bots.
That makes sense. I suppose if someone for some reason really wanted to get into the next Round, but didn’t want to do the work of renting to a scholar, they could simply activate the cartridge themselves on an alternative address and personally pay the fee to recharge it. Maybe this is just an edge case; not particularly abuseable in a way that immediately comes to mind (since they have to pay a fee), other than being able to duplicate cartridged addresses across Rounds without actually having to rely on scholars.
I like the idea of it and am definitely a proponent of $GLTR being implemented with a recharge. Makes sense.
The only thing that would concern me is the distribution of these assets. Where would Guilds fall into the fold on this one? Like what are the qualifications imagined to be around this? My initial worry is that guilds could be handicapped in some significant way as a result of a proposal that doesn’t carefully factor that in (would love your thoughts here).
The rest seems great. Love the thought process on ‘recharging’, player conversion metrics, and automatic invites to proceeding rounds of play as they rotate through. Only thing I could add would be to shorten the trial period from 30days to something lower, 30days seems like a long time for someone to walk the gotchiverse in a trial-run. I personally would like to see the need for caartridges show up sooner in this scenario.
1.2kk GLTR at currently prices is around 48 usd.
If the player grinds 8h a day, he will make around 8 usd per day with current alchemica prices
So the caartridge reload will already cut 20% of his earnings.
It would be much wiser and I would even recommend for them, purchasing a humble, so it is very likely that I wont get my invitations for round 2, which I would be fine if he did purchase a land.
But I thought one way of incentivize such thing is that I make a deal with my scholars (something like 50%-50%) and IF they either recharged the caartridge or purchased a land, I’d give him half of my % back.
But I can not enforce him to play with my gotchi, it could be the case I give him the caartridge and he simply rents from the market (unless caartridge is tied to whitelist). If the caartridges came in 4 (1 per week), it would be easy to simply not giving this person the caartridge for next week.
I’m trying to think what I’d do and probably I’m complicating things but I think guilds could potentially suffer from such a thing too and we could go for round 2 without both, caartridges and players that didnt purchased a land.
It seems to me that the problem will be solved by increasing the interest of ordinary players, by adding more and more new content that will require alchemy, so that they balance the costs. Restrictions in this case I think is not a very good idea.
Suggested an idea about the police.
You can enter the role of the police in the Gotchiverse. These are frens who have more than 5000 GHST gotches or lands on their account, they will have an admin panel with logs of other players and they will be able to ban them, and if after 5 days there was no appeal, then 50% of the alchemy is burned and the second 50% goes to this policeman
I’d say if this additional friction reduces the number of bots and discourages at least some extractors from playing, it’s a win in my book at this point. Emphasis on “at this point”, cause I would agree with you at a different stage. But the truth is that until we have a deeper and more engaging gameplay, most people are here either to earn some money and cash out, or to grow their assets and prepare for the future gameplay (nobody is gonna fall in love with gathering alchemica all day IMO and might not bother to read what the future plans for the gotchiverse are). It might not be great, but anything that limits the former players (specially automated ones) and focuses on the latter, is good for now I think.
You guys are highly under-estimating the amount of friction that this adds to getting casual players to play, and landlords / gotchilords alike spending extra effort and time to try to find players every single time someone flakes out to continue making a few dollars by spending precious time in discord talking to randoms?
Assuming that someone will deal with this convoluted system of finding people to borrow their cartridges (and to continuously build trust to get to that stage over discord???) rather than go play another game is delusional in my opinion. Everyone really here has their heads down buried in the sand.
If you want to implement this, and put further burden on asset owners to solve this problem, I don’t want to be forced into these one-off dealing markets… implement proper tools into the marketplace / game / guilds to build reputation so that it’s not an ongoing burden to the solo users please.
Also consider that whomever is participating in this forum is likely heavily TIME-invested into this. I signed up just to comment on this because I really don’t like either suggestions as a TIME-STARVED asset owner, and if would’ve just passed this by normally.
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).