There are several important interests that any future season should protect:
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Do not devalue old wearables.
The reason that the appraisers valued the Aastonauts so high is because of their very rare and very valuable wearables. People invested a lot of money in those. They should be considered in one of the future leaderboards. -
Give new players a chance to win BIG, even first place.
To onboard the masses, it is imperative that new players have a chance to win big, even first place in BRS. Since BRS is the most valuable category, points 1 and 2 are mutually exclusive, unless there are two leaderboards. One all-time and one that only considers Gotchis that have not yet participated in previous season and only wearables that were minted after the previous season (otherwise they could just be given to a freshly bought H2 Gotchi, which new players cannot do, because they don’t own any of the old godlike wearables). How many funds are going to which BRS leaderboard (all-time and new) can be decided later. -
Do not devalue past time, work, and effort, that dedicated players put in.
As I said before, it is vital that the people who come back every day, even between seasons, get rewarded for their hard work and love for the game. Using delta leaderboards for XP and Kinship would be a slap in the face to your dedicated player base. Since this is again mutually exclusive with the possibility that new players would be able to win first place in these categories, we need separate leaderboard in these categories (XP and Kinship) as well. All-time leaderboards and leaderboards that only considers what happened after the first Haunt after the last season. I said first Haunt after the last season just in case that there might be multiple Haunts between seasons.
So with 6 leaderboards, all of these important things can be considered! Of course it would be totally up to the DAO or to Pixelcraft how much percent of the funds each leaderboard will receive. Many people here seem to favor all-time BRS + delta XP / Kinship. So those could receive more funds than the 3 counterpart leaderboards. But you do need all 6 and here is why:
Why are there problems with having only all-time BRS + delta XP + delta Kinship leaderboards?
You significantly devalue the work that people put into the game. A Gotchi with a lot of Kinship has worth because he is a good “horse” for next season’s rewards. If you take that away from those Gotchis you devalue them. Why would you want that? Imagine the owner of Burger King Gotchi, who just yesterday chugged Kinship potions that they bought for over 13k GHST! Imagine how they feel if you announce that for S2 Kinship only counts after H2 happened. #Rekt. Aavegotchi is a big happy family and we don’t want to screw people over. Not the new people and not the old people either.
But what about what @coderdan said, that there will be another use case for Kinship?
This is purely my own speculation but I have long been suspecting (and I think he has been hinting at it as well) that you will be able to spend Kinship on something. This would put the Kinship leaders in a pickle. Buy whatever they can buy with their Kinship and loose their placement in the leaderboard, or hold on to their placement (or possibly climb because Gotchis in front of them might sell their Kinship) by not selling their Kinship. Only counting Kinship that that was acquired after H2 would prevent people from having to make that (at least for me) VERY difficult choice. So you might mistakenly think that having just the delta Kinship leaderboard would be a good idea because it prevents people from having to make a difficult choice for themselves. But this is where I would like to bring up the dependability metric again. Dependability is potion independent and based on how many interactions you had with your Gotchi since its birth. So people can spend all their Kinship on whatever it is that you will be able to buy with it, but their dependability score will not decrease! This, in my opinion, is the much better solution to this conundrum. No more Kinship leaderboards but instead 2 dependability leaderboards. One all-time and one only for Gotchis claimed after the new Haunt (independent from which Haunt they belong to). This would not devalue Kinship Potions too much because you could still (presumably) buy stuff with Kinship. It will also increase the value of H1 portals, which for Kinship leaderboards were at a disadvantage, but would now be on equal footing for dependability. Also, dependability is easier to climb for newly claimed Gotchis, even if you only have 1 leaderboard. It is the lower bound of the 95% confidence interval. So in a way it is how certain your Gotchi can be that you’re gonna pet him.
Ok, you got me, This does actually sounds a bit intriguing, tell me more about this “dependability” score.
You can find an implementation that is still work in progress at aavegotchi.pet. I’m working on the perfect scoring for a fair play to win system. Right now, you can already see that there are a lot of younger Gotchis in the Top100 because they never “missed” a pet and only had very little time shift, meaning they pet as soon as possible, twice a day. This is dedication! But since the value is based on the timestamp when the Gotchi was claimed, the score is not constant during the day. Right now, Gotchis still switch ranks for a few hours of the day because they are not born at the same time and with every 12h-since-birth passed, a new interaction opportunity is considered for the score, increasing the n of the formula for different Gotchis at different times. I plan to fix this soon and have it be fair for all. I don’t want that the time of day that the snapshot is taken will randomly favor some Gotchis more than others, simply because they had a “lucky” birth time. Also alexjj made a very good point in Discord about whether or not to consider owner changes for the dependability score. I don’t want to spoil too much of the blog post but the answer is “yes, if”. So stay tuned my fellow Gotchi lovers!