With the launch of Firewars ticket system players were able to start testing out the system economy, but as you know this is still work in progress, the game doesn’t have all the systems implemented and Firewars is an early access version focused on the most basic and simple game experience of Binamon Arena, this mean that the economy of the game isn’t finished yet, but we want it to be fun and attractive right now, that is why we decided to make some temporary changes to the formulas while we work on the remaining earning systems in game and in metagame.
Current bounty Formula
The current formula is entirely based on how much time your opponent stayed alive before you kill him, so the bounty you earn is not based on how many kills you made, but instead, the quality of them, as we assume that a player that could stay alive more time is a more skilled player, so it is fair to get a better reward when you kill that playe. The inverse happens to new players that die often, and so the bounty on his head is low. This is to incentive fighting players of your level, if you are skilled, to focus on the big reward players because noob players don’t worth it, and if you are not, seek for opportunities and fight players of your level while you grow your skill.
Although the system seeks to be fair, rewards are difficult to anticipate unless you use TAB scores to find the players with fewest deaths who carry the biggest rewards, but even then, is just a supposition as you cannot know when that player entered the game or when they died the last time.
We expect that at some point expert players will be very skilled in choosing their opponents to take advantage of this reward system, hunting down specific targets instead of a fighting whatever moves, so we will keep this formula as a base, but we will add some balance.
New Formula
We want to give an expected minimum reward upon killing and opponent, but keep the variable part, this will improve lower rewards and will reward you more for killing players with longer time alive, but the variation won’t be so extreme as before
This will be based on a fixed reward per life, and to make it interesting enough, we will reduce the number of lives for each player, so each kill will get a bigger cut of the bounty. We will also introduce a variable to balance between the variable part of the formula and the fixed reward per kill, this will be used to align the incentives and the gameplay, reducing the fixed part if there are abuses like spawn camping or noob hunting that spoil the fun of the game for newbies (which is the chance to welcome new players into the game). Lives will be balanced to make rewards interesting while players keep fighting instead of escaping fights.
fights = kills = rewards + fun
What happen with the unpaid Bounties?
When a player pays for a ticket, Binamon cut a part for server maintenance and development now and to distribute to BBM holders on the future. The remaining is the total bounty for killing that player distributed by lives and time. When the remaining reward systems are in place, a part of that ticket will also increase the shared rewards pool, that pool will be used to give extra rewards to players, like kill streaks, drops, in game rewards collect, events, missions rewards, etc.
When a bounty is not entirely paid, for example when the ticket is timeout, the remaining bounty is added to that reward pool too, is not charged by Binamon, instead will make the in game rewards more interesting, it means that the more tickets played and the more bounties lost (not claimed by an opponent killing that player) the game world is richer, with more reward opportunities like NPC monsters rewards, collectable bmon, equipment drops, etc.
But right now, the reward pool is not being used, and so the players are finding that the reward opportunities are scarce, good players kill a lot and their bounty is not “eaten” by anyone because they don’t die, this won’t be an issue when the reward pool mechanic is fully implemented but now is easy to end the game in lost even by killing a lot because the potential rewards in game are reduced on each logout or timeout.
For example, if you join a game with 10 players that didn’t died paying a ticket of 5 BMON, the earning potential is 40 BMON (50 BMON — 20 fee%) while they are in the game, once they all disconnect or their tickets are over, the earning potential drop to zero, but with the reward pool those lost bounties stay in the game world as extra rewards for the next match, making it more interesting with each new battle.
For the moment, we will launch a special event while you wait for the full reward systems, during this time the players that doesn’t disconnect and keep playing will receive a partial refund of the ticket if they still have lives, this will allow to make it easy for the players to reduce the minimum required kills to earn over the ticket price.
Our focus is to make the game fun and active, if this mechanic incentive the players to avoid fights we will cancel or balance the event refund.
Matchmaking
We know coordinating a game between many players is not easy, the next version you will be able to check how many players are online as a first measure, but we are working on a matchmaking mechanic to start counting time on the tickets only when the minimum players are met, so anyone can join a any time without risk of losing the tickets on a empty server, with the time and adoption this won’t be a issue.
