Some things we've been thinking about the future of @holozing and player earnings I wanted to discuss in this post, which both rewards those being active in different ways and ensure's there's "something to lose" were they to start doing things we deem unfair towards other players.
This is something I've been thinking about quite a lot looking at web2 games, let's take for instance counter strike global offensive/cs2. They have an xp system where playing games grants you xp, it's limited by how much xp you can earn per week as to not have players play just for the levels which is a good thing. Then there's rewards in terms of loot boxes or very low odds for good weapon skins, most of the time it's junk. The loot boxes require keys to open, keys can only be attained from purchasing this from Valve directly and those loot boxes have of course higher chance for better skins, albeit still not great. This encourages gambling in a way but not going to get into that in this post. The reason I'm comparing CS is because unlike most other games, they allow you to sell these skins, of course on their own market only (doing so outside of their markets isn't officially allowed and may get your account and skins banned) for which they take a 15%! trade fee and with the $ you get all you can do is purchase other things in their market, even outside of the game itself such as other games or ingame assets there.
So why am I bringing this up. There always felt like there wasn't much "to lose" when you progressed through the levels and attained achievements and reputation in the form of people commending you after a match, etc. This was at most just novelty things that didn't give players anything of real value. All the value was locked up in skin assets, which can be traded at an instant.
Let's take this scenario. Player A has ingame assets worth $10,000, he decides one day he really wants to win this tournament he's playing at, maybe he's made some side-bets (e-sport sportsbooks) for his team to beat the odds and win this specific match. He realizes there's a chance he may get caught, either by the software or by spectators noticing he's cheating through aimbots/wallhacks (something that's plagued most FPS games in forever and there still is no real solution to). He chooses to sell all his skins or trade them to a different account, now this other account has no connection to him, Valve can't know if it belongs to him or not, so even if found cheating and them wanting to punish him, all they can do is ban the account he's playing on which only has levels, achievements and his username, all worthless in terms of tradable value. They can't also go and ban all the skins he had because there could've been a legitimate buyer on the other end, the user could even have used their market to pay the 15% fee to purchase all those skins on his second account, etc. It escapes the reach of Valve as they wouldn't want a legitimate buyer to have his new purchases be banned.
Okay, so how would we change this in terms of @holozing players not wanting to risk their account getting banned. One thing will be that many assets both tradable and non-tradable (soulbound) have earning potential.
As we've already discussed in some previous posts, with the start of the starter sale we'll be enabling "Collection Rewards" for those opening up their Alpha Vials and receiving creatures and items but also a little towards those not opening up their vials but owning them. These items will all have points dedicated to them, if you receive an Infurno that's quite rare, let's say 2% chance to get it, it'll have up to 50x more points than an Infurno you can get 98% of the time (as an example), same would go for items and their rarities.
Now this of course means that collectors purchasing vials and opening them would get a head-start in earning Zing from Collection Rewards until the game is playable, then once beta is out and players are able to encounter creatures and capture them, they'll keep earning points based on the creature's rarity they've caught and how many they have. This will start diluting the Zing in Collection Rewards. If Player A has 50% of the collection rewards and Player B has the other 50%, if Player B is the only one capturing more creatures while playing his 50% will start growing thus earning more Zing.
Okay, now that you have an overview of that, let's get into soulbound nfts and achievements.
With soulbound nfts we have quite a lot of plans to make the game both more unique in terms of what else exists out there and at the same time more rewarding passively for players. Let's say we make an achievement called "1st day delegator", all the accounts that delegated to @zingtoken on the first day token distribution launched will earn this achievement. We then give this achievement a point value and the players who own that achievement will automatically be able to claim extra zing from Collection Rewards. Now we can make more achievements and give them out to players as non-tradable nfts. "1st creature captured", "1st mana potion used", "1st creature defeated", these are of course just some examples, there may also be harder to obtain and more unique achievements down the line such as "1st player to reach max level" and the achievements would all have specific points attached to them as to how much zing rewards they can earn from the Collection Rewards pool.
Now imagine someone who has rare or a lot of achievements, that player is less likely to start botting and maximizing the game in ways we deem unfair. Because while soulbound nfts are immutable and we can't take them away from players once they receive them, we can just blacklist their earning potential on our end. If that top player was earning 0.5% of the daily Collection Rewards through his achievements and stats, suddenly he's banned and isn't earning those zing any longer. This gives players "something to lose" if they misbehave.
This is also a reason why zing will constantly be inflating, some periods less than others, some periods maybe more, but we have other plans on how to combat that inflation. The idea is that players who join early on compared to some that join later, can still earn a good amount of Zing and it won't be too difficult to move up the ranks to still earn the same amount of zing as the first one did. The thing that will matter, though, is total players competing for the Zing. If there's 100,000 players all competing for it compared to 2,000 registered users we have now, naturally it won't be as easy to earn as much Zing as those did early on even though inflation of Zing has remained the same. If however we were to stop inflation completely, all those passive earnings potentials from achievements would go out the window.
While CS:GO had a good idea with their "Overwatch" system, where volunteers could look into suspicious clips that had been reported by other players to check if someone was cheating or not, there were never any rewards included there neither. We believe that incentivizing a report system for suspicious behavior, especially once the holozing open-world game is out and players are able to roam to gather and look for creature encounters, with achievements and zing rewards will work better to make sure people aren't cheating and it going unnoticed. Of course it won't all hang onto players being the ones to report things, we will also have tools that could automatically detect activity that goes against manual activity but players will be able to also report to keep the ingame economy in balance and valuable.
We could probably talk a lot more about the achievements and different scenarios but best to leave that for later, I'm sure the community will also have a lot of input on the point system and help us balance them out to fairly attribute how much certain achievements can earn and certain restrictions to weed out alt/sock accounts from gaining the simple achievements just for the passive earnings.
Thanks for reading, let me know what you think!