Some thoughts about an actual gameplay outside of economics and token values:

A Hero is a central point of the game and designed in such a way that requires a meaningful individual attention to it:

• Full equipment system (4 slots, each with quite complex stats, durability, enchantments)
• Broad Stats systems (8 basic stats, ~15 combat secondary stats)
• A personal unique pet (with its own functionalities)
• A lot of class abilities, own Skill Tree, own leveling path (with stats selection, crystals)
• Visages (that is designed to be bought and worn by one Hero)
• Combat as a 3v3 encounters (Hunts; future PvP)
• Questing as a group of 6 max

Current population/inflation of Heroes goes greatly against that, imagine owning 1000+ Heroes at once in terms of above points.
This inevitably makes a large portion of these Heroes into a meaningless passive asset.
I think we should go away from that, reducing the overall number of Heroes, and making owning of less than 100 Heroes to be a more meaningful and satisfying game experience.

Now in terms of times and cooldowns:

• Plain and unlimited repeatable activities take cooldowns of 8, 12 hours (Quests) or ~24 hours (Hunts).
• It takes MONTHS to level up a Hero from 1 to 10 by simple questing (out of 100 planned levels).
• DFK is supposed to be a fully-fledged MMO RPG that is played for YEARS (Social aspects, daily/weekly activities, monthly/yearly updates and events).

And such an unique and limited event as “Summoning a new Hero” (That a Gen1+ Summoner Hero can make only a few times over their entire lifespan) taking only HOURS of cooldown does feel as out of place.
Overall I think we should support increasing these cooldowns.

But it’s also important to remember current role of Summoning as a some sort of gambling / gacha mechanic, if this activity will be greatly reduced there should be some replacement for that in the future.

Without any additional data or analysis it’s a tough call, but if we made a moderate change, i.e. Option B, it might serve us well in the near future and longer into the eventual DFK-boom. If things start getting out of control in some other respect, we can change things again? If nothing else it will be an excellent (invaluable?) data point on how this affects the entire ecosystem. Could we have a 6-moth change and then reassess at that point? If things went good, we’ll be happy and if they stink, we discuss the new direction.

One thing that scares me is that we have an amazing window of opportunity to do something. I hope that we can get a vote no matter how much action is happening in this thread. If one of the options is “no change” what’s the harm in a vote?

I asked Hubert directly below, but if there were any resources that would help navigate this discussion without pure guess work that would be outstanding. So if anyone has links to that, I am pretty sure it would be very appreciated. In particular I’m curious about what the predictions of hero counts look like moving into the future. Something indicating a confidence interval for number of hero vs time for each scenario.

At first glace this proposal is appealing, and the initial thought is that it will slow the hero inflation and increase materials price. The more I’ve thought about it I think this will have an overall negative affect on the game and economy, at least shorter term. If this hero cool down is implemented summing volume will go down significantly. In turn power token and Gaia’s tears will go down in value. In game material value then does not have a chance of going up until crafting is here which is over a year away. So with tear prices down my guess would be questing will be net even or a losing game. (Expeditions would change this, but also lead to an increase in materials)

Also this proposal does not address perhaps the main cause of hero inflation which is the Jade and Crystal arbitrage. People summoning just for pennies of profit en mass.

Some good points already shared and some I disagree with which is to be expected in a public forum. It’s good to see the community having a productive conversation here and I hope this post is constructive. For those that may not know I made a brief video dealing with the present incentive structure for summoning, lack of realm parity, and the predictable human behavior I believe has lead to hero inflation:

https://youtu.be/K6hrfjvSTkw?si=kKH8DN-NtbGLDSKh

My conclusion was simple but perhaps a bit understated:

• increasing cooldowns is a good solution
• dynamic summoning fees are a better solution
• if the good solution is easy to implement and the better solution requires redirecting development resources away from PVP I am in favor of the former

In other words let’s not let perfect stand in the way of good. Dynamic summoning fees are not on the ballot and I don’t see a write-in option so all that really matters are the relative efficacy of the 3 options up for vote.

Will longer cooldowns fix the lack of demand for power tokens with reality-based garden rewards? No.
Fix the dislocation in an ever-increasing Crystal/Jade ratio? No.
Will a lower percentage of summons get immediately listed on the tavern for profit? No.
Is there any rational reason to believe keeping the status quo (option C) fixes any of the above either? No.

Will it even lead to an overall decrease in summoning or will profiteers move to later generations? Unclear. This is dependent on power token price more than summoning cooldown and there is no solution being discussed to incentivize people buying and holding them. Forcing later generation summons decreases profit margin and is an indirect method for increasing summoning costs so either way I see this as a positive change.

With that in mind and with some additional information regarding the transcendence feature I will be voting option B for the simple reason that I prefer it to the other two. I wish we had more information a year ago so we would be reaping the rewards of a change by now but alas it was a non-starter. Increasing cooldowns won’t have much (positive) immediate impact but the sooner we make the change the sooner the timer starts for decreasing hero inflation in the future.

