Something Ain't Right with Installation Upgrades [RESOLVED AND IN PROGRESS]

Game Mechanics
121

Just uploaded a fresh set of simulations. This includes the new version of Recipe A (thank you @letsgobankless ). I also optimized the bot behavior with respect to the maker and altar… they have caps now on how high they’ll level up the maker and altar so as not too overspend - especially on smaller parcels where the costs balloon quickly compared to the parcel alchemica supply. This makes it a bit fairer comparison between the strategies and across parcel sizes - I’d still say the bots lean a bit aggressive towards the maker, but at least it’s consistently applied across parcel sizes now.

All results here, as usual:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1WB8L6aEPEdGnEgxcRUD3ysRwko2fjzMU

My observation is still that recipe B remains the best balance for upgradooor or expandooor, but to give the upgradooor any kind of a real advantage on a longer time frame will require lowering the overall harvest rates of the recipe and offsetting that reduced income with lowering the cost of the maker and/or removing the altar level requirement

I do want to run recipe A on spacious once again, as I don’t believe the upgradooor should have went up to a L9 altar - I would like them to max it out at L8 for a spacious (leaving L9 altar and harvesters for partner parcels) - still, this only makes a difference of about 200K FUD in their final profit - doesn’t change the overall outcome by that much.

2 Likes
122

it may also be indicative of concern about long-term tokenomic viability. change is difficult, and we’re going through a lot of it right now. as difficult as prioritizing what needs to be addressed can be, it’s also important. we need to be realistic…practical…focused…not easy, but beneficial for all in the long term

123

Why would you stop doing something we’ve always done? Rarity farming has nothing at all to do with any of these other things. It is is own thing, funded by its own things, and allowing delays in other areas to muck up things that have worked well this entire time, is throwing the baby out with the bathwater because it farted.

Thunderfish is coming in the morning, and the proposals are getting posted. Make your moves now, methinks…

124

Hey frens, we’re nearing the completion of the harvester revisions. I put together a handy “speed sheet” which gives you the key differences and metrics for each proposed recipe. @MikeyJay and I merged Recipe B and Recipe C as Recipe C is now an improved blend of the two.

You can read this document here.

We will be getting close to launching the sigprop here very soon so please carefully look things over and bring any issues you have to the surface. Thanks :smiley:

6 Likes
125

I went back and read through your methodology to see how you calculated everything. I appreciate all the math you’ve done and your thought process. I do wonder if these numbers can be tweaked off-model, to further favor the philosophy of low alchemica cost, low inflation, long time-cost.

GLTR has a supply of 1 trillion. 10% will be emitted in the first year. That works out to 273,972,602 GLTR produced per day, which equates to approximately 6,682 block-days, assuming roughly ~41,000 blocks per day on Polygon.

With the blocktimes in recipe C, it takes about 38 block-days to hit Level 9 on a FUD harvester. That means in a single day, there is produced enough GLTR to instabuild about 175 Level 9 FUD harvesters. Based on the recipe cost, channeling alone already produces more than enough alchemica to sustain this rate of construction on a daily basis.

Of course, GLTR and alchemica aren’t being distributed unilaterally to a single builder, so we can’t expect a maximal build rate. There are also limitations in that the altaar has to be leveled first before haarvesters, and there are reservoirs that need to be built. But I would still expect to see lots of level 9 harvesters popping up pretty quickly, and that level of production sustaining itself indefinitely. We would see inflation rates balloon very quickly because of GLTR inflation + reduced alchemica build costs.

Can the build times be increased? I think your numbers for cheaper harvesters and lower production rates make a lot of sense. But we could incentivize GLTR usage further by considerably increasing the time it takes to build, which would theoretically also slow the growth of inflation rates. The trouble is finding that sweet spot were build times aren’t prohibitive, but are long enough to have a significant effect.

For Maakers to be competitive, there may need some other bonus aside from just allowing simultaneous building. Ultracheap Maakers would cause the same issue as GLTR inflation (albeit spaced out somewhat, especially if build times are increased). As it currently stands, there is simply direct arbitrage between the time-cost of a Maaker and the price of GLTR, which is a fight I think Maakers will lose unless they are extremely inexpensive. GLTR-fed harvesters start producing at high rates immediately, whereas Maakers have to sit through the entire build time, even if they are building things simultaneously.

4 Likes
126

I think you make many good points here. If anyone has a proposed change to the build times and/or maker recipe with some math logic backing it, I am happy to run some models on it and report back.

