What should debt really mean?

[Swiddis]

In general, it's just generally assumed as "you want to read away your debt if you have it" as a sort of motivation, but it doesn't really have any mechanical effects. Should we introduce those effects? How? Should people gain debt in ways other than the lottery or players giving it to them? Until the lottery is introduced (#22) it doesn't really mean much.

[sumofall7171]

Perhaps a levelling system, where xp is replaced with words. If you have too much debt for an extended period of time your xp and thus level gets given either to the person who gave you the debt or if it wasn't given by a singular entity your xp (words) are given to everyone else who is also playing.

Some issues I see with this is - How should levels be - linear or exponential. Personally I believe linear would be better.

Your overall accumulated words read should be store somewhere though.

[azhitian]

I like the idea of giving another player debt benefiting you in some way rather than just affecting the indebted player. It might be difficult to track debt for everyone, but it could make the game more interesting.

If you have debt, could clearing it give (some or all) cranes to all other players (or maybe only players that have logged in the last X time)? So inflicting debt on A Tian would be a good strategy because it would slow down their crane accumulation while increasing yours. I worry about the lottery dumping a whole bunch of debt on a casual player might just make them quit though.

I do agree it would be good to have some kind of reward/progression system; so far it doesn't seem like competition alone has driven a lot of interest (maybe that would change if the game were introduced to other servers like JP, but that risks a more toxic environment). To avoid discouraging players who aren't getting in 10,000+ words a day, I also like the idea of some of the progression being global and maybe soft/hard-capping cranes you can earn/keep for each reward cycle.

Another Discord bot game I used to play involved farming--you'd use currency earned by taking care of your farm to increase the size of your prize vegetable, and the bot would generate a picture every time it grew. I like the idea of a visual representation of your progress, and I personally think tying it to something concrete like building up a city or growing a forest is way more satisfying than number go up. Hard to think of something that feels Refoldy/immersiony though.

[Swiddis]

Hard to think of something that feels Refoldy/immersiony though.

In the spirit of refold I almost wonder if it's possible to do something like that anki heatmap, but tying that in with debt is probably more convoluted than it's worth. I like the idea of debt being an actual debt to the assigner, too, though I worry about the cycle where one person who's assigned a lot has so many debts coming in that they can start indefinitely assigning debts to others without reading. Even if it's only 10% going to them, that's a loop at 10 active debts assigned. Hey, capitalism! (Or is that just a pyramid scheme...)

Maybe we rework the lottery to be for cranes, and cranes go into the lottery instead of debts. Now assigning debt has the benefit of maybe coming back to you if you win the lottery, but the barrier to entry for getting into the lottery is very low. That seems to hit a lot of the checkmarks for global progress and making debts useful on paper, but I feel like the 3-winner system isn't going to scale to more than like 20 active participants at best. I wonder if there's a way to make a fixed reward come back from the lottery pot as well (the inverse of guaranteed debt)?

I also like the city/forest idea but making an image out of it would be a lot of effort, we could maybe add a separate discussion issue for it as a long-term goal. In principle I could do it with overlapping sprites without too much complexity, but it just feels out of scope atm unless there's a lot of interest. I could see it working kind-of like the anki heatmap where you have a bunch of blocks and the amount you read controls the coolness of the building on that block, and the calendar slowly moves more recent blocks in so you have to keep up a habit to have a cool city.