Hopefully this lines up with transcendence, expeditions, and PVP releases to increase hero demand; vastly improving the overall health of the DFK economy at some point in the coming year. I don’t know that it will but I have ZERO confidence that trudging along with the same system for another year will lead to different results. If not for transcendence I would be voting option C but now I think it is overkill and the option B porridge is just right.

If you are solely a token holder and don’t own any DFK heroes or NFTs, I urge you to read or skim the pointers. Else, see TL;DR at the end.

Before we discuss some possible outcomes and opinions, I think it is very important to explain what hero summoning is, briefly:

• Hero Summoning, is a feature in DFK wherein you can utilize two (2) DFK heroes and summon a new hero that can be used in-game. Summoning uses up three resources:
  • Remaining summons of the parent heroes
  • Gaia’s Tears
  • Power tokens
• There are different hero rarities: Common, Uncommon, Rare, Legendary and Mythic
• There are different hero class tiers: Basic, Advanced, Elite and Exalted

Now that we have gone over through what hero summoning is, let’s get into the different motivations and reasons why people do hero summoning:

• Gunning to summon a Dreadknight: Dreadknight is the hero class that sits on the highest tier of hero classes (for now)
• Summoning a better hero with good abilities: some people summon to obtain heroes with good ability and crafting combinations
• Summoning a better hero for hunts: while others summon heroes with the hopes of obtaining a hero that will perform better in void hunts
• Burning heroes in Dark Summoning: while some people with enough resources, burn heroes in hopes of utilizing the higher rarity chances and upgrading their current heroes

Given the different motivations and reasons on why people summon above, we will now proceed to some possible outcomes if a cooldown extension is implemented:

Less activity and power token usage throughout the game

• Longer cooldown times will lead to less summoning activity, and lesser DAU. Web3 or crypto space in general is fast-paced, implementing a lengthly time-altering measure, not sure what would it convey.
  - In my opinion, we have to retain DAU or even find a way to increase DAU, this change would definitely, no doubt, decrease this exponentially. Lesser DAU, more chances are, there will be lesser activity in the game overall. We wanted users to stick and actively play as frequent as possible for maximum user conversion into spending more time onto other features of the game. User conversion retention is first and foremost.

Lesser heroes in circulation, the good and the bad

Hero circulation, will definitely be impacted. Some of the points that will be directly impacted are:
- Barrier of entry - although I won’t expect any significant hero price increase, it’s always a good thing to have a good barrier of entry for newcomers.
- Hero scarcity - if plans for Divine Essences will 100% be pushed, lots of heroes will be burned, and in turn, heroes would be scarce. This will either drive away the player base we have now, boost hero value up or drive away users getting onboarded. It’s a double-edged sword.

Less token circulation

• If you are a power token holder ($CRYSTAL and $JADE), $JEWEL staker or hoarder of any other materials, this portion is what you need to pay attention to the most. The following areas and factors of the game will be impacted:
  • Stone crafting and usage - lesser summoning activity over a period of time will drive down stone usage, or boost stone usage. Once again, this is a double-edged sword, it can be either good or bad.
  • Power token ($CRYSTAL and $JADE) and Gaia’s Tear usage - Let’s admit that Summoning and Tavern volume are the primary token sinks that we have right now, since these aspects/features of the game are the token sinks that we definitely need. Extending the cooldown will drive down the activity on the tavern, summoning portal and dark summoner, which in turn, would lessen token usage all throughout the game.

TL;DR

Team has decided to start a vote on whether or not to increase hero summoning cooldowns. If cooldown extension is passed, DAU, user conversion and retention will significantly be impacted, resulting in significant token usage and volume reduction.

I have significant experience as a product architect and manager for software and games and have 7 years of exposure in crypto, and am currently offering my thoughts on this matter.

So far, these are the aspects that came into my mind and have simulated these outcomes as we decide to proceed with the cooldown extension. Will definitely add more once I come up with more success and failure scenarios.

Some great points here. I agree with most everything @Scoopyy said (I also purchased many of the ridiculous heroes he is creating 😂). While I agree that our (devs vs players) short term motives might be different i think we all want a healthier hero and item ecosystem with reasonable prices like @CodeGreen is saying.

This is a complex topic with some crazy second and third order consequences that are almost impossible to predict since the game continues to evolve with new features. I’m keeping my approach to this simple. Hero inflation is a problem and some cooldown is better. I’m not convinced yet that we need crazy amounts of cooldown, but I’d rather summon in a world with 14days of gen0 cooldown versus the current state.

Something that might not be obvious just reading the options is that Option A and Option B have exactly the same result for the first 4 months after either one passes. This is because it takes about 4 months of a Gen0 summoning to get to a max cooldown of 7 days when starting at the reset point of 3 days. Something to keep in mind if deciding between those two.

Option A is really crucial to get hero population under control by reducing hero inflation. Less hero inflation means less item and mats inflation, which will slowly increase the values of dfk assets again. To hopefully get us back to early 2022 values. Otherwise, if option C is selected, the hero inflation will keep spiraling out of control until everything goes down to 0.