Increasing the Breeding and Evolution Costs 2.5x

[swmartin19]

After reading through some conversations in #strategy on discord, I think that breeding and evolution fees should be increased 2.5x for the following reasons:

• At a certain point, it will become more profitable to gather than to breed, which will only hurt UNIM & RBW prices more due to higher inflation

• No one could have predicted a bear market which is affecting new DAU. If unicorns supply continues to grow at the same pace, we will have an over supply problem for Unicorn NFTs which requires new demand; something harder for laguna games to control (supply side is easy to control, attracting new DAU not so much)
  

  

• Due to the decline in RBW and UNIM prices, it is becoming much easier to 'buy your way up" to level 7+ land, taking away the fun of the game

• The feeling of hatching and evolving unicorns is extremely special. If it were harder to accomplish, that feeling would be amplified

• This I can’t confirm, but I imagine a lot of laguna games resources have been spent putting out fires/fixing bugs instead of developing future gameplay. A slower unicorn expansion will likely buy the devs more time to push out future game loops (hopefully bug free)

• Perhaps most importantly, if UNIM and RBW prices to breed/evolve were to 2.5x, that would directly benefit the early players who lived through the bugs. They would have expanded their unicorn herd for fractions of the cost, and have an edge going forward.

• Full disclosure prior to my last point, I own at least some of all CU assets i.e. land, unicorns, UNIM, RBW, Shadowcorn, and soft currencies. With that being said, higher UNIM and RBW prices may lead to a higher unicorn floor price and thus raise the barrier to entry for new players. While this is bad in the short term, if there is money to be made there WILL be players willing to spend up to earn. I think new DAU would INCREASE faster than it is right now (as made clear in the above Dune screenshot) as users search for places to profit in a bear market.

I am very curious to hear everyone’s thoughts. Please be kind in the discussion, these are just some thoughts I had. We are stronger together and I am sure I am missing some things from both sides of the coin.

[Thilagavathy]

The concern you are addressing here is definitely important which is the oversupply of UNIM and RBW, in particular RBW at this point in time. We are witnessing an accelerating downward spiral in RBW which is concerning .
This is much more than the average downward pressure due to current market conditions.

Your suggestions in general are good imo.

One way to solve it is by increasing the sinks and another way is by locking the rewards. A suggestion to consider is converting the in game currency and the RMP currency from RBW to sRBW. It would allow incentivization/earning with RBW but it would be locked. This would promote mid to long term reinvestment into the game rather than dumping, which would make it more sustainable.

[Vyona]

I am not sure about the proposed numbers but agree with the proposal overall. LG teams said many times they had levers especially UNIM which can be pulled at anytime to counter external factor, and I think we are now in this case. External market condition put a slowdown on the growth and it is needed to be counterbalanced.

UNIM is the obvious one which need to be tweaked, increase in cost is an obvious play because there is a lot of incoming UNIM airdrop and we cant really cancel these. Also this will put a stop on prices spiralling down and will give some confidence back into the project which is much needed.
I don’t mind having RBW tweaked the same way so we have a bigger sink against staking rewards.

The important point is to have the growth following the expansion rate of the assets to avoid spiralling down.

[Segarion]

I see how this would help but I think set multipliers is not a great way to solve pricing. When you have a locked in value for certain features, i.e. breeding/evolving a unicorn, that set pricing can either be a blessing or a curse.

For example, we’re locked into this set price and it’s bad if price of the 2 CU tokens goes way up. It’s also bad if the price goes way down. The fix isn’t that we use multipliers to set the value, that’s temporary and will only require we address the issue again the next time the 2 tokens decide to go up or down.

I think a simpler solution is already presented to us in the form of how materials are priced in game. The pricing of materials are based on how the LP pool is doing for that material. It never goes way up and even if it does, it will hit a ceiling that determines the equilibrium in correlation with how other materials are doing. This should be the same approach with breeding. We expand the strong ideas behind the mat LP pool towards breeding.

So how do we do this? What do we tie breeding/evolving value to? Very simple. Use MATERIALS to breed. Now breeding is tied into material value versus how the tokens are doing outside the game which doesn’t fully reflect the health of the game economics inside the game. But what happens to UNIM and RBW. Simple, you still need these to buy materials and craft them. However, the health of the materials value are dependent on how players buy and sell ingame. The value of the materials will balance itself out just like any LP pool as people buy them to breed/evolve or any activity.

If people are buying to build out like crazy, so will the price of mats, and in turn raise prices of unicorns to breed. If the opposite happens, not enough mats are being bought, prices goes, down, so does the value of breeding out a unicorn. But even if value drops like this, the price of unicorns to sell on OS will have to adjust to ingame pricing of materials.

I’ve thought about the locked in pricing of breeding and evolving as an issue a while back. Now, it’s baring its ugly head. When prices are down, no one sells, When prices are up, it’s too expensive. It’s hard to thread the middle where people are willing to jump in.

Not sure if this made any sense but something I’m throwing out there.

[PlayaPlay24]

This is a reasonable rationale, the last thing that CU needs is an SLP (Axie Infinity) type scenario.

[swmartin19]

This makes a lot of sense to me. I think there are things in here that could be included in an actual draft proposal so I am flagging it w/ a response. Thank you for joining the convo!

[TheGenji]

Hi I am TheGenji and I support this message.
It’s not just about the price, it’s the sad reality that the economy affects people entering and exiting the game. Realistically we can’t blame LG for the bear market, and they have done a spectacular job fixing bugs… As someone who was affected with the privacy error I have to say we’ve come far.

