#Illuvium Beyond Alpha Sale Restructure

1 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

untold tartan
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Simple Summary:
Establish that Alpha illuvitars are First Edition ilIluvitars with no added in-game benefit for Beyond. Return to the Wave 1 Alpha sale structure by making the Alpha sale limited in time with limited Alpha D1sks available but this time around remove the Alpha price multiplier whilst only selling Alpha D1sks in ETH. This will make Alpha D1sks have the same price as non-Alpha D1sks thus making them truly feel like traditional First Editions.

Full Proposal:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vTzmOCsh4qrwp56eHKqphP1fdDYOYbsKv_w028qxR1NVnwB0XfCd3SwThr7t0WJfX-lN-OxHlfMu2fX/pub

Key Contributors: @inland rune, @hard cobalt, @clear dirge, @idle heath, @spare iris, @dull nacelle, @twin pasture, @analog marsh, @torn tendon

beyond_sleeves.png
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I want to thank everyone who participated in the discussions and helped improve the proposals and I want to give a special thanks to @inland rune for all the help he gave writing these proposals I really appreciate it Atlas_Love

inland rune
untold tartan
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@white hill I know you're very fond of Alphas and you're the one who came up with the idea. Would love to hear your opinion on this proposal.

white hill
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Alphas may have additional cosmetic benefits (such as effects or animations)... I don't think that is what you mean by 'in-game' benefits, but maybe the wording can be clearer there.

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I'm not sure if I like removing the price multiplier. Either that means we:

  1. Have to put a whole lot of them up for sale, making them not really that limited in number at all, just in time.

  2. Have a race.

If we avoid the race using option (1) there is potential to get the number wrong (possibly very wrong) meaning alphas are not very rare at all... maybe even there are more of them than non-alphas.

If we go with the race (2), maybe someone (definitely not me) will just buy all of them and then sell for the 2-5x multiplier anyway 😉. If number is too low I think the race being won by a very small handful of buyers is a very real risk.

The increased price has a strong limiting effect without making it a race.

Personally I don't 'feel bad' as a large alpha buyer if the next wave of alphas aren't more expensive to buy, if we consider the alpha pricing a mistake then we don't have to live with it forever ... but I can definitely see that some would feel this way.

There is also a lot of merit in just keeping things the same between sales. Both because its clean and simple for buyers and also because it lets us make better decisions the next time around. The more we change the less confidence we can have in those changes being impactful. Conversely if we changed nothing then we can be much more confident that any change in result reflects a change in the market.

(I don't think the revenue is affected notably, certainly not predictably, by this decision... so I'm just ignoring that angle)

(Similarly I'm not sure the numbers and marketing angle of 'selling out' the alpha sale will be meaningful ... even if it would be, I don't know if we can pick the right numbers with the limited information we have ... so I'm also ignoring that angle)

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In short I don't support, but I'm not strongly against it either.

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(noting I replied based on summary above, not full proposal)

spare iris
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If W3 alpha D1sks are same price as regular D1sks I'll feel hyped and want to participate... and still buy D1sks after Alpha window closes.

If W3 alpha D1sks continue 5x regular price... I won't participate in the alpha sale at all and won't feel hyped. I'd leave it to the few whales who will though. I'd participate post Alpha sale.

My guess is that W3 Alpha D1sks with a 5x price multiplier won't sell as well as W3 Alphas with a 1x price multiplier because we all have seen what's happened with the value of Alpha Illuvitars. It seems irresponsible to throw money into a 5x multiplier only to see that value fade so deeply. Whereas treating the Alphas as, 'limited time only' would be hype and encourage participation... even from newcomers as they wouldn't be cutting off an arm and leg to get into an ecosystem they'd already be behind on. You just jump in with the same cost as regular D1sks and more people would feel excited about it..

Alpha Illuvitars only hold symbolic value... and that isn't much as reflected by the market. Until there is a reason for Alphas to hold more value, beyond 'I paid more for it', then Alphas will continue to dissappoint if priced higher. So I'm all for equalizing Alphas and bringing them to their rightful home... alongside the regular price D1sks and not high in the sky.

