Hey everyone, while we're waiting on art to be generated and finalized I wanted to discuss a little bit some of the thoughts around the starter sale and what you can expect to get from buying a "pack". The reason I'm quoting 'packs' is because it won't technically be packs, more like a certain type of energy to fit with our opening animation of the assets. Let's first get into what will be in the assets and what some of them will do.
Starter Creatures
First off, of course, the starter creatures of Holozing. They're yet to be named but you can view their 'pose' stance in the naming post. I won't get into much details about the card art just yet cause I'd want that to be a surprise, the same thing with the opening animation in which @rubencress has done an amazing job on along with @mobbs working on the sound effects (how cool when hivers get together to co-operate on things!).
The creatures as has been mentioned before will have 4 stats which have specific min and max amounts for each of the stats based on which creature it is. You can imagine for instance that the Fire Wolf creature focuses on doing a lot of damage but may not have a lot of defense or HP where as the Water Whale may not be quick and crit often since his agility is lower than the others at the same level but is robust and can take a few hits before needing some heals.
The stats are due for adjustment and balance during the alpha and beta phase along with the healers but the creatures will also have a "hidden" stat that'll determine its rarity, basically "how far off max stats is this creature". This is done in order for players not to get their creatures "nerfed" in a way it changes the average rarity of the stats. If a creature for instance has epic level rarity on their Attack, Agility, and Defense but only Blue level rarity on their HP, its average is of Epic rarity so number changes to the balance of the game shall not change the rarity of the stats of the owned creatures of players. Players will however be able to change the stat rarity through training and leveling up as has been mentioned in the past.
Odds
Okay, let's now get down to some odds. As you can imagine, getting high-stat creatures is going to be really, really difficult luck-wise. This is done on purpose partly because you'll be able to adjust it as mentioned by training the creatures and partly because these assets such as creatures are meant to be used in more than one game long-term. Thus they're being generated with multi-use in mind and for a lot of players and if everyone managed to generate a close to or max stat creature it wouldn't be as rare. This isn't something we've decided on but you can imagine that a max stat creature at level 1 will have something like 1 in a 50,000 odds to be generated, whereas those at legendary stats will be a bit more common, something like 1 in every 20,000 while we leave room for those at epic stat to have a small chance to hit max level during leveling up.
Okay so what will this mean for the starter "packs"? The starter packs won't have a cap, we're not fans of limiting how many creatures can exist in a game as we want people to be able to play with each and every creature, even if some of them can only be bought we aim for players to be able to earn their way into a full collection including starter creatures. We've seen some projects like Gods Unchained creating very limited Genesis cards which in turn didn't get used often by competitive players because they literally couldn't afford them as they were so limited in amounts, that's something we definitely want to avoid but not necessarily make it very common neither. We will however allow for a delegation market to exist for cards and assets.
We aim for the starter packs to run for as long as the game is still in beta, upon which players will be able to buy these "alpha packs" (names to be decided) and then we'll be introducing new starter creatures for future packs. Once this happens it also won't mean that the alpha starters will stop being generated but we are going to make them rarer to appear in "beta" packs on top of their stats being skewed towards being even rarer to have max stats than the alpha packs. As an example:
Alpha pack: One of the 4 starter creatures will have a 1 in 50k chance to have max stats, 1 in 20k chance to have legendary stats, 1 in 5k chance to have epic stats. While in the Beta pack: One of the 4 alpha starter creatures will have a 1 in 100k chance to have max stats, 1 in 40k chance to have legendary stats, 1 in 10k chance to have epic stats while at the same time the drop chance for alpha starters compared to beta starters will be 5-10%.
(Exact odds and drop chances not yet fully decided)
While this means that Alpha starters will get artificially rarer it leaves the decicion of how many exist in the hands of the community and how many Alpha starter packs they buy and how many they open.
Zing Distribution to Collection
With the start of the Alpha starter pack sales we will also be opening up Zing inflation to collectors, this means that those buying packs and opening them will be able to also collect hourly Zing rewards on holozing.com based on their collection. Here we also haven't decided yet how much of those Zing rewards will go to creatures compared to unopened packs (or if unopened packs should receive any) and the point system to count what kind of creatures you have (stat rarity will determine how much points you get for the daily reward distribution). This means that those buying packs will be eligible for Zing inflation ahead of the game's release where captured creatures will also count towards it.
Similar to Hive Power delegations giving curation rewards, we will give delegatees the rewards if your cards are delegated out as this will increase the demand to delegate cards other than playing and competing with them and not make it a "double dip" for collectors earning both delegation rewards and collection rewards.
Okay, that was a lot about the creatures, let's briefly talk about other assets you'll be able to find in the packs.
Other items
Capturing device, every healer will need its own capturing device (a form of gun combined with a Polaroid camera), this capture device will need laser ammo in an effort to capture a creature. The ammo gets used upon each attempt and an ammo shell will have limited uses based on rarity. Both the device and ammo will increase your chance of capturing a creature based on other factors such as the creature's current health percentage, status change, and its rarity stat. Both capturing device and ammo will have their own rarity with unique stats and effects, more on that later.
Healing gloves, every healer will need a pair of healing gloves to perform healing abilities on their creature. These will have unique stats and rarity as well along with level requirements for the healer who has them equipped. Stats such as amount of mana increase of the healer, mana generation and healing power increase. Amount of mana boosts your healers total mana, mana generation increases how much mana a healer can recover over time when off-battle and healing power will boost your healing abilities output.
Cards, cards will be the holders of your creatures. In battles, you'll be able to pick what creature you want to send out from your cards and they'll also tell you the exact stats of the creatures you capture. You will have to decide which card you're using (if you have unique ones) on your capturing device to have the creature be held within if a successful capture occurs.
Consumables, water/drinks and food will be important in the daily life of a healer and its creatures. These will help to generate mana faster and generate ability points for your healer and their creatures because without ability points you won't be able to use some of your favorite abilities.
Aside from the starter creatures, all of the assets mentioned after will be something players will be able to generate with professions. The starter packs will just increase the chance of how good of a rarity the creatures and items will have compared to the skill/level required for professions (i.e. a healer will need high profession skill to compete with the RNG of starter packs, thus they'll be in more demand for crafting).
Ending thoughts.
I think this way of introducing starters that can't be captured in the game will be a good way for the team to raise further funds for development. Collectors being able to leave packs unopened may give the packs some added value later on if the game is successful and player base increases where they'll want to open alpha/beta packs that aren't obtainable from the game/team anymore. Not completely cutting off alpha starters in future sets will also help with allowing new players to buy them in future sets while the odds are lower to still get a chance to use them instead of having to rent through delegations or buying them at premium prices. The Zing rewards to collectors will help offset some of that missing supply shock of the alpha starters and potential delegation rentals missed cause players were able to get the alpha starters in future sets. This method also ensures that the team continuously sells packs in all sets and development doesn't have to rely solely on HP delegations/other future potential income sources. Something to keep in mind is also that there aren't many games in the space where all income sources are only used to further develop the game and grow the ecosystem on top of not just printing new tokens to dilute players and investors, so this will be quite an exciting journey!
Thanks for reading and as always, feel free to drop your thoughts and opinions in the comment section regarding the contents of this post!
Images were generated with Midjourney for this post alone and don't reflect on the game.