Make Season 2 great for new players

Game Mechanics
42

Would like this post twice if I could. If you really think about it, supposedly H1 will be more than compensated for this change of terms via reaalm,and will forever hold value as genesis haunt.

But what about H2? When its time to nerf H2, there might be no reaalm parcels to offer and no genesis-haunt rarity to support value. What would? What would motivate people saeson after season to buy disposable NFTs worth for 1 season/15% ROI in an active defi bull market that can yield 15% in one week elsewhere? Why even bother with a blockchain game if nerfs/ hasty changes come and go a-la-Blizzard (or any other centralized publisher)?

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43

That is not at all how dependability works.
If you pet it once, perfectly, as you say, dependability will be 20.65%. If you pet it 10 times perfectly since it was summoned it will be 72.25%. If you pet it 100 times perfectly (without missing or shifting more than 12h) it will be 96.30%.
So there is really no need to worry about that, fren.

I do not believe that would be well received. I, for one, would be deeply disappointed with that.

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44

Great, glad to hear it! I haven’t taken a closer look at the mechanism yet, just the leaderboard.

45

Not a full reset. There could be All-Time Kinship Level and Seasonal Kinship Level.
When the conversation happened within Discord, most agreed that would be the way to go, including Coderdan who had either brought it up or commented further.

Each new season should measure the amount of Kinship or XP gained, discounting previous seasons.

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46

This thread got intense, but at the risk of adding to the noise, I want to clarify and re-iterate my stance, specifically for Kinship leaderboards. I’d like those who have voiced concerns recently to respond, to help me understand where our opinions differ (sorry if I’m missing something, but damn there’s a lot to read, haha)

To my thinking, the idea of the Kinship leaderboard (and XP to some extent) is to reward those who are willing to spend time to engage with the game rather than simply paying to win the rarity game. Of course, the implementation has been imperfect (potions), but I think that’s the general idea.

My thoughts:

  1. It doesn’t make sense to me to reset Kinship for the next rarity farming season (people will have no incentive to ever engage outside the timeline of a rarity farming season)
  2. Neither does it make sense to exclude H1 gotchis from S2 Kinship farming (@JG1 and others have argued this well so I won’t add any more)
  3. But it also doesn’t make sense to allow absolute Kinship score to determine ranking in S2 leaderboards, as newer players would have no chance of being competitive. We could discuss implementing some sort of “catch-up” mechanic, but my gut tells me that it would feel unnecessarily complicated and a little arbitrary, and I don’t think many of us want to feel that rules will be made up arbitrarily from haunt to haunt.

So it makes the most sense to me to leave existing Kinship scores as they are, but for the S2 Kinship leaderboard (there should only be one IMO) to be determined by tracking Kinship points earned from a defined starting point. Perhaps this starting point would be the moment of the Haunt 2 launch, or sometime shortly afterwards. The leaderboard would use clear language to indicate that these scores are not your “Absolute Kinship Score.” This feels to me the best balance of establishing a level playing field for everyone who is willing to put in the effort to compete, while allowing all-time kinship scores to remain intact and competitive for whatever advantages/incentives may exist in the future.

So how closely does this opinion align with those who’ve voiced concerns over nerfing, etc? What does it fail to address?

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47

Thank you Jujy, Great white-flag post lol.

I’d like to begin my response to you by highlighting that the incorrect but still-somewhat-popular opinion that kinship rankers are all botting. aavegotchi.pet is a great resource which is confirming certain things I had already seen anecdotally: The top 10 gotchi in Kinship leaderboard aren’t botting, and aren’t perfect.
Ok so potions- The idea that they were a bad implementation is generally agreed upon, and was the justification to cut szn1 kin rewards(we thought the cut would be redressed by season 2, NOT taken further). At this point potions are greatly diluted, and are so expensive, they actually create a sort of economic value. If you pet succesfully for a day- you can think the market is at this point valuing those 2 kinship points at 300 GHST per potion - pretty neat! This has great implications in the game economy such as otherwise unspectacular gotchi, holding value because of their kinship.

