CATALYSTs update and feedback request

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Hello Creator Community,

Over the past few weeks, we have been engaging in discussions with many of you to understand your concerns. We recognize that the current system for CATALYSTs is not meeting your needs. Our goal is to provide a great creator experience, and your input is crucial to achieving this. We want to address the current challenges and propose potential solutions regarding the volume of catalysts in circulation and improvements to the Builders Challenge.

Framework for Change:

  1. Accessibility and Availability: Common CATALYSTs need to be easily accessible and widely available to all creators.
  2. Nominal Value: We want CATALYSTs to have a nominal value; Our goal is not to use them to monetize builders, but to help builders monetize their experiences.
  3. Special NFTs: NFTs created with CATALYSTs don’t need to be unique, but they should be special in some way that differentiates them from standard assets.

Goal: The overarching goal is to make CATALYSTs more widely available and streamline the process for requesting them.

We are actively implementing solutions for builders, some already on the roadmap, while others still in planning. We would like your input, ideas and advice as we roll them out or consider them. Some of the inputs below come from discussions with your fellow creators (thank you for your contributions ;))

Marketplace Purchases: In less than a month, creators will be able to purchase CATALYSTs directly from TSB’s marketplace. We believe the prices are reasonable enough to allow you to build economies of scale, while maintaining the rarity and uniqueness of the items. Below the prices we plan to roll out:

Common: 1 SAND
Uncommon: 3 SAND
Rare: 10 SAND
Epic: 40 SAND
Legendary: 200 SAND

Other ideas we are considering:

Earn CATALYSTs: Incentivizing creators to earn catalysts by staking LANDs or publishing live experiences aligns with our broader engagement vision. This system can be implemented to encourage participation and LAND utilization, thus increasing overall activity. In parallel, implementing a tiered reward system where creators earn more CATALYSTs based on their level of engagement or the complexity of their contributions.

Catalyst Drops: Implementing CATALYSTs drops for BC1 participants and including CATALYSTs as rewards in BC2 is a solution that can quickly boost availability. This approach not only rewards participation but also motivates new creators to join and contribute to our events. Regularly scheduled drops tied to specific milestones or achievements within the Builders Challenge could enhance engagement and competition. We could extend this to most creator challenges, like GameJams and VoxEdit Contests.

We want to hear your thoughts and ideas on these proposed solutions. Please discuss with us and among yourselves here for the next week. We will gather this feedback and roll out ways to obtain CATALYSTs based on your input. We are open to keep this discussion ongoing to want to receive critical feedback and improve as things move forward. Please keep in mind that ideas that require tech/engineer implementations naturally will take longer to be adopted.

Thank you for your ongoing support and contributions to The Sandbox.

Let’s work together to enhance our ecosystem.

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whatever happened to regular cat drops for premium land owners? I’m still trying to see the value of premium. Profile wise, i dont see my 2 premium experiences having much priority in terms of visibility other than a larger image, which suggests that the real difference in them and reg lands has been the v2 or 3 assets that came with the land. Not a great value for property that is 4x the regulars.

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It would be great before revamping the catalyst system, payment, access etc, to have a clear idea of hours they will affect assets that are not equipment down the road.

Historically, these cats boosted platform speed, search radius, interact distance, max height, etc, and then were removed. Is anything like this coming back? If yes, this would place an immense value on needing cats.

I hope this isnt the plan because locking access to attribute ranges hampered developers in the past.
I do imagine though that cats will have some use other than equipment and I’d love to hear of those plans to have a more fullsome sense of how much value and access to place on them.

@Dankoyy and i were chatting offline a while back and he suggested that a free category of cat would be useful as a baseline for basic assets. He can elaborate on that more.

The other issue with cats on equipment from a dev side that we talked about was in how it makes dev work far more difficult when you have to build for variable strength, speed, defense, etc attributes per avatar, when having to simply deal with small vs / Medium avatars can be enough trouble on its own.

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Dynamic Minting

Before Catalyst launch, I sent to TSB an idea about Dynamic Minting. I’ll take this opportunity to bring up the topic again.

“Dynamic Minting” are an Asset’s panel that incorporates versions into Assets so that artists can continue making modifications and improvements to the assets over time, even when placed on the market for sale or sold. This allows for progressive upgrades to the animations of their assets, increasing functionalities and adding value to their collections over time.

This idea comes with the intent and objective of allowing artists to develop a roadmap where they can involve progressive improvements in their asset creation. This way, even when placed on the market for sale or sold, if the artist wants, they can remain open to making changes to the assets and creating value over time.

Another important aspect is that the buyer should be able to accept or reject a modification. If they want the modification, they can apply it the version. In this idea of Dynamic Minting, you would have versions of Assets that could be accessed.

