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.
If alchemica spillover is being used as a marketing tool, maybe this is a bad time to use it? It seems like many out there are still abandoning other blockchain projects or are trying to make money back.
I kinda like invites as a way to sort of give guilds some healthy exercise and keep the good scholars in the loop, but Moon’s idea sounds easier and much more fun
You make some good points here. I think the main issue with bots is that they are using up dev time and hence delaying other game features. So cartridges was a quick easy to implement fix that would free up more dev time.
Like the idea of reduced spillover radius and less of it, would add a new dynamic to the game for sure. Also wall building might stop allot of alch going to the bots and be a sink for alch at the same time.
Also if we were able to sublet gotchi’s and spillover radius was reduced then this would add more of a team element to the game. Guilds could have gotchi managers that plan channelling and make sure there’s players there to capitalise on it.
I never really had an issue with scholars extracting, all though I do think it’s in their own interest to acquire in game assets. But the trickle down economy is a nice feature of the game.
Messing with rates is going overboard, but cutting the radius in half, would make this much more gameable and community organizable. Changing both at once, would feel the same. A L9 altar looks the same, from where the gotchi is standing, because thee is less spillage, but its in smaller radius. It neve gets to a point where you can see the effect.
What if we cut radius in half, for one week, and see if we like the effect?
The playdrop was really exciting and I think we did a great job of delivering a groundbreaking product but I think we’ve put ourselves into a corner by continuing to deliver our alchemica to the bots. I think it’s perfectly acceptable to proceed on a touch-go basis if the mechanics are not working out and even if we change spillover radius we are still going to have (often more than 2) bots insta-teleporting to our parcels and stealing from us, our scholars, and depressing token prices.
With the current iteration, it’s really frustrating for our scholars(and me), and have not been pursuing rentals and have put my guild entirely on hold. I think the cartridge, and tutorial ideas are good but in the interim, I wish we could put all drops on hold to save token prices and settle on a harvester release schedule with dialed-in mechanics courtesy of Notorious BTC, and Mikejay.
I don’t think any of us would be against saving the current spillover for a mega harvester launch party or Saturday’s discord events.
You just game me an idea for a simple idea that might help for that one.
For the first minute you are in game, no picking up. You can interact with your installations, and walk around, but you are on time out from pickups. Yellow name, not red name.
If PC likes this idea, please delete this post, and implement it quietly, so you can use the opportunity to wipe out all of those botters, as they will be extremely obvious and it will require a rewrite of their code, to beat it. Also, you could do forensics on that, and figure out who they go to, to purchase the bot, and anyone who has transacted with that address or addresses that feed addresses that interact with it, can be flagged or shadow banned, too.
I agree with some of your points. We can probably all agree that the gotchiverse gameplay right now is lacking, and that ultimately once we have a more robust gotchiverse, it’ll be easier to fight bots. For the sake of moving forward in the discussion, I’m not gonna argue whether fighting against bots should be a priority cause it might be controversial, but my guess is that, as Dan mentioned, fighting fraud one way or another will be something we’ll have to deal with many times (even with your proposed solution), whether we like it or not. Most online platforms do, as there are always people who try to game the system or take advantage of others.
So, once we accept that the current gotchiverse experience makes it easy for bots and not very enjoyable for players, the thing is, it’s gonna take quite some time to build something that significantly improves the gameplay. The question is, what should we do until then, considering we don’t want to spend too much precious dev time on this? Multiple choice, select as many as you’d agree with:
Stop spillover as originally proposed by Cookiethief (-dev bandwidth)
Invite system/Caartridges (+dev bandwidth)
Review period (-dev bandwidth)
Onboarding quest (slightly more bandwidth than review periods)
Reduce spillover radius and/or rate, and do nothing about bots (seems easy to implement, -dev bandwidth?)
Reduce spillover and implement a review period as well
Looking ahead a bit, I wanted to add some context to the spillover discussion with regard to harvesters and spillover. Using the tentative reservoir spillover rates PC has provided for the harvester simulations (they’re here), we’re able to quantify what to expect in terms of harvester spillover.
In our harvester simulations, players lose somewhere between 20%-40% of their harvested alchemica on average to spillover over the course of 3 years - probably weighted more towards the 20% side in reality as IMO real players are likely to upgrade their harvesters a bit further to capture that added return and to lengthen their emptying time (our simulation players stick to 8 hour emptying).
So that’s the equivalent to the spillover rate of a L4-L7 altar. I don’t know for sure, but just from walking around the gotchiverse, I’d guess the average altar level today is below L4. Harvesters will also help in that there will be more incentive for players to upgrade the altar to allow for higher level altars and reservoirs (especially if new harvester recipes pass sigprop-coreprop). That should reduce the overall % of spillover relative to emissions compared to today.
So that’s sort of good news- but the bad news is that harvesting represents 50% of alchemica supply (compared to 25% for channeling) - so they will be adding a lot of extra spillover into the mix in absolute terms.
There’s also the matter of bubble-ups, which are all spillover, if I understand them correctly.
If 20%-40% of the games inflation is a marketing expense for play-to-earn, I think it makes sense to question whether the game’s economy can afford this level of investment which, in effect, transfers a large portion of the game economy from (perceived) stronger hands to (perceived) weaker hands over the long term. Perhaps some of this budget would be better put to use in one of the other buckets (PC, DAO, great portal, burn).
Not advocating any specific change, but just wanted to provide those numbers from harvesters and sort of look at this thing big picture.
I think you have the radius way wrong there. Reservoirs start around where altars end, don’t they? 800 gotchi to 200 gotchis?Essentially the size of 4 parrtnerr parrcels orr a partner parcel, on the 9. That is most definitly something that a guild or eam could handle mopping up themselves. It would be ninja moves and organization, but I think when its going to be 20+ ghst at a time in an area that’s only a few screens wide, it will be much easier to “keep it in the family”
I agree with every word. We should focus on delivering more mechanics and following the roadmap, making the game more complex. Most proposed solutions will only temporarily solve the botting problem.
) and wander aimlessly