From what I recall, there are measures to reduce individuals from buying the whole supply. Was it 10 D1sks per tx? Which made it accessible to anyone who wanted to purchase. I don't see that as a problem. Seems like everyone who wants in will be able to get in... just mark your calendar cuz 24hrs goes pretty quick XD

Furthermore, setting this pricing structure now will make for a stable path ahead for years with predictability and sustainability... encouraging people to participate and anticipate.

untold tartan
untold tartan
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Just like it was with wave 1

idle heath
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I have expressed similar concerns than Johnny before, and nothing changed since then. Right now, this project is somewhat under the radar in NFT land. But if the game takes off and 1-2 NFT whales realise that they can make a basically guaranteed flip by buying up the alpha supply for the same price as normal disks and flipping them for 2-3x, it's gonna be game over for everyone else. We would be just handing free money to a few whales who have no intention of benefiting the project in any way, they only want to extract. Everyone else would just be frustrated.

If you think this is unrealistic, you probably did not try to buy any gaming NFT drops during the last bull. I have been a wannabe buyer many times, having the tokens on my wallet and pressing the buy button the second it appeared, missing out to whales with faster bots/internet repeatedly.

As for your proposed solution of limiting the supply to 1%/minute, it does not change anything. First of all, I'm not sure if this could be done in the backend. But even if it could, the same bot that was faster than you a minute ago would be faster the next minute too. You would have 100 people trying to but the same 40 disks again and again, and most of them would miss out again and again, leaving lots of people frustrated.

untold tartan
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  • Implement a time related limitation to the number of D1sks each wallet can buy.

"Some sort of a safety measure should be implemented so that one wallet can’t instantly buy all the available Alpha D1sks to allow everyone a fair chance. It will be up to the team to come up with a good measure for this but an idea could be limiting the available D1sks to buy per wallet to 0.1% of the total supply per minute."

untold tartan
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The backend shouldn't be the problem you literally just have to implement a condition to check the last time that wallet bought and not allow it if it was under a minute...

idle heath
untold tartan
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they already have tx limitation and you would need to create 1000 wallets to buy all D1sks with the 0.1% suggested cap

idle heath
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Why would I be talking to them? But they do exist, and new projects are implementing proof of person measures to combat this issue. Not something that will happen here.

untold tartan
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anyway if you don't like the proposal just put a thumbs down it's all good

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and contrary to what you said I did buy gaming nfts in last bull cycle

idle heath
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Anyway, I'm not personally interested in alphas so I don't wanna spend more time on this. I voiced my concern and that still stands.

I understand the idea behind and even agree with the intention, I just don't believe it will work in real life. Maybe I'm wrong. But I think selling them for the same price will lead to a few smart kids with money figuring out a way to game the system and thank you very much for the free money, leaving everyone else frustrated and complaining how they did not have a fair chance to buy alphas.

untold tartan
white hill
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I read, but it mostly seems to hang on the argument that the alpha price was the factor that lead to less alpha sales and less overall sales in Wave 2. But that's just an educated guess.

Coming in to a bull market one could easily argue the numbers show far more support for an alternative educated guess: we should push the multiple back up to 5x.

But this is why I prefer things to stay exactly as they are. If we can run a few sales without making changes we can get enough data to be able to make meaningful comparisons in the future.

untold tartan
# white hill I read, but it mostly seems to hang on the argument that the alpha price was the...

Well what can I say... I tried... But reading that it's just an educated guess with all the market data and community sentiment presented in the proposal is a bit of a letdown.
I did this for the community, but to tell you the truth I think alphas are just a gimmicky feature that do more harm than good and I would scrap them altogether, but this is just my opinion and I'm just a nobody here.

white hill
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There's nothing with the proposal it is reasonable.

But we've only had two Wave sale events, we changed many parameters between those events, and the market conditions were vastly different in each sale. There's far too many variables to make anything other than educated guesses (there's noting wrong with educated guesses, we need to make them all the time, this is not supposed to have a negative connotation, its just the raw truth).

How did you analyse community sentiment? Because I don't recall any notable negative sentiment towards alphas for Wave 2, and I was very actively reading and posting in the thread at that time. Some people will always have a negative impression, or just want to change stuff to match whatever parameters suit them. I came away with the impression most people were happy with the alpha price change and happy with the alpha/non-alpha balance in Wave 2.

Ultimately I'm just stating my preference, which is to build a better basis for data driven decision by making by keeping as many parameters the same as we can.

untold tartan
# white hill There's nothing with the proposal it is reasonable. But we've only had two Wave...