My points above are in support of the following claim: The kinship game has finally started to prove itself against all the early doubters. We had a recent post by Coyote sharing the different difficulties he had with botting, so contrary to popular belief, humans rule the kinship game right now.

Just yesterday, the #1 ranking gotchi in kinship, was showing that he hadn’t been pet for a full day. It is very difficult to remain engaged and perfect at the kinship game forever. it is an interesting and long term game of dedication and we haven’t even allowed it to develop for more than 3 months before disqualifying the first entrants? That’s what has made no sense to me so far. And let’s not get into the credit proxy opportunities- I was very bullish about those but have to assume now those ambitions are dead if dev intention is for H1 gotchi to forget about kinship ranking.

You ask for solutions… here’s a few:

  1. From the moment H2 is released. Increase the kinship generated by each interaction from 1 to 2 points. I think this is simple, clean and self explanatory.

  2. Haunt 2 temporary bonus event - Create a certain period of time where summoning any portal provides the gotchi with bonus kin/xp. This would be great to provide new comers with a catch-up mechanism, it would also stimulate the market to summon otherwise inactive H1 portals.

  3. Allow the kinship game to continue - While providing avenues to earn higher kinship and also to spend it. It’s really not that bad. I understand that onboarding new users is the giga-priority, but also expecting/forcing H1 buyers to absorb 100% of these “indirect marketing costs” is just not fair or proper business form.

EDIT: Failed to respond to your suggestion. Unfortunately, I am with @actaeon on this one:

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48

Hey! If I understand correctly, your question in layman terms is what’s so bad about a season specific delta leaderboard. I think the main point being made against this is that, in @CryptoGotchi words, it “devalues past time, work and effort that dedicated players put in”. So basically, nerfing OGs. One could argue that they already obtained their reward for that work in season 1, but I guess it’s more complicated than that cause it kills the original concept of kinship as a long term dedication reward. I thought deltas were a good idea when this discussion started, but after @CryptoGotchi posts I don’t think so anymore. For now I prefer to remain neutral until the LP is released.

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49

I just asked myself why am I here, what I want from this project.
Some money…Great! A lot of money…Yes please, I really need it :):):slight_smile:
To be a part of a bigger story, a part of a great experiment … Priceless!

I would rather see us try and fail than not try at all.
We can not just hold our positions, we need to be open to be able to expand.
And expansion will bring big opportunities for everyone who is deeply involved and understand.

Let’s be realistic and ask ourselves to whom will we sell our beloved gotchis if there is only about 2000 players so far. There is not just rarity farming that will bring yield, there are other possibilities like lending, staking, LPs, maybe access to some parts of Realm with high XP and kinship only (let’s wait till Wednesday).

Won’t we have better options to expand in defi ecosystem if there is a lot of players.
And if we want new players to step in, we can not treat them as second, they will come and stay if they will see opportunity for themselves.

Btw, I love all of you who are more careful and fight for H1 players positions. You are very much needed here. I just expressed how I feel the story.

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50

Great point! That’s why beyond money… creating separation instead of union makes no sense for the overall shared story.
Fortunately we’ve heard dev confirmation now in Discord that these were simply comments and aren’t reflective of what may ultimately happen:

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51

I second this. Three leaderboards, plain and simple.

Just like other competitive pvp games, the rewards are based per season. The kinship and xp gained pre-season or from other seasons should be irrelevant.

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52

This so much, I feel exactly the same way. People don’t realize how fast growth (or the lack of it) can make or break a project. And no one makes progress and grows without some trial and error along the way. Nice post!

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53

Thanks for the detailed response, @JG1 and @kenymccornick. Maybe I should have started with this, but I’m speaking my opinion as someone who has done very well on the Kinship leaderboard almost completely by petting several gotchis consistently (I did buy 3 small Kinship Potions aftermarket, one for each of my top 3). So I’m with you in the knowledge that the Kinship leaderboard is not overrun by bots, and I’m also someone who would stand to benefit greatly from an unchanged Kinship leaderboard going into S2 farming. I wasn’t aware Kinship rewards had been cut (do we know by how much?), though I’m still pretty happy with the farming rewards I netted over the past two months.

