Staking -we’re testing it right now. It looks good, but we’re fixing some things up from the audit. If everything goes well, it should be released next week mid-week. But if we don’t clear up everything, it might be a bit later. We’ll also do the withdrawal fee at the same time. When you withdraw, you’ll have to pay a % of the $PIXEL you’re withdrawing. It sounds greedy, but we’re not keeping it for ourselves. Most of the in-game purchases and fees will go back to stakers.
Right staking is not gameplay. The token is a very important part of Pixels. In this company, for everything else, we need to make a game people like. But that’s not enough. We have to think about game economy, token economy, etc. People right now are very frustrated about token economy. But these things are all tied together. If we made it so no one earned, that wouldn’t be a web3 game. Also if we only had people who only had their own interest in mind, then that’s not good for the ecosystem either. Game and Gameplay, Token Mechanics and Data Science - these are the three different buckets. Right now, we work on the smart reward system.
Again, it’s going to be a different approach to earnings in the long-run. If we start leaning earnings way more to people who hold the ecosystem tokens, and towards people who have a long-term interest inside of the game. That’s the main goal and idea. Also we’ll dive into some of the recent gameplay updates today.
One change we just did inside the game recently is we started to attack some of the botting a little more too. An abrupt change we made yesterday is we have a much larger requirement to use the marketplace. The reason is it was heavily used by the bots. So increasing the rep for now has basically cut that out. So now you’re starting to see economic effects from that. Inflation is a complicated thing. If you’re just using MP to buy things, CPP might be increased. But if you go farm the resources, you should be able to make coins from going and doing it yourself. The amounts in the TB have to be high if we’re balancing it towards coins in the TB.
Q: I’m not a buyer, but grinder, I do everything I can manually. But 501 claricite matrix? cmon
A: I would agree some of these stacks seem hard to do in this recent update, but let me give you insight into how we’re thinking about this stuff. What we’re trying to do is make the game as fun as possible, but also balanced when it comes to economy. There’s a lot of work we need to do to make the game balance better. THe end-goal with the earnings inside the game is to make sure that it goes towards people who like and care the most, and who has the best interest in mind. When we think about where the direction of Pixels should go, we need to build something people love and that’s fun. There are some players who really like what the game could be and like the game as-is now, and have some feedback on how to improve the current game. And there are some people who just look at how to earn the most. We’re looking at the first set of people. Basically no earnings can come if there’s no one who enjoys playing the game.
Q: But you won’t punish me for having placed my pixel in the wallet to avoid fee, will you?
A: We’re implementing something called dPixel. There wont be any withdraw fee for it, and you’ll be able to spend it inside other games like Pixel Dungeons or Runiverse.
Q: What wen nobody more spend ingame?? then the game over?
A: Yes, that would mean the game is over and we’ve failed. But just so you understand with staking, multiple games will be there, and when you want to stake $PIXEL you’ll choose a game to stake to. If those games have in-game spends to be given back to stakers, then you’re rewarded.
Q: What about Pixels Dungeons? In that game, people are extracting $PIXEL because it’s very easy to earn a lot of it
A: Actually that’s not true. Their RORS is over 1 in most weeks. By default, their RORS is over 1 if they don’t try to do any growth. Last week, it was 114%. So by definition, that’s not extraction. Some weeks have been lower, but they’ve always been floor with Pixels. The rewards were crazy for a couple weeks there but we got on top of that. But the rewards are going for different initiatives. 90% of the revenue is in the high stakes dungeons. The F2P dungeons are very minor source of rewards. There’s more extraction in Core Pixels than Pixel Dungeons right now.
Q: Luke, when will you guys add quicksilver utility of soil? We’ve gone quite a few weeks with no update
A: THere was an update yesterday. You should subscribe to pixels post to get an email everytime there’s an update.