  • "Market conditions were vastly different in each sale"
    I strongly disagree with this point, market conditions were pretty much the same and one could even argue they were slightly better for wave 2 since the total market cap for crypto was above 1 trillion $ once again.

  • "How did you analyse community sentiment?"
    First, I'm a very active member here on discord but more important than reading people's words is seeing what they do with their wallets and the on-chain data is pretty straightforward. The majority of wallets that bought on wave 1 alpha sale didn't buy on wave 2 alpha sale, but they did buy on the extended sale.

  • "I don't recall any notable negative sentiment towards alphas for Wave 2"
    That's pretty much because the majority doesn't care with alphas anymore since they got burned with the 1st alpha sale. I also followed the wave 2 alpha thread and I remember there were those who already wanted to remove the price multiplier but it was too big of a move when compared to having a 5x multiplier from the previous wave so we settled for the 2x. I personally don't care with alphas like I stated before but it pains me to see such bad systems designed to something that I'm deeply involved and invested.

Let's consider 3 different scenarios:

1 - Alpha Wave 1 D1sks with 5x multiplier

2 - Alpha Wave 1 D1sks with 2x multiplier

3 - Alpha Wave 1 D1sks with no multiplier

1 - We know how this scenario ended up. Probably everyone who participated lost value and alphas didn't hold up the 5x price giving pretty much everyone a bad experience overall.

2 - The team accurately managed to predict what would be the fair value price for the Alphas and made everyone who participated in the Alpha sale have a feeling that they got what they paid for.

3 - Everyone who participated in the sale got something more valuable than what they payed for leaving them engaged with the product and looking forward to buy even more for the next sale.

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What's even worse is we haven't even talked about what really spurred all this for me and that is the rarity of alphas.

Once again I know these things are hard to predict and the 20,000 Alpha Mega D1sks supply for wave 1 was a pretty good call, but only if there was no price multiplier because the Alpha sale drained the purchasing power of buyers for the extended sale.

I showed some numbers in the Appendix section but everyone can see the on-chain data.

We currently have nearly 1 in every 3 wave 1 illuvitars being Alpha, can we really call that Alpha or something that was supposed to be rare?
37 Alpha Rhamphyres and 103 normal Rhamphyres with common expression, this gives us a ratio of 1:2.8 = 35.7% and the price difference their being sold on the secondary market is 2x.

Now regarding wave 2 there are a total of 4 Alpha Ophistos and 143 normal ones considering all expressions. And even though their mint price difference was 2x the only two Alpha Ohistos that are listed in the market are selling for 10x.

If this doesn't clearly show that value comes from scarcity and not manipulated price points I don't know what does.

This is also another reason why it's important to control the supply of Alphas and not let it be unlimited like it is currently.

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This next part is just my opinion and not even in the proposal, but I personally think we shouldn't even have a misprint auction sale but instead guarantee that in the limited Alpha supply there would be a number of random D1sks that would have a guaranteed illuvitar in it, ensuring we would have at least one copy of each illuvitar. Something like Gods Unchained does with their mythic cards.

hard cobalt
untold tartan
hard cobalt
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With guaranteed pulls though I actually think you could justify a price multiplier.

untold tartan
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But the supply needs to be limited

hard cobalt
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One potential issue with this that I see is that if this was the model used for wave 2, 3 holo Alpha Ophistos would now exist, as well as 3 unlimited holo variants, putting them on the same rarity (excluding expression). Although even as I type this I am realising that with the missed print auction, the outcome is the same regardless, so why not just put them in the disks to boost demand, excitement and overall fun of the experience 🤔

untold tartan
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I can make a new proposal for keeping the 2x price multiplier while adding one of a kind guaranteed illuvitar and only having the misprint auction for wave 1 and 2 but only if @white hill agrees with the idea.

hard cobalt
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I personally like the balance of it.
Even if it's generally accepted as a concept, does the team have the time to strategise and implement such changes in time for the wave 3 release?

untold tartan
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I don't think it would take too much work to implement this change in the sale but can't really answer for the team so

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I'll just add that the guaranteed illuvitar would be with a T1S1 background, either matching color or random color

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there's only 1 alpha holo blazing rhamphyre

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and 2 non alpha

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hard cobalt
untold tartan
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we don't have any holo omnipotent ophisto

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not even worth mentioning alphas

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so if wave 3 sales numbers are bad we might end up with some misprint as well for the extended sale

oblique arrow
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Thanks for taking the time to come up with this proposal, it is well written and structured.
I want to comment on this:

"You would be betraying every Alpha Wave 1 and 2 investor trust by changing the sale parameters now.
-This would be valid if we hadn't already changed the sale parameters for Wave 2."

