Expectations & Results of the Bronze Age III Tournament

Introduction

Previous tests of Mithraeum were largely devoted to the technical state of the game, the study of the needs and desires of the players, and the user experience in an unfriendly blockchain environment. Along with this, we have received a lot of information about the tendency of players to organize and the forms these organizations take.

Another task was to demonstrate Mithraeum to the blockchain world and try to recruit the minimum mass of players who are interested in the game and understand at least something about it.

Game design as such was not a priority in the face of an ordinary player’s attempts to simply understand the management and description of game mechanics, on the one hand, and the enthusiastic sharing of prize pools in secret guild chats, on the other.

The situation was further complicated by the fact that Mithraeum’s game design had to solve tasks that were not typical for classic game design, which increasingly pushed it into the realm of uncharted territory. And if earlier the player could at least navigate using well-known stereotypes from games of this genre, now these stereotypes rather interfere and often drive them into insidious traps. As a result, postponing the solution of game design problems in favor of other tasks became less and less justified.

We approached the Bronze Age III Tournament*** with confidence both in our technical state and in the interest of our players. Therefore, the focus shifted toward game design, which was supposed to turn a crypto-project into a crypto-game.

This was preceded by painstaking work on the balance, collecting and analyzing statistics, solving at least some of the annoying logical errors, and drawing a portrait of our average player.

In this tournament, the outlines of the mainnet are already beginning to be seen, both in many finalized and well-established mechanics and in the manifestation of the principles and consequences of the “zero-sum game”.

Regarding the community, this tournament was supposed to be the beginning of the division of those who came to the crypt solely for easy money from those who are ready to seek and accept something new and are ready to risk money, attention, and time for this.

We understood that this approach carried a lot of risks for us as developers, but we understand that by offering players to take risks, we must set an example for them.

Wipe as gamified mechanics

An important milestone of the Bronze Age III Tournament was that the wipe finally acquired a complete form, which was analytically substantiated in this article and now could work exactly as it was supposed to according to the game theory.

Restarting the game world turned out to be a non-trivial task on a technical level, and therefore it was crucially important for us that it worked at least once under real conditions. Especially for this, the game world balance was changed, turning a wipe from a “possible” event to an “inevitable” one. The only thing that players could influence is when it would happen and how many times.

From the balance side and gaming experience, the following points needed to be checked:

• How the mechanics are perceived by the players and whether they are ready to adapt their strategy for it;
• Balance changes to the economy from the economic debuff of the cultists;
• “Surrender Line” — the size of the cultist army that players would prefer not to mess with.

Conclusions after the tournament

1. The technical readiness turned out to be perfect; the mechanics themselves, for all their complexity, did not cause any problems, except perhaps for some standard visual bugs;

2. A group of players was able to delay the wipe by one cycle, however, coming very close to the limit of the cultists and, most importantly, using it in their favor;

3. At least once, a cultist settlement was used as a trap for enemy armies;

4. The effect of the cultist penalty on balance was changed very quickly from “almost unnoticeable” to “overwhelming”. In the first case, the players calmly ignored it, and in the second, they stopped playing actively;

5. In general, the rise in cultist numbers and the subsequent wipe went too fast and didn’t give players any chance to react and adapt. However, it was an intended price on our part for the opportunity to check the technical state.

Motivation via stablecoins

The reward pool in the form of Mithraeum tokens revealed several problems in the tests that were passed out earlier.

1. Instead of a part of the players, we get airdrop hunters whose goal is to imitate player behavior in order to pass the airdrop conditions with minimal effort;
2. The difference in awareness creates an early trading market for Mithraeum tokens in the game itself, where those who do not believe in the project sell their chances for prizes to those who are better informed and able to play in the long term;
3. Most important decisions are made by a closed diplomatic club, reducing the role of ordinary players to an extremely insignificant one, and their efforts, in fact, have a minimal impact on the potential amount of rewards received and are not encouraged in any way;
4. As a result, complex game mechanics and balances are not in demand from the players because they play completely different games, little related to the Mithraeum gameplay.

We consider the solution to these problems to be the recess of the “positive sum” game in favor of the “zero-sum” game, in which the possible profit of one player depends on and is proportional only to the losses of the other player. Thus, this creates a much more competitive and harsh environment where players are forced to use all possible mechanics for better performance.

