We have plans to introduce quite robust and elaborated stats within the game once it is playable, achievements being a big part to combat bot-abuse and farms. While these functions are still way out there I wanted to get through some of them and give you a vision as to how they could function and the effects they could have.
Let's first start out with achievements.
Hive and hive-engine being one of the few who've started making soulbound nfts possible will be quite prominent for our achievement system. Let me start off by giving some examples.
You ranked #1 on the leaderboards for the max level Player vs Player ladder, you get an achievement stating your accomplishment and sent it to your Hive account. This nft cannot be traded away, it is stuck on your account. Owning this achievement gets you collection rewards meaning you will passively earn zing by having it, I won't say forever but for a long time forward unless something forces us to switch systems. This is of course quite a rare achievement, each month there might be new achievements for this accomplishment and it might be quite competitive for you to reach it again the next month.
One can introduce several achievements for different things and they'd have different weight behind how much zing these achievements can earn passively based on the effort and scarcity of them. For instance an achievement based on professions, you've crafted the most high rarity items that month, here's an achievement that represents that accomplishment in the form of a soulbound nft.
Achievements and stats are quite intertvined as they help trigger achievements when certain milestones are crossed.
We can for instance issue smaller achievements as well that many players can earn but of course won't have the same weight to earning as the rarer ones. For instance an achievement for winning 100 PvP battles, 100 PvE battles, catching 100 creatures, failing to catch 100 creatures, etc.
Stats are something important in RPG's as we've seen in past web2 games, people are really curious about these things while playing their favorite games. The new thing with stats and nfts are also that some can be transferrable.
Let's imagine we'd have each creature track their own activities. Let's take the Infurno creature as an example. It starts at level 1 and you start playing with it against wild creatures. We can already start tracking things like:
- how much damage has Infurno done in total
- how much healing has Infurno received by healers
- how many creatures has Infurno defeated
One day you decide you don't want this Infurno any longer and trade it off on the market, the new player could then check the history and stats of the Infurno as those stats would move with it. At the same time, though, account stats would still show that you've done this much damage with your creatures in total.
Using achievements and stats as a way to deter bots.
The talk of any web3 game is how to avoid bots and farms, while it's always close to impossible to completely eradicate them I think the best method forward is to make it less and less profitable for them with the risk of losing their ability to play or sell creatures and healers. This goes the same for achievements and stats.
Imagine you have 15 unique achievement soulbound nfts and your account has quite some stats on it based on combat and gameplay, let's assume it's in the top 5 ranked accounts in the game. One day you decide that you're tired and you heard someone has created a bot that'll let your game play pvp battles and pve battles on its own and even farm materials while you are AFK enjoying touching some grass in the sunlight. If detected by our system or other players that you've been doing this, you'd risk having your account banned from future encounters, pvp, gathering and while we can't take your nfts away from you we can flag them as non-playable.
This means that once you notice your account has been flagged as botted, a lot of your earnings will be removed, if you tried to sell your healers and creatures, the marketplaces would tag them as non-playable meaning you won't be able to connect to in-game servers for enounters and pvp with them, rendering them close to worthless as no one will want to buy those creatures or healers or items.
We see cheaters in most games but in web2 they have close to nothing to lose when cheating, it's mostly on brandnew accounts and when they get found out they just switch to a new account. Here it pays to not cheat as consistent playing and progressing means you'll start earning more zing than others.
Being able to track stats and achievements and other things about player activity I'm not going to get into here will help us determine and alert us of accounts that are farming or botting in non-human ways.
images created with midjourney for this post alone.
May want to add a player reporting system or some sort of community watch where human players spot any suspicious activity in some accounts and gamify the process by a stat where how many players flagged the sus account and it turned out right. It's not expected to be superior to the game's way of tracking bots but bot farms can get smarter. It also incentivizes community awareness and involvement in keeping nice things.
Yeah an overwatch system is also planned an incentivized in some form.
Love this idea!
This is awesome! this penalty will probably shoo away those guys trying to bot holozing.
I think having a weak bot policy has caused Splinterlands a lot of problems as time has passed. They were happy to take the spell book fee for opening massive numbers of bot accounts, but it was at the expense of the player environment and the game economy.
I like that you are thinking of ways to counter bots from the beginning, this speaks to a "bots no bueno" culture, which I like.
Rising Star have a very strict no-bot policy, I think Hive games should protect themselves from activity that aims to drain resources in only one direction. Games need players who engage and transact, economies need to have minimal leaks out of the ecosystem. We are small pools, we can be drained quickly by large leaks.
Everything looks to be going in the right direction with HoloZing, good luck and happy hunting !
I agree complete with your SL take.
As a "xbox achievement hunter", putting achievements/trophies in a game for me is like pouring fuel on a fire 😂
Yep! This game is really going to scratch that itch for collectors.
Between achievements e stats we are going to see quite some grinding, that's for sure ahahahah
So much to get optimistic about the game right now and I believe more update will be rolled out soon
This is a very interesting way to incorporate stats and achievements to fight against bots. Bots have been a constant thorn in Web3 games, if this is very successful, I think it can make the game even more popular.
That's a niche way to make this game fair and competitive and may be unique as well ?
demo
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That's the new way of blogging, as the account description states ;)
okay but he's just saying "demo" in comments
Yes, that's how deep this way of blogging is :) He clearly DEMOnstrates that
lol
Those sound like some really interesting features. I'm really looking forward to seeing the finished product!
All measures to combat bots are good and necessary. One of the reasons why I lost my taste for Splinterlands is the amount of bots in the ecosystem. So I fully support this.
However there are several things that come to mind, such as in what way could this be considered suspicious activity? Will You set parameters on how to play? These are doubts that come to my mind as a player
By coincidence I just started the stats tracking and achievements planning on my game as well. 😅 It is not going to be as complicated as this though, being a local, likely only solo game that there will really be no point in cheating. Online and NFTs introduce some interesting variables to consider. I also echo most the other comments that I like the early anti-bot stance. 👍 Not to throw shade at Splinterlands, but like the others say, their accepting stance on the issue, at least in my opinion, was the biggest part of the game's down turn.
I wish we could just start playing the game right away, lol
I’m very sure it will meet up to people’s expectations
$WINE
If you can actually get rid of bots or at least discourage them or make them unprofitable you will have won the web3 gaming race by far, I hope this works man! Happy to be an investor and hear about these news.
If you can't see this awesome banner, open this post InLeo
I am so excited for this game and yes the last thing we want is bots ruining the game and just taking rewards from players who are putting effort into playing the game. I feel like you have thought of everything and I believe this game will be a big success.
the anti bot rules looks quite promising, if we can make it possible to become totally bot independent and give players a human only playground, then that alone can cause massive positivity towards the project.
I so much love the developments and update that keeps rolling out about this great project. Thank you for the amazing work you are doing daily