Setting a Fixed Cap on New Wearables

Game Mechanics
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Hey frens,

A topic we were discussing in the Wearables Task Force some time ago was imposing fixed caps on wearable distribution. Now that things are slow in the marketplace and crypto winter is upon us I believe it’s time to discuss this as a community, refine the idea, and bring it to a proper vote.

The premise is simple: impose a percentage-based hard cap on wearables based on the total live gotchis today.

For example, the total item count in the category of “common body” can only constitute 40% of the 19,404 summoned gotchis. That means 7761 is the maximum amount of common body items we can have (and by no means do we have to fill the gaps!). And with a current count of 7000 common body items, PC wouldn’t be able to launch any new common body items.

The advantage to this is investors will know exactly how much item dilution to expect. By being able to predict dilution events, the market prices will be more stable.

Several months ago I made this chart which shows the total item counts for each rarity and slot.

Screenshot 2022-07-11 at 20.29.25
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A consideration: whether by design or accident, we have two tiers of item slots: Face, Pet, and Eyes form the rarer of the two and Head, Body, and Hand are the commoner.

I set some proposed percentage-based caps here as well (the hand slot is multiplied by two as gotchis have two hands :stuck_out_tongue: ). The green highlighted boxes show the only slots which are under the proposed caps.

These caps let us know not to expect any more wearables until there are more gotchis.

And then when the next haunt does eventually come, we will understand the total allowance for new wearables based on each slot.

What do you think about this?

Have a look over my numbers and let’s discuss about this. The last thing we want is another situation where the markets recover and wearables pump again. Then, in that pump, we release another big batch of wearables.

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Strongly support this proposal (exact numbers would need to be discussed) but in general I think it will be very helpful for everyone to know our Wearables budget.

One question this raises (and this might be a separate topic) is how we would like to apply this budget to potential community-generated aesthetic wearables.

Nonetheless, great topic and looking forward to the discussion on this!

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I support it too. More game features will attract more players, more players will mean more demand for gotchies / parcels, more gotchies means that we need more items. More parcels, means that we need more decorations / aesthetic installations. This should be a natural inflation path, otherwise we just add inflation with dilution. I understand that there is a case for natural inflation to onboard more players and investor at low prices, but this should be done at a lower scale.

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Yes, strongly support this, needed clarity for everyone imo.

These numbers for the proposed cap actually look really sensible to me as well, great job @notorious_BTC!

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Strong support. I love anything that sets an actual emission rate and is tradable information. We need more things like this and less nebulous “when we pass a prop saying its ok”

PS - Hurry up on the stuff you already have in the pipeline. RF is upon us!

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I fully support this and think it’s long overdue. Thanks for sharing your work and numbers. MWGA.

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Awesome post @notorious_BTC ! I have strong support for this! I do believe the numbers you shared do not include the latest (RPG) raffle which would paint a clearer picture of the current oversupply (esp. on higher end wearables like myths and GLs). Over time, the average price of high end wearables has been steadily declining, (even before and during a manic bull phase in other PFP and gamefi NFTs!), and to me… this has been strong and clear evidence of dilution outpacing organic demand for wearables above a certain threshold of price and rarity.

There were certain arguments in main DAO discord about coverage of wearables for all gotchis from a gameplay perspective. I think there’s many potential solutions for coverage via alternative wearables such as aesthetic-only, gotchiverse-only, leveling-up werables, crafted wearables, etc etc. These potential solutions (to a problem of slot coverage I am not convinced we even have) are better alternatives than continued dilution of werables per existing gotchi.

Over the life of the project, I think the pendulum has swung (via dilution) from a general sense of long term FOMO surrounding rare wearables, to a sense that the sensible or smart thing to do is avoid these wearables unless they fall in your lap via a raffle, fat finger bazaar liquidation or some other unorthodox means. If we establish a wearables budget/cap, we are providing the market what it needs for sensible price discovery based on available and reliable information. This beats continuing with the zero-sum game of choosing winners vs losers on drawn-out DAO discussions re. how much to dilute ourselves (to “entice” new users to come play with us). It would be nice to see our culture move on from the notion that existing users must sacrifice something to convince new ones to join us. We tried it, and It didn’t work… so it’s time to move on?

Imagine instead creating FOMO about being part of our community. Cartridges could help with this. If our long term remaining supporters can see a hope or path back into profitable and enthusiastic ownership of the NFTs- that would work wonders as well of course.

I think we must exercise a lot of care and precision in determining a wearables budget. The measure can’t be as crude as total/active gotchis because we have clearly seen an invigorated market for floor/unequipped gotchis for the sake of collecting spillover or channeling in the gotchiverse. Will these spillover gotchis ever engage in something that equates to mythical or godlike wearable demand? As the population of users grows, the number of whales and high-spending users will not grow proportionately- the honest truth is that our p2e structure nearly guarantees most of our user growth will come from underprivileged communities, and these users will NOT provide any demand for something such as godlike wearables (demand for free handouts doesn’t count). Over the course of this project… the threat of large and long term holders exiting has become more and more of a daily reality while it once was considered nothing more than fearmongering and hawkish speculation. I fear that if we charted our total amount of active users above a certain spending threshold, the resulting graphic would be greatly concerning and/or discouraging.

I truly hope that a big brain budget comes out of this discussion, and we turn a new page, away from zero-sum decisions and towards making wearables as valuable and desired as they once were!

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I think the divide between “makes rarity farming” and “makes a good PVP gotchi” mean that really only half the gotchis need wearables, and the other gotchis are just laborers… unless, there are enough good farming wearables.

To make “all gotchis be good gotchis” we want to have aarena gotchis, RPG gotchis, and farming/utility gotchis, and the outfits should be different, so it makes sense to have wearables even on the low brs guys. A strong tradeoff between the movement and CC stats and the other stats is probably the big angle to work, to make the difference.

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Absolutely! The richest ecosystem would feature naked gotchis collecting spillover, and fully decked out GL gotchis at the opposite end of the spectrum, with many archetypes of gotchi users in between. There would be all sorts of subdivisions or use cases for gotchis in all sorts of attire. You make a great example mentioning PVP sets, because a GL gotchi can be expected to dominate in PVP, but perhaps a PVP-centric player realizes that a full set of rare wearables already provides very decent PVP utility at 1% of the cost of a GL set/outfit! Other users might decide they only want to roam/scout with movement-speed (they would buy few and very specific wearables) or farm in specific activities that need specific gear (bubble-up mining?fishing?)

IMHO this would be a much more exciting and absorbing gameplay meta than aiming for all gotchis to be equipped the same. I counter that the notion that all gotchis must be equipped fully/similarly and given similar powers regardless of stats/spend (for the sake of aavegotchi market share and “fairness”) would instead make for a terribly dull and uninspiring game.

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Great idea and I fully support this.

Anything that makes the future supply of our assets clearer to investors is a positive.

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Hey fren thank you for sharing your insights. I did a quick spot check and the numbers do include the RPG set (you can see it with low count items like legendary face & pet- flower studs & horse hoe mustache, and ROFL & sus butterfly). It is possible I did miss something, but it should be accurate.

I am surprised and very grateful for the level of support this initiative has across the board. It seems both the investors and players alike are keen to have some form of set distribution models.

I agree we could open up the distribution caps to other possibilities beyond just live/total gotchis as you make some excellent points.

How many of these live gotchis are being actively used for anything besides playing in the Roombaverse?

What is the actual, true demand for wearables- especially those of higher rarity?

However, some things to consider:

If we have a different metric than live/total gotchis, ie something based off market data, then the % cap might be more of a moving target and harder to predict.

It is possible that a different cap would be harder to digest for investors and players. I am speculating here as we don’t have any other proposed mechanics.

On a live/total cap:

This metric makes the most sense to me as it is easily digestible. Investors can quickly see the spread of item distribution for each slot and rarity.

It also gives us insight into which wearables will be minted next and can properly allow for people to prepare. From the current distribution, we can see some categories are oversaturated while others are underrepresented (looking at you, uncommon & common pets!).

From a logical & gameplay perspective, it makes sense. We can see the body slot across all rarities covers over 100% of gotchis. We don’t need to consider market volume or other metrics to understand how many items are being distributed.

The caps will only be increased with more gotchis. That means we won’t have any new wearables until we have another haunt. The demand for more gotchis will likely come at the same time we need more wearables.

The caps are set to be maximums and are not guaranteed to be filled. It’s more of a budget than anything. Once we have hard-caps in place, we know exactly what to expect.

Let’s say Haunt 3 is in demand and the DAO decides on 10k portals. The wearables investors can quickly calculate the maximum quantity of new wearables will hit the market.

One reason I prefer live gotchis over total portals is the budget slowly increases over time, rather than hitting all at once.

I ran the new caps with a 10k Haunt 3 and you can see the results here (this number is total open portals today + 7500 new ones opened):

Screenshot 2022-07-12 at 11.50.31
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Right away, I can see the numbers need tweaking. I also see your point @JG1 with regards to the higher tiers. Is there even demand for 35 godlike hand items (speculating, of course). The question is: are we currently over budget with our wearables? And if so, then the caps ought to be reduced so that our current set numbers are over the limit. That way, a new haunt wouldn’t realistically be able to add but a few more sets.

Perhaps the best course of action is to create a live gotchi cap as the absolute maximum mintable assets and then have another metric which tracks demand for minting of the higher tiers of rarity?

