Axie Infinity Discusses Ways to Balance SLP Economy
For decreasing the supply they may consider iteratively balancing all in-game SLP rewards where they may need to manually reduce SLP emission rates for daily quests, PvP, and PvE.
“We should collectively work to improve the economic balance of our community assets. We’d like to provide a framework to start this conversation.”
Axie Infinity, a popular play-to-earn non fungible token (NFT) game, released a development journal earlier addressing the concerns about in-game economic balance and it’s token Smooth Love Potion (SLP), one of the game’s coins that can be converted to real life money.
“One of the most common topics of conversation within the Axie Infinity ecosystem recently is around the Smooth Love Potion (SLP). We’ve been amazed by the level of thoughtful input you all have shared with us, and we also empathize with many of your concerns,” the developers wrote.
They noted how the community’s response made the best out of SLP with an “explosive growth in 2021” from its initially “humble” core purpose. They stressed that this “has driven both incredible growth in the liquidity as well as some fundamental inflation in the token over time.”
“To put things in perspective, the average amount of SLP burned per day has grown over 500x (50,000%) through 2021! However, that must be contrasted with breakneck SLP creation, which historically has consistently outpaced its use, and has additionally grown over 160x (16,000%) over the last 12 months. Today’s data shows a growing chasm between SLP minted vs. SLP burned (Figure 1). This inflation in the token is not sustainable,” they stated, providing a chart about the daily SLP burn, mint and net emissions.
According to the developers, the primary complexity in economic balancing of SLP stems from the difficulty in predicting future player growth as well as timing further releases of products within the gaming ecosystem.
“As hopefully you all know, we are working on a number of new gaming experiences, including the next generation of our battles experience (Origins) and a new land-based gaming experience (Project K). Each of these games will include a number of new features that will affect the economy balance,” they said.
Recently, Axie Infinity unveiled another teaser and the latest updates about its upcoming Land gameplay. (Read more: Axie Infinity Teases Land Gameplay for 2022)
Further, the developers assured that they are listening to the community as they name some of the ideas they would consider in the short term while their team has come up with some as well.
“In short, SLP economics evolves with changes to its supply and demand,” they stated as they listed the popular shorter term supply / demand ideas emerging within the community.
For decreasing the supply they may consider iteratively balancing all in-game SLP rewards where they may need to manually reduce SLP emission rates for daily quests, PvP, and PvE.
Changing ratios of in-game incentives is also an option, it aims to have a more equitable distribution of AXS rewards through gameplay wherein the developers are considering increasing AXS in Leaderboard rewards and reducing SLP rewards to high MMR players.
Another course of action is to reduce SLP produced through non-skilled / automated / botting techniques, they noted that they received a number of recommendations from the community focused around reducing SLP rewards for parts of the game most vulnerable to automation or botting techniques.
“Specifically, SLP won during PvE battles. This could occur in a few ways, including overall reductions in PvE emissions, or by updating the Daily Quest requirement splits to be more Arena focused over Adventure to make it easier for real players to earn. This unfortunately isn’t a precise science, and it’s likely that some real people will earn less SLP because of this change. Another idea would be to require energy to earn SLP in PVE. This is currently not the case in that players can still hit the 50 SLP cap when they’re out of energy,” the developers explained.
On the other hand, there are also two options for increasing the SLP demand. First is “Axie releasing / burning / consumption” which they noted as “a very significant feature that we have to be very careful around.”
“However, we plan on releasing some smaller tests this year to be able to validate the mechanic iteratively. Since the primary utility of SLP is to create new Axies, having this burning mechanism for Axies would increase demand for SLP (and AXS),” they said.
Another alternative to increase demand is community SLP buy back which means that they may allocate some of the Marketplace fee for a limited time to buy back SLP in the market into the Treasury. However, this would only be done in unique circumstances as “maintaining the fee is important to sustainability of the Community Treasury.”
“Needless to say, there are many factors we have to consider for each of these ideas, so ultimately we cannot make any promises as to which will be implemented. However, know that we are spending a lot of time and effort across our teams figuring out how we can make positive adjustments. It’s also worth noting that this above list doesn’t include all of the longer term ideas you’ve shared, including introducing Axie cosmetics and tournaments,” they added.
Accordingly, Axie Infinity is encouraging the community to give feedback regarding these approaches by sharing thoughts on Twitter using the #AxieEconBalance hashtag.
This article is published on BitPinas: Axie Infinity Discusses Ways to Balance SLP Economy
