Serfdom and Sorcery – Play to own edition

Introduction:
This is not a whitepaper, because I am not that full of myself. This is just some thoughts about how a successful web3 game can operate in my opinion. Later I will go into the problems I see, how they affected the past and how I want to create solutions where it is feasible and clear cuts where it is not.
If you don’t want to read about what I think about P2E you can skip to “Transitioning to a P2O economy”. If you don’t care about economy you can skip to “Just add more fun stuff”.

Why P2E is just stupid:
So, what is my problem with P2E? Well, it is built on promises that can likely never be fulfilled. The main promise is, that you can earn from playing a game. While this is technically possible, it was possible for a long time before this term ever became popular. The big issue is, P2E brings earning from the game left, right and center. It creates expectation that you will earn if you play. It creates the temptation of “you earn more if you invest”. It inevitably results in grievances when the realization hits that not everyone can earn, because where will the earnings come from?
The hero of many a tale, the new player who just plays for fun and finances the earnings of everyone else is a myth. I had a talk with Santa and the Easter bunny, even they can’t believe in that guy existing in a game that advertises as earning you money. But the truth is, this guy exists, this is your 99% player who just wants to have fun and entertainment, in whichever form it comes. This player will never touch a P2E game, especially if it is marred by gameplay that is designed to somehow balance earnings, prevent abuse, safeguard value. So yeah, a P2E game.

What is different with P2O:
But why are we not playing a classic web2 game where you just pay and play? At least for me the answer is, because they are greedy bastards who want to own your time. You build something in a game? That’s ours. You earn something? That’s ours. You buy something? That’s ours. You want to trade it? That’s a ToS violation. Web3 is supposed to end these practices, but in my opinion it does it in a way that is even worse, P2E.
I don’t want to rattle too much on what makes game fun. I don’t want games to be a job or an investment. I don’t want people to think how much buying something in game costs in real world currency or calculate their possible return when choosing which activities to do. You will NEVER go mainstream with that. Instead, all I want to do is give people ownership over their assets, that is all, play to own. You bought something and you don’t want it anymore, go ahead, find a buyer and sell it. You earned something another player wants? Sell it. Cash out the profits. Sell them to another player who wants to buy other stuff.
That is already all I suggest, ownership of the stuff you own in the game. No promising returns, no APRs, no investment options, no completely passive earning. Get the finance out of the game. Will people still have these considerations? Of course. Will there still be investors? Sure. But it is about how you design the game. No more offering anything that is directed at big pockets and removing the need to interact with the game. No more promising returns and no more paying people to interact with the game. All of this is closer to a Ponzi scheme than a game because I have yet to see a web3 game that actually is rich in players, the base is usually just investors and extractors.

When currency withdraw becomes extracting:
Oh yes, I said the bad word, extractor. Somebody who withdraws can only be an extractor in one very specific but unfortunately very common situation. When the game pays you to play. This is the only situation in which this can happen, everything else is just someone withdrawing.
If the game pays a player to do whatever in the game by rewarding currency and said player just withdraws the game loses value. This is when problems begin, because if enough players do it the game will simply pay and pay. Where do these payments come from? Well from the game, so the game must make more currency, resulting in inflation and basically everyone loses in the long run.
So, there are ways and means to try to regulate this, limits, fees, preconditions, rewards to not do that (staking). Do any of these make the game more enjoyable? No. Will it help in the long run? No. The solution to solve this is obvious: Just don’t pay people to play, as in don’t do P2E. But generally, a game will not have much success with a buy in requirement in a sea of games offering players to earn for free. So, what is the solution? Well, other players must pay for it, but why would they? Out of the goodness of their heart? Probably not. No, it must be because doing an “earning activity” should produce something that players want. The easiest example is labor. If a player can produce labor and another player needs this labor to produce something, then the producer will probably be prepared to pay for that labor if it means he can produce what he wants faster (or at all).
So, in short, a game should not be afraid of withdraws. I would argue it can’t be if it is a central selling point. It must be designed in a way that withdraws are just moving transactions from the game to the chain. Less currency in game? Well, currency will be more valuable, meaning prices going down which should lead to people picking up currency from the chain and move it back it. This is how a healthy web3 game can operate.