For example, if I make a chair and want to create animations for its destruction, burning, or make the chair in different colors, I can create an asset with these characteristics in a Roadmap. This approach allows the Voxel Artist to continuously improve the asset over time, while also selling them, adapting both the animation and aesthetic improvements, as well as technological innovations from VoxEdit and GameMaker, ensuring the assets are always adequately prepared for use in GameMaker.

Knowing, therefore, that the versions of the assets are not related to the Smart Contracts and can be managed internally by TSB, the “Dynamic Minting” can still be possible if planned alongside “Lazy Mint”.

The control of Assets Creation during sale should also belong to the creators. Associating this with a dynamic market encourages quality and technological development in assets in the long run. Avoiding too many similar copies and giving artists more tools to create their collections and asset projects to efficiently meet the demands of landowners and studios.

The Asset’s versioning system for “Dynamic Minting” described is also compatible with the “Shared Palettes” feature in VoxEdit. This compatibility allows to easily modify the colors of an Asset inside GM, enabling different color variations of the same Asset through a streamlined process.

As always, I am available for a conversation or meeting.
I’m open to answering more questions about the idea.

Thank you for your attention.

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I love the idea Dankoyy and the value it would add to be able to continually push value to an nft over time, allowing it to evolve with the gm.

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Love the idea of selling cats in the marketplace!

I have 2 questions.

  1. What is the progress on lazy minting?

  2. ‘Universal’ cats seem to have a ceiling of 100 stats. There’s already ‘Universal’ items that are 98 stats with at least 8k in supply. Is it possible to reconsider that ceiling? Perhaps to a max of 50 stats is reasonable, otherwise, Legendary items will eventually be worth nothing due to the oversupply of overpowered EQs produced by TSB.

Thanks!

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Thank you,

  • We expect Lazy Minting to be ready by Q4 of this year
  • The feedback on the ceiling makes sense and seems feasible

We are gathering more answers on all other qs and welcome any ideas and proposals as well.

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Universal Catalysts shouldn’t have stats at all, that’s why exist all the other tiers of catalysts, for those stats.

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I’d think so too. It devalues all other existing cats.

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I think this is a huge step in the right direction, accessibility to catalysts has been a big bottle neck in our creativity and now having access to them allows us to integrate this into our ecosystems confidently as there is now a consistent stable supply.

I would like to make a suggestion that rather then having all rarities listed for sale, only the common is listed for 1 Sand. With each catalyst purchased there would be a chance to potentially receive a higher rarity.
(Ratio converted to %)
Common: 68.34%
Uncommon: 22.78%
Rare: 6.84%
Epic: 1.71%
Legendary: 0.34%

Just a suggestion, but great news on the changes looking forward to seeing everyone’s creations BoopGoop!

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Like Andy mentioned, I think this is a great step towards a better ecosystem. Allowing us to purchase catalysts without having to rely on OpenSea’s secondary supply will give us the ability to plan without unnecessary obstacles.

I also agree that selling anything but Common catalysts for 1 SAND should be reconsidered. We should just be allowed to buy a single item called a “Catalysts” for 1 SAND. Most likely we will receive a common, but there’s a chance to get one of the other rarities.

This would ensure that the scarcity supply for the entire ecosystem can be set by these attributes ahead of time, and therefore won’t be an issue in the future (there won’t be a disproportionate amount of legendary items in the ecosystem with this method). Otherwise, if allowed, people can just buy legendary catalysts all day long and the scarcity would be all over the place.

The Sandbox would also benefit from revenue as well. Using the proposed Sandbox system in the original post, if I wanted to mint something with 10 Rare catalysts, I would spend 100 SAND.

With Andy’s proposed system, I would spend 150 SAND to try to get 10 Rare, but I would also get (on average) 102 Common, 34 Uncommon, 2 Epic, and maybe 1 Legendary if I’m lucky. I would much rather have this deal.

People will also be encouraged to trade and the secondary catalyst marketplace would flourish again. If TSB sells all catalysts directly, the secondary market would be useless, or worse, harmful to TSB.

This also makes it so TSB can reward free catalyst mints as rewards for participation, and the players are much more likely to play for this reward because they have a slim chance at pulling something super rare. It gameifies the whole ecosystem a little more which makes everything a bit more exciting.

Lastly, I 100% agree that universal catalysts should not give attributes. Otherwise there’s no point to the other catalysts.

Thanks for listening and for the forum allowing us to give our feedback!

James

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Love the idea of having the hybrid. Having it start off as a default catalyst ‘blind box’ and to get players to open it.

