Greetings, fellow Pilot!

After we’ve posted an update regarding the Guild Hall & Player Housing sale, I’ve noticed that there are a few people who don’t yet fully understand the immense impact guilds have on the Solarbots ecosystem and I put the blame for this on myself. Whenever people don’t understand a message you try to convey, it’s easy to shift the blame on your audience, but not only does it not help your case, it’s also wrong most of the time.

You want people to understand something so it is your job to make sure they do. In this case, replace “you” with “me”.

While we at Solarbots see the quality of the game as our chief priority, we have to put a lot of thought into the economy side of the ecosystem.

This will be another free-form entry meant for you to absorb while leaning back, getting comfy and preparing another cup of hot chocolate!

Understanding Guilds

In order to tackle the implementation in Solarbots, we first have to understand Guilds in general.

While “Guilds” in Solarbots aren’t necessarily what people in the blockchain-gaming space think of when they hear the word, they very much can be.

Many people paint blockchain-gaming guilds as extractors who damage the sustainability of the ecosystem, and while that is true in some cases, we have to understand that current blockchain games (also most that are currently in development) give them no other option. These games have a singular and very simplistic yield methodology which makes this the only approach for any and all players.

In order to remedy this, one has to first understand what these guilds are, what potential values they have and how you can marry that with a mutually beneficial partnership in contemporary and future games.

You will have most likely heard of our partnership with Yield Guild Games (YGG), which is why we will use YGG as an example for this thought exercise:

YGG is one of the first and largest blockchain-gaming guild and has taken great care in their onboarding process to bolster their ranks with people of many disciplines, all of whom have a great deal of expertise and understanding of their respective fields. It should come to no surprise that precisely this is an incredible and invaluable asset that no current game is factoring into their implementations of greater economies.

Especially YGG is a proven gaming DAO with a deep understanding of economies, leadership as well as the capacity to kickstart community on launch.

We didn’t want to just copy systems that have proven to be unsustainable at scale but rather take advantage of the benefits we are offered by partners. While others might only make use of the community kickstart, we wanted to find ways to make use of the leadership and economic understanding that a partnership with people like YGG affords us.

Keep in mind: Blockchain-gaming guilds like YGG do not want to extract. Their goal is to participate in, and help grow a sustainable project for many years to come. It is our job to offer this opportunity, not theirs.

At the same time, we also have to keep in mind that these blockchain-gaming guilds are have an obligation to themselves to find revenue structures. Here as well, it is our job to find a solution from which we can all benefit.

Creating mutually beneficial opportunities

Taking into account what we’ve learned from the previous section, the question now becomes: “How can we utilise this information and implement it in a game?” and it would be a lie to claim this was a simple process. However, since the process is kinda boring, we will skip ahead to our solution and the implications.

Instead of blockchain-gaming guilds being just extractors and leveraging the burden of sustaining the economy on the entire community, Solarbots-guilds can be seen as the supply to fuel the entire game. Their potential profit don’t come from extracting yield tokens, but directly incentivise their burn and purchase from guilds by passing marketplace fees and asset production to them.

This massively shifts the dynamic as they no longer compete with the community for the same assets which are created infinitely by a smart contract. Instead, it creates a symbiotic relationship in which the community supplies guilds with the resources required to then supply the community with goods they require in their journey. Resources that aren’t created infinitely, but with a monthly limit. This adjustable monthly limit makes runaway-inflation essentially impossible.

Instead of praying for growth to sustain the ecosystem, this model also works on smaller scale.

How does that work?

Money has to come from somewhere. I think we’re all familiar with this concept but it’s worth exploring a little because the implications are fundamentally important.

In most current games, we’ve seen that high marketplace activity happened during growth phases while being minimal before and after said phase. This is caused by the ecosystem being skewed in a direction where it is required by only the community to add funds to the ecosystem which were then extracted by others.

With the changed dynamic explained in the previous section, it places supplier and consumer on a more similar playing field and requires the guild to also inject into the economy. Since the supply of the resources is adjustable, limited and based on “Proof of Skill” (explained here), this means that guilds cannot simply produce all they need (and more) by themselves and live in excess.

In essence: Players supply guilds with resources → guilds use these to create various assets required by players → players acquire assets to help them in generating resources.
To learn more about these assets, see my earlier crafting-blogpost.

Economic Understanding

At the same time, this system gives Solarbots-guilds (and keep in mind, these are not just blockchain-gaming guilds, but can be any group of players or individuals) an opportunity that was never seen before: A share of the marketplace fees generated by all transactions using the guild’s marketplace NPC.

These NPCs will be Solarbots market units which can be crafted and placed in a guild’s Guild Hall, as well as on the out-of-city-land owned by the guild. They are required to access the global marketplace within the game.

This makes immediate use of the economic understanding of guild leaders and allows them to test their prowess against other guilds.

Leadership

Dealing with bots is a massive challenge for any game developer and studio and depending on the complexity of the bots it may become close to impossible to guarantee prevention of botting.

For crafting and gathering, this is how we make use of the leadership skills of guild leaders as we place the burden of bot prevention on them (on top of implementing various preventive measures ourselves). Guilds have a direct and vested interest in making sure their members play fair, as bot detection will result in penalising the guild in charge of botting members.

Great opportunity comes with great responsibility.

However, we of course won’t be leaving guilds to fend for themselves here and will be closely working with them to help. After all, guilds are a close and important partnership.

Community Kickstart

Last but not least, community kickstart is an obvious and valuable benefit guild leaders offer. This is usually the first thing people think about when talking about guilds and other games already make great use of this, therefore it requires very little explanation and can be summed up with: many members → many potential players

Phew, that was a large one wasn’t it!

Thank you all so much for giving me the time to elaborate a little on the implications of guilds, the partnership with blockchain-gaming guilds and the mutually beneficial relationship we’re striving to establish through a complex ecosystem in which we greatly care about every participant.

As always, you can always approach me on discord or twitter if you have any questions!

Live the Word.