I haven't talked much about items, for one cause it's still quite out there in the future and another cause we've been busy with other things in the mean time, but figured it's been so long since I've posted I may as well so my followers don't get worried. :D
I have mostly just been busy trying to help on things with the game that I can and other parts some waiting around and moving pieces here and there, I even managed to learn some editing myself recently just so I could get that done to save the project some temporary liquid funding so it could be used elsewhere but dang was that workload tedious. Though I hope it'll pay off once you guys see the end result. ^^
Either way, items!
I think this post will also cover parts of what we have planned for zing in-game, but do keep in mind that everything I'm about to say isn't set in stone and a lot if not everything may change in the future.
One thing that's been important to keep in mind with the project and item generation is to prevent "gambling" as we've seen in modern web2 games where most of the monetization is based on players purchasing "lootboxes" and it enabling younger people to get into gambling habits. I believe Europe has even banned some of these mechanics but needless to say you can't completely avoid it from games as people can often find ways to gamble on certain things but we have of course put a lot of thought into it to not encourage it in any way. One large factor that comes into play here is that when players purchase these lootboxes, that money of course directly goes to the game and even though players may be able to find out what the odds of getting rare cards or items are, they don't often show it to you directly at the screen to discourage you from buying which is quite bad mannered.
You may think that I should be comparing lootboxes to starter packs rather than item generation but the main difference there is that starter packs and their content can be resold on the market, there may, for instance, be accounts that eventually just purchase a healer license, a healer and a starter character to directly get into the game, or just lease them eventually which means they can practically avoid the whole having to buy packs and "roll the dice" on what stats their creatures will have. So not only can players choose to skip that part completely but even if they purchase something it may still have resell value compared to lootboxes in web2 games, some of which even become obsolete every season (Google FIFA lootboxes, you may find quite a few articles on the controversy and moneygrab).
So the next part is about item generation in the game, here we also wanted to make sure that it doesn't incentivize gambling and we believe that the best way forward to achieve that will be to make a lot of "currencies" in game not tradable. While this may sound controversial for a web3 game let me get into the reasons as to why we think this'll be better for the health of the ecosystem.
Let's say there's these items or currencies you need in the game to craft items, let's call them shards, shards may drop off of holo-creatures when defeated in battle or you may find some sprinkled here and there when harvesting gathering materials and most items you want to craft will require shards and some zing. If these shards are tradable it'll create an ecosystem where farmers will thrive, all you'd need to do would be to create an account, pay for a healer license and lease a healer and creature then figure out a way to bot grind defeat creatures to garner shards in order to sell them on the marketplace to people who don't want to bother gathering them to create items - which also incentivizes gambling since they'll just purchase shards to create hundreds of items per day in order to try get the best one there is, etc. While this may be good for the project short-term (to sell a lot of healer licenses), it's not going to go well for the player economy long-term if there's farms with thousands of accounts selling shards at any price and making item generation cost close to nothing and having best in slot items become common.
Now that's not to say that there won't be checks and overview on the bot activity that may crush these accounts before they go wild, but we believe that making these in-game currencies/materials not tradable is a better solution.
If these materials aren't tradable, how is this going to work, you may wonder. Before you start thinking that we're going to force every account and healer to level up their own professions to the max, we have a different solution in place for that. It'll work like this.
You basically have to agree with other players either through socializing in the community or discord or later in-game to craft certain items, let's say you know a forger that has the plans for a certain helmet you want to be crafted for your healer, he has spent a lot of materials, zing, and other resources to get his forging up to that skill level to learn the plans for that helmet and he's deciding to use his day on crafting your helmet so naturally he'd also want a fee for his work and you end up being the one overbidding everyone else that day. You would simply through a trade window or in-game mail system send him all the materials needed to prove that you have them, and the forger, without ever getting access or control over your materials (to prevent ingame scams and tomfoolery) would be able to use them through the mail or trade window to craft your helmet which you then would instantly get back without him having any control over the crafted result either. If you don't also include the fee the crafter requested he could simply decline the trade or send the mail back. This removes any abuse from both parties but most importantly makes it work without the need to make the materials tradable. For the "trade" or "mail" system to work, a crafted item has to be the result, thus you can't just mail or trade away materials with a fee which makes them nontradable.
This means it would force people to play the game, defeat creatures, gather materials, etc to craft items. There may of course also be people who prefer to level up their own professions so they can craft their own items, there may even be craftable items that incentivize that so there's a reason for you to want to level up your professions rather than always having others craft them for you but there will also be limitations on how many unique professions a healer can have which means that eventually you're going to need to look for other crafters either way. If you choose forging, for instance, you won't be able to also learn gem-cutting or botany or engineering, etc.
