RE: SPS Governance Proposal - Alternate Solution to Address Bot Farms & Wild/Modern Format Discrepancies
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I don't understand how you would implement this, but I'd like to hear your thoughts. If you want to message me and explain on discord, I'd love to hear what you are thinking.
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Hi, thank you for your interest in my thoughts.
Currently, earnings scale directly with rating to the power of 3. If we compare two accounts with different ratings, for example 3k and 4.5k, the account with 4.5k rating is going to earn (4500/3000)**3 = 3.375 times more rshares per battle.
This may sound like a lot but it's not if you consider the investment in cards required to reach these ratings. To reach 3k rating, you may need to have something like 20$ worth of cards, but to reach a higher rating, you need to start using rare, expensive cards like Yodin at a high level. When we look at the values of collections of people with 4.5k rating, for example QPRFDB, ryan6000 and ESQUORET, they have total card values of 4.6k$, 25k$ and 8.6k$. We could argue that a more efficient collection could be made to reach a rating of 4.5k, but it is still hard to imagine that it would be possible to reach this rating with a collection that costs less than 20 * 3.375 = 67.5$.
So far, I was talking only about earned rshares. What makes things even worse is that the SPS amount required to reach a certain multiplier scales with rating to the power 3.5, which is higher than the scaling of rshares. The following graph shows earnings in USD per month of accounts at different ratnigs, assuming you rent the optimal number of SPS, with rent price of 0.004DEC/SPS/day, which is the current market price. You can clearly see the diminishing returns of reaching a higher rating because of the increasing amounts of SPS required.
This system economically motivates people to create a lot of accounts, and in turn, because it would be very time consuming to play on more accounts, to use bots to automate their gameplay. It is similar to how the economy of axie infinite worked and why people hired scholars to play on their many accounts, instead of focusing on developing a single account.
My proposed solution would be to increase the exponent of rshares earned to a higher number. I don't know the optimal number but we could start with something like 4, or even more, but there certainly is a number at which it starts to be more beneficial to gather all assets in just 1 account. With rating to the power of 4, an account with 4.5k rating would earn 5 times more than an account with 3k rating, which may not be enough, but it would be a good start. This would move more rewards to the tail of the distribution of players with the highest ratings and would reduce the economical incentive to create many low value accounts instead.
TLDR: Just increase the exponent of rating in the rshares calculation formula, bot farms are no longer economically incentivized.
Very interesting idea. I think this is something that @royaleagle and @yabapmatt will probably want to consider in the future. I realize there's a balance between all the variables to get the desired results, so considering all tools in the future is a good idea.
I also think the rank has to be monitored and make sure we aren't making it too hard or too easy to attain a particular rank. That will also affect the distribution.
Thanks for explaining what you meant in an understandable way. I think the goal you have is the same that we all have (including the team itself), and how we get there is a learning process and all levers that can be pulled should be considered as we continue to refine the process.
The only thing these 2 consider when looking at anything or coming up with proposals is how to get more money out of as many players as fast as possble. Lets call a spade a spade they don't care if the project tanks they will disinvest before, take their money and run
I think this would completely undermine any potential NPE retention.
**New players need to feel progress or they will have no reason to stay. **
The issue I'm seeing is that a single Rshares factor is used for both SPS and also for Soulbound tokens and it is already very top heavy. Increasing the exponential factor will only compound this problem and progress will seem impossible for players without existing skills, soulbounds, strong decks, or sufficient SPS to feel like progress is possible and they will simply move on before they get hooked.
I think it's fine to have SPS distribution weighted towards higher ranking players. But the glint rewards need to be disassociated from the high exponential rating of rshares.
We can already see - the high rating players are getting too many rshares that they are bored with the shop and need jackpots.... while lower league players are still screaming about how many cards they are missing and yet unable to get to their needed level. If the intention is to scale monetary rewards with in game assets, then perhaps lower ratings are about getting glint, and higher ratings still get glint but they also have the monetary prizes (SPS)
I'd actually suggest keep rshares calc the same.
Then slowly reduce the incidence of sellable glint rewards.
This would allow lower rating players to grow their soulbound collection at a reasonable speed and experience progress that way. Meanwhile, higher rating players will still get more glint than lower rating (since glint factor is still rating^2) but get a higher share of SPS (and lets be honest, they need it for staking multipliers anyways)
Hi, thank you for taking the time to read my comment and respond. I think that you raise a valid point and I agree with you. Adjustments like this would need to be made to keep the new player experience in mind.
I mostly wanted to raise the point that the formula used to distribute rewards is inherently flawed and unfair in the current state of the game (at least in wild) and encourages creating many accounts, therefore botting, and that we can address the bot issue by making a very simple change to a formula, without having to introduce complex new systems like CP requirements, minimal card levels, or having to buy a license to play in wild that make the player experience worse in my opinion (e.g. having to balance creating the best team and rewards due to card levels when creating teams). Note that all of these solutions were removed in the end because they did not end up solving the problem. They are an inconvenience for everyone, including botters, but do not address the fact that to optimize your earnings, you have to create many accounts.
The easist way to get rid of BOTS is to have KYC on each account and no-one can have more than 1 account, older players with more accounts can combine all their accounts (and cards owned per account) into a single account