Rarity 2

An implementation of Andre Cronje’s Rarity with rare gold, community governance and optional pay to play controls for game developers.

Origins story

Our team forked Rarity the day it was deployed by Andre Cronje on Fantom and started to deploy it on Polygon. Rarity was described at one point by Andre Cronje as a DeFi lego blocks approach to blockchain game development; it made sense that the same lego blocks could be important on other chains. We loved the core idea of rarity being achieved via an active economy and market driven rarity supported by an ever growing economy. This was such a contrast to NFTs that are just jpegs.

As the work progressed we gained a deep technical understanding of Rarity’s mechanics and design and we had the benefit of observing how the ebullient Fantom community interacted with its rubric.

We decided that Rarity had three issues that, as master of our own destiny on a Polygon fork, we had the agency to address:

1. Firstly, gold was not rare. Items (goods, armor and weapons) had an intricate and well thought out pricing in gold as part of the cost of crafting them. But, since any bot developer could mint unlimited Summoners and automate leveling up perpetually without any cost other than gas, we foresaw that the Rarity economy would be forever flooded with gold, which would never be able to discover a meaningful value relative to items.
2. If the first problem was the abundance in the gold supply algorithm, the second issue was the supply of Summoners themselves to the economy. Summoners level up to get gold, and if done by bots, this directly contributes to ever-increasing gold supply, perpetually.
3. Thirdly, and more nuanced, we decided that, despite the goal of the project to create an active economy, a purely pay-to-play approach was limiting and that this limitation was avoidable. For example, if one of the determinants of winning a battle is level, would you prefer to compete with other players who, like you, ground through levels using hard fought XP? Or would you prefer to compete against some wallet that simply purchased the Summoners with the highest levels? Extrapolate this to complex DND play. Would this highly intellectual-reward driven activity really flourish in a context where players can just buy their way to a result? We felt that while pay to play had massive potential within all sorts of tokenomic innovations it could also limit the code’s utility.

Before going on, who are we? In terms of development we have a Ukraine-based team of ten hungry young blockchain and frontend developers passionate about web3 and DeFi that has bonded to us because of our passion for being on the bleeding edge of innovation for a decentralized future. At this time, it is pretty cool to support a team from Ukraine given the troubles they have with their neighbor.

In terms of team leads, Paul Scott and I (Fraser Brown) are doxed proponents of a VC-less (venture capital) approach to bringing projects to market. Our core belief is that there is ample money and sophistication in the degen community and frog nation to bootstrap projects through intelligent use of decentralized markets and the token that serves the project. Our project, Degen.VC is essentially a group of $DGVC LP (those that provide liquidity) token holders who receive an airdrop from projects we launch. Degen.VC keeps some project tokens too, which funds R&D and operations. There are currently 315 such LP holders amounting to $400,000 of liquidity. They will receive 5% of the Rarity 2 token ($RG) in the form of vesting NFT’s (1 year vest).

Rarity 2 is a Fantom chain implementation of our Polygon Rarity fork (called Scarcity) and uses the same mechanics. It addresses the three issues described above as follows:

1. Only named Adventurers (Summoners) can claim gold at each level. The names smart contract contains functionality that allows the community to change the price for names and the currency. For example, names can be given a price in FTM, wrapped gold or governance tokens $RGV. At inception names cost 75 $RGV. The effect of this is that bot gold producers have a real economic decision to make in terms of how many Summoners they create, and the community can tweak this lever to best serve the game economy. Of course, the ownership of this smart contract parameter will be made a DAO governed by $RGV holders.
2. Gold supply is governed by an algorithm with four parameters. The community can decide what these should be and they can make gold supply inflationary or deflationary over time (and levels) depending on needs of the game economy. We envision fascinating community-led debate and voting around these decisions as the game develops and the economy expands.
3. We implemented simple tags in the smart contracts that allow game developers to exclude players that did not organically level-up and craft items through their own effort but rather bought them on a secondary market.

Our motivation

When the original rarity.game frontend developers threw in the towel and put the domain name up for sale, it felt like a low ebb for the Rarity community on Fantom. We decided to react because we believe our adaptations to Rarity are complementary and evolutionary.

Everyone can choose to keep playing Rarity Classic and also play Rarity 2, should they choose.

Launch Party

Rarity community members are hereby invited to the Rarity 2 Launch Party where your Summoners can mine $RGV tokens depending on their level, similar to how wolves get wool in Wolf Game. The design of our approach hopes to minimize the capacity of bot operators to capitalize on the opportunity by using gold and other tokens in the economics of this first game. The full Launch Party invitation and instructions article can be found here (we will publish full details on Friday 25 February).

Our hope is simple: that Rarity 2 achieves an active and ever growing game economy.

Please join the discussion about Rarity 2 on Twitter