Now this doesn't completely prevent bots either, but it makes it a lot more open and creates community awareness which may make it easier to report suspicious activities if noted which makes it easier for our devs and other workers to look into the right place to squash it among other activities and detection tools we'll work on implementing against bot farms.
To give you some concrete examples of the day-to-day of a player and crafter, let's say you just defeated a level 30 creature and it dropped 45 shards, you now have 800 shards and can craft that amulet you really wanted for your Light Healer, your profession is, however, botany so all you can do is craft elixirs, potions, and other buffs, not actual amulets. You look in the chat for a forger and there are plenty of crafters looking for work cause they'll get a fee for having spent the time/crafting cooldown on crafting your amulet for you. You look for one that specializes in amulets in the hopes it'll grant you a higher rarity amulet and you both agree to a 200 zing fee. You send the crafter all the necessary items in the mail, 800 shards, 10 melted iron bars, 2 melted gold bars, 20 zing to craft (gets burned) and 200 zing for the fee. A minute later you get a notification that your craft is finished so you open up your mail again and there's your blue rarity amulet waiting for you to equip it, increasing your healing stats and boosting your mana generation. Meanwhile, the crafter receives his 200 zing and won't be able to craft another item until tomorrow because he's so tired from having crafted this one.
Lastly, there will of course be some randomization with items as mentioned above, you'll never really know what you're going to get in terms of rarity and exact stats. You can't completely remove that attribute from games like these cause else it'll just be a straightforward grind to x amount of shards and x amount of zing to get the best items you want for your healers. Limiting this to only materials you can obtain yourself or going to the marketplace to purchase already crafted items will hopefully remove a lot of the gambling aspect from the game to not incentivize people to spend a lot of money on getting the best gear but instead spend time and being consistent at it.
Professions will have skill levels both in terms of levels and how high you can go to learn certain items to craft for specific level restrictions and also different "talents" in professions where you can focus on certain things to become more efficient at crafting them. This gives you a specialization that makes you stand out from other similar professions when offering your crafting services to players who haven't bothered to level up professions or just haven't gotten to that level yet or are currently on cooldown but have enough materials to want another go at crafting a certain item they need for pvp or pve.
Items will have weighted randomness to them, so when crafting a certain amulet it could range from uncommon to rare to epic to legendary or even holo rarity, and specialization and other factors would help with making the super rare ones occur a bit more often. Items will however also have certain attributes that are rare, for instance, if your healer specializes in mana generation to heal creatures more often in and out of battles instead of focusing on big heals in-game, he would want that holo rarity amulet with a lot of mana generation but may get unlucky and only get healing power attribute for instance. On top of some attributes being replaced by others, there's also going to be range in the item stats, my holo amulet may not be the same as your holo amulet even if the plans of the forger to craft it are the same. Even though both our amulets are of holo rarity due to their stats being super high, yours just happened to be slightly higher thus potentially giving you an edge in combat, and those 5 extra health points it managed to heal that one round deciding on who lost and won an important pvp battle.
Items will also have different soulbound odds here and there so that not everything can be bought or sold on the marketplace but I think we're already got quite far in this post so I'll leave that for another time. Just wanted to give those eager for more info an overview on how items will work in the game and that we've put quite some thought on that as well even though we're not really there yet.
Let me know your thoughts!
I'll try posting more often from here on out, even though I've been saying that for the past couple years. xD
Images were created with Midjourney for this post alone.
One of the reasons I'm so excited for this game is how well thought-out the various systems are. Another is that - at every turn - you prioritize long-term growth over quick, unsustainable bubble mechanics.
I like the idea of a cool down. People don't want to be dominated by whales, but they also don't want to be dominated by people willing and able to play a game all day (well past the point where the fun wears out). Things like bonuses to first wins of the day and cooldowns help keep those of us with lives feeling competitive and engaged.
I suppose people can have multiple healers. Will the cooldown be per healer or per account? Per account might be too strict. I suppose if someone is willing to buy and level up multiple healers, we have to let them craft more than others. Even so, the system you outlined will slow them down to something we normies can somewhat keep up with.
Nice write up!