Transitioning to a P2O economy
So let me stop with the philosophical and abstract descriptions and let’s talk about the game. When I started changing things, I made it clear that I want to get to deflationary currency. The first step for me was to reduce the worst offender, the passive print. I am well aware that this ruffled some feathers and made some people quit, but I tried to stay as fair as possible. The main reason why I built the whole production system and the market to support it, is to move to a player driven economy and have the game no longer pay players to play. That does not mean that the game will not give out tokens ever again, it will still ensure minimum prices on crucial things like labor, there will be few pooled emissions based on a percentage of the burn where feasible and even prizes are of course also a place for tokens.
Now to the bad news. As many noticed, there is too much production or too little demand. The only thing I can say is yes, there is. I was aware of that from the beginning because there simply are too many assets for too little players. And I am talking about players who play, not people who are registered or players who do nothing in game but cashing the daily payout.
To be clear and give some numbers:
There are 2420 farms, 851 ranches, 47 citadels and 18 acropoli out there. In comparison there are 312 mining complexes.

So, we have about 20k farmproduction, 10k from acropolis alone. Compared to 312 miningproduction. For those who wonder about the farms, 80 were sold to the game or burned for miningcomplexes and furnaces. For those of you who are did the math about ranches, yes this is more than 5k. I discovered only once I made a report for this breakdown (not this document) that over 6400 ranches were sold, not 5k. About 80 or so were burned for miningcomplexes and furnaces or sold to the game. I am well aware what this means, but I don’t want to go off topic here.
So, the main issue is we have far, faaaar too much production for a playerbase of roughly 50 actives players, the daily active is much lower. If we break it down to energy using apples that’s 6 apples per production a day, so 120k apples or 840k energy. This how much on average would have to be consumed to allow for every productionfacility to produce. Sure there is hay and there can be other stuff, but yeah, it is not even close. We maybe get to 10% of that on a good day, usually it is more like 5% of it.
Before you say “see, it doesn’t work”. Well sure it doesn’t, same as the passive print of 10m DBLN a day didn’t work (500 per farmproduction). Because we are not even close to reliably burning 1m. In the end there are too many assets for too little players and if we look back at the P2E model this means too little earnings to pay everyone who was promised returns. The astronomical 365% APR were unachievable, even the 36,5% we have now are not manageable, it is closer to 3,65%. At the moment.

Controlled shrink or hope for growth:
So, I see two options out of it. Either the game grows into the current demand, or the supply shrinks.
I have plans for growing, more on this later, but I hate the idea of relying on this because let’s face it. The game is rather losing players than the other way around. What about shrinking? The production numbers I put up were to stick with the original DBLN rewards, that is why a ranch is simply double the production and an acropolis is 300x a ranch even though it requires only 200 ranches, it simply has the 1,5x factor. Originally it was planned to completely remove the passive print and have the amount you can sell regulate how much you can earn from your assets. To be a bit more accommodating to passive investors and not exasperate the overproduction issue I decided to keep the 10%, which the game can’t afford, for a while.
The problem of overproduction remains though, it is simply too much. There is a buyback for farms and ranches, but to be honest, if enough were sold to stabilize supply and demand you could probably add a few more 0s in front of the token price. A farmproduction point costs the game 100k DBLN with the current buywall prices, which are admittedly generous at 2x the buying price. It is slightly less for acropolis because it absorbs the production bonus. So absorbing half of it would be about 1b DBLN, more than the game even has on hive (some of it would go to wax I assume).
I try to widen the game economy to allow farm production burn for new production options, but this won’t reduce the numbers to the extent needed. I think for now the best option is to simply live with the overproduction, hope players accept the loss of returns on the assets and replace the 10% with 100% of the game burn, which might be 0 for some days because there are still printing activities out there.
I really don’t want to be unfair but at this point it is about salvaging. I know it is a big ask, but you should consider your assets as ingame items and not an investment. Am I saying write-off? No. But just don’t expect them to make you money. They are yours, they can do stuff, that is the best I can offer, for now. The hope is still to get the game to a state where it is a fun gaming experience and attract more players and less people looking for ways to profit. Which will require fun stuff.

Just add more fun stuff
Ah, yes. How often did I hear that already. Add more fun stuff. Just make the game fun. We need people spending. Yeah? Why didn’t I think of that… First of all fun is subjective. Some people want to build stuff, some people want PvP, some people want story. In the end everyone wants something different and to “just do” anything is not really how things work. That said, luckily there are about a billion games out there to provide ideas what is fun. The tricky part is transitioning this into a web3 discord game. Web3 is trouble enough, especially when the goal is supposed to be P2E, text-based discord games makes it even better. I started a bit of a devblog to explain considerations how to port traditional game ideas to discord here (https://peakd.com/@cardeegel). It is just meant to explain.
It is really not about flashy big ideas, it is about building something that works from start to finish. It doesn’t need revolutionary gameplay, it is making something that is familiar enough to jump in but polished and with a couple of twists. There is a reason why World of Warcraft back in 2004(?) was such a huge success when it did absolutely nothing original, it just did what everyone else did but better. Im not saying look at discord games and steal their gameplay ideas, Im saying look at what works and make an adaption for discord. So what fun stuff do I have in mind?

