Bandaging the Unsolvable

Hiya, a few hours ago I just decreased the cost of multiple items to be capped at 5 billion coins average sale value. This has caused a lot of confusion, which is to be expected with such a dramatic change. This post will explain why, and what might change going forward with this new type of balance.

Inequality in Dank Memer has always been and will always be a thing. It's just the nature of a bot where people are constantly joining for the first time vs players who have played for years. It's not inherently a problem, unless a few things start happening. Well, those things HAVE been happening and need reigned in. This is the biggest reason for this blog, but not the only, which I'll address later.

Cycle of Abuse

Due to how this is set up, newer players will not ever catch up to older players naturally. This is a hot topic in the community, but as the person who makes this game, this is a problem in my opinion.

It's not bad that older more experienced players have the edge, and wealth built up. It's part of the game! What's bad, is when those players are single handedly in charge of the entire economy with very little oversight, and have the power to tank the entire game in just a few bad days.

No one has done this which is fantastic! But what is happening and HAS been happening, are these same players abusing newer/f2p players for their own gain to the point of creating a ridge that newer players can only get over with luck. Because no matter how much a new player grinds, the old player is grinding just as hard with way more benefits and systems that support them.

Example

Let’s take say, the blobs. That LEGENDARY item that hasn't been obtainable (besides when it was and over 1k more got made) and everyone strives to have JUST to flex, fight, or pad their collections worth. THIS IS AWESOME! We love having rare things, and we love players striving to have these rare things.

But... Due to HOW rare they are, the people who own them can infinitely go back and forth in bidding wars either knowingly or unknowingly raising the cost of this item to the point where people have zero hope to be able to get it without being either someone who pays ABSURD amounts of money, grinds like it's a full time job AND pays a lot of money, or gets entirely lucky.

Net Worth

The issue doesn't necessarily lie with the cost of the item. It's just how the nature of something rare goes. But it's amplified ten-fold when this item gives you an advantage over others, which net worth has begun to do. Previously, all net worth was good for is flexing. This is still the primary purpose, but it's being used now as a pseudo balance instead of just a number achievement.

Now, because net worth is seen as the PRIMARY goal of so many players, there's an incentive to get these types of items NOT because they're rare but because they're worth a lot. The more that this cycle continues, the higher the price goes. This is artificial net worth, more so than any other form of the term we have in the bot.

This can be evidenced immediately and is the reason we didn't release this blog before the net worth change as you'll see in the next section.

Abuse Continues

Now, after the announcement of these item values being lowered, the price for both are taking nose dives. Take the puzzle key for example.

It was at a solid 35b and rising, and now it's being bought at numbers under 20b in just a few hours. Behind this, is less than 10 users across the blob and key markets. They're undercutting each other and buying these at a fraction of the cost just a day ago, which raises the amount of panic selling and allows it to continue to go cheaper. One specific user has put up 20 offers since this news and will profit immensely in the long run.

Why it Matters

This game thrives on people being able to reach their collection goals and see numbers of their coins and items go higher. It's not EVERYONE's goal, but it's the biggest in multiple surveys we've done.

It doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things that one user is mass buying keys at a low price. It wouldn't matter if 1 person owned every single blob in the grand scheme. What matters, is when it starts to negatively affect everyone around them and starts to shift the goals of the players in the game to something that's unsustainable.

It is common, in ALL of our data on this, that most players who start out feel at an extreme disadvantage to the point where the game just... isn't fun. This type of upwards mobility for only the richest of the rich, is slowly clamping shut any possibility of this game surviving long term.

And TO BE CLEAR, this isn't the fault of those players! Any game giving players the ability to sit at the top and play puppet master cannot blame the players for doing so, and I am no exception. This game is an amalgamation of different ideas across different periods of my life and in different journeys in not only my game development knowledge, but even as far as my mental health. But things do need to change if we're not going to sunset this game and move on to leave it to die.

Let’s take a look at how this game functions to be able to understand why this is a hard concept to tackle.

There's not a TON of games that have all four of these, so we can't just simply look at solutions other games have. At this point, to be frank, we can't fix inequality. It's baked into the game, and as long as we're a f2p discord bot it cannot be fixed. We can and are, however, doing things to lessen the bad feeling it can give off.

Today was just a start. We're putting a temporary Band-Aid on the leaderboards being dominated by people who hold a few expensive items, some of which don't even play anymore and haven't for years! We're going to put an artificial cap on rare items that can no longer be obtained. This has multiple pros and cons. To list a fraction of them, it's good that leaderboards will be more competitive but it's bad that people's net worth are going to look lower than they should for a while.

We're also doing other things that help push towards this, while ALSO solving other problems. Those include things like fighting/market tax for everyone equally, and limiting sources of income that are disproportionately favoring people who have pre-existing wealth or have the money to spend hundreds if not thousands on gems. (Yes, this hurts us, but the balance of the game is more important to me right now)

We will continue doing things like nerfing anything that is generating enough money in a given period to double the total of all coins ALL time, like leveling.

We will push for more of a way to celebrate players reaching certain goals, past just having a high net worth and tons of items.

There is plenty more to be done, and we will do them starting in 2024. We want to prioritize some new things, which I'd love to share more in later this month in a blog about where we're taking this game in future years, and how it's shaped us as developers and humans.

Lastly, a word to players

We are constantly trying to learn and grow as game developers. What's most important to us is sustainability and having a product we're proud of. You might have seen this with fishing, where (while I'll admit we missed a bit and need to fix it, we're still learning!) for the most part it didn't matter how rich you were, everyone started fishing equally and experienced the same things.

We understand things like nerfs aren't fun, but know, we never do them for any reason other than wanting this game to last years for tons of new players to find and enjoy. We know losing net worth hurts in the short term, even if it IS better in the long run. But we are, and will continue, working on making a game that you can enjoy by yourself or with friends for more than a short period. We've come a long way, and we've got a long way to go. Thanks for sticking with us.

TLDR;

To help bandage the insane wealth inequality, lowering the prices of unobtainable hyper-rare items forcefully is one of the firsts steps of many to ensure the game can be fair and fun for everyone and not just a few at the top, more in 2024 and in the Christmas update coming 12/20/23.