We've been doing quite a bit of work on holozing "under the hood" so to speak which has quite frankly forced our future vision to be more under the hood than we like. It's not an issue per se, we've always meant for the game to be stand-alone even as a non "web3" game, thus our focus on the artwork, the gameplay and mechanics and future additions such as professions and general uniqueness of the idea and broad selection of games we want to add to the ecosystem while using the same assets to access them.
During talks with other projects and companies its been made abundantly clear that the general web2 space is very, very against web3. It doesn't matter how fair or nicely you've launched a project, that founders and team have to buy into your own ecosystem to be vested in its future. The sentiment of the masses that have driven the web3, play2earn, etc, narrative have 99/100 times lead to scams, theft and general shadiness. It's clear to see that most are being driven mainly for the people interested in earning and trading rather than those actually having fun and wanting to invest their free time in a gaming ecosystem that'll value them compared to pre-blockchain era.
Everyone not in the web3 space has urged us to never mention web3 aspects at all when pitching the project, even going as far as asking us to remove hints of it from the website. While it is too early to do so we expected this very early on and "earning" from playing the game isn't our main focus, similar to how our main focus hasn't been the price of our token at this time but rather the funding of the project.
The difficulty of access for players outside of this space, and let's face it, hive still not being easy to get an account to and even if you do, wondering if you want players to rely on losing access to a game they've paid for if they don't save their keys properly or get hacked has often been on our minds. At the same time we also don't want to be liable if we get hacked and players lose a lot of assets in their "web2" mode of playing the game, but those things can always be rolled back if they occur.
I've posted in the past that aside from offering people "web2" accounts to play the game we would also want to offer potential players trial accounts while making sure those don't get taken advantage of by multi-account/bot/clickfarms thus it'll always be important to keep a good eye on the abuse vector. At the same time making trading of in-game assets and profession materials easily accessible to all accounts could cause for a lot of shady activities and different markets to pop up for each asset which we're also not fans of. For instance, if you're gathering profession materials such as "holo dust" and could easily trade it to your "main account" where you've leveled up professions, bots would have a field-day gathering them on the cheap/ease and sending them forward to their main accounts to create items that may be worth some zing/hive on the markets. This would also lead to market manipulations as we've seen with other in-game markets of web2 games, let alone web3 ones. Lastly it would also open up a world where gambling would be enabled for players of all ages which we definitely don't want to encourage in any way.
While all these things may sound like a lot to deal with, and partially they are, we want to make sure that we make it as difficult and more importantly as unprofitable as possible for abuse and bad behavior to sprout in our gaming ecosystem. Luckily things have taken quite a while to be rolled out so it has given us quite a lot of time to plan them out properly before rolling them out.
Some of our item-variants between what can be traded, what can't be, what can be salvaged, what you can do with salvage materials and how you can trade them, base zing burn costs to most activities that lead to making items tradable and a market fee that'll partially burn zing/hive, partially fund the team and partially give dividends to zing holders will make it harder for abuse to occur. On top of most activity being open and public to anyone to help detecting glitches, imbalance and potential abuse to allow us to nip it in the bud from our side so either the accounts, the assets they've purchased and/or the assets they're attempting to profit off get "soft-banned" from our side to alert potential buyers that we don't allow the items to participate in our ecosystem any longer, whether they're immutable nfts or not.
There's been a lot of testing of other games in the past with these methods, a couple such examples could be counter-strike and splinterlands. Bots and multi-account farms aren't going to care if there's an entry cost to the game itself when a CS copy would cost $10-20 and getting a splinterlands summoner's book along with a hive account. They won't care as long as they can make a ROI back quick before they get caught/their abusive activity gets patched.
Our focus won't be on earning in general, while player will be able to earn Zing and items that may have value to others, our goal is definitely long term rather than what we've seen in general in this space. Our focus will be in collecting and playing and deciding if you want to burn your earnings to progress in the game further or if you want to stop there and risk getting diluted over time by those progressing further. This is a bit simplistically put of course, but our hope is that the rarity of assets and creatures will be sought after by collectors to make certain items invaluable to them and enjoy having them and using them in a broad ecosystem with long-term view on their value. As an example, people who purchased the first edition of pokemon physical card collectibles didn't instantly try to dump them for a 1.5x gain to the next person a month later. While they weren't able to also earn some "equity" in the project with them and with Zing they may, it took them quite some time to see a nice return on their "investment" and that was only after the project became a worldwide sensation which even after many years remains at the top of collectibles. When we say our vision is long-term, we have something similar in mind but all the while giving players more perks than just the return on one aspect they could invest in when it came to those pokemon packs and we hope that people will appreciate what we're trying to do with the opportunities blockchain offers us which we believe will be hard to beat in this space.
There's a lot of flashy fun things coming out in the web3 space these days, and some are doing things right by not mentioning nfts or web3 all that much, but most of them are also not as web3 as we'd like things to be following the true vision of what blockchain technology wanted to enable. Community funded grassroots projects are a dime a dozen in this space and definitely even rarer in the gaming scene, but we believe that with our connection to Hive and future crowdsourcing efforts we're going to outlast the competition and see brighter days that'll reflect on the differences of our gaming ecosystem compared to the rest out there.
Anyway, I kinda side-tracked a bit here compared to what I was really going to talk about, but there's also some things still hanging which I can't really discuss until they're finalized. What I can say is that the people I've talked to outside of this space really love the idea of Holozing's first game, the focus on artwork and graphics we have yet to showcase to the community and even if they hate the web3 aspect of it as most outside of this space do due to stigma, we're going to try our best to not shove it into every new players face until they opt in the immutable world everything's been running on when they're ready.
Healer artwork from our amazing artist @craizuss