Seem some chatter on the chain the last few days as I have certain keywords tagged on the FRIDAY bot to alert me when certain accounts are mentioned. There's been talks about Holozing for instance "milking hive", "not having anything to show for", "crying over more funding", etc, so I just figured I'd make a post to check what some of you who may be more reserved concerning delving into the project may be concerned about.
This isn't a "judgement post", while we're all human and question certain activities or lack thereof, I feel like I've been trying to run this project as transparent and close to the heart as I can. I recently "paid" myself some hive from the project and it felt odd, partly cause most of it ended back in as purchase of vials but I get that to outsiders it'd look weird so I made a post mentioning that zing is meant to be ran as a DAO where contributors get an equal amount of rewards back for their time/contributions. Not everyone that's gotten paid from zing for helping it along has for instance bought vials or is holding zing - and that's all fine and their decision, similar to how for every other stakeholder it is their decision if they want to participate in the crowdfunding of the project or not.
Generally the vibes have been quite positive surrounding zing which I am grateful of, but with practically anything that grows beyond a certain amount of users there will always be outliers. For instance I'm sure there's many who are against splinterlands, their proposal or general lack of "going up" which may have driven a lot of players to spend time/energy/money into their ecosystem. Simiarly there may be a lot of people upset about Leo underperforming, also having received DHF funding and a similar sized delegation last I checked as zingtoken. This post isn't meant to go into any of the other projects in detail, simply mentioning some similar projects in this space and how many of them may be in "survival mode" or barely making ends meet with funding I presume.
One thing I need to mention, which I have been a little "unfair" towards the general crowd with, is that there are quite a few developed parts of zing that have yet to see the light of day. I do try to make it clear in my posts rambling about random details of game logic or ideas that "yes, there definitely is a game" and I have cheated with this unfairness to show a few "key" players in the hive space that this isn't a rug or me throwing my reputation down the line to scam people out of their delegations and now hive/hbd for buying vials. Thus I do understand some concerns regarding the lack of us showing what we have so far and how "close" things are to coming together - which I have also often mentioned that due to the game only partially being holo-3d ready with certain assets that can't really be "hidden" if I were to show sneak peeks such as environment or the temporary healer models we are using - it would kind of ruin first impressions of the game and project which we have wanted to maintain in quality until things are presentable.
Another thing is that for an "alpha" version this game is generally quite complex under the hood and I am very much at fault in that case. I could tell you about certain random details we've implemented to make sure it is "web3"-ready to avoid people taking shortcuts/cheating other players, for instance it took us a while to implement a system where "creature-swapping" in-game would result in the previous creature not receiving xp nor a "typevstype" count and how the next creature would only receive partial xp based on the damage output they did towards the enemy creature to prevent players from what some of you may remember from other similar games called "xp sharing".
Thing is, holozing is a very ambitious project, there's a lot of angles either being developed in unison or in periods, let's go into some of them:
Unique creatures created from scratch, have to fit in with the general vibe of the project, have to differ from other games, projects, brands, need names, need evolutions, need a type, need revisions on the looks, need references to make sure certain parts of them end up the way we want them to from the illustrator, need polishing cause illustrator probably does a lot of commission work and for that price won't polish them 100%, need a "radiant" skin, need a "holo-max" skin version, need to be placed on banners for reveals, need to be added towards capture cards both as png's/stills and animated/3d effects. Then we need the same illustrator to create different angles of that creature to make the work of the 3d team possible, one from the front in idle position, one from the side, back and partial top. Then the 3d team starts their work in sculpting the model, revisions back and forth, animations, adding it into the game, assigning 2d pic to its profile, giving it stats, assigning how much stats it can earn per level and per "typevstype" count based on if that creature leveled through easy, medium or difficult battles. We've yet to start balancing which will be quite some work in the private alpha I hope the community will be happy to help with! Now the creature needs a passive talent, something to set it aside further from similar creatures in the future of the same type + balanced stats (is it a tanky electric type or is it a damage dealer type or is it a hybrid) what passive talent should it get that fits with the animal-type, why does Miu get "more resistant to being poisoned" when he's just a random cat? (kind of personal this one I admit) Passive talents are important because it gets players to need to learn the game somewhat to know about it in important pvp battles.
Either way, this is kind of the process for 1 creature, now let's look at some of the other things we've developed so far.