I do foresee a similar issue persisting though, which is that rarer cats will be few and far in between.

TSB selling it in the marketplace solves both liquidity problems, as well as allows creators to fix the cost of producing assets without worrying whether tomorrow’s price will be double.

The SAND accumulated from sales can be distributed to players via various rewards system.

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Love the proposal of a 1 Sand common cat, with a weighted percentile affecting whether it is rare, epic , legendary.

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That issue shouldn’t be a problem, plenty of all rarities will be minted with this and many more will end up on the secondary to supplement the ecosystem. And at the end of the day, they should be fewer and farther between than common cats.

But yes, I totally agree, this will solve a huge liquidity problem and allow many projects to actually move forward with a lot of currently tabled plans.

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This solution is the very very good, it’s fair, it’s affordable, it creates scarcity and value, 100% with this idea.

  • It creates Sandbox a form to monetize on the sale of Catalysts, as it solves the Catalyst supply, while maintaining the scarcity value of the ecosystem.
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I dig Andy’s thoughts on this, and Tusch’s iteration on it! Definitely feel like improvements on the current catalyst situation could be made, and these ideas would be a great start.

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Hey! This is a really interesting idea, and it’s fully aligned with our vision of delivering value over time to NFT holders.

In the past months we’ve been featuring a couple of events based on NFT transformations. So far, transformations have been temporary and only applied to avatars, as seen on the Smurfs event.

I imagine this system evolving so we start allowing creators to sell NFTs, and components/reactives (other NFTs), to make their original NFT change.

I’m not sure I would modify the original NFT without requiring a user interaction and signature.

Definitely something we should look into it.

What do you think?

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Yes. Consent and signature to update would be ideal as we dont know what the specific use case of an nft might be for a holder, and an unwanted asset update could change behavior in someones experience.

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:fire: ONE NFT PER EXPERIENCE ISSUE

@TSBCreators I am concerned about a very important situation associated with Catalysts, which is the use of only one NFT per Experience. I believe this should be reviewed and very well communicated to the community, given that the community now has the potential to create their own projects and collections using Catalysts.

Now that the Catalyst is active, allowing only one NFT per Experience puts a lot of scarcity pressure and turns the NFT into a usage permission rather than ownership. This functionality does not allow for the scaling of game production using Marketplace assets and contributes to the continuation of the system using Voxel Artists in a freelance mode.

It is important to highlight that, although the idea for “one NFT per experience” seems very good.

TSB: “Wow, how about we limit it to one NFT per Land, so people have to buy 10 times the amount of NFTs to place them on their 10 LANDs.”

In reality, it becomes:

UGC: “Oops, I am not going to buy 10 NFTs to place them on my 10 LANDs, I will hire a Voxel Artist, and besides sending me the voxel file, I can place it on as many Lands as I want.”

In other words, it is a solution that generates more problems.

One NFT per experience is a gear blocker for the community today. I have made more than 25 purchases of community NFTs and my own collection of Numpads. It is a complete chaos to manage these assets with this limitation. Basically, there is no reason for me to buy more LANDs if I don’t have assets to use.

This concern is also opened at TSB DAO FORUM
[Removing the '1 asset per experience' requirement - SIP Ideas - The Sandbox DAO]

Eagerly awaiting the response regarding this important issue.

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:fire: Wishlist Situation

The Wishlist is a very important tool for the community, and it is being completely misused or, at the very least, complexly ignored. Since GM 0.6.14, the wishlist is known as ( :heart:). With it, you could mark the wishlist and automatically place the asset in GM for testing.

However, recently early this year function has been completely changed, making it possible only for minted NFTs. And now, recently, the wishlist is working for non-minted again.

Minted and non-minted wishlist
Minted and non-minted wishlist1521×420 57.2 KB

Snapshot August 8, 2024

The situation is that the wishlist is a temperature gauge and should not only have its functionality better exposed but should also be test in GM for everyone.

And why, Daniel?

It’s very simple. Many times artists do not currently have the ability to assess whether their NFTs are in demand. The wishlist has the potential to provide an understanding of supply and demand so that they can decide how many they will mint.

It is necessary for the number of wishlists and who added them to also be available to the artist. It is very important to know the demand for the asset.

In addition, the wishlist has a very important purpose, which is to test the asset in loco. This test is fundamental for artists to share with friends or other people so that others can evaluate it before minting.

Without the wishlist mechanic, artists are basically trapped inside a bubble and have no references regarding the demand for the asset. It is necessary to reinforce this and make it clear to the community that the wishlist will continue for both minted and non-minted and be even more expanded for artists use the feature. It is a little-known feature that has been largely overlooked.

Thank you.
Daniel, Dankoyy

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