Yeah also curious who pumped the zing price, thought it was you, lol. How small we still are in the space when there's mainly a handful of people we think of when it comes to this.

I'm at 30 vials now.

Some additional words I could say about its value prep:

Let's say we'll create a total of 10,000 vials before beta launch, I'm sure some will buy some more once opening is available.

That means there's only 10,000 starter creatures, 2500 of each on average. We won't cut off supply of those starters completely but in future vials they'll be a lot rarer to pull from (10% maybe), so opening a beta vial you'll get a beta starter creature 90% of the time and an alpha starter 10% of the time. This decision was made after seeing how GU kind of dropped the ball there with their alpha cards being very limited even tho it was a big project with a lot of ETH funding at ~100-300$. Once the game shot up in popularity some of the rarer alpha cards were literally impossible/expensive to get a hold of and they ruled the battlefield (epic rarity card demogorgon as an example). Furthermore they failed to make them delegateable ~ passive earnings for holders and they failed to create some kind of pool where demand leasing demand would decide on further temporary copies of the initial cards to play with since many wouldn't sell or sell cheap with only ~2k in existence.

Holozing will offer delegation of creatures and healers so that whoever wants to play with the starters but didn't get lucky to pull one from the beta vial or alpha vials are too expensive they can lease them.

The GU example doesn't fit well in comparison to gameplay however as our balancing won't make creatures stand out from each other too much. For instance you can capture creatures in the wild which at same rarity/stats level as the starters would be equal if not stronger at times (depending on balancing). We're not making starter creatures extra powerful on purpose just to sell more vials to fund the team further, but rather making them scarce for a collection pov.

When it comes to all the other items in the vials, their design will be limited to alpha. Again, they won't be better than items in beta vials or items that players will eventually learn to craft themselves, but the design will be different in beta and craftable items. Think of healers and professions from other RPG's, you'll be able to craft cards that hold your creatures upon successful capture yourself but the design/looks of those cards may not be as "cool" as alpha and beta vials, but you'll be able to make the game work on your own.

Now as you maybe can imagine there has to be a "cost" to crafting, this'll come from gathering materials and the burning of zing mainly. So while we don't have much use-cases for zing at this time, things will definitely start to change later and depending on how the team is doing with funding and their dev plans we can add in different burning mechanisms to the game so there's a cost to close to everything that generates value. You want to capture a creature? It'll take an average of 3-6 capture attempts, your capture device may see some damage and need repair over time, this'll cost a visit to the nearest Blacksmith profession healer, some in-game material and some zing sacrifice to fix it up again. You ran out of laser energy ammo for your capture device? Craft a new one that'll cost some herbalism gathering professions along with an alchemist brewing it up and having a blacksmith hammer the mag down while burning some zing that everyone benefits from and can be earned in many ways. Anyway, gonna try not to get too much into what I was going to post about today in terms of zing use-cases here.

The focus of the vials will be quite collection based, let's assume you become a big fan of the game and project and want to build a full collection of all creatures but you want them all in alpha designed cards. There's only 1-6 empty cards from the alpha vials and only 10k have been sold (for instance), out of those ~30k alpha cards, 25% are type-restricted (the youtube short example in the vial ANN post) and only 1-2% are non-type-restricted and of a different rarity in terms of cards themselves. As a collector you set a new goal for yourself, you want all creatures in the non-type-restricted alpha cards because you like the looks of it and you wanna stand out from other collectors, etc. As you can see there's a lot of things people in the future may want from the vials, their scarcity is immutable and verifiable, our packs can't be cheated off from team-members like some printing factory workers stealing the rare cards from packs and if you reach your goals you can potentially earn passive income from your creatures along with the cards they're in from players wanting to show off some bling in the future in-game.

Okay this got way too long already and I only touched on creatures and the alpha cards, maybe I've made my point of their value preposition and why $20 may sound like a lot but may not be long-term.

NFA etc