2d healers of 3 different classes and 2 genders, the 2d versions will be generative starting out, i.e. a nature class male healer can look very different from another same class and gender healer based on accessories, colors, backgrounds, rarities, etc. This will of course be way too much to expect us to implement as 3d starting out - we may make exceptions for the rare holo-looking ones but even I know that here I have to draw the line on "okay this is not going to make it into the alpha and beta and I shouldn't even try". Generative nft's have been quite popular over the years on ETH, SOL, BSC, etc, aside from it just being artsy our healers will of course also have a use-case in the game, they will have healing abilities to aid their creatures in PVE and PVP battles. In generative nft's (think Runi of splinterlands if you aren't familiar with other projects) you need assets/accessories to set the base outlines apart, each healer should be unique and we have 6 different outlines due to 6 different characters. You want a "holo hat" well you gotta make it in 6 different versions so it'll fit that healer outline while accounting for other layers and assets to not go over/cross certain lines, not fit well with that particular assets, many if/then rules, if this asset gets picked then all assets a-f can't get picked since it'd look weird/wouldn't fit in.
That's mostly just going over the 2d versions of the healers, I'm not even going to go into their roles and items that'll provide them with completely different stats compared to the creatures and I didn't even go into those earlier when discussing creatures either.
My point with this half-rambling post is that while there are very few people against holozing that I know of, I'm sure there's others who also don't expect much from it given their lack of support over the years - and that's fine. What does annoy me a little now and then is a few people who've quite literally not done close to anything on hive or have anything to show for keep throwing our name in the mud because it may not fit their expectations or they don't like the way we are crowdfunding quite a massive project on hive. I've heard things like "they're centralizing stake" even though - aside from the zingtober (inktober) event, we pretty much burn most of our voting power on hbd.funder as to not "overreward" content posted about our project with delegated stake by crowdfunders. I.e. we don't just throw hive votes around to anyone who supports us or we think they may re-invest it into the project - something I know some other projects very well do to the point where they differentiate voting strength based on if they pay for certain services of theirs or not. We take our curation quite seriously with curators who've had experience curating in OCD for a long time and constantly keep checking for abuse factors from content creators.
Anyway, before the vial sale went live our delegations were earning us somewhere between 600-700$ in rewards weekly - that's it, that was our funding. We were quite behind on a couple devs here on hive in backpay, our gamedev had a big tab, our previous 3d artist, many other freelancers somehow gave me the benefit of the doubt that I'll make up for the lack of funding at the time because I tried to show them we're a legitimate project but with handicapped funding while often trying to explain what powerdowns are. Even though we are striving to create things as cheaply but retain a good quality as we can in different ways through freelance work that amount of funding at these hive prices is still very, very little for a project this size. Sure you can say it's my fault I didn't expect Hive price to sink this low or that I maybe should've pushed for the vial sale to launch earlier because I wanted to make sure our game had a future and will definitely be a thing before directly taking people's hive/hbd in the form of in-game asset purchases.
I could talk about other people/bigger stakeholders I've been in contact with over the years who for some reason or another have refused to support the project, even though I wouldn't have asked for much from them and most of them would've turned a profit if they had literally traded the zing instantly back for hive as the delegation APR has been over 8.5% for literally the whole year it's been running. I could tell you how some of them quite literally play similar types of games on their free time yet don't give it a second thought that maybe this project could go somewhere - but hey, to each their own. The times when it does get annoying - even though I have quite often attempted to ignore it - is when some try to undermine holozing and what we're trying to build here even though we're quite open about close to everything we can be.
Anyway, in general I'm quite grateful to many of you who've supported the project in one way or another - this isn't a post meant to "nudge" you into supporting the project now. We are quite frankly doing a lot better and looking forward to actually release something soon.
But, if there is something you're still concerned about, I'd be interested in what that might be and maybe I can answer it.
Obviously, you don't need to comment if you aren't into these kinds of games/projects in general and don't see the appeal, that's totally understandable.
Maybe I should've titled this "AMAZING" as in Ask me Anything Zing, but I'll save that for another time when I can be more open about certain things I may not be able to at this time to protect the project/people working on it, maybe I'll title it AMAAZING in that case. (ask me almost anything for you non-redditors).
Oh well, quite a rant here but maybe a good change from the usual "all sunshine and rainbows" posts and comments surrounding the project. :P
Judging by this post, there is so much to talk about it's hard to maintain focus in any given area.
I've already voiced my concerns about potential economic issues and will refrain from rehashing.
Given there is so much to talk about I guess my biggest ask is that we organize a space on X so it can become more of a dialog instead of the 2000-word rants we love so much on Hive. If it doesn't happen no biggie... time commitments and all that... I just think it would be a little easier to address all these issues verbally in a forum.