One final consideration

One last thing that pops up for me is whether or not we should also cap the amount of weapons for each hand rarity?

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On the topic of aesthetic wearables:

I think there is a lot to unpack with these. I do believe we should have a budget for community wearables. Even though they don’t have BRS bonuses, there should be some level of scarcity or gatekeeping mechanism for them…otherwise we’ll just be flooded with hundreds of designs.

Some ideas:

We could set vanity wearables to also have rarity tiers. Ie the quantity which are minted fall in line within the BRS wearable criteria.

If we want to drive further demand for BRS wearables, we could mandate some top-tier aesthetic wearables to need to be pegged to a BRS wearable in order to equip it. For example, I have an aesthetic godlike helmet. In order to wear it, I need a BRS godlike helmet as well.

This makes the vanity wearables more of a transmogrification approach. It also would capitalise on the unused equipment slots we have. Basically one suit overrides visually the main suit.

It would be possible to have both simple vanity items (likely quite common) and then transmog only ones.

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Glad you see it too fren! This is a clear issue and your numbers illustrate it perfectly.

We could have demand for an H3 soon based off of demand for floor gotchis- the problem is with extrapolating that fact towards minting an amount of godlikes and myths that our market demand can’t absorb. So in this scenario, even sticking to a budget, the high end wearable market would be diluted, saturated, and debased yet again as a result of H3.

As such, I hope we can come up with the proper metrics to properly forecast wearable demand and make proper budgets, otherwise the devaluation and saturation of high end items will continue, with great harm to our economy.

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It’s good to talk about as part of a broader discussion on wearables. I agree that wearables inflation is a concern. It’s also hard for us to judge what the utility of wearables will truly be, and how that will vary based on rarity score.

Until there is gameplay, we won’t know which wearables the market will want. We can make a few predictions based on slots - as you pointed out, beyond simply rarity scores, certain slots are less represented than others. There are also certain rare item types, the rarest of all being the vehicle, of which there currently are only two, one of which is Godlike, and which convey what is usually one of the more coveted game abilities: increased movement speed. The value of weapons will vary wildly depending on how powerful they are. Will we need to cap the supply on a per-slot basis? What about item stats and abilities, do we need for example an overarching philosophy of how many movement speed items and powerful weapons will exist in the game?

At what point does this become a balance issue, and how can the DAO act to fairly correct game mechanics? Certainly people holding scarce and powerful items may be upset if their supply gets diluted or more powerful items get introduced, even if those changes make the game more fun to play. Game companies are able to unilaterally make these kinds of balance decisions based on their own internal analyses, but that paradigm changes when we’re dealing with a financialized game like Aavegotchi.

In a traditional MMO, there is also gradual power creep that outmodes old equipment in favor of new equipment, to give players something to quest for. That model runs counter to the idea of items holding their value over time. We don’t need to replicate that exact model for wearables, but there do need to be goals and things to get, which implies asset inflation of some kind, beyond just accumulation of game-money (alchemica and GLTR). Even if we try to enforce scarcity, none of these things will hold their value if the game is not fun to play.

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Excellent points fren. I’ve thought about the power creep before and what I’ve come up with is a creep which benefits the older items. That comes in the form of things like

XP for wearables
Augmentations
Imbuements, jewels etc

Another great idea which has been floated around are temporary wearables. These wearables have power in the gotchiverse but no BRS for rarity farming. They can be earned through dungeons pvp etc and require a constant stream of alchemica to keep them alive.

I also agree that some form of cap will need to be established for item classes as well. Weapons, vehicles etc will all need some balancing

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I like the ultra minor creep, based on usage. You can simply make things asymptotically approach +1, so that they never ever infringe on the level above, but there are also never ties, and there is an incentive to use it or lose it, and if the XP resets if you unequip, it gives a nice lil boost to the people who arent flipping, and have had their gotchis dressed for the game since the beginning.

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The idea had some traction here Introduce XP for Wearables
The challenge is the wearables are semi-fungible so we’d need some kind of conversion mechanism.

Either way I think it’s a solid idea that could be ironed out in the coming months

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Hi frens, I just raised a sigprop here:

https://snapshot.org/#/aavegotchi.eth/proposal/0xe9bddee5dfe05a1294844f0e77a1d989051a096cbf2f118b946400f6abb60fc3

Right now, there are only a few hundred active players. So it doesn’t make sense to set the wearables budget based on total gotchi count.

I think the best metric to gauge wearable emissions would come from something like daily active users. This metric is unavailable to us until we have PvP and other mechanics where players will be doing more than farming.

Right now we can only farm our lands. There is no need for BRS, wearables, or anything else beyond a naked gotchi.

What I’m proposing we do is raise a sigprop to simply block all wearables emissions until we have more data.

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