GO: Rapid Agile Development

Breaking things and charging forward

Huge changes have been implemented to the Golem Overlord game on Hive. There was a critical bug on the exponential algorithm equation (1.1^level) that created a situation where @angrychipmunk1, the player at the top of the leaderboards, was allowed to farm with algo faster than the cost of leveling it up. Basically it broke the game and would have led to runaway hyperinflation.

I'm actually kind of surprised that this even happened because obviously if your equation increases exponentially (even if the base is only 10% on a 1.1^x multiplier issues like this can easily happen. The only way it can work and scale is if the cost to level up algo was also exponential. I guess it wasn't (I have no idea what governs the increase).

So a major change was implemented to make farming more fair across the board, and I'm actually pretty impressed with what Yixn came up with. The exponentiality of the equations has been flattened to a linear solution, and surprisingly this linear solution seems to be not too big of a change for the low to mid tier accounts.

Added maneuverability.

There's also a decay that's been added to the equation. Algo has been scrapped and scavenger golems allow you to farm part tokens, but at a price: they break down over time. The core of the idea here is just like any other timelocked yield farming. Lock your parts up now and get more than you spent later.

The 0.5% decay is the max decay.

Should you get attacked a lose a bunch of parts the decay can never be higher than 75% of the parts you earned. So if you farmed 10 parts in a single claim it would be impossible to lose more than 0.75 scavenger golems during that claim no matter what the 0.5% decay has to say about it. Also it's only 0.75 scavengers because scavengers are worth 10 parts a piece, thus the value of 0.75 would be 7.5 parts for the 75% cap to come into play on a claim of 10 parts.

I actually got a little confused this morning when I claimed parts because the cost to buy back the scavengers was higher than how much farm those scavengers would produce. This led me to believe that the equation was in fact not linear, but this confusion essentially happened because I was not considering that the cost to top off my farm needs to take into account upkeep on all my scavengers at once (not just how much the one I'm buying will farm over the next 8 hours). The decay is a very slow burn and can be hard to wrap your head around in certain tunnel-vision situations: but for the most part you'll simply get double what you put in over a certain period of time (assuming you don't get attacked).

However, this change broke another part of the economy

This is a common theme within economies. If you fix one problem it will often create at least one other problem somewhere else. This cascading domino effect happens in the real world and gaming alike. Because this change was so drastically different from the old way suddenly the way maximum stash was calculated was completely broken (too high).

Haha! I had an idea!

So I've taken a pretty active role in the Discord. The first change to the max stash completely broke and crippled low level accounts like mine. So I proposed this one and when Yixn implemented it the nerf ended up being EVEN WORSE than the previous iteration. But I asked for 24 hours to rotate my farm into banked and he graciously rolled back the change once again to be re-implemented in 24 hours. Now I just have to roll all of my farm into the banked staked parts so I can continue farming business as usual.

The vibe in Discord is really strange today.

Price is down 50% in 24 hours but instead of being panicked like they have been the past couple of days prior, whales seem to be in pretty high spirits and almost actively trying to tank the price more to buy back in at a lower level. Pretty interesting vibe we'll see how that evolves over time.

To wrap up the GO talk:

Another big change that happened was the charging station skill. This used to be a huge part of how much you would farm, but that is no longer the case. You get a light 0.5% bonus per level on the claim multiplier, but when you run the math on that it becomes obvious that you'd have to make a ton of claims before that actually paid for itself. For example leveling the skill up to 5 from 4 costs 32 parts. A half percent bonus means you'd have to claim x200 times more than that for the skill to pay for itself (6400 parts). However it's also worth noting that this bonus makes your scavengers more efficient and slightly lowers the decay ratio. Although I'm not sure how relevant this is compared to the cost of leveling it up. Seems insignificant.

GCS does two other things as well:

1. Sets a hardcap on max scavengers you can use (real reason to buy it)
2. Nerfs raider builds by setting a new max steal.

gcs now sets max steal
(attacker.charging_station_spent()) * 0.05 + 5

This ends up being a little confusing because there are two max steal equations:

attack_faith / ((attack_faith + (defender_faith)) * 1.5) * [Enemy's current claimable stash]

Whichever equation is the lower number is the one used.

When running the math GCS equation would only be used on raid builds who don't have any levels. I'd say the main problem with this change is that players like me have basically already leveled it up too high based on the way it worked before. Still, the game is in alpha and it's hard to complain about such things.

My idea to buff the banked skill to rewind time was not implemented (which is fine because banked just got a huge buff), but rather it's your avatar's level that has been buffed to reduce the timers lower than a full 24 hour claim window.

This is a great change because something called "drift" kept happening where if you wanted to claim at say 4 PM every day it was impossible. If you were a minute late you'd be at 4:01 the next day. Five minutes late on another claim now you're at 4:06, and so on. I keep my claims at 8/4/12 and I've already drifted past 9/5/1, which is really annoying because I'd rather not be forced to stay awake past 1 AM just to claim my silly parts. Luckily a change like this makes it possible to move backwards in time instead of forward only. Good stuff.

Conclusion

I very much did not want this post to be centered around Golem Overlord on Hive... but here we are. I wanted to briefly mention Golem Overlord and then move on to other examples of agile development combined with rapid evolution and change in the crypto arena. Wish in one hand, amirite? Perhaps I can do a more generic one some other day that isn't focused on this random niche.

Development continues! Spirits are shockingly high considering the lower price of parts, which should be expected on a game in which you can ROI everything you put in over a couple of weeks. In this sense GO is almost like a gamified DEFI situation where you can give a loan to the platform (buying overpriced parts) and then sell them over the next couple weeks and hope to make your money back (you won't). Still, the game is surprisingly still holding my attention and the more I participate the more it seems like Yixn knows what he's doing (even if the entire thing reeks of hyperinflation on a long enough timeline... doesn't matter much because there is no centralized agent printing the money). Whatever though: this isn't an investment contract. Play at your own risk (which is high).