Technically, it looks like a scenario in which the reward pool will be formed from the funds received from the game access. From our side, we guarantee a minimum reward pool, which should provide the required number of participants and some interest on their part.

The obvious risk of this system was the expectation of a significant reduction of both real and virtual players. In this regard, the number of zones was reduced to 5 (there were 20 in the Bronze Age II Test**)

Conclusions after the tournament

1. Such a reward system caused the expected barrage of diverse criticism from the players. Many refused to participate.

2. Nevertheless, we noticed an increase in the density of game events, high involvement, and activity of participants. Despite the decrease in players, the number of game events has increased. The players acted more bravely, were not afraid to offend anyone, and experiment with new things. In general, the average game level has grown a lot and would have grown even more without running into old game design problems, which, nevertheless, have become much more obvious and noticeable. Which, in turn, helped to find faster and more effective solutions for them. The balance issue has also become more noticeable, and the level of game statistics has increased, getting rid of the “clicking” noise.

3. Another effect is that some players stopped taking the game too seriously and were able to relax and play for fun without fear of making mistakes. Although we are making a game with serious gameplay, at the moment, we can consider that this has benefited the tournament, and in the future, serious moods will return along with rising stakes.

Settlements Auction

The formation of whitelists and the auction for BLESS tokens left a mixed impression and caused a lot of controversies and justified criticism. Players were strongly unsatisfied with our approach to forming entry criteria, and paradoxically, all categories of players felt deprived. We needed a system in which fairness was difficult to doubt.

We had to borrow a system from the real one, which, with all the known shortcomings, so far works better than the idealistic-fairytale one — that is, to sell access for real money.

Potentially, this may close access to the game for many players, but we hope that:

1. The price most likely will not be too high for a member of the crypto community;
2. Players will be able to return most of the amount back, and the money invested will be a stake ensuring the minimum seriousness of the game rather than aimlessly wasted.

For the system to work properly, we needed the price for the settlement to be reasonable: it would increase if the demand from the players corresponded to it, or it would decrease if there was no demand or the players were not ready to pay the current price.

We also understood that over time, the value of setting up a settlement would fall due to a clear progress lag and a decrease in the remaining life of the game world. Although, there were many controversial points in the context of the wipe and the strategies chosen by the players.

Conclusions after the tournament

1. In general, the settlements auction worked as it should, without experiencing technical and logical problems. The guaranteed reward pool was exceeded by 2 times, which shows that the system worked at least satisfactorily.

2. There were no significant price imbalances observed.

3. It was interesting for players to watch the price of settlements, and for many, it influenced their overall tactics.

Hidden information as part of the game

By getting rid of whitelists and player lists, we realized that we could allow players to be completely anonymous. Of course, most of the anonymous players and, most importantly, the connections between them can be revealed in the form of blockchain analysis, but with some care and skill, this can be avoided.

What could this lead to?

• Information becomes an important element of the game;
• Finding out the strength of the opponent is quite difficult without risking your own troops or stealth;
• Spy games have become much more complex and require more and more advanced methods;
• Diplomacy becomes much more difficult because suddenly, instead of a potential ally, you can reveal information about yourself to the enemy;
• Players have to be more careful in choosing targets for attack since a lonely settlement can turn out to be an insidious trap from a huge guild at any moment.

Conclusions after the tournament

1. Unexpectedly, but we don’t know much and probably won’t find out :) The plans of the players remained hidden both for other players and observers like us. Many actions in the game remained unsolved, both in terms of motive and number of participants.

2. But it is widely agreed that such a system brought a lot of confusion to the game and puzzles over more than one guild leader.

Intertwining the economy with the military part of the game

In the Bronze Age II Test, it was noticeable that the military system was used as a way to record economic achievements. In fact, the economy and the military system are divided, and each of them plays an important but separate role from the other.

We would like the influence of the economy and the military system to be interconnected and intertwined in the form of game decisions. In the Bronze Age II Test, this was hampered by the disproportionately fast movement of armies and their efficiency — the economy simply did not have time to respond to the challenges of the military part. Therefore, in the Bronze Age III Tournament, the movement of armies was slowed down, which should have made the hostilities more protracted and, as a result, spread them throughout the tournament. The result was supposed to be an expansion parallel to economic development, forcing players to make complex decisions based on mathematical calculations and on expectations from opponents and analysis of the game as a whole.