World of serfdomcraft?
So, the first thing I already talked about is making the game be more of a game, more concretely a traditional MMO game. I want to do away with the attack command as it just exposes so many different issues the game has and it just swings between printing tokens and being completely unsatisfying. Further I want to introduce a sort of progression element other than the number next to level or the number next to token. The goal is to have zone-based exploration similar how you see it now with scavenge and forage, but far more advanced with more outcomes, storylines, monsters, bosses. Unlocking more zones, storylines, weird fun stuff. Think starting up a new MMO and just explore what it has in store. This will mean that the current commands like scavenge will be eventually absorbed into !explore to give players a single command option.
As combat and monsters are important, I want to make the combat more than just attack until the enemy or your own HP are gone. In fact, I want to overhaul the complete character because the level and attack inflation is problematic and it leaves little room for customization. Think more of a stats point based character with hit and miss chances, crits and abilities, gear that changes certain numbers, etc. Don’t expect a full interaction combat where you need to dodge, it is still a discord game, but the goal is to think how to skill and equip your character to beat the challenges of the game. Sounds fun? I hope so because it also means rebalancing. A lot. The huge power spread can’t be dealt with. You can’t make content like this for lvl 1 and lvl 5000 and everything in between. It has to be crunched down and there will be corners to cut. Levels will have to be compressed, equipment will have to be adapted. I try to be fair and reasonable, but consider your progress… malleable.
The 3rd pillar of it, is questing and storylines. It is meant to guide the player through the game and set goals. Currently, what is really your goal? Earn x to do y? And then? That is a big issue of the game in its current state. Why keep playing? Sure, you want to keep earning, but why play? What is there to do? Hit higher levels with attack spam? Buy the thing you want and then? Wait for the next thing? There is no challenge other than spend x time or spend y DBLN. There is little sense of achievement, little sense of a journey. I want to provide something to do, something to pursue and not just another race to get something first. In an ideal world you talk about things you did in the game, describe how this was great or that was fun. This is how games get popular, not sharing a link 100x on social media. If you have one streamer playing a game and he has fun with it, guess how many people will give it a try. If they don’t, well, I think you can guess.

Boss we got it, what do we do with it?
PvP, oh PvP, amazing how bad you can be. The PvP in the game is terrible in my opinion. I am sure some might like it, but in the end, it boils down to steal, steal and steal more. Do some damage on the side but mostly steal. There is a number of PvP commands but there is no real PvP. You are not fighting each other, you just hit each other over the head with various commands. What makes things worse is that with the P2E mentality people get actual monetary value stolen. Now I don’t have a problem with that, but to the extent it is in the game now it is a net negative for sure.
I want to move away from stealing from people’s accounts and towards to two things. An actual fight between 2 (or maybe more) players and a fight for scarce resources. From a king of the hill kind of world PvP to dueling, everything would be more fun if players fight each other instead of one just being the victim. A sawmill could be taken over which allows to create a good amount of lumber by the occupant, if he can hold it. Or a special mine. Another element could be, that these goods must be transported and while you transport (simple cooldown) you are a target for someone who wants to steal it, sort of a caravan raider type of gameplay. There are plenty of options to choose from, not all can make sense in a discord game, but everything is better than just hitting a victim which can’t defend at all. The only command where this makes sense is steal, because why can’t I fight back against a wardog or a golem?

Prestige
Now this one is still rather vague and I have nothing concrete to talk about, but it would fit into the world perfectly. I am thinking that progress should not just come from getting rich or getting strong, but to become powerful. I would like to add a prestige system down the line where players try to increase their standing in public, eventually reach nobility, etc. Nice house, nice clothers, good food, lavish festivals, trophies and treasures. I plan on having this to be the social currency of the game, for example you get certain perks, access to locked game functions and you can actually become a noble, influencing the world, etc. It would be the social pillar of the game, forming the 4th after economy, adventuring and war.

Conclusion:
The game is not in a good place, a lot was promised, a lot was overpromised, not a lot is finished. I don’t want to throw blame around, but it needs an honest assessment to move forward. The playerbase is far too small to support the current assets and in my opinion there is not enough game here to change that. I think the mindset shift needs to happen. We have to leave P2E behind us and move towards P2O and yes, the assets you own are now worth a fraction of what you paid for them if adjusted for inflation. I can’t change the past, I can’t promise anything, in fact, unless it is prefaced with “I promise”, I promise nothing. What I can offer is that I try to continue with building a game that can work and then your (and my) assets might be worth more again in the future.