Questionable Developments in the Citaadel - D27 & D30

Proposals by Gotchi Gov'nuhs
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Frens, I come to you with this information and ask you to consider it carefully. What may first appear as fud, is actually a serious matter and will affect the future of Aavegotchi drastically.

However before I present the issue, it’s important to remember we are not holders of Pixelcraft Studios, we are GHST, Realm, and GOTCHI holders, therefore by extension owners of the Aavegotchi DAO.

According to the Wiki, it states “Although AavegotchiDAO Oasis is the final iteration of AavegotchiDAO’s evolution, it is only the beginning of the realization of a DAO-governed game. All decisions related to Aavegotchi game mechanics, REALM mechanics, ecosystem spending, and even smart contract upgrades will be voted on by the AavegotchiDAO.”

It has come to be known that the north easternmost quadrant of the citadel (District 27) will be given directly to Pixelcraft Studios.This land contains dozens of humble, reasonable and well over a hundred spacious plots, and also quite a bit of Alchemicha. At current floor prices is an approximate value of hundreds of thousands of dollars. This was not a decision that was ever proposed to the DAO, let alone passed. This was also never mentioned anywhere in writing, in fact the Realm litepaper specified an 80/20 split between auction and raffle with no mention of any Citadel Realm being given away or reserved for other use, other than mentioning 69 Paartner Parcels which were also given away without DAO consent. While the Paartner parcels led to many well received announcements, It seems as though dao partnerships should be a vote, especially when land is involved.

A very similar situation applies in D30, where again a decision was made to allocate Parcels without a Dao vote. These two allocations cannot necessarily be looked at as separate issues, given that the Devs from Pixelcraft have told us that we were given D30 to compensate for them taking D27.

You may be asking yourself, should you be concerned? Does this meaningfully affect your GHST or land holdings? Well let’s look at some numbers. Had the parcels been allowed to be auctioned, as we were led to believe here , there would be additional GHST being allocated to the Treasury, and additional GHST being burned. How much, you may ask? The 200 spacious parcels alone would fetch approximately 200K GHST, of which both Pixelcraft and the DAO would each be entitled to their allocation, along with burned GHST. This decision seems to fall under REALM mechanics and game mechanics, which according to our founding documents should be governed by a vote.

Pixelcraft does not have the authority to unilaterally decide if parcels should be given away for free, the same way they are unable to suddenly decide to mint 100,000GHST or create new haunt portals. These are major decisions with potentially drastic consequences, and thus, require the DAO to agree on them before they happen. While there may be some merit to the idea, It concerns me that this was thought to be within the decision making authority of Pixelcraft.

Allocating significant real estate to the studio itself without any oversight or approval from the dao is setting a potentially dangerous precedent as there are yet a couple hundred thousand of Realm to be distributed outside The Citadel. Do we have to worry about large swaths of the grid being given to Pixelcraft, without input from us in the future?

Pixelcraft has made excellent strides so far during the development of this game and it’s important to acknowledge what an awesome shipooor Dan and team have been. However, the whole idea behind having a DAO was to give control over the game to the actual players. We need to make sure we are following that to both the letter and the spirit of this and even when Pixelcraft has good ideas that will benefit us, they still have to submit a proposal to the DAO and have their idea be accepted.

I propose that initially we vote on whether or not to turn the control of the PixelCraft plots in District 27 and 30 over to the DAO and temporarily remove it from the auction pool, whereafter the community can decide if it is in our best interest to allocate or rent this land to Pixelcraft based on the proposal they submit on why they want the land and what they intend to use it for. This would be done in a future proposal, if we do decide to retain ownership of this district.

So what do you guys think, should we allow Pixelcraft to unilaterally mint assets to themselves without DAO approval, or should the DAO retain control of governing the realm assets?

I am curious to know how other DAO members feel about this issue, please share your thoughts.

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Where s the origin of that info ?

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Curious about this part, not sure if I understood correctly that you think every single one of the 69 Paartner Parcels should be voted on by the DAO.

…other than mentioning 69 Paartner Parcels which were also given away without DAO consent. While the Paartner parcels led to many well received announcements, It seems as though dao partnerships should be a vote, especially when land is involved.

Also just wanted to add a poll as a general sentiment check

Should Pixelcraft & the DAO get 1 district each?
  • Yes
  • No
0 voters
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Origin of which info? I tried to link what might be relevant. Happy to add clarification

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This one in particular

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I do not agree that the DAO has to vote in everything
I mean, did we decide how many parcels would exist?
We dont know 90% of the details of the game, partners, future plans (just a vague idea), so how could we decide what is good and what is not?

Im in favor of giving land to DAOs and everything, if they cant sell, they wont impact the market negatively but probably in a positive way as they can use to market and make partnerships

I consider myself a pretty smart person but I have no idea at this point of what would be good to Aavegotchi so I trust the project and trust the team

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Thank you for the poll, that will be great to gauge sentiment as we go.

With the Paartner Parcels, I mention them as an example of a time when the decision making process strays from “trustless”. I think most of us have a pretty strong inclination towards decentralization. This appeared to be a red flag in the sense that we are now relying on an offchain group of people to decide whats best for the DAO. Atleast its a red flag for me that the DAO has no input, but that’s why I’m so curious to hear from you all.

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The most recent twitter spaces, “Auction EVE”. I will link you a recording of it once I get a copy. That was part of the issue, it was whispered to about 150 people, after the fact. To me it seems like a major DAO decision.

