Bronze Age II: The end and the next steps
Foreword
Salve adepts of Mithra, and congratulations on the end of the Bronze Age II.
It was a very intense three months filled with emotions from victories and defeats, clever gambits, and prudent intrigues. Virtual empires have risen and fallen. Alliances were made with former enemies, and wars were declared against former friends.
No social connections can be guaranteed to last forever. But the Autonomous World of Mithraeum must become eternal. The seasons of the Bronze Age are the preparation for launching into eternity.
And so I congratulate you again. Participants in the Mithraeum Bronze Age, you are the early adherents of one of the first autonomous worlds Mithraeum should soon become. You are all part of the gaming space’s unique history!
We have been closely monitoring the game situation for all test’s three months, collecting insights, forming hypotheses, and preparing for the next launch.
In this article, I will reveal a few insights we received and tell a little about the context of the next iteration — Bronze Age III.
Inflation fight
I’ll be honest with you. We had little faith that players would have time to figure out how the inflation-fighting mechanics first introduced in Bronze Age II work. I’m talking about cultists and toxicity. Therefore, we deliberately reduced their strength just before the launch, which seemed redundant.
One of the main goals of this mechanic was to provoke military conflicts, which in turn cleaned up the economy. And what do you think happened? The map was truly blazing in the flames of total war! It was a surprise how quickly the players figured out the trick in the toxicity mechanics and why the “easy money” farm-to-market scheme was just an illusion.
Therefore, I can confidently say that the cultists will stay with us for a long time (maybe forever?). But in the future, they will become stronger. By the way, we still have disputes regarding renaming cultists into barbarians. Write on Discord what you think about it :)
In-game political situation
Previously, we did not particularly touch on this topic. But with the growth of the Mithraeum community and the increase in the overall diversity of political factions (guilds), one of the most critical problems of social game design comes to the fore. And it must be solved if we strive for the autonomy of our world. I mean — the problem of total military-political domination.
Although conflicts with interruptions lasted all three months, and the intrigue persisted until the end of the session, one of the guilds distinguished itself from the rest and managed to take advantage of the momentum to secure absolute superiority for the rest of the time. This situation demotivated new players to settle, and the defeated ones to demand revenge. Which eventually led to a gradual ossification of the political situation.
We consider this problem to be one of the main challenges, along with the problem of inflation, for any grand strategy that wishes to be eternal and autonomous.
Therefore, most of the game design efforts in development are now aimed at achieving a stable political multipolarity.
So far, I can only say that the changes will primarily affect maneuvers and logistics to find a suitable equilibrium between locality and isotropy. But this topic is worthy of another article.
Incentives
Both Bronze Ages had basic incentives for players, and we rewarded the top 10 settlements by prosperity in each zone. The reward currency was “futures” for project tokens, which will be launched when the game is released.
This system has proven itself as a good method to attract promising but already-established crypto guilds as early adopters of the game. But as the practice has shown, this incentive does not work for newcomers and ordinary players who are not experienced in crypto investing.
The disproportion in the evaluation of the project tokens by the players eventually led to a disproportion in the incentives for a serious and thoughtful game. In other words, different players understood very differently what was at stake.
We expected that highly motivated players interested in long-term gains would create incentives for short-term profits for less incentivized players. This happened, but it also led to the problem of the dominance of small groups, the above-mentioned problem.
And that is why we came up with the idea to revise the incentive model and remove the project token reward for the next iteration. Instead, it is planned to create a pool of stablecoins, which can be obtained by burning mWEAPON (mTOOL). The pool will be filled by installing new settlements on the map, the mechanism of which will work on the principle of a Dutch auction.
The diagram below illustrates this cycle well:
According to the current hypothesis, this model should eliminate the disproportion of incentives among different classes of players, which in turn can provide opportunities for new promising players and guilds.
Everyone will be required to pay stablecoins for setting up a settlement. And the monetization of gaming success will become tangible and instant.
Tournament announced
Finally, I am pleased to state that the first Mithraeum tournament, formally the third iteration of the Bronze Age, has already been announced.
More details regarding tournament context, incentives, and full changes await in the next article. See you in a serious game, and may the blessing of Mithra be with you!
Bohdan Melnychuk — founder of Mithraeum
Join the Mithraeum community:
Website: https://mithraeum.io/
Discord: https://discord.gg/bna7WrWmBn
Twitter: https://twitter.com/MithraeumIO