That being said, this is gamefi and if the economy crashes the game dies…
Please save our cute unicorns UwU!

[Bigmc19]

This needs to happen asap to stop this slow bleed. Current inflation will kill this game in a bear market. Team had a plan for the CU economy, which was perfectly fine in a bull market, but not in today’s market conditions. The team needs to adjust their goals and intervene before its too late. Nice suggestions sir. Hopefully team will listen to the community who have been asking for changes! Surely they must know things aren’t working right now!

[Skidz_SGG_Rebirth]

@swmartin19

cting new DAU.

I am all for this. Right now, we need to survive the bear so we can run in bull.

[Rocc]

Obviously the current supply of unim exceeds demand, which is unhealthy.
Just thinking about lowering costs to attract new players is not right in the crypto world. Only when ogs successfully run the game will it spread to more people.

[gw2021]

I might have a different opinion here … increasing breeding cost won’t help the UNIM price in the long run

In my opinion, the drop of the UNIM price is mainly due to …

(1) Bear market
(2) lots of existing game bugs due to understaffing
(3) UNIM liquidity pool is too small
(4) oversupply of UNIM during DF Act 1 reward

( summer of love reward would NOT bring down the UNIM in the long run, as it encourages us to breed more, and there are many UNIM sinks associated with each additional corn, but dark foreast Act 1 reward is a problem, as some unicorn holders do not breed, they just sell the UNIM reward. I think there is nothing wrong to attract new players with DF Act 1 reward, we just need to absorb the cost now )

Increasing breeding cost would help (4), but not (1) to(3). In addition, an incraesed cost of breeding means a lower ROI, it will greatly discourage people from breeding more and reinvesting more in the UNIM sinks. In the bear market, we really want to “stimulate” the economy.

If we are having a balanced UNIM burn and mint ratio for each new unicorn, the system is working fine, and we don’t need to increase the UNIM costs. The drop of the price is coming from (1) to (4) and we just need to absorb it, or else increasing the breeding costs might discourage people to do fewer trasactions in the game, and that is a pretty serious issue. I understand that incraesing the breed costs might increase the unicorn price in the short term, but that’s not what we want. Having too much unicorn is okay, as the number of lands would limit how much UNIM we are giving out which is the supply. I think it makes more sense to keep the current breeding cost.

[JKOOIJMAN]

in favor.
its important to increase as soon as possible. for new players its to cheap to play and for early investors its a shot in the face

[Farmer_Poncy_Donner]

@Segarion

So how do we do this? What do we tie breeding/evolving value to? Very simple. Use MATERIALS to breed. Now breeding is tied into material value versus how the tokens are doing outside the game which doesn’t fully reflect the health of the game economics inside the game. But what happens to UNIM and RBW. Simple, you still need these to buy materials and craft them. However, the health of the materials value are dependent on how players buy and sell ingame. The value of the materials will balance itself out just like any LP pool as people buy them to breed/evolve or any activity.

I like this idea, add materials to the costs of breeding. (could be even class specific)
Its too easy now to earn loads of RBW in the marketplace, unim is harder to get enough of as a breeder.

[TMGA_Official]

From what I have seen in any other game, increasing the breeding cost directly just devalued the nft (because your ROI it’s much longer now).

I would suggest to increase berries needed to breed, maybe put materials in it and other in-game soft currency.

[swmartin19]

I am confused here. If the cost to create a new unicorn is more, less supply hits the market and the intrinsic value of the unicorn NFTs rises… therefore raising the floor price.

What game are you referring to where breeding costs were increased and floor fell as a result?

[Shikam]

Sounds interesting, and I know some games that change the breeding cost once in a while as well. Not a bad idea to try

[TMGA_Official]

The “intrinsic value” of the unicorn is what you can do with it, not how many are available. If you increase the cost breeding, the cost of the token that are used to make the baby will just decrease by the same amount.

This because you have changed the demand of the token as well. People won’t breed if is not profitable, which means now they will just sell their UNIM/RBW until will be profitable to breed again. At that point, if the tokens are lower in $ value, all your unicorns are gonna be worth less because you can get less of those tokens $ with it.

You can simply look at Axie as an example. They have keep increasing and increasing the cost of breeding and what happen? people just stop breeding and market sell their SLP. We could say that if they didn’t do it it would have happen faster but who knows…

For what I have seen, gaming NFT are very stable if priced in their game currency.
If you check the data from when evolution kicked in, a baby has always cost on the marketplace around 4500 UNIM.

While in Axie you could only change the breeding cost in token, in CU you can do much more stuff such change the amount of berry needed for breeding/evolution, add other materials to the breeding process, maybe introduce some quests material for the breeding process and so on. The main reason is gonna “hide” the real cost of breeding, you reduce the constant sale of material on the market and make the game more enjoyable to play.

[swmartin19]

Strong argument here. My 1 rebuttal would be that Sky Mavis had much less control over the SLP supply than LG does over UNIM. Additionally, unicorns are far more useful than axles. So I do think increasing the UNIM and RBW cost to breed/evolve would sink the supply enough to create an increase in token prices, and there would remain sufficient demand for unicorns (still 100 being traded on OS daily) which would result in a higher floor price and ROI margins would remain similar.

With that being said though, it’s hard to know who would be correct as there are too many variables. I would be just as much ‘for’ increasing soft currency costs. So what I’m trying to say is - I like your idea a lot.

[Bahis]

never seen this work in the past