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As the Game unfolds, i find out what is happening through PixelCraft & team members. If they allocate themselves an entire district for events for the Game, i am perfectly fine with that. It did not sound as if Pixelcraft was getting the district to harvest alchemika and compete. I like the idea of the DAO having a district as well something all aavegotchi owners can vote on. Each district will be able to customize; I would like to see what Pixelcraft (i love their aesthetic) and DAO customize in the districts. I am not concerned with the monetary aspect because of the prudence Pixelcraft has shown over the last YEAR. They could have moon boy hyped all last year, but instead they continue to remain humble about production to maintain a steady value/buy in.

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Eliminating the need for “trust” is why DAOs exist, fren. Would you hypothetically be upset if they minted themselves 5k Gotchis brining out total to 30k? I see the the two issues as eerily similar.

Trustless execution is out most valuable asset or else we are just a Pixelcraft fanclub…

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Your current worry is vanilla compared to what already happened these past 9 months. There were a lot of decisions Pixelcraft took without regard to what the DAO had to say(or rather the DAO accepted it blindly, like the Dinoswap farm), there were also a few core proposals that went through which did not get built, like little aavegotchis and sending treasury funds to Curve Finance to yield farm.
DAOs never impressed me because 98% of the teams behind DAOs usually ignore what the community wants even if it passes, there’s no legal government forcing them to do it that instant. I was always scared since day 0 “Oh it’s a DAO and the token is almost a stablecoin, these projecs usually don’t moon” and “Oh it’s a DAO/community, they can fuck up the game instantly with just 1 decision, if not Pixelcraft then the DAO” what has been interesting though is that this specific DAO has been incredibly boring and the forums underused. The only core proposals so far that took immediate effect on the game were the H1 backgrounds and aging mechanic, namely the aging mechanic. The rest of the core proposals were like tears in the rain.
I was especially impressed/disappointed the creators of the minigames did not try to highly influence the price of the wearables, out of like 12 minigames or so only the tower defense one was the first and almost the only one which affected the price of grenades. That actually puts me at ease that the DAO is too boring to make any game-changing decisions that will destroy the game in 2-4 years, at the same time it also means drastic imaginative proposals won’t happen such as little aavegotchis and boombox+casettes+minigame cartridge NFTs.

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The team is cautious maintaining value for both wearables & gotchis. Land is new and still being released, i do not see them throwing caution to the wind all of a sudden. 5 year plan, Partners investing hundreds of thousands. slow and steady

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“DAOs never impressed me because 98% of the teams behind DAOs usually ignore what the community wants even if it passes”

So given that you have this mindset about DAOs, would it be safe to say that you would prefer a trustless project? I personally believe a lot of people here see the power in Dao governance, and would feel deceived if they strayed drastically from the Litepaper without even a vote?

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I agree completely and thats why I took the time to mention the appreciation for the team. If later down the line in the 5year plan, wouldnt you prefer to know that we govern the asset minting, as opposed to the dev team? I think a lot of us have been in crypto long enough to know that Trust is a dangerous thing when we can literally build a beautiful trustless model. Or else why do we even have a dao?

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True. These are serious decisions that need to be handled by the DAO.
If we just offload the decision making to a single studio, then what is the point of having a DAO ? Or even making minigames ? :persevere:

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Couldnt agree more. Ive been in this project for quite a while now, Pre H1, and this is the first time Ive seen this much of a concerning move. Thats why I really want to hear from the community on this one.

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How do we want Pixelcraft spending their time? Delivering on a very ambitious roadmap? Or waiting for days/weeks of low-engagement discussion on every issue?

This is a DAO in cocoon phase, not a fully-realized agentic DAO that can react quickly to any given problem. We have to trust the devs to design so many things (all art, many stats, release dates, hiring decisions, roadmap, game mechanics, tokenomics…). In fact, if you don’t trust the devs, you are crazy to stay in. The ‘MEV’ of frontrunning game decisions is so high that pixelcraft could exploit the community any time they want; yet time after time they are too busy shipping, talking with users, and fixing problems to even buy/bid on the items they themselves created! Like it or not, this whole project is based on trusting the core team.

What makes decisions like this one okay? The way the devs respond to criticism. Contrary to what Flame says above, I’ve observed them listening pretty reliably to strong community sentiment (see: delaying H2 contrary to PC’s own wishes, changing UNI eye design, etc.). When just a couple people expressed concern about the change to a higher % of raffled plots recently, Dan (I think? could be Jesse) immediately said, “Well we’re surprised that people think it’s a bad thing, but put a discussion up on the forums and we’ll change it if the community disagrees.” And I guarantee you that if you got the same engagement against giving pixelcraft their plots as the aging proposal got, they would reverse their decision and find another path to acquire land.

Nothing will happen if we put every decision up for a discussion and vote ahead of time. I’d be more interested in discussing the issues you have with pixelcraft and DAO having a square. Based on the poll right now, people seem to think these are very good ideas.

Finally, although I think your thinking is off base, I appreciate the effort you put into your post. You obviously care about the project.

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How do you categorize the two pre-sales for metaverse parcels?

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You make some really good points. However, you mention
“I’d be more interested in discussing the issues you have with pixelcraft and DAO having a square”. Thats basically what this whole thread is about. The issues that we have with this are as follows - unnecessary centralization, no communication until after the fact, and a disregard for the whitepaper, specifically "All decisions related to Aavegotchi game mechanics, REALM mechanics, ecosystem spending, and even smart contract upgrades will be voted on by the AavegotchiDAO”.

We must atleast admit that any early investors were misled by the above paragraph. Would you agree?

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I would categorize it as an action taken according to the Litepaper. This would have been nice if it was documented for discussion prior to happening.