I have taken a lot of flack over the last two days for my decision, first discussed in my previous post, to 'break the game'. Mostly I don't mind fending it off, discussing with the other players about this case and how to manage it. One of the most hurtful remarks to me though, is that I am somehow 'crushing the poor' and/or enriching the whales.
I want to address this case in today's post and show that, in some ways at least, the scales have been tipped in favor of the little guy!
SIM rewards- Favor: War Whales
Right now, using a blunt instrument, we have clubbed SIM rewards to nil, we have just a little bit of SIM coming in from the WAR lobby. This favors people with MIC and Military Bases, I suppose because these are largely negative population buildings, they could be perceived to favor medium sized cities and above, but very small cities can do very well with just a few WAR cards.
Nonetheless, this puts cities that invested in WAR in the drivers seat from the very tiny SIM flows that are still making it through.
HIVE ranking rewards - Favor: Reward Pool
I tend to see this one favoring the long term players over the short term players, but there is a case that zero-income cities are being favored relatively, even though they are still getting knocked just as much as anybody else, they are not getting knocked more....
But why are we associated zero income cities with 'whales'? Zero income strategies are much cheaper than SIM heavy strats, as I published last December, and there have been several medium sized zero-income cities built by smaller players since that time. They don't benefit, there is just no method to tax them any more.
I probably agree there is some risk in pushing the price for population up if we keep this tax policy on for too long, as I mentioned in my last post. But lets move on to some of the other rewards given for playing DCITY.
TECH Mining - Favor: Small - medium cities
I would say that TECH mining has become the main form of payment that we are receiving right now, and it might appear that this benefits the rich, as they undoubtably have many 'TECH Farms', as I revealed to you all previously. But remember, these require population/popularity to get up and running, taking away from the ROI from any zero-income strategy being employed by the same group of accounts.
Also, and importantly, Education TAX boosts small players TECH mining rate but adds nothing to whale accounts.
But since the max cap is 25%, without many expensive combines to build University Campus, one of the only combines that eats INCOME:
This means that a very medium sized city is the best placed to receive the ROI associated with TECH mining. And a bonus to anyone smaller is active.
Citizen Mining! - Favor: Little people!
I might be the only one reporting on Citizen mining, but this is actually the most easily accessable ROI in the game, and can be HUGE at small levels. With approximately 8-10 hive of investment (depending on SIM prices), I built a city to take in a homeless or an immigrant on 95% of days. I also revealed this strategy last December.
If you take a medium value of 0.07 swap.hive per homeless/immigrant, with an EV of 95% of days, this is a 242% apr investment on 10 hive.
This type of mining is only available to smaller players, there is no practical way to achieve this at scale. And the returns can be compounded by getting a few job centers to train your new found citizens.
Job Training - Favor - Small - medium sized players
With job tax on, you only need about 16 job centers to train ~1 citizen a day, which is all you are getting per city. This benefit is COMPLETELY USELESS to whales because they have no way to make enough homeless or immigrant tokens unless they use the market.
Creativity Mining: Favor - Small creatives
With the creativity boost from art tax, small players will boost their background mining, with anyone near or over the maximum of 2000 creativity will receive no benefit.
Creativity has been mostly ignored because the background market remains shallow and the art gallery divs are pretty tiny since the NFT auctions have not generated very large bidding prices. Many whales do not even have full creativity, so I suppose you could say they would benefit too.
ENTRY, GAMER, BEER and WEED tokens.
These tokens remain a part of the game, and holders of stadiums, casinos, breweries and Weed Farms will continue to get their payouts, and EVENT hosters will continue to see benefits for their city, like HARD WORKER and DICE PACK mining with BEER and DEC!
One thing I have been thankful about is that there have been more players than I expected who have supported the move and also have risen to the challenge of creativity in playing DCity. I hope you can see that the 'whales' are just as affected, if not more, since the alternatives to SIM ROI cannot be scaled nearly as well as SIM income.
We have moved out of BETA mode now, and apparently in BETA mode we were running a crazy money printer. I think we will come out the other side of this experience - which has only lasted 2 days so far - stronger and with a healthier respect for the game and gameplay of dcity!
As our defi-farming game continues to mature, I think it will be the players with the most robust strategies that will benefit the most. Backgrounds and citizens may seem like a waste of time today, but with COMBINE and LOAD features, the possibilities are endless for anyone of these NFT token types!