We didn’t introduce the price of GLTR too much into our thinking since it’s dynamic and theoretically will rise to meet the market demand. However, looking at GLTR emissions relative to what could theoretically be spent is something worth considering… and thank you for doing the math on that.

A few thoughts come to mind:

Our intent was to try and keep as close as we could to the intended player returns of the original recipe while balancing the upgrade levels. We largely kept the build times similar to the current recipes. If we were to increase build times we would be decreasing the players’ overall return, and should probably offset that elsewhere by lowering build costs for either the makers even further or the harvesters.

Unless we add a build time to L1, any increase in build times has the potential to favor L1 builders or expandooors… So there are trade-offs with leveling balance as well. We tried to avoid build time for L1 as that has been the convention elsewhere in the game.

GLTR presents the advantage over a maker in that it decreases the wait time. It’s a one-time advantage, though. Once a maker is built, it benefits all future upgrades. Again, I haven’t had time to really delve into the exact math on the GLTR side, so I can’t quantify how much of a difference that ongoing benefit makes at this point, but just wanted to toss that out there fwiw.

Final thought - if the issue is GLTR supply relative to build times, this will be an issue beyond just harvesters- perhaps the issue is better dealt with by tweaking GLTR emissions or the 1 GLTR = 1 block of upgrade time ratio. Not sure how feasible either of those options are.

2 Likes
127

The factor for glitter that is not being mentioned is, those of us who are early,. will have a greatly different experience to those who come later. Glitter wont be relatively free, later. Us alpha players are getting the juice for free, essentially. Players joining a few months in, will find a maker to be more affordable, because it will take a lot of alchemica to make a dent in the per block rate.

1 Like
128

What about making L1s just… suck? Arbitrarily nerf their daily rate. The viability of L1 spam seems more like a design flaw than a strategy we should condone. They should be the foot in the door, so to speak, with L2 being the standard for low level builders/expandoors.

On one hand, I like having the unrestricted ability to spend GLTR, as it gives players a lot of freedom in building out their parcels as they like them, when they want them. On the other hand, it feels like a serious balance issue. I wondered perhaps if the amount of GLTR that could be spent daily on a parcel could be restricted by its Aaltar level, and Maakers themselves could affect this either by increasing that capacity or, if GLTR received a general nerf, increasing the efficacy of GLTR on the parcel. But this wouldn’t stop GLTR inflation, and since GLTR distribition is diffused anyway, it might not stop the rapid proliferation of level 9 harvesters. It would also favor lateral builders with many parcels (which is maybe desirable, as it would increase the value of land).

That said, inflation implications notwithstanding, I think your work has corrected the haarvester design flaw of being too expensive, in alchemica terms, for their rate of return. The problems posed by inflation and by GLTR’s design are not the subject of your proposal and I don’t want to distract too much from what you’re doing, because those aren’t the things you’re trying to solve.

I do think there needs to be a broader conversation about what we want to see in terms of inflation in the Gotchiverse and the balance of GLTR’s mechanics.

3 Likes
129

Hey fren thanks for the feedback and you raise some excellent points.

The L1’s have been made quite sucky with Recipe C :smiley:
The original yield was 14 FUD/day reduced to 3. A full spread of L1 32 FUD harvesters on a spacious parcel only extracts 96 per day. This would take a player 26 years to drain!

As @HARDKOR mentioned, this huge GLTR bag issue is really something granted for those staking before the game launch. Once things are live, I reckon we’ll see GLTR appreciate significantly in price as there is a huge burn mechanism in place for it with insta building.

You are absolutely right about the need for a broader conversation. To be quite frank, the harvester revisions is just a bandaid on a gunshot wound. It was the most pressing change needed but without a deeper exploration into game mechanics, things are going to get wonky pretty fast.

The biggest challenge is right now we have no knowledge as to what alchemica will be used for apart from building things that give more alchemica. PC has a lot up their sleeves which we have not yet seen. I am hoping a big part of this information is how alchemica will be needed for gameplay.

Without something to pull us out of a circular economy, we are destined for hyperinflation. To me, this is where we must bridge the gap between gaming and investing. We have to have an experience worth paying for.

Overall, I trust in the long-term vision. We just may have some bumps along the way as things roll out piece by piece.

3 Likes
130

I am amazed that people are not stockpiling it continuously. The rate of emmisions is set forever. As the economy grows, you wont be able to make a dent in the pools. Early glitter is a gift :smiley:

2 Likes
131

That just means that theoretically, you could build out one spacious, and one reasonable for the entire gotchiverse, every day.

