I've been following the development of Alien Worlds very closely ever since it released into its first playable Beta version. So far, you're only able to play the mining game to find TLM (the game's token) and new NFTs. Yesterday evening, they released a new article detailing a new game mode coming to the game that's going to change all of this: The Thunderdome. This is going to be the first PvP game mode Alien Worlds will have, although they are already hinting at the possibility of more game modes being added at a later stage.
In this article, I'm going to discuss the implications of this new game mode and give my personal opinion on everything that we've learned about it from the announcement article. I'm not going to rephrase the whole article, so if you want to know all the details, I'd advise you to move over to the original article first and only then come back to read my analysis.
So what's the Thunderdome going to look like? It's going to be a battle royal style arena where many different players can send in their minions to battle it out until only a single monster remains standing, taking the grand price for the round. This is what the process is going to look like:
- Choose the minion you want to deploy
- Equip it with a weapon
- Choose the planets affiliation
- Optionally add an artifact
- Give Orders
This can be repeated as often as you want to (and as long as you have additional minions, obviously). Each battle will have differing rule sets and will only allow for a certain amount of minions to be entered in total.
Basically, the minion and weapon you choose will determine the core attributes like attack and defense. The planets affiliation determines which minions will be considered as allied during the battle. Minions with the same affiliation won't attack each other until all minions with other affiliations are defeated. At that point, it's every minion for its own. We don't know much about artifacts yet and there don't seem to be any in the game yet, but they will probably add additional modifiers to the battle.
The orders is where it really gets interesting. Each minion you send can receive several orders and that dictates how the minion will act during the battle. Try to go for the strongest guy right away? Kill the weaker minions to make sure you won't get dropped from the battle first? Or maybe just try to evade battle altogether? We'll have to see how this plays out, but the idea is obviously to keep the strongest minions from automatically winning each round.
Once the battle concluded, the top placing minions are rewarded with TLM and possibly new NFTs. The loosing minions, though, will have their health reduced and their weapons will be damaged. This is actually saved on the NFT and in order to use it again at full functionality, you'll have to send your minion to a hospital first and repair your weapon before you equip it again.
So that's about all we know about how the Thunderdome is going to look like. Time to go full hype? Well, to tell the truth, I'm a bit cautious at the moment. That's not to say that I don't think the Thunderdome is a cool concept. Quite the contrary, the battle royal style competition is a breath of fresh air. I applaud their decision to not just try to copy what Splinterlands is doing and build something original instead. My concerns are more with the way the reward structure and the associated fees are going to work.
Registering a minion for the Thunderdome is going to cost you some TLM. Then if it isn't the last one standing, it will have to be cured and it's equipment repaired before it can be sent into battle once more. This again will be associated with a fee. At the same time, only the top placing minions will receive rewards while the ones falling first won't get anything. I'm not saying that this setup can't work at all, but I believe the balancing to be very delicate for it.
Most likely, this will lead to a situation where many players will try the waters a few times only to realize that they've only been loosing TLM each round and then just stop playing altogether. While the announcement already points out that theoretically every minion has a chance to win a battle, the reality is that this won't happen most of the time (and if it would, we'd have some other issues). So in the end, competing in the Thunderdome probably will only be worth it if you are among the higher ranking players. This might lead to a situation where more and more of the lower ranking players will stop competing eventually, thus making it harder and harder for the rest of the player base to actually be among those winning anything.
Keep in mind that everything I discuss here is based on a work in progress announcement and I'm sure they are aware of the issues that might arise from this. But what would be a solution to fixing these problems? Well, there are certainly several ways to go, you could come up with several leagues or an ELO rating to help players be matched with opponents of similar strength. I don't think that would be ideal for a battle royal style competition, though. Personally, I'd change the way the entry fees work.
To me, the biggest issue is the concept of having to pay to play and then being punished for not winning. That creates a negative feedback loop and will drive players away. So instead of having to pay to heal and repair, I'd remake that into a premium feature. Meaning you could opt to have your minion healed at a clinic for a fee, but if you don't, the minion will heal all on itself within a given time frame, say 72 hours or something in that area. This would allow very active or competitive players to battle again right away without drowning the more casual players in fees.
The same goes for the entry fee. Players will only pay these fees for a prolonged time if it's a winning proposition to them. The truth is, though, it won't be for new players and so they won't pay it. Again, I'd make that into a premium option and allow for ways to list minions without having to pay for it. A simple option would be to drop admission tickets from mining along side the usual NFTs that drop there. Each admission ticket allows you to enter a minion to the Thunderdome once. Maybe you could make it so that only one admission ticket per player and battle can be used. So if you want to battle often or list several minions in one round, you'll have to pay the fee. But if you want to compete casually, there's still a way for you to do so.
Ultimately, a battle royal tournament will only work if enough players are around to compete and that's only going to work by giving them options to do so without having them operate at a loss every time they join.
To not end the article on a negative note, though: The concept itself is really amazing and, if done right, will be a lot of fun to play. It's really cool to see the developers try something new and fresh instead of copying the competition. There are already a lot of strategies and ideas floating in my head and it will be amazing to see what the developers and other players will come up with. What's going to be the best strategy?
If you have the strongest monster on the field, chances are it'll just get ganged up and will go down as one of the first. Also, what will artifacts do? Maybe you could have some kind of suicide monster where you pick a super weak monster but equip it with an artifact that will deal damage to all monsters that attacked it? So that way, all minions going for the weakest one might get taken out of the battle just as well. I'm sure I'll spent a lot of time in this new game mode and while I'm cautious about the fee&reward structure, I indeed am pretty hyped about everything else. This is going to be so much fun!
And that's all from me for today, thank you all for reading and see you next time!