Yeah for now it's planned out where profession restrictions are per healer, so accounts could potentially have multiple healers with max'd out different professions if they've put in the work and resources to get there, there wouldn't be anything wrong with that. At the same time this would discourage bot farms because say you've farmed enough mats to want to craft a nice item for your Light Healer and your Ocean Healer is the one with that profession that can craft it, you can then mail the mats to it, login to that healer, craft the item and log back into the other healer. This would be possible but is also where bot farms would attempt to abuse, i.e. they'd have a botfarm on a specific healer on a different account, then either sell or transfer that healer to a different account and do the crafting with all the mats they've bot-farmed, but with specific restrictions like when healers get purchased and transferred between accounts they wouldn't be able to craft anything for a few days, we'd be able to notice these activities and put a stop to them which would jeopardize all the time, effort and resources they've put into their max'd out healer professions. That's also where having certain currencies/materials not be nfts/tokens will be important as we could then just null all the mats they've gained unfairly and even put a stop to their collection earnings and pvp rewards, etc and flagging the healers on the marketplaces so new users don't purchase healers that can't earn rewards or play in general.
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I really like the idea of a player driven economy since you've mentioned that there would be professions like crafters which could help in players interacting more. For loot boxes i am definitely with you in that regards but I think there would be some who will still enjoy the thrills of it tho I pretty much unlucky with that stuff in all of my gaming experience so I mostly relied on grinding .
starter packs will pretty much be the only form of "lootboxes" provided by holozing for this game and it'll mostly be collection-based skins, like for instance alpha skins as we've showcased, then beta-skins and occasional seasonabl skins. These won't be necessary for players to attain eventually except for early on as we need to fund things, players will be able to do well through player crafted items as well and those will have unique skins too but not the ones we've created.
Now that is like ten pages of text on something I can hardly imagine without trying the game out.
I swear I'll give a post-long feedback once you let me roam the in-game world, craft a bit of something and tame or defeat some monsters :) I understood that the game would relate to my physical activities and locations in the real life (please correct me if I am mistaken), and I percieve that like the best way to go - a kind of an augmented reality with tradeable digital assets. Something between Pokemon hunting and, according to this post, Minecraft Light where people actually own what the items. Brilliant!
Not so much in the alpha and beta but there's definitely plans for that in the future to incentivize physical activities, but before that there's also a whole open world we want to add so players can choose between the holozing world or real life world and mix it up a bit!
That sounds even better :)
It gives me great joy and hope to see that a brand is being built more than a game. I feel that there will be a lot of balance in the project for players and investors.
As a pokemon fan I will be inside the game and this together with the car project is a big step in the evolution of hive and web3 gaming.
Well, it is certainly something unexpected as you mention in a web3 game where everything is generally tradeable. But looking at the reason for these measures, I see them as reasonable, thus avoiding or greatly mitigating abuse within the ecosystem.
I hope you continue to keep us up to date with updates to the game mechanics. So far you can see a certain degree of complexity but it continues to be exciting, especially focusing on player satisfaction.
Every time I read one of your updates, I'm impressed with your patience and long-term approach! Those of us who are old know well that things like MTG didn't reach globe-spanning popularity overnight.
It's also my hope that when actual gameplay arrives, it will include a similarly deliberate approach... not sure if it's possible in this day and age, but it would be nice if the game were only playable by humans, and not by bots/automation.
Looking forward to the next one... and slowly building my ZING stake...
=^..^=
That was a long but interesting read..
I must commend your resolve to build something solid and sustainable, something worthwhile and educating, something inspiring and cognitive. Holozing is the thing!
I'm amazed how you create time to iterate the possibilities around the game's engagement. Making efforts to reduce farming and gambling in the game is epic .
question
I'll want to learn more about the professions in the game.
didn't sound like a question to me :p but as I said professions are still a bit out there, we'd want the game out in beta where players get limited daily creature encounters before professions are live.
This crafting ability sounds great, leveling up your skills and building a reputation for making high end unique items, means everyone can carve out a niche.
Looking forward to playing
Balancing tradeable items and non-tradeable items seems like a smart way to deal with bots and to keep control over ingame odds: I like it!
Why do I get the feeling no matter how much Zing I acquire I am going to end up wishing I had more by the time the game launches!
Zing is a longterm game I'd say (pun intended), while professions will most likely be the first to introduce burning of zing it won't be the last. It'll definitely be interesting to see later when things have fallen into place how much of the daily zing generated gets burned but we want it to be a healthy mix of being able to earn and burn zing so players don't have to force themselves to buy zing in order to progress with certain activities in the game, we'll leave the "forced" buying and burning to some other future plans instead.