I guess I consider it unacceptable to leave the Kinship leaderboard mechanics unchanged because the ethos behind Kinship is to reward engagement, and I consider it very important for that to be achievable for new players who buy into Haunt 2.

I also think that achievability needs to be immediately apparent to a new player, and my opinion is that the more complicated the process of “catching up” with kinship, the less apparent that achievability is to a new player. I feel less strongly about this point, but I’m someone who prefers simplicity, and Aavegotchi is already hella complicated, haha.

I understand that tracking Kinship from the start of a farming season is nerfing OGs on some level, especially if you take potions into account. But I don’t feel the need to consider potions too heavily because no matter how you handle it, someone is going to be “screwed,” whether it be the petters who couldn’t afford to pay for the advantage, or those who could pay and want to protect that investment. I commend the person who spent 13k (or whatever amount it was) on potions after S1 ended, but even if Kinship mechanics don’t change that’s a very bold strategy.

I guess the bottom line for me is that those who were willing to put in the time for petting up to now should be willing to do the same into the future for the potential upside in rarity farming. I know I will be. (hopefully no one thinks I’m talking about completely excluding H1 gotchis from competing, right? For the record, that seems insane to me, not sure whether that has been argued by anyone)

Now, I argue all this under the assumption that those with high all-time Kinship scores will enjoy significant benefits apart from season-specific rarity farming rewards. If those benefits turn out to be minimal, I’ll be disappointed, but I’m not sure whether my fundamental stance will have changed. I’m assigning a high value to creating a competitive environment for H2 players and H1 players alike. It’s a tough trade-off, and I understand the strong feelings.

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54

Yeah absolutely. Please don’t mistake our stance, we are with you in the search for a fair and engaging and sustainable outcome. However, once things got into the extreme side of nerfs and exclusion, a strong response was merited.

I want to share via screenshots to update you in what is basically common understanding and postponement of this issue until we see a lightpaper:

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The arguments you make for dual/reset of leaderboard to welcome new users are strong, but great arguments and comparisons against it (such as Actaeon’s above) are strong as well. I think the screenshots above reflect the best solution forward, which accommodates gamers, rankers, plankton. shrimp, whales, casuals all alike- in a single leaderboard!
I think this might be the simple and obvious way forward: Respect the current leaderboard, but, together with kinship spending options, and play-to-earn-kinship-potion options in place, it’s not a matter of who got what when, it’s simply a matter of personal choice, discipline, and strategy within a free open market- as it should be.

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55

Hmm, those seem like viable options to me, or at least solutions I wouldn’t be necessarily opposed to. I think I could get behind things like summoning bonuses and catch-up, and would be very interested to see how play-to-earn potions would work.

I’m okay with any scenario in which someone buying an H2 gotchi would have at least a theoretical chance of making it to the top-100 Kinship leaderboard if they were willing to put in the time to pet consistently and understand the mechanics (and if earning potions has to be part of that equation I think I’m fine with that too).

Thanks for sharing those ideas.

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56

Can’t figure out who to reply to, so just adding another general reply :sweat_smile:

The kinship “catch-up” mechanism sounds like a decent way to just maintain the current leaderboards. I like the simplicity of it. To me, simple is almost always better then complex.

The only issue I can see with it is that players that fall behind one season will have lower incentives to continue next season.

With the delta based kinship/xp leaderboard, everyone in the game starts as an equal for season start. This is more like fortnite. It doesn’t matter what happened in the past, each new round brings the possibility of victory. That’s why players keep coming back. Maybe they fall behind in one game, but the next game wipes the slate clean. So why not try again?

That’s the main reason why I’m still more in favor of the delta based boards. We now know that there is another use for kinship in the realm, so why not make the leaderboard more engagement focused? Don’t make new players play catch-up. Sure, the boost can at least start them in/near the rewards pool, but they are still starting from behind.

