There is a problem with the currently proposed estate building mechanics. The problem is that since linking parcels is restricted by the presence of an upgraded lodge, it is quite expensive to link parcels with very little benefit for doing so. To put it simply, creating an estate is not worth it. I personally see no good reason to link up my adjacent parcels or seek out new ones, and from feedback I have seen on the forum others feel the same way.
I am making this thread to be a brainstorming session where we can come up with some way of either increasing the benefits of estates or decreasing the costs. Estate building is a great opportunity to create a fun meta-game of building a large estate and help users see the value of a parcel as more than just its alchemica-harvesting potential. Unfortunately, the way it is proposed in the Gotchi Bible 4 it’s so expensive and worthless that very few people are likely to bother.
Some ideas to get things started:
Break the link between Lodges and Estates
The benefits to having an estate are so small (a little bit of convenience in harvesting, slightly less walls needed to enclose) that there’s no real need to tie estate linking with lodge level. Lodges’ primary use case is communal channeling for guilds, which justifies its high price. But plenty of people by themselves have 2 or more adjacent parcels and would like to link them without becoming a guild and paying a huge alchemica price. Estates could be free to link up, or have a new installation dedicated to gating estate size whose price is more appropriate for the tiny benefits that an estate gives.
Allow linked parcels to share certain installations
For example, allow harvesters from all linked parcels in an estate to harvest into one highly-upgraded reservoir on one of the parcels. This would allow large estates to save a little build time (not to mention Polygon transactions) by buying fewer higher level reservoirs instead of a ton of smaller ones. This would give a large boost to the convenience offered by an Estate without giving a huge boost to performance.
It’s ok for me to link Lodges and Estaate but I agree with you that the benefits are currently not so great.
I like your idea about sharing some installations. For example, a good one would be Aaltar.
If we have an Estaate, only one Aaltar should be enough to upgrade all the other installations within the same Estaate instead of one on each parcel.
Estates are a whale tool and guild tool IMHO, and fine as is. It is a convenience for those who are so big they are starting to experience scaling issues , and nothing more.
This is not so you can make humble estates. That is a misuse of the tool.
“This is not so you can make humble estates. That is a misuse of the tool.”
What’s wrong with humble estates? I think allowing everybody including non-whales to participate in collecting parcels and building an estate would be fun, and good for the ecosystem.
Simply change the wording of the thing so it says each level of the lodge enables you to link an additional spacious parcel’s worth of land.
This would mean that if you put a L1 lodge on a humble, you can link 31 humbles to it, 7 reasonables and 3 humble, but not a spacious. If you wanted to link a humble to a spacious, you would need to put the lodge on the spacious.
This is the equitable approach to it. Determine the amount of land you can link instead of counting by parcels.
The downside to this is that this is obviously more dev work.
TBH I’m ok with the lodge/estate connection too as it is. The fact they’re called “estates” always made me think the intention was to have them as a more exclusive feature for spacious owners, whales, big guilds and eventually companies and businesses.
The really big advantage for estate builders in the long term is going to be the advertisement and branding value they get from owning a large identifiable block on the Gotchi world map. As much as people hate on whales, they are the ones most likely to pay for this kind of exclusivity/flex/branding hook so paying for estates via the lodge is actually a good thing for the ecosystem overall.
Humble estates also seem like a pretty extreme edge case. Are there really owners of 4+ adjacent humbles out there? I feel like they would have just bought a reasonable or spacious instead right?
The harvesting convenience is huge thing. I would also like if installations could be shared but it is also a positive we can build more of the same installation which has a 1 per parcel limitation. Like the aaltar.
Having more altars per parcel is not really that helpful. It is just the HQ type building that lets you build other buildings. There’s very few people who have so many gotchis they would never have enough land to service them with mid level altars, and those people are most definitely whales.
Actually… that does explain a use case for a humble estate… Except it is probably a string of humbles coming off of a guild spacious, that are used to service the extra gotchis.
A few things that would make estates great again (MEGA!!! )
Share in build queue. If you link three parcels, you could simultaneously build three things across the estate. So one parcel might capture three builds while the other two are dormant.
Faster build time. To build on above, if you have a three parcel estate, you could build one installation faster if the other two parcels are not building. The increased build speed would have finishing returns, so a thirty parcel estate would not big things epically fast.
Share reservoirs. As said before a shared reservoir would be very nice, especially for space-limited humble estates. You could build out a humble estate and pump one parcel with four harvesters while holding the alchemica in another.
The first two could also serve as alchemica burns. You could use those abilities only if the conditions are met and then would need to spend some alchemica on top.
While it wouldn’t be impossible to accomplish what you’re proposing, it would be quite involved on the smart contract.
Currently, each REALM parcel is a separate NFT. We were not planning to put Estates on the blockchain because of the huge array of rules involved in setting them up and maintaining them, which cannot be coded into blockchain logic.
That’s why we opted for the “batch empty Reservoir” function, because it’s something we can enable onchain that doesn’t affect the internal contract logic of how Alchemica is calculated onchain.
Anything that involves changing logic to allow multiple parcels to share the same resources would require quite a deep review of contract logic and significant overhaul, right before the launch.
In summary, definitely open to finding more benefits for Estates, but the DAO should recognize that anything that deals with core Alchemica logic on the NFT level will involve significant dev overhead, not to mention far more complicated Web2 backend support to manage.
seems to me that the most practical boost for estates is to show the lodge on the minimap and the outline of it for visibility purposes.
as well as the increased time efficiency of being able to manage all of your estates installations from the same spot since they will be linked. do they need to be stronger that that? it already quite important boosts imho.
What about simply allowing linked parcels to share the highest level aaltar on the estate for tech tree purposes? I.e. Once you build a higher level aaltar on one parcel in the estate you can build higher level buildings on all parcels in the estate. I assume the tech tree restrictions are on the Web2 side, not the contract side, is that correct?
Hm, now that I think about it the tech tree stuff would probably be in the contracts, otherwise people could install or build wrong stuff on a parcel by interacting with the contracts directly. I would love to be wrong about that though.
Hm it’s hard to come up with potential perks of an estate without dealing with installations or alchemica.
Perhaps estates could have an outgoing teleportation radius, to make up for the fact that the owner is concentrating their parcels all in one spot instead of spreading out. The more parcels in the estate, the bigger the radius the estate holder could teleport out to from their parcel. Maybe they could even share this ability to others via an installation, so large estates could become the “last-mile” mobility option within districts.
It seems like doing anything related to sharing installations is not going to happen in the near term. What about the first idea above, about not requiring lodges to link an estate? This would at least make creating an estate a net neutral (as far as alchemica), instead of a net negative.
Even for “lazy whales” it’s barely worthwile, would be much easier to hire a bunch of people for a fraction of the cost. Definitely gonna be tough to add stuff this close before launch, but estates do feel extremely underpowered at the moment.
Spillage coming from each reservoir, makes dumping everything at once, a non-benefit, IMHO.
I think people who haven’t thought of that, will be very disappointed in their choices, the first time they empty reservoirs, on their C shaped estate with reservoirs spread haphazardly throughout.
The solutions that let you share reservoirs, would have helped this, and also helped the L9 issue, but that breaks the code, so… seems like we need to think outside the box a bit.
Basing the size of potential estate, on squares, not parcel # spreads the love to the humbles and reasonables.
Letting humble and reasonable use higher level altars to make estates does this as well.
Giving a teleportation radius also gives more utility and affects something that is far enough out, and mostly un-fleshed out, to not be a dev cycle issue.
Mini map visibility is always a great add on, in any of these tougher discussions, it’s come up in the Eyes, Traits, Alchemica, and Wearables discussions. It almost feels like a minimap task force, or at least having access to the dev in charge of minimap, might be important?
Adjust build time
Are there any other angles we are missing here? Need more brainz… the second 2 ideas are nice touches, and the first two enable estates with smaller lands, but do not fix any of the issues with having the estates, outside of achievability. Adjusting build time is a tokenomics idea - viable, but touchy.
Maybe if we back up, and take the temperature of the community, on what they want from an estate?
Below is a poll about the various options that have been discussed. I didn’t include sharing installations or modifying build time since I’m pretty sure those would require contract work.
Disconnect Lodges and Estates. Estates have no prerequisite.
Estates require Aaltar levels, not Lodge levels
If gating estates with installation, scale per square rather than per parcel
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