I mean, there's not actually that much talk about it, it's a very small number of people but they're quite consistent for some reason. :D
Hmm a public talk could be okay but maybe a bit later, I'm kind of a nervous public speaker and already gotta prepare myself for a call I have early next week with a very prominent figure who has a lot more xp than I do with these sort of things. :D
Yeah for sure public speaking is the worst.
In high school I skipped the required 5 minute speech every year in English class (worth a full letter grade) and then in order to graduate I had to do it one time in front of the staff at the front-office.
While there aren't a lot of problems to discuss there does seem to be an immense amount of detail and random gameplay mechanics that could be talked about. Although I'm sure the plan was just to launch the alpha and let people figure it out in the jungle.
Ah in terms of what goes into the game yeah I could talk for hours, thought u meant the people talking negatively about it.
I'll let you know in a little bit about spaces, but concerning your other concern you had regarding LP, it seems that more value has gone out of them during these volatile times so making me wonder if we should reconsider adjusting the rewards come next reward window.
It's the launch, naturally, what concerns me the most. Is there a large and well-targeted campain aimed on non-Hiveans? The people from the outside are what would make the difference (besides, say 1,000 active Hiveans cannot really keep such game alive).
If the launch fails, there's no place for other concerns :))
Anyway, most play2earn games are boring in their very nature, and people play them only to make some cash. So it is often "play and dump", we've seen many of these. What's the long term sustainability vision? And is the game genuinly entertaining? Would people play it with no financial incentives like they do with the successful non-NFT games? And speaking about that, who is the target audience of Hlozing?
Quite some loaded questions, I was just about to head to bed but let me give it a go!
I don't really think the launch can "fail" so to speak, it'll be a bit of a "soft-launch", i.e. the beta of the game where everything from alpha such as progressions, test nfts/assets will be wiped and everyone starts fresh - will be quite limited to start off with. Limited daily encounters in PvE and then ladders for PvP. This is by design so we make sure no glitches/bugs get abused with unlimited encounters that we envision the game will allow in the future.
In terms of campaigning - we'll accept other coins and make it easy for people to get a "holozing" account along with having many more social platforms going posting about the project and sharing things from the community - I expect a lot more people will post about the game once there is one.
I don't really consider holozing "p2e" in that sense, our focus is collectibles and fun - while our flagship game with its soft-launch won't possibly the most fun game it won't be the last but work well to enable other games in the future. If people are going to like the games we aim to build - some of them I really enjoy personally, I guess will depend on them, not everyone may like them.
Our aim is definitely to make the games standout so we may have players who aren't even connected to web3 play them and eventually maybe decide to connect so they can trade their in-game items they've collected so far. That'd be great!
Oh, feel free to hit the hay ;) Thanks for the elaborated reply, it's almost a stand alone post itself :)
I'm very happy with Holozing personally actually.
The fact that we get a lot of updates and transparency is quite enough for me to keep trust for the project.
My only concern would be that if the game is ready at one point and we all get to play and then it happens to just SUCK, then I would be really dissapointed.
Hopefully the game will be fun and playable, I see that you yourself have put a lot of thought into this and y'all are trying to create something very exciting for us all. So I'm not too scared of Holozing Sucking, as far as I've seen and heard so far, it's going to be amazing.
But it doesn't take a lot to make me happy anyways, If the gameplay is more exciting than Splinterlands, it will already be a huge W to me.
I get it from both ends. Games take a long time to prove value and alphas etc. are not common in the general gaming.
My personal concern is from other experiences like Chainmonsters which was really promising for a fun creature-collecting game. Then it went from 2D to 3D and focused so much on the cryptocurrency aspect and eventually I don't even know what happened to the game.
I'd love for Holozing to be moer than 'good enough for a game on the Hive ecosystem' and actually be fun and engaging compared to other games, but that I understand will take a long time. I've backed games on Kickstarters and it always took 3-4 years for me to get the game, so I'm always happy to wait for good quality!
was chainmonsters on hive/steem or do I remember it wrong? Either way we aim to only stick to one crypto-zing, with most other material items for crafting etc not even being tradable, aside from nfts like healers, creatures and healer gear. Our focus is very far from zing and its price - altho it's nice if it doesn't dump too hard as it allows for extra funding through people delegating for a quick profit while those who can't delegate buy the token off of them or now purchase vials to earn zing.
We are longterm oriented and thoughts about what happens with the price of the token isn't our concern at this point in time.
Chainmonsters was, not sure what! It was on Kickstarter and even Epic Games, I forgot what system they used but had some NFTs.
