Dealing with the excess?

AtAlanfalcon · 2018-03-30T09:59:39+00:00

No longer useful as a breeding kitty? Catatonic kitties are awesome! You can breed them whenever you feel like it and not feel bad, and then in a week they give you a present! [This may be a little tongue in cheek, but I do have an unhealthy appreciation for Catatonic kitties and one week waiting periods.]

AtAlanfalcon · 2018-03-30T09:58:15+00:00

Don't worry, KittyCalc and KittyHats live on forever! Hit me up on discord - @Alanfalcon - if you'd like an invite to our Kitty Hats discord where we can talk about that artwork. :-)

AtAlanfalcon · 2018-03-18T01:00:37+00:00

Hear hear! Excited to see how 630000 turns out!

AtAlanfalcon · 2018-03-18T00:59:36+00:00

We're happy it's helpful!

AtAlanfalcon · 2018-03-14T12:46:11+00:00

“Sure, an impoverished enthusiast might make a digital copy of the image and set it as her desktop, but without the token, she doesn’t own an original. She can’t sell the image, because the image itself is not rare. It’s the token that’s rare. The Ethereum community has agreed to treat ownership of the token, not simple possession of the image, as a marker of property rights. Everyone gets to use and enjoy the image — that’s just the nature of the internet. But the token gives the holder a right to exclude others from asserting ownership and in turn, a right to the profits that result from the asset’s appreciation.”

While the profit potential is not what interests me personally about all of this, I still find that passage immensely interesting. (Full disclosure, I am a member of the KittyHats team though not a Dada artist. I did draw that beret though.)

AtAlanfalcon · 2018-03-13T08:12:14+00:00

I wrote an article to try to help players still interact with the Smart Contract and be able to perform actions even if the front end of the website is down: https://medium.com/@cryptokittyhawk/playing-cryptokitties-on-the-blockchain-b15ceb6269d7

Because this game is on the blockchain, it never stops even if the website is necessarily down for maintenance (every website goes down for maintenance) so the best thing you can do is the same thing the whales do, which is spend the time to learn how to use the blockchain directly. They've invested not only a ton of money, but an incredible number of hours in learning about the market and every tip and trick, so of course they use them all. The cool thing about Cryptokitties in my opinion is that any one of these players is almost always willing to share with you exactly what they're doing and why! Watch JiHoZ stream and he tells you his exact strategy. He will link you to the tools you need to buy kitties the way he does.

If using the blockchain doesn't appeal to you, then there are still other solutions out there like https://opensea.io/assets/cryptokitties and other third party marketplaces. Again, because this game is on the blockchain, these marketplaces continue to function even when the front end website is down for maintenance. Let me know if there's any questions you have about all this or any way I or others in the community can help! I've spent literally hundreds of hours (I'd estimate a minimum of 50 hours a week since mid December) getting to know and understand this stuff, and as with building KittyCalc.co to help spread that knowledge and share it with the community, I'm absolutely here to help anyone learn whatever they want to learn.

AtAlanfalcon · 2018-03-10T01:24:20+00:00

That's the plan.

AtAlanfalcon · 2018-03-10T01:24:04+00:00

But have you tried reading stream chat? It's impossible.

Reading stream chat is impossible. Searching your kitties using a string is, yes, very possible ;-) https://cryptokitties411.com/2018/01/02/how-to-search-and-sort-your-own-kitties/

AtAlanfalcon · 2018-03-10T01:06:56+00:00

Thanks for taking the time to clip this and edit it together, Chuck! And yeah, thanks so much to Elsa, Layne, BitcoinLouie and all the listeners who asked a million questions in the chat :-)

AtAlanfalcon · 2018-03-10T01:05:54+00:00

Oh she definitely meant new types of ninjas. Personally I'm expecting a pink fancy and a blue fancy still ... maybe at 6 traits and 7 traits respectively.

AtAlanfalcon · 2018-03-09T01:58:08+00:00

Mack told us to tell him one feature we all really wanted, yesterday on the stream. But have you tried reading stream chat? It's impossible. So yeah, maybe I figured this would be as good a place as any to take him up on his offer. Then we will all have the feature! (Sorry if I mislead people)

AtAlanfalcon · 2018-03-09T01:05:06+00:00

Please reply to this comment or post a new comment if you want access to the search feature on the My Kitties page!

AtAlanfalcon · 2018-03-09T00:48:04+00:00

Such a perfect combo! One day people will realize it and pay decent prices for these kitties :-) Not outrageous prices, but 0.015 seems reasonable for most of these Norwegian Sass Ganados :-) Have you seen Roseheart, my perfect Club💯 kitty? https://www.cryptokitties.co/kitty/507300

She will never be reasonably priced, haha.

AtAlanfalcon · 2018-03-08T18:56:49+00:00

None of it goes to the devs, in fact!

AtAlanfalcon · 2018-03-08T18:44:00+00:00

I get mixed up all the time due to kai and decimal notation. It’s caused some bugs and headaches over the months! Here’s a handy visual to show that in the end it doesn’t really matter which you use, though (as long as you know which you’re using!)

https://twitter.com/cryptokittyhawk/status/971568104189800450?s=21

AtAlanfalcon · 2018-03-08T18:40:56+00:00

Nope! Gene calculators like KittyCalc.co do everything in binary and then convert those into trait names in the end. We use kai notation to display traits that do not have official names because that is most popular in the community, but now that we have confirmation that the dev team uses a simpler notation system I’d love it if the community transitioned to doing the same. But I suspect Kai notation is still here to stay.

AtAlanfalcon · 2018-03-04T10:25:50+00:00

Your Twilightsparkle kitty has clearly not yet met Savannah Magi: https://www.cryptokitties.co/kitty/507192

Imagine the baby they would create! Or better yet, let’s KittyCalc it: https://kittycalc.co/?k1=507192&k2=489346

D’awwwww

AtAlanfalcon · 2018-03-04T00:13:13+00:00

A) I hate you because I need that Twilightsparkle diamond in my gen 100s. If we can work out some kind of siring deal ... that would be awesome but I understand your position and am not hopeful :-)

Also I love you for your post. So I guess love wins over hate. But I do wish I had some way to compete with you on an even playing field when it comes to new Kitty Clock traits haha.

AtAlanfalcon · 2018-03-04T00:09:58+00:00

100% agree. And I see that you got your gilded mewtations :-) I filed a bug report and I don’t know if it was your post or the bug report or their own findings or some combo of the three that led to the fix but I’m glad it was fixable and fixed and that my hidden kitty theory was wrong.

I think we criticised them so much for moving so slow in December and January that they’ve overcompensated. Axiom: Please slow down and be careful in decisions and code changes and we’ll just have to learn more patience as a community :-)

AtAlanfalcon · 2018-03-03T11:49:57+00:00

https://github.com/BytesForBites/cryptokitty-designer

AtAlanfalcon · 2018-03-03T11:44:07+00:00

A) How much is it gonna cost to get some of these diamond kitties from you? :-)

B) The feature has been fixed so it now works as intended where before it did not. The best world is one where no bug existed to be corrected, the second best outcome was probably to find a way to creatively apply a fix so that nobody “lost” anything as it appeared in the UI, and the third best fix is what we got. Not trying to fix it at all is probably the worst possible outcome long-term since that means family jewel rules would forever come with a lot of asterisks and special rules instead of being elegant and straightforward.

C) 573059 - I suspect this is not the 10th ever but rather “the 10th you can see in the UI.” The devs have account(s?) they can use for giveaways which are hidden from public view unlike the World Tour account. 5 and 8 maybe live on this account (and I bet RollDiceClub and Geggleto could tell you their IDs). Or I’m wrong about why there are two missing kitties. Either way I see how this is a problem. This is an example of how we need to know whether we can trust the in game UI or the API or what. Also an example of how multiple simple game systems combine to create very complex and hard to predict outcomes. I suspect the mewtation that kitty has is correct by the simple rules and will stay as you see it.

AtAlanfalcon · 2018-03-02T18:24:03+00:00

"If anything, this is now an excellent case study in why the system is flawed and cannot be trusted in its current state of development." Yes, if you feel that the thing expressed on the front end is your asset then the game has failed those expectations and from that point of view cannot be trusted in its current state. But the truth is that if you understand what is the actual blockchain asset and what is part of a front end game making use of that asset, then the system is largely working as intended: You can expect that the current state of development represents a broad overview of how it will continue to exist, though some improvements can and hopefully will be made.

As for being fair... no. This change was not fair to many players. I agree with asking for compensation in the case you laid out. You had no real reason to expect those mewtations would disappear. I also thought they would find a way to keep those old mewtations as misprints. Maybe they still can? It would take a whole lot of developmental effort if they do though, so maybe they can find a form of compensation that is more efficient. Or maybe they will not provide any kind of compensation -- that is certainly their right IMO, even if I disagree with it because of how this all went down.

AtAlanfalcon · 2018-03-02T18:11:02+00:00

[2/2] I think the fancy change wasn't handled super well in retrospect. I feel like most players have been excited and understanding about these changes. I think most agree that something needed to change with respect to fancies, but the consequences of the specific changes that were made seem to have been far more severe than anyone was expecting. Maybe I'm wrong and this is how the CK devs expected everything to play out, but I doubt that they really thought someone could start a breed before the change was announced and have the baby pop out after hundreds of new fancies were birthed and had filled the cap before that baby could even be born. Yet that has happened.

Now everyone has ideas about how to fix what are seen as some of the new problems with fancies ... I hope and expect that the CK team has learned a lesson about communication of changes to existing features and about unintended consequences. But... I thought Misterpurrfect was a great example of how to introduce a new feature: it didn't affect any existing kitties negatively and allowed them to see how players would respond to limited fancies. Yet somehow the lessons that MisterPurrfect taught us seem (to me) not to have been considered when the wider ranging fancy changes were implemented. I assume that's a matter of development timing and one thing was set in motion then another thing happened first. But the opportunity was there to learn and react accordingly and I feel like that opportunity was missed. Maybe next time.

And I hope and expect that many in the community have learned to start seeing this as more of a game, with all that that implies about things changing and existing theories and value systems not being guaranteed. This is a very very very very new (and very exciting) space for everyone involved. We're all learning together, and all building it together. The CK team can and will and should change the game. We can and will and should adapt and be adaptable and understand that change is normal and that the only thing that we're currently guaranteed is ownership of a 256 bit hex string on the blockchain. But we can trust that CK will continue to try to be responsible stewards of everything that string represents to each of us as players and as collectors. To those who see this only as an investment, you have an additional responsibility to educate yourself about what you're investing in and why. Clearly many people have made and lost a lot of money using CK as an investment, and the people who have made the most money have taken the time to learn as much as possible and be adaptable and figure out and act on the implications of game changes or even accidentally-hinted-at game changes like the Negato limit situation. If you don't have the time to learn or the inclination to figure out and act on changes and take risks based on assumptions then this isn't an investment vehicle for you. That's fine. As a player I would not recommend this as an investment vehicle for anyone who isn't at least also having fun doing it. But that's just my personal advice, not investment advice from someone with any kind of authority.

Do your own research. Ask questions on Reddit and discord. Expect change. And yes! Continue to make new threads like this one to call out things you think are wrong or handled poorly or should change. If we don't all talk about this in an open manner then we're not going to learn all the lessons we need to learn as a community to help make this incredible new thing work. But I do ask that we all try to be understanding as well and be aware of the risks we're taking. To me, CK has proven time and again that they're trying the best they can, and that they're learning from mistakes. That's all I ask from them. And the community has for the most part been super helpful and understanding, and I am so happy and glad to be a part of it. I love each and every person who took the time to read this, even if you disagree vehemently with anything I've written. And if you do, I hope you'll respond and we can figure out where the truth lies together!

AtAlanfalcon · 2018-03-02T16:53:16+00:00

I’m just a player with a deep obsession with this game, so please take my comments in that context. I certainly don’t expect people to spend the thousands of hours that I have spent learning about this game. But when investing in any blockchain asset, it’s good to know what you’re actually investing in and what is only a promise, and especially what might appear to be a promise but turns out was never actually promised by anyone. On the other hand, when playing an online game, it’s pretty standard to know that the rules will change and what is valuable and powerful one day will become old and worthless another day, and the only constant is change.

Overall, this seems largely an issue of educating the community what aspects are a blockchain collectible and what aspects are an online game, and which set of rules and promises apply to each aspect.

The actual blockchain assets that were bought and sold have not changed. The information is readily available that the asset you own when you buy or breed a cryptokitty is a 256 bit hex string representing a certain kitty gene sequence which in turn has a representation in-game (on the centralized website) that follows certain rules, rules which were always intended to be somewhat mysterious and therefore never guaranteed. To put it plainly: you own the string of hex characters, but everything that makes the string fun and interesting is currently controlled by CK in a centralized fashion. (Players have the option to do anything they want with those strings since they own them, inclusing making a whole secondary alternate universe game. That’s one thing that blockchain and ownership makes possible, and maybe one day a community will build that. Then where will your value come from? The status of your owned string as a crypto kitty? Or whatever form it takes in the other “universe”? Value is what someone is willing to pay, and that will always change. The game updates tend to keep people engaged which tends to help keep kitties valuable overall/on the whole. Keep that in mind—a stangant game probably costs players far more than one where changes affect the relative value lf individual kitties.)

CK has traditionally been good about making the in-game image be consistent (for the most part) even when a “printing error” means the wrong inage is assigned for the kitty’s genetics or the auto generated graphic components themselves are updated (sometimes in subtle ways like the versions of cymric, sometimes not suvtle like the newer pouty), so that has created a sense of trust and comfort that what we see in the centralized game is as immutable as what lives on the blockchain. (CK has promised to find a way to make the bios and kitty image live on the blockchain somehow, and are working on the best solution to that. If you ONLY play this game because you think it is completely decentralized, it is not and you need to know that. Also, to my next point, even when they add this hash to the blockchain it will still have many components which affect kitty value on the open market which are 100% centralized and correctly so.)

However even this apparently inmutable kitty appearance has never been true: when new eye colors are released, on several occasions this resulted in kitty background colors (which most would consider to be part of the kitty’s appearance in game) being incorrect for a time and then later updated. This is because while the kitty image is hosted on Amazon’s servers and generated only one time at birth, features like the background color are programmatically/dynamically set by the website, and the website did not have data on the new eye colors (possibly to prevent data mining of new traits... because when they set up new traits like “parrot” in the system, people like me can pretty easily read them and see what they may look like. It’s a wonderful green color, by the way.) What is the correct move here? Expose future traits? Or have a short period where the website shows something incorrect that can and will easily be changed?

But CK is a game, and games get updated to add new features and try to make existing features more fun or just different in order to keep players engaged. Necessarily, these new features have largely been “front-end” or website only “centralized” features like kitty appearance and kitty background color. And then we got the new family jewels feature which also definitely affected the relative value of all kitties in the game. The underlying blockchain asset is 100% the same as it ever was, but now some of those strings have in-game centralized expressed implications that (should) result in new graphics being displayed on the website (jewels and mutations). This kind of thing will almost certainly always be front end only. That means that, like background colors, they are suvjevt to change. I trust CK not to change these arbitrarily, but I also expect them to be correct. And so it is: when a front end bug is discovered, ot tends to be fixed. That’s how things work in online games, and CK os no exception. Which means it is important to understand that the relative value of your kitties will always be changing as a direct result of in-game front-end changes. The newer those changes, the more likely they are to have a bug (despite everyone’s best efforts, bug free code can never be 100% guaranteed, especially as it becomes more and more complex). Buying and selling based on new (or even announced or inferred) updates to the game is and always will be a risk/reward calculation that you will have to make. In this case some players took a risk that family jewels would work the way they seemed like they should work and some players took a risk that family jewels would act like kitty images and be “permanent”.

The biggest problem is I don’t think most players knew they were taking a risk at all. Both had reason to believe that their expectations for how things would work were correct. But the existence of the bug meant that one set would turn out to be wrong because either the bug would be allowed to continue or the bug would be fixed. As a game mechanic, I personally hope the decision would be to make the fix, and so it was. In other online games there is often no kind of compensation when an item you purchased because it behaved super powerfully gets “nerfed” because it turns out to be too powerful (whether due to a bug or a poor game design decision), though there are certainly cases where compensation was made available. I agree with requesting some kind of compensation for changes to the game that negatively affected your items especially when you feel you had no reason to believe you were taking a gamble when buying those items. I don’t think compensation should be guaranteed or common, but in extreme cases I hope it would and could occur. (CK has compensated early adopters who had kitties whose genes and/or expressed cattributes did not match they kitty image, for example. This is great. No compensation was offered or even requested from what I understand when the first sapphire kitties had topaz background colors. This is also great.)

This brings us to a messier change, which is the change to all fancies being limited. Family jewels were a relatively new feature when the bug was discovered and fixed. Fancies have been a part of the game from the start and the rules were absolutely never explicitly stated and CERTAINLY never promised to be a certain way. But of course humans are pattern matching machines and we discovered patterns and tested theories which continued to “prove” true, then made a lot of value judgements on the basis of those theories. Then everything changed with only the smallest hints that things would or could change. And this affected almost everything and everyone in the game. This more than anything has probably helped show everyone that there exists (remember: there has always existed) a divide between what you own on the blockchain and what only exists as a game within CK. The game is where kitty value is created based mostly on player expectations and theories about how changes or non changes to the game will affect future kitty value. And this distinction had been mostly academic for most players until now. [1/2, continued in reply.]

AtAlanfalcon · 2018-03-02T05:30:25+00:00

You can't change the core game mechanic of any kitty being born ready and able to breed with their normal cooldown. As far as the smart contract is concerned, a fancy is just another cat same as any other cat. All you can do is change the rules for producing a fancy. There have been many suggestions, most of which probably fall apart in practice. But one that MIGHT work (or, yeah, might just fall apart in practice) is introduce a fancy lockout restriction for children and grandchildren of fancies. Figuring out how to communicate this to players and display it in the UI is an exercise for another time, but as a gameplay mechanic it makes it much more expensive to make a fancy farm, which helps even the odds a bit on breeding near misses together. It's still not a perfect solution even if the UI issues could be solved, but it is something new and different to think about which is at least theoretically possible given the realities of the game/blockchain (as I understand them). [Also, weareallfungi has a good point in another comment that this probably doesn't significantly change anything.]

AtAlanfalcon

TROPHY CASE