With delta based kinship and xp boards, everyone has the potential to do well EVERY season. I’m concerned that if someone falls behind one season, even with the “catch-up” mechanism, do we lose that player next season?

Summary:
Kinship “catch-up” solution may help solve the on-boarding problem.
Kinship delta leaderboard solution could help both on-boarding and retention.

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57

I think these are great, well thought out arguments!

I generally agree, except what you say regarding retention.
Yes, someone may be more inclined to return following season if there is a refresh and clean slate, however, core users could also be scared away or disengaged, as they don’t have a status or standing to maintain after a single season. Hard to predict if we lose or retain more users via leaderboard resets.

Successful MMOs and RPGs generally strike the right balance between not capping progress for hardcore users, while allowing new entrants into the game to have a chance.

Because of this, I favor “catch-up” mechanisms and dynamic kinship spending and generating options, over resets.

EDIT: Nobody has brought up the concept of “diminishing returns”. This is a staple in most MMORPGs. Basically, upon reaching a certain level, achieving the next one up is going to be so much harder. We already have this in place with the XP grind. We could look into a higher difficulty to raising kinship after let’s say, a 500 kinship score.

58

I second this. The delta boards, from my perspective, make the most sense. I think if we were to adopt some wicked seasonal wearables (see: Vanity Equipables and Seasonal Rewards - #5 by notorious_BTC)
Then the hardcore players wouldn’t mind a fresh slate each season as they reap rewards from each cycle.

I believe in the beginning three boards in total makes the most sense as there aren’t many players overall, but in the future we could see high xp boards, high kinship etc. For more competitive endgame enjoyment.

59

This conversation is a little disappointing… if you want to make the experience great for new users, all you have to do is ensure as many users as possible get 1 gotchi at a fair price and then let them start competing and earning just like everyone else. Giving a kinship bonus isn’t going to improve the gotchi experience if new users are forced to buy portals at 5 to 10x markup on the secondary market.

Separately, for those us who were not lucky enough to get a portal in Haaunt 1 and bought on the secondary market, the value of our investment will be undercut by this decision.

Lastly, I think people are undervaluing just being consistent and communicating the road map well in advance so user can plan and know what to expect 6 or 12 months down the road. I think there could be tremendous value in not changing rarity farming format at all.

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60

Here is precisely the problem. Right now, non-rankers and non-owners are seduced by the idea of a reset, or using delta-only. You are acknowledging that rewarding the highest xp and kin gotchies makes the most engaging and competitive sense, just not now but in the future (in your personal view).

The issue is that your “future” will be the “now” for those who aren’t leading in future seasons. It will always be tempting to change the rules around to knock off gotchies from the top-perch.

It is also tempting to believe we could do it just this once, but again, same arguments will be rehashed in the future.

We would have to decide now whether all-time or delta is what we want, but I have to agree with @Pebbles above, that reset/delta leaderboards weren’t precisely signaled when people were taking on the most risk- by being early buyers.

We are suggesting the very opposite of first-mover-advantage here, which is very antagonistic to the overall spirit of crypto.

Should we track buyers of the GHST pre-sale and say that because their GHST was 100X times cheaper, they have too much of an advantage and should therefore pay 100X more for their gotchies and wearables? If we are rewarding or punishing early investors and risk takers, it should extend across the board. I have argued this before, the concept that we can crash the value, efforts and successes of the earliest participants, is assigning all the risk and losses to a single one of our demographics (the first believers in the core product, the first consistent petters, etc), for the sake of pushing everyone else forward.

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61

I think you have to find the balance. Early adopters are going to have accept some level of dilution, but you do this hoping growth will more than offset. Also I view it as dilution, not punishment.

I personally think crypto rewards early adopters too heavily and hear this complaint frequently from people I’m trying to get interested in the space. If you have a situation where early adopters each have 100k ghst staked that they got for pennies, how will new users ever have a chance in a wearable raffle, and by extension a chance in Rarity Farming? By having too much concentrated in few hands you create a situation where the whole system, just accrues to the largest holders. Also it’s not like they took some huge risk, they just happen to hear about the project first.