Pixel Progression #16

Welcome to Pixel Progression #16!

Slower week! As I said previously, I took a small vacation to get some R&R after a stressful week of work. Lets dig in.

Sorry for the clickbait title, I'm practicing my YouTube writing.

I've talked about this a fair amount in DMC with people, but lets open up the discussion here as well. I think the way we implemented net worth has caused more bad than good, and we should take some steps to remedy this.

What those steps are? Not sure yet! But let me point out a few issues:

• Old inactive or barely active players exponentially gain net worth on the backs of the active grinders.
• Items are rarely every TRULY accurate for various reasons, including both artificial limits (blob, etc) and rapidly changing markets.
• People equate net worth with actual value, when it's meant to be a rough guess at your value of items.
• Players abuse the net worth system to influence their own profiting, often taking advantage of new players.

Inactive players

You might find, by looking around, that most leaderboards are fairly littered with fully inactive players. Look again in a month, they'll have gained even more value.

This is because while a player is inactive, people who are active are still trying to obtain/trade/sell the items the inactive player has. The price naturally goes up over time with inflation (which isn't as big of a deal as people seem to believe, at least not in this sense) or when enough people are inactive with the item that it's hard to get ahold of.

You, the average grinder, will never catch up to these players without extreme luck. That sucks!

Inaccurate pricing

This one has multiple fairly easy fixes, but each has enough downsides that it's not worth the development time right now. It's also not that deep, so I'll move on.

Fake Net

Often what makes something expensive is the fact that people won't sell it. Issue here is, it's not a TRUE indicator of what the item is worth. It's not rocket science that if everyone decided to sell their blobs, the price of blobs would fall to the floor.

There's nothing DEEPLY wrong here, it's just how things work in economy systems more often than not. But it does artificially raise numbers and cause interesting design issues for us. But with that said, you bet if I cut all the net prices in half or limited them all like we do the blob, people would truly feel like they lost REAL TANGIBLE value, even though quite literally nothing changed except for tax being much lower.

Player Abuse

When an item falls out of the realm of being commonly traded, it is more often than not being abused in the same way blob/key were to artificially inflate the net worth of the people who own the majority of it.

Then, these same players can charge ridiculous amounts to people seeking these items under the guise of "no really, look! it's worth this much!". New players suffer greatly from this. We recently found a player who is commonly selling hoes to new players for 400k, despite being 100k in the shop. This hurts new player experience and retention.

Solutions

I have none right now, past a few ideas I want to explore internally. Do you?

Flows are a hacky system. We made them as a bandaid to player feedback about slash commands, and never really took the time to make them properly function.

We're going to, this summer, overhaul flows to work completely different in a lot of ways, while retaining all the things you enjoy about them.

• Less command spam
• No more "hidden message" replies
• Fun new features to improve a grind session (such as post-session stats)
• Less bugs

More info on this soon, but we already have a plan. Only blocker is completely removing and rethinking all minigames first :mmlol:

We love art, we love skins, we love customization. Next up, fighters.

We'll be implementing a system for fighters to change their image frame when they win (the winner image at the bottom of fights)

It will feature unlockable frames, some that are customizable, some that are downright funny.

This is in active development and we expect it to be released within the next month barring any blocker during testing and implementation.

This one isn't going to become real because we decided to not show both users on a frame, but this is the vibe of some of the more fun ones we plan on releasing.

This is to give information on ongoing known issues or common points of confusion.

Known Issues

These are issues we know about, and don't need reported right now.

• Quality time's tutorial text is incorrect
• The image of freemium in /vote is incorrect
• Get the full list here: Public bug tracker

As a recap:

Posting on reddit with the phrase #PixelShowcase in the title will give you a chance to be here.

We want:

• Fan art (ZERO ai art is allowed)
• Community made resources
• Concept/Suggestion posts
• In depth feedback
• Funny/Awesome moments

Anyone who gets selected (2-4 per week) will earn EXCLUSIVE rewards, including a title, some gems, and an item that we'll showcase next week that can ONLY be earned from winning this and is non-transferable. A true flex of flexes.

We want to showcase you guys, but lets empower you to post high quality content in the first place <3

This week, you brought the fire. It was so hard to choose, that I picked 4. Shoot us a dm via reddit modmail so we can get your discord IDs and reward you!

/u/danklover612

Welcome back to your SECOND win, and being the reason I'm going to consider a cooldown period for winning this! Amazing work, as usual.

/u/IanfinityXD

Why yes, memes DO count if they make me chuckle!

/u/RumSedditor

Loved finding this gem. It reminds me of those tiktoks with the little bears doing silly dramatic stories.

GG.

/u/Visible-Set354

I'm glad this art set made its way to a showcase post, it's just as good as the first time we saw it!

I'm hard at work. Are you?

Drink your water to summon me for PP 17 next week, I'll have some neeeeewssss!