I respect and appreciate the thought you have and continue to put into this!
i just finished reading your post sir, although im not quite yet updated with a lot of happenings here on hive and specially here on holozing but based on the contents you shared honestly speaking i think the game is going to be enjoyable since the motives is not purely to rake money in, i love the idea of not falling into the same strategies of several if not most of the games out there in the market. The idea of the mechanics of professions got me excited since i think it helps in balancing the game though everything seems still blurry to me at this point, once the game came out i think i could better grasp the things going on for now ill do some arts and maybe it could help me with the finances to get on the holozing train. I am just really excited since i am a pokemon fan ever since i was a kid and with all honesty i see that great potential even this early
The holozing game will really be an amazing game to play and from the analysis and activities set to experience this will really be more exciting especially when you have to defeat creatures in claiming items and also awesome rewards.
I really like the amount of thought the team is putting into this. I think I have bad luck with RNG, so seeing that there will only be a few RNG involved, and that I have options to minimize that makes me really excited. The different things a player can do in the game makes it all even better.
I like that manual dependence on other players to trustless-ly do stuff. That interactivity is fricking valuable and for me, something I wanted to see more ways of "gamifying" it for a long time.
My friend was already wondering if he can play it. Hope to see the game being rollout soon.
Keeping some reaources non-tradeable is a good idea. If all resources were tradable then someone sets up a swap pool, collects the fees and thus spikes an economic lever you have to control game play.
I wish you take your time to do most of the Holozing game work. You must have passed through a lot. I am fine to see Holozing game stand out to bear other games. With the way trying so hard gambling to be avoided.
Just saw this on X and it looks like an interesting game. Looking forward to launch.
I would have thought that every monetized game is gambling. But I later understory your concept. Though most of the terms referred to in this post are alien to me, I think I we give myself to follow on in this game once is out
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I understand from this post that I will have to keep accumulating Zing. As @godfish said, I think I will understand what he is talking about much better when I try the game.
i agree. it is better to control those bots before they go wild later on the game.
So, first of all it's nice to read that you guys take gambling very serious. My son is 10 and he will be playing Holozing since he is a huge fan of Pokemon and he enjoys Hive so far. I don't let him read everything ofcourse...not yet.
You wrote a lot about professions, how many will there be? And will you be able to change profession? If yes, will everything go back to ZERO?
Also regarding professions, for example: I want to be a healer, but there are already so many of them and the chance that someone will pick me for healing becomes smaller every time a new healer arrives. This can be demotivating and get less fun. Then you get the top healers who will always have a job.
Then the so called shards not being tradeble is a very good decision but like you said this will not prevent bot activity. Bot's can still collect, send shards to another bot then the bot crafts it and puts it on the market.
You are your own healer, dunno what game you think this'll be but healers themselves aren't a profession.
I wrote it as an example... "Healer" is just as an example profession.
Quite a confusing example since the game is based on characters being healers who have professions. New crafters coming into the game will have to level up their crafting skills which they can do by crafting things people need. Unless you meant when new professions arrive in future patches? I'm sure players will eventually have more than one healer and won't need to reset their profession to learn a new one.
There's also cooldowns for each profession, if a top forger who has the schematics/plans to craft something end-game people always want is busy crafting that daily for a queue of people wanting it there's room for others to craft something lesser or for other professions to try and match his skill level to get in on his demand. Obviously not everyone will have "work" and be able to earn zing from their professions, it'll depend on demand and how many don't bother to level up their professions or choose another one, etc.
This was such a great read but at the end of the day, I see commitment and I see the passion you have for the Holozing. I wish you the best.
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So it's possible that a healer chances upon an item with high stat value they don't need but can't get rid of it? Will there be any plans to have fees paid in ZING to remove the soul bound status?
A balance maybe to have those fees high enough to moderate or greatly reduce potential profit margins for selling the items on the marketplace while reactivating the soulbound status when transfer of ownership is confirmed. The fee could be based on the item rarity, stats of other items previously crafted of its kind?
Would there be NPCs that can craft items when there are no other players available for the request? Probably an agent in the game that burns ZING.
the odds of soulbound or not won't be on all craftable items, all items will also be salvageable based on their rarity and stats it could give back quite a few mats.
Not a big fan of npcs taking over that but there could potentially be made easier to craft things without always having to be present as the crafter. I.e. having job offers up and the buyer just supplies the mats and requested zing and it gets autocompleted and uses up the cool down of the crafter.
You must have been putting a tons of work and effort on this lately and this is great to see
Excellent, it is always important that there are controls and to avoid abuses, the mechanics of the game look good... and of course to avoid the excessive commercialization of chance as much as possible and make it more community-based, I think it is an excellent idea, greetings from Venezuela.
You've been muted from the Holozing community for running alt accounts and accidentally asking for an unmute on the wrong account. We will also be removing our active votes from your posts due to this.
😅 Got to catch them all 😅
proof: