a while back I read in discord, that the secondary sorting criterion for kinship (for Gotchis that have the same amount of Kinship at the time the season rewards are determined) is going to be BRS.
I’d like to propose that we change this, and here is why:
BRS has nothing to do with kinship. They are unrelated. A low BRS Gotchi could have a huge kinship, that is the beauty of it. Furthermore, high BRS Gotchis already get higher rewards in the rarity category, which features much higher payouts anyway. What reason would there be to contaminate the kinship ranking with BRS?
A much more adequate secondary sorting criterion would be the time that is left until petting your gotchi would raise kinship again. We are all in our own little 12h cycles and whether the snapshot for the kinship season rewards would be 1 hour before you can pet or 1 sec after you just pet, will be absolutely arbitrary. In the latter case you’d feel very lucky but in the former case you’d feel awful. However, when using “time until the next pet gives kinship again” as a secondary kinship sorting criterion, then it doesn’t matter anymore if you just pet or if you can only pet an hour from the snapshot. It would still be fair for all!
In summary: Compared to BRS, “the time until the next pet gives kinship again” - as a secondary sorting criterion - is more closely related to kinship. It is more fair in terms of the 12h cycle and how it aligns with the snapshot time. And, if you go down to millisecond resolution, it is extremely unlikely that two Gotchis have the exact same time left, which makes it also better for sorting than BRS (since two Gotchis might have the same kinship AND the same BRS, which would require a third sorting criterion).
I saw the announcement on medium. Personally, I don’t think EXP is a good sorting criterion. Its pretty much the same argument. EXP already has its own category. Furthermore, there will be a lot of Gotchis that have both the same amount of kinship and EXP.
Could EXP as a second sorting criterion be reversed by a successful snapshop poll?
If not, could you guys implement “time since last interaction” as a third sorting criterion?
Could we spread the snapshot timestamps for the 4 reward rounds 3h apart? E.g. round 1 at 1pm, round 2 (two weeks later) at 4pm, round 3 (two weeks later) at 7pm, and round 4 (two weeks later) at 10pm?
I feel that if “time since last interaction” is ignored, there will be a lot of drama again. All the Gotchis who would have gained +1 kinship just a few minutes after the reward’s snapshot time.
Thanks for hearing me out and keep up the good work!
I agree. Time since last interaction, if easily implemented, sounds like one of the best options. I can’t think of anything else that would be better than that.
I would have liked a third option in this snapshot, to keep EXP as tie-breaker but add “time since last pet” as a secondary tie-breaker. I’ve changed my opinion about the EXP tie-breaker, and prefer it now, but at the same time it seems pretty obvious that there will be many, many gotchis with identical Kinship and XP scores, so it seems to me that a runoff tie-breaker is needed.
How come? It would be great if you could give some reasons for why EXP would be a suitable tie breaker for Kinship, so that we can get some discussion going.
I thought about this too, before I submitted the proposal. However, considering the required vote differential and quorum, I don’t think it is feasible for any signal proposal to have more than two options right now. It is hard enough as it is, to reach those numbers.
I don’t have a particularly concrete reason why I’ve warmed up to the idea of XP as tie-breaker, other than realizing that mechanism was already in place and is much, much better than using BRS. Really making sure BRS was not the tie-breaker was my biggest concern.
But when I think more about it, I guess to me, kinship and XP both go hand-in-hand as measures of a player’s engagement with the game, rather than BRS, which has much more to do with luck and money. So I think it could be argued that in the case of a kinship tie, maybe the player who made sure to vote on all proposals and show up to all events might have an edge over someone who didn’t, and in the event of a tie on both, then it finally makes sense to get down to the microscopic level of who has the fastest petting hands. It makes sense to me that we’d find commonsense ways to use the data we already have (raw kinship and xp numbers) before resorting to implementing a new dataset (time since last pet).
I understand the sentiment of what you’re saying. If there were only two reward categories (rarity and engagement), I’d completely agree with you. But Exp and Kinship are two different categories. Why should your performance in one category determine your placement in a different category? That still doesn’t make sense to me. Especially if there is such a great alternative for tie-breaking already in place.
Because, we already have that data. It is what prevents you from receiving Kinship from an interaction before 12h have passed, and it is displayed prominently on every Gotchis profile: “Next interaction in: X hours”. The reason they chose hours and not seconds is purely based on good UI esthetics. The data is there down to the second (or even higher resolution). So there is no need to implement new datasets. It is readily available and waiting to be used
“Time Since…” seems too arbitrary if the time difference between two tied gotchis is a matter of minutes. If there are a significant amount of hours between, I can start to see how it makes sense.
But I see people getting upset when they fall in the leaderboard because the person they were tied with ends up petting just slightly after they did and just before the snapshot is taken.
Maybe something to clear up here is what happens in the event of a tie that is not broken…if a snapshot was taken today and rewards were distributed, would everyone with 118 kinship and exactly 540 XP (just pulling an example at random) all get an equal amount of rewards? I think when people see a very specific amount of GHST allocated to each position on the leaderboard, the easiest assumption for them to make is that every tie MUST be broken.
How come, fren? As far as I can see, this is the only game mechanic that there is right now. Pet every 12h and do it as fast as possible to minimize the time drift.
If this was not intended, then the devs could have easily implemented a fixed 12h cycle from e.g. 12am to 12pm, so that it wouldn’t matter when you pet, as long as it was within the 12h timeframe. For example you could decide to pet at 11:59am (and get +1 Kinship) and then pet again at 12:01pm (and get another +1 Kinship). And then you could wait for (up to) 23h:58m without losing a kinship opportunity. Or you could do it at 11:00am and 11:pm. Or whenever else you wanted during these fixed time frames. Then there would be no time drift, and seconds or minutes between pets would be irrelevant.
But that is not how the devs chose to implement the game. They made it so that it is literally impossible to pet twice within 24h, because there will be at least a couple of seconds drift for each pet while the transaction gets confirmed by the network. So the people who actually play the game the way it was designed, by trying to keep the time drift to a minimum, should rank higher. If this is not intended, then why not implement a fixed timeframe like described above, which would be way less of a hassle for everyone?
Imagine a Gotchi with comparably low EXP who has an interaction (which was confirmed at) 02:01:00pm that increases its kinship to e.g. 101. At 02:01:01pm the lowest ranking 101 Gotchi has e.g. rank #50. That would be its correct/fair rank placement (imo). The snapshot time for rewards is scheduled for 11:00:00pm. So all the Gotchis who still have 100 Kinship have 9h to catch up with that 101 Gotchi and most of them will rank higher at snapshot time, because they have more EXP. This could easily pull that Gotchi’s rank down from #50 (which would be the fair rank based on interaction schedule) to e.g. #90, because of all those Gotchis that had time to catch up until the snapshot. This would be extremely unfair.
Hm the time drift point is a good one as well as the fact that kinship is the central measurement of one’s interaction with a gotchi. That said, its debatable whether kinship is more important than other factors. Admittedly XP will be the worst for tie breaking because it will likely have the most ties itself.
Currently there is a “backup” tie breaker for each round that themes around a different trait per round (rarer energy…rarer brain…etc). If Kinship is the be all end all… and can be measured down to the second… this backup tie breaker feature would be rendered obsolete.
The benefits of the trait themes is that they slightly shift the meta from round to round, incorporating and giving priority to different traits.
For the Kinship category, yes, for other categories, no. At least (looking at the vote differential in the poll above and at the snapshot proposal) that is what the majority seem to agree on. But I’m happy to debate this further.
Thank you for clarifying this. I misunderstood the medium article and thought this regards the three different reward pools - as in “primary sorting” → “secondary sorting”, while the tertiary sorting is undetermined. But from what you’re saying, it sounds that all of these are applied in order.
From the vote differential, it seems that the majority would consider this a good thing.
Personally, I think the season would be much more interesting if - for the BRS category - the primary sorting would be one individual trait (per round), and the secondary sorting the overall BRS. Then the hardcore farmers would actually have an incentive to switch things around from one round to the next.
However - for the kinship category - I don’t see the relevance of individual traits. What relation is there between kinship and individual traits? So I would not miss individual-traits sorting in the kinship category.
As of the time of this post, the poll has a vote differential of almost 60% and the snapshot of over 90%. However, I find it rather difficult to get eyeballs on the snapshot. So far, the quorum is only at 200k GHST.
To give the devs time to do a core proposal before the season starts, I chose to end the snapshot on the 10th of April. That is in only two days. What happens if the quorum stays so low? Will the proposal just die, despite the high vote differential?
I with they would have included this thread / snapshot in the “Aavegotchi Threadz” in the Community Update article to get a bit more attention. But then again, the proposal tries to change something that they worked on and put thought in, so I understand why they didn’t wanna promote it.
Strongly in favour of this assuming it is technically feasible to implement.
Some spots on the kinship leaderboard are only minutes apart from each other. Letting that competition come down to who was able to attend the community call or the raffle live drawing for the xp tie-break would be a big downer when it’s been such a race to keep up in kinship over a period of MONTHS.
I don’t see how anybody could justify becoming upset over this mechanic though.
Even if the change was implemented before the leaderboard distribution, Kinship rewards have been a part of the discussion for quite a while now. Anybody lagging behind has refused to take it seriously and we shouldn’t reward that by protecting their feelings over the matter.
Most of us are adults, we make our own decisions, even if that decision is to neglect utilizing specific reward schemes.
The snapshot proposal has ended. As I said earlier, I only gave it one week, so that Pixelcraft Studios would have enough time to create a one week long core proposal that concludes before season 1 starts. I think it is important that this gets sorted out before the season starts. I want to thank all the people who participated in the discussion, the poll, and the snapshot, so far. You guys are all awesome!
@Jesse_gldnXross The snapshots quorum wasn’t as high as I had hoped for (~230k), but we all did our best to promote the snapshot here in the forum as well as on Discord. We managed to get a really large vote differential: 61% in the poll, 94% in the snapshot. This is clearly an important issue to the community and I really hope you guys will turn this into a core proposal before season 1 starts.
As @Cookiethief and @Grip pointed out so passionately, a lot of people take this game mechanic seriously. We set our alarm clocks twice a day and some of us have intense battles about who pets first, where it comes down to a few minutes. This kind of dedication over so many weeks should not be disregarded, as it shows a much higher degree of support for the project than whether or not someone had time to attend a meeting at a specific time. Also, many users didn’t know about Aavegotchi in January, and hence had no way to vote in those early proposals. Rewarding the people who joined early is a great sentiment that I fully support, but it is already covered by the Experience reward pool.
