Been a while I've posted about Holozing from this account, so figured I'd write a little bit about the plans and thought process behind a feature we want to include in the game and are happy that Hive makes all of this possible without ridiculous fees.
Creatures as has been mentioned before will have base stats depending on which creature it is. For instance "Zappit" (the electric rabbit - we've picked the names finally), will at level 1 have a minimum attack stat it can have and a maximimum attack stat, the way other Zappits will differ from it is where this stat has randomly landed (of course weighted randomness where getting a higher stat is rarer). If we assume it's attack stat at a minimum is 60 and at max is 80 at level 1 and my Zappit has 62 while yours has 78 we can determine that the attack rarity stat of my Zappit is common (white) while yours is legendary (orange). We then combine the rarities together to give you an average rarity of your Zappit.
What I want to point out, though, is that while Zappit may have high attack, another starter creature has different min and max stats (possible attack stats) for that level. The balancing here will occur where if that other creature has lower base attack stats, it will have higher base other stats such as HP or Defense for instance.
As we've also pointed out in the past, the way you train your creatures will decide what stats the gain when they level up. If you constantly pick easy fights, i.e. your electric creature vs water type creatures in PvE (against AI computer creatures or healers and their creatures) where your electric attacks are more effective thus you make them faint faster, then you will both earn less XP and upon level up you may only receive a common to uncommon rarity stat gain (white-green). Compared to picking difficult fights where you have to rely a lot more on healing, tactics/strategies, synergies, etc and will instead be rewarded with a lot more XP for your creature and healer and a good chance at higher stat gain upon level up.
This last part now brings up a question when it comes to delegations. We of course want to open up a delegation market for creatures and healers, but the way your delegatees handle your healers and more importantly creatures is important, thus we will also be implementing a reputation system for delegations/leasing.
The thing to keep in mind here is that players may want to delegate their creatures out for many reasons and it'll be a bit different from games like @splinterlands or @axieinfinity where as far as I'm aware of, it's always the person leasing the card/creature that gets the benefit of it. I.e. you lease a card so you can play ranked and compete in end of season rewards or tournaments, etc and similarly for Axie, you have players rent your cards and get kickbacks from the SLP they earn.
In Holozing, leasing out your cards can also work in the favor of the person leasing it out meaning that they'd be the ones paying people they delegate the card to for certain services. Here's an example:
I have a max level healer and a roster of 6+ creatures at max level, I happen to capture a new creature that has higher base stat than the current same creature in my roster at max level, but this new creature is only level 5. Instead of me spending time leveling that creature up the "hard way" to maintain its stats and get the most out of it at high level, I would want to see if someone else is interested in leveling it up for me which I'd wanna pay for so I check out the delegation marketplace if there are any offers of reputable players wanting to do this.
As you can see there's trust involved in handling your creatures level-up thus we require a reputation system so you can rest assured the creature is handled well and potentially even an escrow system for funds until the delegation deal is cleared.
For the leasers, they will be spending a good amount of mana, food, time, and potentially potions and (without me spoiling too much) be prepared to more efficiently level up creatures compared to someone (me in the above example) whose only focus is to play competitively in high-level tournaments/ladder. The leaser will during the time he has a creature in delegation receive zing collection rewards as if he owns the creature along with whatever the amount of zing or hive was agreed to in the deal once the escrow goes through and the owner takes back the delegated creature. During this time they can of course also inspect the creature to make sure things are going the way they would like and the reputation system can of course go both ways to make sure neither the delegator nor the leaser are being cheated.
Naturally there's also room for other kinds of delegations where the leasers are the ones interested in leasing high stat creatures to compete in tournaments and ladders where they are the ones paying for the lease but there you don't have to worry that your creature can be handled badly so it won't have as many warnings, escrows and reputation required before you lease those creatures out. Do keep in mind though that people won't just be able to lease high level creatures to play with if they don't have a healer they own to accompany them and even in cases where they lease both high level creatures and healers they may not be able to play them if their account XP doesn't match (i.e. they will need to have leveled up a healer or creature to max once before being able to compete with leased characters at those levels).
Level caps
Holozing will also offer level-capped ladders, a.k.a. twinks in other games. This means there'll be competitive ladders with different level restrictions for creatures and healers.
Example: you may compete in a lvl 10 ladder where your creatures and healers can't be higher than level 10. You may wonder what the point of this is, here's a few examples how it differs from higher/max level:
At level 10 your creatures are limited to which abilities they've been able to learn. Your creatures may also be a lot rarer to have high stats (since you can improve the stats of creatures while leveling up, this gives your creatures less room for improvement at this low level). Your creature's abilities may not have high rarity at these levels (at higher levels creatures will learn new abilities where with RNG you can pick some good ones or skip some bad ones, alternatively you will also be able to teach your creatures abilities that have level restrictions (more about how you teach and where that comes from later).
At level 10 your healers are also quite limited with abilities and the level of their abilities, on top of it all you'll be quite restricted to what items you can equip and find for those specific levels 10 and under.
Level-capped ladders will have different zing earnings but give players a variety of battles and competitiveness to choose from. I.e. to compete for weekly rewards you may have different teams focused on different ladders. You could for instance have your max level healer and creature roster compete for the weekly zing by playing against other similarly ranked players at max level but at the same time you could switch it up to play at a level 10 ladder with your second team.
There will also be ladders restricted in other ways than purely levels, for instance rarity restricted ladders where your creatures and healers aren't allowed to have items of epic+ rarity equipped to participate, or stats of epic+ or abilities of epic+ where we believe things will get a lot more tactical and not so much based on how much zing you can throw at the marketplace or how lucky you've been at capturing high stat creatures or crafting high rarity healer items.
Alright before I delve too deep into this section, let's go back and end it with delegations.
As you can tell there'll be a few restrictions to protect delegators' creatures and healers from "harm" but there will be some reputation required to make sure you can trust the people leasing your creatures and to avoid giving them to bad actors along with escrow to make sure no funny business occurs. We'll still have to figure out how the escrow gets cleared to make sure it is fairly decided. Owners of creatures will also be able to set level caps on creatures before they lease them out if they're interested in not having creatures level higher than a certain level for usage in specific ladders. Similarly there'll also be restrictions on which creatures and healers accounts can use so new players can't just dive into high-end pvp instantly by buying or leasing creatures but will have to level up some on their own either the easy or hard way first, it might give them some time to learn the game this way as well. :D
Thanks for reading, let me know your thoughts on this system and if you think there's some scenarios I missed above!