Yep, two parcels, out of tens of thousands, got to finish in a day(Assuming that absolutely everyone sold their glitter to that guy.)

I’m OK with that :smiley:

1 Like
132

That’s very true, and it’s also the case that haarvesters don’t necessarily need to be released until there are some major token sinks in place. What you’ve proposed will create strong demand for GLTR, which is desirable considering it has a front-loaded peak rate of emission that only decreases at set intervals. There is plenty of room in the Gotchiverse into which GLTR can flow.

By comparison, Alchemica’s inflation rate will only accelerate over time, especially with the changes you’ve proposed to correct overpowered low level haarvesters and overly expensive high level haarvesters. I think Pixelcraft will need to design their core Alchemica sinks with built-in accelerating progression costs, because fixed prices, while appropriate for certain things, will start with a reasonable nominal value before geting massively diluted, which will require Pixelcraft to constantly adjust prices if they want to keep up with inflation.

It would be interesting, for example, to simulate with Recipe C how long it would take to maximally build out all Citaadel+Grid parcels with level 9 harvesters using altaar and haarvester emissions, assuming a proportionate distribution of FUD, FOMO, and KEK haarvesters (plus ALPHA for Maakers) and all Alchemica and GLTR emissions were bent toward this purpose.

I was a curious about a rough estimate of haarvesters and their costs, so I looked at some of the information in the Bible, and calculated that there would be space for about 5,210,204 haarvesters. Based on the numbers of Recipe C, there’s more than enough Alchemica in Act 1 to pay for this (roughly triple the amount needed), which I think is a very significant departure from the original design. There’s only so much GLTR produced per day, so in this simulation the ultimate limiter on growth rates would be the cost of Maakers.

I can’t say how long it would really take, but given the numbers I was getting under ideal conditions (infinite GLTR and all parcels available from Day 1), it doesn’t seem impossible that the Citadel+Grid would be able to approach its maximum production rate well within the 2 year bounds of Act 1, and still have tons of Alchemica left over.

While I don’t think it’s likely we will hit maximum rates (especially if Lickquidators are particularly destructive), such extraordinary acceleration is enabled by these low recipe costs. Just something to consider.

1 Like
133

I can see your logic however there are some things which are slightly off. With the previous recipe there was no point to level your harvesters beyond L4. You could drain your entire spacious parcel with a low level set up in just two years (the length of Act 1).

Just because L9 exists doesn’t mean someone will necessarily build it.

Recipe C actually costs more to build out your parcel to maximum rate of extraction than the original recipe did. So the excess alchemica in the market is actually lower.

In your calculation of 5.2m harvesters, what level did you bring the harvesters to? If the level is only one, then 3x the supply is actually a pretty good number as it takes many, many years to drain a parcel with just L1 (with Recipe A & C)

2 Likes
134

The extra alchemica needed is the player’s reward for playing though… if there’s only enough alchemica to build the harvesters, there would be no reason to build them. The original harvester recipes are not profitable for the player at the higher levels, so no rational player would ever build them.

Under the original recipes, it is easy to exhaust your parcel supply with only low level harvesters- The new recipe actually has a slightly lower net profit in our simulation for the “expandooor” vs the original recipe (1.8MM FUD vs 2MM on a spacious)… so it is not a drastic departure in terms of the player’s earnings, it just balances those earnings across upgrade levels more evenly. It’s only a departure from the old recipes if you assume players are going to accept a much lower return to upgrade their harvesters under the old recipes… which is to say they haven’t done their math.

Bear in mind the backstop for extraction is the surveying - since you only get 25% of your alchemica in your first survey, and then only small chunks evenly distributed across 9 more rounds, trying to extract faster than 2 years starts to become less profitable because you waste a lot of harvester power on empty land (this happened quite frequently to our bots in early simulations, and it was a very bad outcome for them).

I think it’s reasonable to assume that 2 years is a target timeframe within which players who are active from day 1 will try to exhaust their alchemica. By distributing all the alchemica in Act 1, this is fundamentally built in to the token emissions of the game, regardless of harvester recipe.

4 Likes
135

How so? I’m reading the total cost of the original level 9 FUD harvester in your opening post and on the wiki as 47885 FUD, 46170 FOMO, 4450 KEK, while the total level 9 cost of recipe C in your document is 1823 FUD, 1323 FOMO, 92 KEK. I used level 9 haarvesters for the calculation.