Conclusions after the tournament

1. In general, the idea was successful. Although some of the players complained about the length of the game, there were almost no days in the game when nothing happened. It was always interesting to observe different parts of the map and the discord bot, which suddenly gave out the start of the next movement.

2. The actions of the defenders became more competent, both due to more comfortable defense conditions and because the shock of a sudden attack had time to pass in a few days, giving way to a well-thought-out plan of action. As a result, we saw more principled battles and much less unjustified surrenders.

3. The relationship between the economy and the military system has become more interesting and diverse and provided material for new ideas for developing the game in this direction.

Defending settlements from rapid defeat

After the Bronze Age II Test, when some of the settlements were destroyed right in the early days, a mechanic like a Shield that would limit the ability to attack the settlement until a certain time expires or the trigger goes off seemed almost inevitable. It was necessary to let newcomers feel the game before they were suddenly destroyed. However, this mechanic was in many ways contrary to our principles and was essentially a step back toward a fun farm, so we wanted to find alternatives.

One of these alternatives was the solution within the balancing framework:

1. Army is very expensive at the start of the game;
2. Siege is not very effective;
3. Weapons can be effectively spent to get Prosperity;
4. Maneuver is long, and during this time, the moving troops will have time to become much cheaper;
5. Given the stealthy nature of the game, the settlement could be either a solo newcomer or part of a large alliance.

Conclusions after the tournament

1. Yes, it worked for the most part. Some settlements located on the outskirts were not attacked at all. Most of the solo settlements were attacked after the 10th day of the game and already had plenty of time to figure out the game mechanics. Some of them even managed to put up serious resistance.

2. Many of the solo settlements turned out to be outposts of large groups of players, as a result of which the attackers had a hard time.

3. As a result: the shield no longer seems necessary. Beginners may well be protected by balance and game logic, of course, with the counter desire of beginners to take advantage of these opportunities.

Lack of a market

As a result of the many decisions we have made, we have essentially deprived ourselves of the ability to incentivize players to provide liquidity to the market. This led us to make a choice: either to completely abandon a reliable market or to fund it ourselves.

As a result, we decided to abandon the market for the following reasons:

• Players already have a way to monetize their success through the reward pool;
• Early sale of resources led to the fact that the selling player essentially lost a competitive settlement in the very first few days, and all the remaining time until the end of the tournament just played lazily;
• The market was an attractive, accessible, and lazy way to try to profit from the game, which discouraged trying other mechanics;
• Players may be able to find their own ways to trade.

Conclusions after the tournament

1. The absence of a market was not liked by the players. Timid attempts to establish trade through the bulletin board did not bring many results. Solo players received a significant debuff to the economy since the periodic surpluses and shortages of certain resources could not be compensated through the market.

2. However, the consequences turned out to be not as critical as they could be and clearly did not overlap with the benefits of the decisions that led to the disappearance of the market.

3. We also continue to believe that players will be able to find a way to trade without our direct help in the future.

General conclusions

What can we say… we are satisfied with the results.

The high intensity of professional game actions made it possible to collect enough statistics and, in practice, to reveal our correct theories and assumptions, rejecting the incorrect ones accordingly.

Players’ investments more than doubled our guaranteed reward pool to quite a substantial amount, which once again confirmed the seriousness of some of our players in relation to the game. And at the same time keeping our budget, which is also nice :)

An interesting phenomenon was the absolute dissimilarity between the collected feedback and game statistics. That is, the players usually claimed the opposite of what they or other players actually did. The reasons for this are yet to be explored.

We paid little attention to media activity, which resulted in a very small attraction of new players. On the other hand, this tournament was planned as a tough test for the best, which does not go well with training inexperienced beginners.

Playing in the dark did not improve the situation either. Although it created excitement within the game, it made the game completely incomprehensible for external spectators.

Nevertheless, anonymity and secrecy are the essences of the nature of the blockchain nature, which we will continue to develop in our favor.

*Bronze Age I Test — February — March 2022. Remembered by the army mobilization mechanics and the creation of the TombStone guild.

**Bronze Age II Test — August — November 2022. Remembered by the appearance of toxicity, cultists, and a large alliance.

***Bronze Age III Tournament — January — March 2023. Remembered by the first autonomous-algorithmic wipe, the participants’ stealth mode, and the stablecoin reward pool collected from the players’ entries.

Thank you for reading,
Dan Pavlenko — lead game designer in Mithraeum

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