Q: I’ve been trying to plant the 359 astracactus since yesterday, but all the soil is occupied and people are selfish, they don’t harvest and they don’t let me plant
A: The soil issue right now is people are leaving their crops, they leave them to die, etc. This is a conversation we’ve been having with LO and been having internally to try to find a solution. We know this is a very annoying thing that happens. We’re working on a solution. We can’t leak anything yet but we’re looking for best-case scenario.
Q: How is quicksilver doing? Are there any adjustments planned or is it performing well?
A: It’s actually not performing that well. There might be a few reasons. It might be due to mispricing. We also need to increase T3/T4 demand to make it worth it. It also needs to be used in more industries. It’s a cool feature, and might help some of the issues inside the game if we make it more accessible. We’ll be talking about it later with the team. It might solve more things with soil crowding if it makes sense to buy it. I looked at the numbers and there was about 2000 $PIXEL spent on it. I saw someone in the comments yesterday saying i should stop talking about Pixels as an experiment, but the reality is no one has quite figured out web3 gaming yet. There are finally some games doing interesting stuff. There’s more teams shipping games. I feel like we were the only game out and getting attention for like a year. But now we see more people innovating and there’s some ideas we can pull from. Y’know it’s interesting, I can’t help but think some of the sentiment around Pixels is market driven. Reality is it took us much longer to get chapter 2 out. The whole point and the plan was to fix out the game economics so we could start to focus on the end-game. Where Pixels is at right now is where we thought Chapter 2 would look like 6-7 months ago. We literally have a list of specific things people are asking for, but they make comments like “You guys are idiots, you’re scammers, not listening to us” but these comments aren’t helpful. Comments that are just mean and nasty, we’re going to ignore them. If you don’t talk to us in a way that’s going to help us. This is not a 40-hour a week team. This team works really really hard. We would appreciate some respect back. We want to be working with people in the community who have the best interest of the game in mind, and enjoy the game.
Q: How does staking affect RORS? Both are YOUR ideas. Ihave to return pixels to get them, but if I stake, I wont get any? Huh?
A: If you have $PIXEL in the game, it’ll be automatically staked. They’re tied so we’re aligned with in-game spend and economic activity. This is probably the most sustainable way to do the rewards. The best way to describe the withdrawal fee, is to explain it in the terms of staking too. Withdrawals: There’s a lot in the game right now. We’re about to put a fee, and take away $PIXEL from the sellers, and put it into people who hold the token. There’s fundamental changes we’ll be making. We might lose users too because of this, but we do need to think about the tokenomics. We need to look at in-game spend, how people use the token inside the game. We’ve been trying to focus on how we give it to people. This is the kind of framing we’re thinking about moving forward. Rep changes are big and that’s going to be a bigger focus in the short-term.
Q: Every day dump my pixel for ron… ROI are most important not stake
A: If you’re earn-oriented like this, that’s fine, but you’re hurting people who like the game the most and we’re building for people who like the game the most. The people who are ROI important, we’re not focusing them. If that makes you want to leave, I’m not so sorry completely honest. Our focus will be on people who believe in the long-run. That ties in a little bit with the land - for the in-game $PIXEL staked, we’ll likely be adding a boost for land as well. You’ll see what that looks like officially soon. The in-game staking system, we have to trial that, and decide a distribution. But the way the in-game staking will work, your in-game balance will be snapshot on a monthly cadence (might reduce) and there will be a boost for LOs who hold $PIXEL. There will be focus on making the game more fun, not just increasing earnings. Earnings are a part of the game, but if that’s the only focus, the game will not succeed.
Q: Yesterday you announced the rep for adding pixels, but if it’s removed, you’re taking away reputation? Do you think you’re doing things right?