I think having changed the parameters last wave does not make the argument invalid, and it would still be quite bad to a big chunk of our beyond community to lose massive value in their held alpha d1sks by reducing the price from 5x to 2x and now to 1x.

i also tend to agree with what johnny and doom have been talking above me. we don't have a gurantee that the change will better things for the dao, and we are increasing the risk of someone exploiting the new system with limited supply.

i see your big point, making the alpha sale this hype event where all the community is here and tries to get one of the alphas before they are gone. i'd love to see that happen, not sure if we really need it tho and if we should compromise other things for that.

all in all the cons outweigh the pros for me slightly, but keen what others have to say!

untold tartan
# oblique arrow Thanks for taking the time to come up with this proposal, it is well written and...

  • " it would still be quite bad to a big chunk of our beyond community to lose massive value in their held alpha d1sks by reducing the price from 5x to 2x and now to 1x."
    I think it's quite the opposite, if the interest in alphas keeps decreasing this is what will devalue even further previous alphas.

  • "we are increasing the risk of someone exploiting the new system with limited supply."
    wave 1 had limited supply and it was a huge success for the DAO so let's be coherent

main crow
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As soon as there is real demand because IP is well known and you have a limited amount of products to sell it gets botted/scalped.
You See it in web3, you See it in web2, you even See it with non digital products like ps5/Xbox, where supply isn't even thaat limited.
If you are OK with it go for it. But it's not gona be that cool community Event imo.

oblique arrow
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"wave 1 had limited supply and it was a huge success for the DAO so let's be coherent "

but we had the 5x price multiplier to pretty much remove the risk. without that the risk is getting very real.

solutions to that could be whitelist for all the discord rangers or whatever, e.g. per 5 level you can buy one, but not sure if we would wanna go down that path

untold tartan
untold tartan
main crow
untold tartan
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having that limit be 0.1% of the total supply means you would need to create 1000 wallets but the % number could be even lower

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also the number of tx's is already limited since wave 1 as well as getting the guaranteed 1st buy

main crow
untold tartan
idle heath
# untold tartan like every system there is always a risk of exploitation ofc. But leaving everyo...

I give you 2 specific examples of why I don't believe we can have the kind of alpha sale you would like to have if we price alpha disks the same as normal disks.

The first one is Farmers World. This was a super popular game during the previous bull run and there sale events were highly anticipated. They had a whitelist AND an account limitation of 2 nft boxes of each kind. They were selling 2-3 different boxes valued between roughly $30-200, and the numbers available were in the thousands, depending on the level. Comparable to an alpha illuvitar sale. For the average buyer, it was basically impossible to get one of the higher value boxes. Out of 4 tries, I think I managed to buy 2 of the lower level boxes, even though I was watching the sale page like a hawk and pressing the buy button as soon as I could.

The second one is the Yuga labs landsale, probably the highest profile nft sale of all time. Here, just about every nft whale was trying to buy, yet a 17 year old dude managed to outsmart every other pro and ended up with a significant percentage of all land plots.

If we were trying to sell alphas and non-alphas for the same price, we would just invite some of the brightest minds in the space to come and try to exploit our sale for guaranteed profits. I think the odds are that they would succeed and leave everyone else unable to buy, frustrated, and looking at instant 3x disk prices on the illuvidex.

It probably would not even happen during wave 3, since that is still before game launch. But if and when the game blows up, we will have the attention of these exploiters and the average community members trying to casually spend their money on alpha disks are no match.

untold tartan
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but yeah it's a thin line that separates caution and fear

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my take is we should aim to be cautiously bold

analog marsh
hard cobalt
# analog marsh This is actually my hope for alpha. Limited supply, guarantee every card in alph...

