Alright, I put it off a long time because I really want the game to be a fun game primary and not a hunt for tokens to sell and get rich mild financial benefit. But its time to talk about the token and the on-chain economical philosophy.
First of all, let me underline here, this is not a play-to-earn game. While you can earn FAVOR by playing the game, the game doesn't pay you to play. It pays you for in-game resources and essentially your time. I get that it is not so different from play-to-earn in principle, but the main goal is that the return for your time is fun and whether or not you will benefit financially from the game will depend on your personal trade off. For example if you spend your time to gather some wood, you can sell it, if you find a buyer and "cash out", but you trade this financial gain for the opportunity to use this wood or the FAVOR gained from selling it in game. In the end I want people to have the freedom to make these decisions and this is what Web3 is to me. Not investments, not APR, not token price, but freedom to do with your assets as you choose.
That out of the way, lets finally talk about the token, $FAVOR. A total of 1 billion tokens will be minted on the HIVE blockchain. That is all, they will be minted all in one go and will sit in the game wallet, at least for phase 1. Every FAVOR holder will be airdropped an $FAVOR equal to the amount of FAVOR they hold in their wallet at the day of minting. This includes the citadel and my personal game account, so the game will sit on the majority of $FAVOR, since the citadel owns most of the FAVOR in-game.
You own the $FAVOR and can do with it whatever you please and of course sell or buy more. The game will sell small amounts of it if supply on chain dries up to allow people to buy, but don't expect too much $FAVOR owned by the game to land on the market. The other thing you can do with $FAVOR is send it to the game, in which case you will be sent FAVOR in-game, so the classic deposit. This also means that the total possible FAVOR in-game goes to 2 billion, but since everyone gets airdropped it is really just the numbers going up. Besides, most of it is in the game wallet / citadel and I will not just release it into the wild when the player base is still small. Keep in mind, that while HIVE is the first chain the game will mint on, it would be easily possible to add more chains, which would mean the same airdrops for in-game FAVOR holders, so numbers go up, but it isn't really inflation.
So what about withdrawing. Well, I don't just want to have withdrawal function but a game mechanic. It is not that I want to slow down withdrawals to keep the price up or anything. There are two main reasons I want to make it a game mechanic. First, I want to protect the game from bot armies doing mini-withdrawals and milking the system. Second, I want additional security for players and the game. So what have I planned?
Initially there will be no withdrawal function yet, players can just deposit. To enable withdrawals, the players collectively have to build the astral mint. I don't have the details mapped out, but basically a campaign will be started for players to build the astral mint, which will require rare resources and contributions and will have a leaderboard, etc. Again, no details on this yet. When the astral mint is built, you can start the FAVOR binding process there. Currently I am thinking a couple days to "hive-bind" FAVOR. Once it is hive-bound, the game wallet will send you the $FAVOR to your wallet.
Why do all this? First, I think it is a cool lore explanation. Second, it allows the astral mint to actually be a building. Fees can be set dynamically in the game context. It likely will requires some upgrades to mint for other chains if they are added. Maybe mints have a limited capacity for active binding actions and additional mints are required, which can be built by players with high prestige. The withdrawal and interaction with the chains actually become a game mechanic and by owning assets in the game you can actually profit from transactions.
But there is a third reason, which involves trust or rather lack of trust. See, I don't trust myself to have perfect wallet security. What if someone gets access and just dumps all the $FAVOR, wouldn't that be terrible? Of course. So I was thinking long and hard how to secure the process and I came up with a decentralization approach. For phase 2 I plan to make $FAVOR lockable or stakeable. No, no staking rewards and that kind of thing, just not liquid. The idea is that the game wallet will not hold the $FAVOR liquid. That way, someone getting access to it will basically not be able to do anything. That is the reason why the binding process that eventually leads to a withdraw needs to take time. Lets assume it takes 3 days to hive-bind FAVOR. These are 3 days where I can review the reason for the unlock/unstake. And not just me, but anyone. I plan to make it completely transparent in the game, which hive-binding processes are happening. People can review it and trusted players would be able to cancel suspicious binding orders. The game binding 100m FAVOR without any announcement of me? Oh oh. Your buddy binding everything he has? Better ask him whether this was him. There are options for required approvals by admins, a sort of multi-sig and other options to further secure it, but the base idea is, that by delaying withdrawals you can add security measures and establish a game mechanics that offer potential for profit-sharing. Sure, it eliminates instant withdrawals, but lets be fair, this is the same you have when you stake for some APR. Just here, your APR is that you can use your FAVOR in the game.
So that is the idea how to handle tokens in the game. I know it is a bit more complicated than in other games, but I brought all the reasons why I think it is a good idea. Let me know what you think about it.
BR
thatclaimgamedev