The extra alchemica is not itself the problem, rather I’m looking at the speed at which the Gotchiverse could hypothetically reach and maintain peak production - that is, level 9 haarvesters on every single space on every single parcel. I laid out the Alchemica numbers just to show that this would technically be possible given the new recipe cost. In the original design of the game, there is nowhere near enough Alchemica present in Act 1 to build haarvesters out like this.

I agree that this is a major design flaw of the original recipes, in that they inherently give a very clear reason not to upgrade at all (simply because the supply does not exist), but the tradeoff of this change will be the vastly increased acceleration of a different problem we already have in the game’s design (alchemica inflation).

1 Like
136

Are you including reservoirs, altars, walls, lodges, vortexes, aesthetic, spilled alchemica, and the shrinkage from rentals, gas, and general business expenses in your math? It sounds like you are focusing on just harvesters and the items directly associated with them.

A single L9 lodge is a massive outlay, and we’re going to have 50-100 of those, and numerous lower level ones. People who want estates, are going to be speed building walls, because those are time intensive, and you need hundreds of them.

2 Likes
137

IF a player fills their entire parcel with L9 harvesters (not technically possible- as there’s a limit on harvesters that can be built per parcel size), there is not enough alchemica in the parcel to recoup their cost, under any proposed recipe. They would essentially be rekt. That would be a deflationary result for the game economy, not an inflationary one.

138

Sorry, by “every space” I meant “every harvester possible” according to the set limits. A spacious could fit 128 level 9 haarvesters, totaling 233,344 FUD (and proportionate amounts of FOMO and KEK) using Recipe C, which should leave a bunch in the parcel. As you’ve rightly said, this excess alchemica is the player’s reward for investing so heavily in haarvesters, so this isn’t inherently a flaw of your system. I wanted however to demonstrate that under this paradigm it is feasible for players to maximally build out their parcels very quickly if they wish to do so, which could introduce a lot of inflation very early on in the game.

139

It depends how you define “maximally build out” - the soonest you can harvest ALL of your alchemica is essentially 2 years (since you only get 25% of your alchemica in the initial survey, and the rest in 9 smaller tranches over 2 years). If you try and build out in such a way that would extract the alchemica faster, you will start to see your profits drop because you’ll be building harvest capacity that goes to waste.

The bots in our simulation are quite aggressive at building their harvest rate (they don’t build it beyond what they need to extract in 2 years, because we saw they had worse performance when they did) it takes them quite a long time to breakeven - in large part because the cost to upgrade your altar in order to get to those higher level harvesters is substantial. There is also the cost of reservoirs to consider on top. (You cannot equip harvesters and reservoirs at a higher level than your altar)

I guess my point is, you can’t just do quick math on the harvesters alone. You need to do a full cost of the entire build-out in order to get an accurate picture. A large portion of the cost of harvesting is tied up in the altar, reservoir, sometimes the maker and/or GLTR depending on your strategy. Not to mention spillover.

4 Likes
140

That’s fair. “Optimal” builds are difficult to predict because we don’t know how players will strategize or how the market will price these tokens, so the standard I measured was the simple comparison between maximal recipe costs. All of the associated costs (altaars, reservoirs, etc) are still present in the original model, so shaving down the price of high level haarvesters straight up just makes them more accessible at a mass scale. Whether building out maximally in this way is actually “optimal” is something players will have to figure out themselves.

The bottom line is that the changes you proposed are necessary. And the work you’ve done is very important, as it corrects a mistake in the game’s design. What this will do to inflation and therefore pricing in the short term isn’t the subject of your work, what these adjustments fix is the glaring disparity in efficiency between L1 and L9 and the total lack of incentive to upgrade, while maintaining the game’s original tokenomics.

But these fixes do raise questions over what Pixelcraft intends to do with the game’s economic design, and it would be good to know what they’re currently building and what their thoughts are about the game’s economy, especially as they think through their pricing mechanisms for sinks.

I think the onus is on Pixelcraft to either:

Set time-costs high, slowing inflation, setting alchemica sink costs toward the lower end and adjusting upward

or

Allow rapid inflation and adjust alchemica sink costs progressively higher

Both cases will require their careful monitoring of pricing, because it’s easy for this to get out of control in either direction, and as the game’s designers they essentially have to act both as the central bank that sets the rates of money creation, as well as the central pricing mechanism for game features.

Perhaps this creates a system that is much more centrally planned than anyone would like, but unless the DAO takes responsibility for designing the pricing of sinks (which I don’t think is realistic nor desirable), it’s up to Pixelcraft’s design team to make these models work. Economic monitoring and planning will need to be a full time job, and it comes with a considerable burden given that real money and consequences are attached to whatever decisions are made.

1 Like