I think i'm leaning that way myself.
Like you say, it gives everyone more time to gather data and really think these concepts through, rather than trying to rush everything through for wave 3.
Many solid suggestions that should be considered for Set 2, but maybe wave 3 we should concentrate on the additional leaderboard incentives and disk purchase reward structure, see how we go from there.

untold tartan
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Great feedback guys.

white hill
white hill
fringe lotus
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  1. I agree with no price multiplier

  2. I agree on 24hr sale and limited supply. Generally, these things may cause FOMO. The only way to drive value of NFT is scarcity, thats why most pfp collection is limited to 5k-10k.

  3. From my experience, there is no way to combat bots in a public sale. There are ready-to-use tools to bot minting like Nexus, or some people can write their own script.
    If you really want to reduce botting:

  • use whitelist system. Example: Give WL to alpha holders, 1 mint/WL. Giveaway WL, etc.
  • If not minted out, then open to public. FCFS
idle heath
livid pawn
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Embracing a sale structure that we know will be exploited by bots and flippers doesn't seem like an improvement to me. I'm much more open to a 1x price multiplier than I am to a limited supply. We already have a time limited sale, but during that time period anyone can participate, regardless of whether they are botting or not. How would it benefit the DAO for someone using automation to buy up all the Alpha disks and resell them at a premium? Exporting revenue and access to botters is net negative from a user experience perspective and from a revenue perspective.

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I know reference is made to trying to create a fair system that limits bots, but that system doesn't exist in a world where running 100 wallets is functionally the same as running 1000 or 10000 wallets.

livid pawn
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I'm also not sure why we'd exclude sILV2 from the Alpha sale. It guarantees revenue is in ETH, but it doesn't do anything to address that sILV2 exists, or that we'd be breaking a fundamental premise of sILV2 usage by disallowing it.

So far, the only circumstances in which sILV2 has been excluded from a digital sale is when the sale is in partnership with another organization, where sending them a percentage of the sale's earnings in sILV2 doesn't make sense.

In the context of an Alpha sale, I see no reason to disallow sILV2 or break sILV2 holder's trust that their sILV2 will be usable in sales conducted by the DAO.

fringe lotus
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the less supply we have, the more beneficial it is to holders. we already have 600k supply of illuvitars. from nft market perspective it's an insane amount of supply.
i dont want to see ILV as a liquidity extractor, im more to give long term investment value to holders.

idle heath
# fringe lotus the less supply we have, the more beneficial it is to holders. we already have 6...

This may be so for a traditional NFT project, but this is a collection game. Have you noticed the hundreds of slots in the albums? And that's just for set 1. 600k supply for a projected player base (if the game will be successful) is peanuts, it means less than 4000 people is able to have anywhere close to a full collection (in reality, much less, since higher tiers are much more rare than lower tiers)

fervent sonnet
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As much as I like the idea of using ETH only for the alpha sale to generate more revenue as @livid pawn said "we'd be breaking a fundamental premise of sILV2 usage by disallowing it." That seems like a slap in the face to those in the community who bought a ton of sILV2 for specific events such as alpha sales. This is coming from someone who doesn't and never has owned sILV2 btw 👍

untold tartan
fervent sonnet
untold tartan
white hill
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But for a minute lets forget about bots, and say we can address that with some strict eligibility rules. Pondering that ...

One of the things the higher alpha price does is make you really think about how valuable they are going to be in the future. Either you buy to open and hope to get a rare, probably because you are hooked on the product (cough not me cough) ... or you buy to hold with the view that in a long time they will be worth lots more than non-alphas.

This proposal incentivizes the opposite. With the same price and limited supply there's absolutely no reason not to buy as many as you can and flip them to the people who would have bought at the higher price. Even if we take away the bots I expect a very large amount of people will do this... if there's near a guaranteed pool of people like myself who will pay more for Alphas, why wouldn't you? Its basically free money.

Its a small financial benefit to the existing holders... okay that's a good thing, but it incentives short term gains over participating in the project. Is that really what we are trying to encourage?

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(I'm actually not sure on the answer there, even though I phrased it like I don't agree... maybe its a super positive thing to have small short term gains for a bunch of people who are already in the project)

fringe lotus
white hill
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Back to where I started, I prefer to just stay as we are, but this idea definitely isn't terrible.

white hill
fringe lotus
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you can set a rule like 5 alpha illuvitars = 1 wl, etc
then do a snapshot at certain date

white hill
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I mean that would be insanely good for me personally