RBW Economy Changes - Revised
We have been communicating with the community in the forum and on Discord, and have made changes based on feedback to our proposal. For those getting caught up to speed, the original idea post can be found here and the first revision of the idea can be found here. This is our third (and hopefully final) revision based on community feedback. To summarize the most recent community concerns:
- Don’t implement until we some some data from pre-season jousting
- Make the RBW fee dynamic based on breeding points remaining
- Separate the LVM RBW input costs component and RBW breeding costs component into 2 different proposals
- Consider UNIM as well when making changes to RBW breeding costs
Additionally, we came to the realization that this proposal will directly affect the player base. As such, we put together different options to provide a variety of alternatives.
This post will focus on RBW and UNIM breeding/evo costs, with an LVM RBW input cost proposal to follow shortly after. The sentiment within the community has been rather mixed around how drastically the RBW breeding input costs should be changed. On one hand, we have community members advocating for a 5x increase in breeding / evo costs to maximize RBW burn, on the other hand we have community members saying this will hurt new players far too much. A solution to appease both camps is to implement a dynamic breeding fee based on the amount of breeding points unicorns have remaining, similar to how UNIM breeding costs are calculated. An additional problem laid out by community members is related to UNIM. As the unicorn population grows, so too does the total amount of UNIM emitted each day. Therefore, we have come up with the following scenarios (Conservative, Moderate, Aggressive, Very Aggressive) in an effort to address every community member’s concerns.
Please note that each option compares the current RBW and UNIM breeding costs per unicorn (current breeding cost per corn for rbw = 25, for a total of 50 RBW) and current RBW and UNIM cost for evolution against the proposed change for each respective scenario. As of 3.16.2023, there were 85,076 adult unicorns according to Hawku’s marketplace. In order to provide a basic overview, we set out the amount of UNIM and RBW burned to date compared to how much would have been burned if we had been operating under each of the respective scenarios, assuming that the same number of breeds per unicorn would have occurred.
Conservative
Tl;DR - Leave evo costs unchanged, slightly increase UNIM costs to breed, and introduce minor increases in the RBW breeding cost as breeding points are used. The ‘Conservative’ scenario would have increased the amount of RBW sunk by ~4M RBW, and increased the amount of UNIM burned by ~19M UNIM.
Moderate
Tl;DR - Leave evo costs unchanged, slightly increase UNIM costs to breed, and introduce moderate increases in the RBW breeding cost as breeding points are used. The ‘Moderate’ scenario would have increased the amount of RBW sunk by ~6M RBW, and increased the amount of UNIM burned by ~80M UNIM.
Aggressive
Tl;DR - Slightly increase the evo costs for UNIM and RBW, aggressively increase UNIM costs to breed, and introduce aggressive increases in the RBW breeding cost as breeding points are used. The ‘Aggressive’ scenario would have increased the amount of RBW sunk by ~7.5M RBW, and increased the amount of UNIM burned by ~144M UNIM.
Very Aggressive
Tl;DR - Increase the evo costs by 50% for UNIM and RBW, aggressively increase UNIM costs to breed, and introduce very aggressive increases in the RBW breeding cost as breeding points are used. The ‘Very Aggressive’ scenario would have increased the amount of RBW sunk by ~12M RBW, and increased the amount of UNIM burned by ~281M UNIM.
Final Thoughts
As discussed in the initial Draft Proposal, the supply of baby unicorns has grown from a market share of ~13% in June 2022 to ~30% today due to players not evolving baby corns with undesired genes or stats. Prior iterations of this proposal suggested lowering the evolution costs, but many community members pointed out that this is NOT a problem and instead acts as a significant sink for UNIM despite the growing population of babies. Based on this feedback, we removed the reduction in evolution costs.
Additionally, we began with a 5x increase in breeding RBW costs in our first Idea post but changed it to ~1.5x in the Draft Proposal. However, many community members pointed out that this did nothing to address UNIM and hurt new players while giving an advantage to incumbents with unicorns that have solid stats/genes. In an effort to find compromise between all of these groups, we changed the RBW breeding fee to reflect a similar design as UNIM: A dynamic scale based on how many breeding points a unicorn has remaining. As you can see in the above across all proposed options, the cost differential is minimal for unicorns with 8 breeding points remaining. This is intentional to address concerns of hurting first time players/breeders.
In order to address concerns from community members who are demanding higher RBW and UNIM sinks across the board, we proposed much higher costs for unicorns with fewer breeding points remaining throughout the various voting options. This makes sense for multiple reasons; breeders who own corns with advantageous stats/genes must pay more to keep the bloodline going, and the change will likely encourage the use of high tier boosters as breeding unicorns with less points remaining becomes costly. This accomplishes higher UNIM and RBW burn from serious breeders who are making high profit margins on their top quality bloodlines.
As you can see, a lot more UNIM and RBW would have been sunk had one of the proposed changes been implemented since day 1. The numbers are not perfect, but they should give the community a feel for how this change could positively affect the CU economy by providing more value accrual for UNIM and RBW. With jousting live and many other game launches imminent, we feel these changes set CU up for success long term.
Thank you to everyone who gave feedback to help with the third iteration of this proposal. We look forward to the community’s response!