Aurory Play & Own Reward Loop Explained.

It won’t have escaped anyone’s attention that rewards in web3 games play a major role, especially when it comes to incentivizing players and gaining exposure. While including financial incentives can be an engaging addition, games should be fun and enjoyable even without monetary rewards. Despite the fact that Aurory Tactics is still in its alpha phase, the feedback we’ve received on the game itself has been very positive and gamers see the great potential for a competitive esports scene as well.

Our main goal has always been to maximize player satisfaction through top-quality gameplay, sustainable fair rewards, and deep economic mechanics. In-game economies play a key part in every game, and they play an even more vital role when it comes to web3 gaming. A single neglected parameter can turn the whole economy into shambles. This is why our team has been laser-focused on implementing a well thought out reward loop and we are thrilled to finally present the first iteration to you, so let's dive right into it!

How it works

Each week, active players will earn two off-chain sub-tokens (OKA and TOKE). An active player is a player who earns at least one TOKE or one OKA during a week. At any given moment, players can check their total amount of all currencies from their player profile and in-game hud, as well as the time left until the next distribution (dd:hh:mm:ss). Each distribution period, the Aurory team will observe a number of factors such as the number of players and overall activity in order to determine how much $AURY to distribute

Each Nefty NFT will have its own ‘’Okanergy’’ that comes with 10 points when fully charged, and each battle will consume one Okanergy point. We will carefully monitor stats and players’ behavior to eventually have the optimal level Okanergy per Nefty in place.

Once your Nefty is out of Okanergy, you can keep playing with it, but you will start earning TOKE after a victory (no more OKA) until the Okanergy bar of your Nefty replenishes at the end of the day. The earned sub-tokens get converted in the middle of each week to $AURY. Earnings are available in both the ranked player versus player mode, as well as tournament matches.

At the time of writing, you can obtain Nefty eggs from Aurorians on Expedition. You can check out our AoE guide for details on how that works.

You can also purchase Nefty eggs from our Marketplace and hatch them with the Incubator by paying a fee in $AURY.

The Sub-Tokens

The sub-tokens - OKA and TOKE - are non-tradable, off-chain sub-currencies. They are used to determine the amount of $AURY we should distribute to players based on how much effort they put into the game over the week and their performance. Basically, there are two ways that players will be able to earn more sub-tokens: for now, you can simply play more. In the future, you will be able to improve and progress through divisions (player rating).

OKA is the sub-currency used in the accounting mechanism for “invested players”. It will be used to reward players in both Aurory Tactics and Aurory Adventure. Depending on various factors related to players’ Nefties (how many they own, how much Okanergy they have, etc), they will receive varying amounts of OKA that will be converted to $AURY in the middle of each week from the OKA reward pool.

Important to note: In our first version of the reward loop for Aurory Tactics, an ‘’invested player’’ is someone playing with at least one NFT Nefty.

TOKE is the sub-currency used as the accounting mechanism for free-to-play players (players with no NFT Nefties). It will be used to reward players in both Aurory Tactics and Aurory Adventure. Like with OKA, the amount of TOKE received by players will be based on various factors (in which division they are playing, how much do they play, etc) and will be converted to $AURY in the middle of each week from the reward pool for free-to-play players.

OKA/TOKE to AURY conversion formula.

Sustainability

A few words from our Game Economy Designer, Adel Elghazi:

"Thanks to our unique method of distributing $AURY every week (see OKA and TOKE system above), we can monitor and keep optimal control over the distribution of $AURY depending on a multitude of parameters. Thus, unlike almost all P2E projects, we know at all times exactly how many tokens will be distributed and can work to avoid hyperinflation.

Web3 games experienced unprecedented enthusiasm in 2021. Led by the success of Sky Mavis with their game Axie infinity, the entire ecosystem quickly iterated on the fabulous promise that is “Play to Earn”. Unfortunately, due to the premature nature of this model, we have seen too many projects disappear just as quickly as they appeared. For those who managed to survive, the majority experienced a period of euphoria with price spikes (token and nft) but none were able to develop a sustainable Web3 economy and gaming experience. Unfortunately, too many “projects” only aim to dump their tokens on thrill seekers with the promise of “easy” money. These models, which always need more invested players, are rarely based on a fun game. The attraction often comes only from the promises of realizable gains on the platform, but the gains for some essentially mean losses for others and when there are no more new “players”, the scheme collapses.

At Aurory, we aspire to better, we aspire to do more for the ecosystem than just a gamified ponzi. With our long-term vision in mind, we work tirelessly to provide the right content for everyone, whether they are familiar with the crypto universe or not, whether they are a degen or free to play gamer, mobile gamer or prefer PC. Everything we do, we do in order to serve our long-term vision and after much discussion and research on the subject we have decided that the term “Play to Earn” does not correspond to the direction we have decided to follow with Aurory. Indeed, "Play to Earn" refers to the fact that players play in order to earn money, or even to generate a salary with the game, but we do not think there is a way to make this sustainable and that is why we have decided to introduce a new term; “Play And Own”, which corresponds much better with our ethos.

This may seem trivial, but for us it means a lot. It means that people don't come to us for the purpose of earning a salary, they play our games because the game is good AND (as a bonus) they will own their assets. They will own what they earn, be it consumables, skins, Nefties, etc. They will be able to own their assets obtained in-game, get them on the blockchain and also use their blockchain assets in our games. The Syncspace that we revealed this week is an important part of this plan and if you haven't seen it, I invite you to take a look here: SyncSpace Explained. With this new paradigm and the technologies we have developed and continue to develop, we are ready to introduce the notion of ownership to gamers in the Web2 world and at the pace we are moving forward, we are confident in our ability to soon provide frictionless onboarding to non-crypto players.

Whether in bull or bear, we will be there to build.”

Why a single token system?

Aurory’s ecosystem uses an innovative “main token with an in-game sub-currency balancing system” instead of a two-token design found in other web3 games, where the token for game currency and rewards is inflationary and the limited supply token is for governance. We feel that these systems segregate the player and investor base into camps that don’t always have each other’s interests at heart. Dual token designs with an infinite reward supply can also create just as many balancing issues, especially when their use cases start to expand. They also do not necessarily prevent the governance coin’s value from falling, since investors will ultimately value it based on the success of the in-game economy (which uses the reward coin). We prefer a single main token design because we trust that governance should be done by the people playing the game - i.e., those using the token in the first place. This reinforces our belief that the community is paramount and should be rewarded accordingly with the centric token of our ecosystem. Our system ensures that price increases of $AURY will not change the accessibility of the game, given that players will always be able to join for free. In fact, if $AURY’s value increases, it is most likely due to an increase in the number of invested players, and thus, distributes the token more uniformly. A more even distribution is highly desirable as it increases the overall resilience and sustainability of the ecosystem. Furthermore, if the value of $AURY increases, F2P players will not be locked out of accessing the marketplace (as they will be earning a comparable amount of $AURY required to purchase items).

Conclusion

It's safe to say that with the introduction of the rewards, we can expect an increase in the number of daily active users, but not just for that reason. The upcoming patches, which include our MMR matchmaking and new ranking system, will be very exciting.  We are also happy to share that a total of 15,275 matches have been played to date (4128 against AI / Fuddies and 11,147 PvP).

Growing the daily active player base is not the easiest task, especially in a competitive game with a significant learning curve, but we will work hard to make learning Aurory Tactics as attractive as possible and to provide a positive player experience for novices as well. We're also close to launching our first tournament, and we can't wait to get started. You better prepare yourselves, because the best players will be richly rewarded!

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