The game is supposedly coming back but it changed so much every time it was, so I actually appreciate you not showing too much cause it's better than changing goalpost a lot hehe
I shouldn't worry too much about what others have to say.
People can decide themselves if they want to invest or not.
It's always a risk if it will be good investment or not.
There are many examples of rug pulls, so I do understand the scepticism.
I've learned from the past not to get too hyped.
Just continue building your game and release it. Then people can judge the gameplay instead of promises.
I wouldn't pay too much attention to negative comments, it sounds like you are on the right track and it would be great to have another great game on HIVE.
Cheers, yeh I try to ignore mostly. :)
What's Holozing? What does it do? What's the concept? Is it financial? Is it a token backed project or something?
I think its A big project with mighty result.
To be honest, I don't think I am going to play the game. Pokemon and pokemon inspired games are not really my cup of tea. Would I try it, play around a bit and try to exploit it? Probably. No hard feelings, if I manage to exploit it though :P
But with my delegation and all the ZING I sold (which gets powered up and goes back to delegation), I think we have accomplished a somewhat virtuous cycle.
There is no giant behind it sending funds to the project, and people are complaining about the project, which is showing itself to be evolving more and more every day.
The problem is that if people don't follow the steps they think they should, they judge it as if they weren't walking. What a shame.
The positive point is that these people are not accumulating ZING and so I have more units left to accumulate.
I appreciate that you consistently keep Hive up to date, even though I am not a gamer but an admirer of the artistic beauty of Holozing!
I think the people who have valid concerns are going to do a pretty good job of voicing them to you. I can see that already from the comments below. Then there will be those who just expect to make money right away and they can't see the big picture or play the long game. Those are the ones that I would give very little if any space to in your head. As I've said before, I am excited about Holozing. I can't imagine everything that goes into building and ambitious project like this!
I played a lot of P2E games and all start great until inflation kills the token price and then interest in the game wanes. How would Holozing avoid this and keep attracting new players to keep the game sustainable? Maybe instead of a P2E model, make an entertaining game that people will love to play and the tokens are just secondary consideration. More like play and earn rather than play to earn.
For mi the vial sell was very very slow, until now, imagine in SPL in one day a lot of pack were sell and in zing it come very slow,
Sorry for this specially for people which could do something big for the new development in zing
The problem could be come for the new communication for genesis league sport games to stop the contract with MLS, I hope this do not affect your proyect.
For other situation a little of people too think in Ragnarok proyect, it was abandoned and a lot of us bought dust token and do not have hope to recover nothing, this could be one of the reason which affect the new proyect same to zing.
Sorry for your short time but we hope your proyect can be good in the future, same as axie infinity in the beginning,
I was bought one vial, it is not much but can help.
Before voicing my concerns I need to do a small disclaimer: although I have held all my rewards ever since the airdrop, it was not until very recently that I decided to actually get more invested in the game, both from a financial and time/energy perspective, meaning I don't really know much about the project yet and, therefore, my concerns may have been addressed already on other posts. If that's the case, I do apologize.
Also, my concerns are not specifically towards HoloZing because, as I mentioned, I don't really know much about it. It's mainly things that I've seen in other games that worry me about any and all future ones so don't take this as criticism to this particular project or team :)
FInally, here are my concerns:
First, there is the concern that the game never actually launches or takes forever to do so... again, not really implying there is a reason to fear this from HoloZing in particular but we've all seen that before, even here on Hive. A lot of hype is created around a project and it ends up taking years to be launched or it just gets completely abandoned.
Another concern is whether we will actually get to play the game. What I mean by this is that a lot of blockchain games are mostly or completely idle. You login, click a few buttons and wait for a result until you can do something again. It's almost like a chore more than a game really. Don't get me wrong thou, I play and like a few games in that style. I think they have their place. But I'm hoping HoloZing will be a "real" game where I can spend a few hours actually playing it!
I guess that's it for now! Again, nothing of this is specific to HoloZIng. Just stuff I would ask about any new games being developed in this here time and place :)
It's actually a strategic boon to ignore comments from know-it-alls and purists. There's so many examples in the world in which manufacturers listen to them, and make changes which make the experience for everyday users worse.
Example, cars that end up making their wheels thinner, set lower and more like frickin' race cars. The ultimate outcome is the car goes 1% faster for those who care about that. The other 99.999% of people who don't care, end up with a significantly more expensive car.
You are close to alpha version and I think overall this is a very complicated game to develop AND think how it will work, so no concerns there, that's not an easy tcg game here
I'm only worried zing token might end like starbits, worth nothing and dumped to hell