Context:
Rarity farming for Kinship and Experience is a great way to foster engagement from the player base. Indeed, the play to earn element provide a strong incentive for player to interact regularly with the game/community in order to compete for GHST rewards.
Problem:
Given the slow and incremental nature of how Kinship and Experience is earned, it will be very hard for new players to earn anything from the game, because they will start so far behind.
The incentive to engage with the game will be greatly reduced for new players, because they will never be able to catch-up, and therefore might not engage as much as we wish them to.
Potential solution:
Have a “season specific” leaderboard, where only the Experience and Kinship earned during the season is taken into account.
This will ensure a fair competition for all of the players, new and old, and maintain the incentive to engage with the game for all players. Also, this system rewards only active players, which in the long run is very positive in my opinion.
Drawback:
Drawback is that some players that have a lot of Kinship and Experience might not want to move to this system, because it is not in their personal interest.
One potential solution is to have both an “All time” and a “season specific” leaderboard, with rewards shared among both.
I think @coderdan has also talked about this before and I like the idea of a season-specific leaderboard. As you said we need some solution to make the game attractive for new players, this seems like the simplest one to me. So this definitely has my support, would love to hear some other ideas/solutions though.
I also like this idea. I think this could work best if there is an All-Time Leaderboard and a Season Specific Leaderboard to keep everyone happy. The only issue would be figuring out the allocation of rewards between these two reward pools. Quick question for dev team: Will more potions be released when Haunt 2 launches? This information could color this conversation to a degree and would be good to know.
Yep that is a very good point, consummables need to be taken into account. I assume that consummables will not be able to be purchased the way they used to be in the past, at least I am hoping they won’t !
I agree with @nofuturistic. Both leaderboards seem necessary and I would argue that the all-time leaderboard is still where a large majority of the rewards should be placed. The season specific rewards could be enough to drive engagement for new users, but the goal should be to work towards that all-time rewards pool.
We don’t have any plans to sell consumables in the Maall or Aauctions, but consumables will eventually work their way back into the game, albeit via a Play-to-earn mechanism.
I think dual leaderboards is a good idea, but I would argue that rewards should be more heavily skewed towards the incoming Haunt (Haunt 2) rather than towards the All-time leaderboard, at least for Kinship and Experience.
For BRS, it probably makes more sense to give a larger portion of rewards to the Alltime category, since wearables can be bought by anyone in the Baazaar and Drops.
But for Kinship and Experience, if I were a new player I wouldn’t be happy seeing a large chunk of my GHST going to pay off old players with high kinship and experience.
I think that is a fair suggestion @coderdan. Larger reward pools for XP and Kinship for Haaunt 2 players will ultimately draw more players in for H2. What would be the best allocation for rewards? I know we are currently using 70% BRS, 20% Kinship, 10% for Rarity Farming Rewards. Would those percentages need to be shifted to accommodate this proposal?
Another approach to this idea would be to award the “biggest gainers” that kicks off with season 2. It then doesn’t matter what your starting kinship or xp is. Someone with 300 kinship would have the same chance as a 50 player (would need some kind of protection against the hated gotchis who get extra kinship at the very bottom)
This would work as currently all xp and kinship is linear. A future alternative would be to have diminishing returns (or rather amplified starting) kinship/xp.
This would also be cool to give a badge for the most active players (biggest gainers) for each specific season.
You could have biggest gainers and all time boards.
I think a draw down with Haunt 2 leaderboards is if a new player bought a gotchi at the end of haunt 1. His fren would be lumped in the old grouping.
Fair point, I wasn’t really thinking about the idea of separating the individual categories. I was thinking about having the same reward structure twice… now that I think about it more I realize I definitely didn’t have that planned out.
Kinship is one that I feel might need a 50/50 split between all time and current season. If it was skewed towards just the current season then people that hold gotchi’s prior to a season start don’t really have any reason to stay engaged between seasons. Of course, currently owning a gotchi has me skewed towards the all time leaderboard, but a 50/50 split would seem fair to me. Don’t de-incentivize haaunt 1 participants, but don’t make new users feel cheated.
Edit: I’m not certain on how I feel about kinship. Even a 50/50 split may still feel like new players are just dumping money into the pockets of older players. I guess I feel like I don’t want all my kinship to be wasted, but also want to do what is best for the platform. So I could be easily swayed to skew this more towards current season.
XP seems like the category that can be significantly skewed towards current season. So far, the more engagement you have, the more XP you earn. I think pool could be the primary motivator for new players and help them learn about and participate in the community (XP events, snapshots, etc.).
But i think the solution to this were said simply like - cut all time brs since it’s always all time, and add to seasonal kinship an xp, but do not cut the all time kinship and xp rewards, since it’s affecting early adopters and those who consume.
I’ve changed my tune on this one. All in on the season specific rewards for kinship and experience.
Driving engagement for all users is most important for the health of the platform.
All-time kinship is basically just giving money to people in haaunt 1… honestly, I’m now on the side of not having any all-time kinship rewards. Maybe find a way to incentivize maximizing kinship over the long term another way. It does seem like all-time kinship is just paying the “elite” (aka haaunt 1) players. Note that I benefit from all-time kinship and have a finance incentive to not change things (small incentive). While I want the rewards, I think seasonal kinship is better for the growth of Aavegotchi.
I’ve reached a similar conclusion for XP, but unlike kinship, XP already has a built in motivator for maximizing a players all-time XP. You get stat points which then improve your BRS. So to me there’s no reason to incentivize all time XP because you’re already using it to improve BRS. Rewards for all-time XP are close to double dipping… a high XP gotchi also gets to improve it’s BRS… getting rewards from two pools for the same feature (not true in all cases). The season specific XP would drive engagement for all users. No sitting on your haunches just because you were in season 1.
I know the counter argument is that we are de-incentivizing early adopters or harming them in some way, but I don’t think that is true. All of us with gotchi’s were able to compete in season one… that’s already a significant advantage. Many of us earned GHST which can be put to use in season 2. We have a leg up on anyone joining season 2 for the rarity farming. We should be more concerned about making the system more engaging for new players. I think this proposal would be a great way to address it. I had to think about it more, but I’m definitely on board.
I like the idea of tracking kinship and XP from some predetermined start date (maybe date of haunt 2) for rarity farming, while still allowing total kinship to accumulate without “nerfing” a player’s kinship score (same with XP). I think tracking kinship within each season is the right way to incentivize new players to feel that they have a chance to compete, and it makes sense to me that the rarity farming rewards from a specific time period should be largely limited to actions taken in that time period. Whales and OGs will have plenty of advantage in the BRS/ARS category already.
I do think, however, that is important to continue to create incentives aside from rarity farming to reward players for their total kinship and XP scores. I think I remember @coderdan saying something about high kinship scores receiving some sort of advantage when it comes to the upcoming Realm sale, and I think that’s a good example of incentivizing players without putting newcomers at too much of a disadvantage.
Great points. So to be clear, you think it makes sense to have an All-time leaderboard for BRS/ARS, but for Kinship and Experience Leaderboard only to apply to Haunt 2 Aavegotchis, right?.
I think that makes pretty good sense, especially in the context of the information we’ll be releasing soon about the utility of kinship in the Aavegotchi Realm.
Early players already have huge advantages in terms of XP (and therefore BRS), and if they really want to put that advantage to use, they could sacrifice their H1 Gotchis to boost H2 Gotchis on the XP leaderboard. So there will be plenty of ways to play the game.
Yes to the all-time BRS/ARS. Not sure on the XP/Kinship Haaunt vs. Season.
I was originally thinking more like @Jujy. Basically do a time/block based start and calculate the leaderboard based on a delta.
If we only did the leaderboard for Haaunt 2 then it would be a haaunt specific leaderboard. Which I actually wasn’t thinking about, but sounds pretty good to me. Way easier to track and really focuses on new users.
I’ve reached the conclusion that XP/kinship rewards should basically be “on-boarding rewards”. Give new users a reason to participate. I want more people on the Baazaar, buying items for their gotchi’s or just trying to flip items to grow their GHST.
Any other thoughts on a Haaunt specific versus Season specific (i.e. block start) leaderboard?
I agree with coderdan. We need to encourage new players and make it fun for all. Where’s the fun in whales buying the godlike wearables and winning the huge GHST awards in every rarity farming? Controlling the votes? etc. Do we want mass adoption?
I agree with OP and some others, kinship and XP leaderboards should be seasonal. However, I think I don’t quite agree with @coderdan solution, forcing people to sacrifice their beloved gotchis to stay competitive. @plm and @Jujy offered a perfect solution IMO, let all gotchis from all haunts compete each season, counting only the XP and kinship that they earn during said season. That doesn’t give Haunt 1 gotchis any advantages, doesn’t force OGs to sacrifice their gotchis, it’s newcomer friendly and rewards everyone fairly according to the dedication and care they take for each of their gotchis. This would be especially fun if there were more ways to climb those leaderboards, which I assume will be the case in the future.
Then badges becoming worthless + tossing xp all the time sounds like a pain in the neck.
Probably having 2 types of rewards for kinship and xp as said above would be more interesting for early belivers, marketmakers?
A smaller competition for single stats like top100 energy top 100 spook etc etc
there are a lot of gotchi’s who are quite low BRSwise but still have 99 energy for example and they could easily compete with top end gotchi’s if it’s only about a single stat!
I think it makes most sense to have an all-time board and a current season board in which any gotchi can participate. This structure makes it the most fair as a season is a season. If I summoned my gotchi two weeks ago and it’s from haunt 1, I still have equal playing field for the season 2 board. It is also more inclusive as everyone would start the season at zero and everyone could participate. we’d be awarding the most active players during that specific season, not just haunt 2 gotchi holders.
The score for current season would be the change in xp/kinship rather than highest score. Otherwise, we’re going to create so many leaderboards with future seasons. With season three, players who are haunt 2 will complain because they couldn’t capitalize on the gains from season one and so on.
Or, we discuss revamping the system and make kinship gains have diminishing returns as you go higher (or rather, have starting players gain higher kinship)
!