A: The rep system, esp since we just introduced this change in the MP, we’re going to look at it a little bit more over the next little bit. We need to look at some easy ways to add reputation into the game. I’ve been anti-kyc because it’s hard to grow a game if you require KYC. If you’re trying to build a game for a consumer audience, you have to think about the mobile audience. Cuz that’s who plays casual games right now. If you have a loading screen that’s too long, you lose people. If you require a passport upload and a face scan, people won’t want to do it. But we can implement KYC to get rep. The whole idea of rep is to make sure real people are using some of the features we have. We have to think about softer ways to let us know these are real people. If you connected your CEX, Binance account etc, then there’s a higher likelihood that this is one account per one user because you don’t have 100 Binance accounts. A lot of the work we’re doing is building out universal profile systems. And it’s getting better. We want to build a system that connects every wallet someone owns to one identifier. There’s ways we can do that via data science.
Q: Only bots not do KYC. Real player surely they do if they really love the game
A: KYC is abusable. If I wanted to go and buy 100 Coinbase accounts, I could do it. It’s shady. Also it wont be a requirement.
Q: Extend the AMA duration to 2 hours.
A: For the energy, or you just want to see our faces longer.
Q: Not a fan of KYC. KYC will kill the game 100%
A: Agree. I don’t think the only path should be KYC, but some might want to do it to shortcut. It’s not a requirement, but we can give it as an option for someone who doesn’t wanna buy VIP, and wants to access MP quickly. There just might be some extra benefits we could add. We would never have it be in the flow.
Q: Upcoming event next week? or this week? easter event?
A: Stay tuned.. something might be coming today. Fun little simple, kinda annoying event. There will also be an energy party on Monday, some giveaways, it’ll be fun.
Q: Talk about things that interest us, changes in the game that are worth it and the rep you said yesterday
A: How can we complete the core Pixels loop as quick as possible - that’s where we’re setting the next intention. One of the current issues is the only end-game *(and by end-game we mean the type of things you do inside the game if you’ve been playing for a long-time or high level) is MS or TB. If we build end-game from scratch, it’ll take longer. Chapter 3 wont be a big economic rework. We did that in Chapter 2. There’s tweaks we need to do, but that’s easier. We’re working on the next loop that’s needle-moving and will make the game more fun. Chapter 3 wont be a whole rework of industries, or TB. There might be some things we need to think about to make it work better, but we’re not redoing Ch2. Ch3 is supposed to be new stuff, not fixing the old stuff.
Q: Soils issue, fishing needs minigame, hard to level up, and no reward afterwards, taskboard hard, quicksilver expensive, there’s really lots of stuff that can be improved and not focus on profit only
A: Agree, there’s a lot of things we can focus on. Strategy is we’ll spend some time just cleaning up some stuff in the next couple weeks like we have the last week or two, then we need to focus on new stuff. To get the game to where we need to, we need to focus more tightly to be able to get these new features out - which will be more things to do besides just TB.
Q: If there were many new minigames that constantly change - this would be fun
A: There’s going to be some UGC coming out that has stuff you guys can create. There’s been demos from the devs that are pretty cool
Q: How will on-chain staking work?
A: You’ll just go to staking.pixels.xyz, you’ll choose a game to stake to, and click stake. It’s not complicated, so it’s great. Also we’ll have guides ready, and show content creators the UX so they have content ready to-go. It’s very straightforward and simple.
Q: When PLOT building start working?
A: You’ll just have to wait and see.
Q: Luke to save this game, the only thing to do: STOP to give so many pixels, remove nonsense off-chain tokens like life preserver, instead of those, use Pixels. What are the current vision and goals of the Pixels team
A: Make the best game possible, have a sustainable economy, and if those succeed, then start focusing on helping others to do the same. We want to figure out P2E in a way that no one’s done before. There’s still a lot to do to get there, and we haven’t figured it out yet, but we’ve been making month-to-month progress. We have to create systems that reward people for staying inside the ecosystem rather than those who only sell the token. We want to reward the players who are here for the game, and for that, we need to focus on a lot of different things.
Pay attention to your emails and discords over the next day. We’ll see you guys next week.