Valley Report - 12.21.23
The Season of Loyalty
The Season of Loyalty started on December 22, 2022 with the launch of Full Game. Since then, Shep has been tracking all the data and he plans to assign “points” based on participation, risk, time, and energy to award loyal players with 50M pouched wool from the community Prize Pool.
This Season will launch in early 2024, as Shep aims to reward the community members that have carried this project through the last 12 months of gameplay. It’s also safe to say we should look forward to future “Seasons” with rewards from the prize pool, as this latest announcement seems to make it clear that this will be a new, cyclical feature for Wolf Game. Which means future seasons will be the norm.
So what does this mean for your gameplay? Here are a few takeaways…
What you assumed was -EV may not be.
Many Wolf Game players have been assigned EV to individual moves in the game like a single wolf loot, a farmer use, breeding, gathering, and more. While EV is sexy at first sight, players using net wool to calculate EV haven’t been using the full equation. Meaning, they’re missing a major datapoint… community rewards. This makes EV incredibly difficult to calculate, and it could be different depending on your place in the leaderboard, depending on when/where you’re using farmers, etc.
The point is, EV changes based on the player, and it changes based on farmer actions at different points. A good example - if you use a farmer to protect during days 42-50 of gathering, it returns a different EV than days 30-38.
Energy usage seems to be a key factor, which means maximizing energy is critical.
Maximizing energy means getting more for each energy spent. For example, collecting in 15 day cycles will earn you X chops per energy spent, while collecting in 60 day cycles could earn you 2-3x more. With breeding, maximizing energy is critical. It costs 275 energy to breed a sheep, but how far you take it is up to you and your risk appetite. This means farmers have a significant role in helping your overall season performance, if you want longevity and maximized output, you will need a lot of farmers.
For wolves, spending energy wisely is important. Your decisions to loot vs attack could have a significant impact on your leaderboard performance. There’s even a chance that choosing to breed with your wolf or convert to peak credits constantly (which are risk free) could have 0 impact on your immediate leaderboard rankings within a season. This has ramifications on Peak Credit production, wolf inflation, pelts, and more.
One thing is clear, the Valley is about to change forever.
My biggest takeaway - the loop is more closed than it’s ever been.
This type of seasonal rewards leaderboard will incentivize gameplay in Valley and on Peak. Although we don’t know the exact details regarding how points are calculated, it seems to be clear that risk is about to increase, along with rewards, and most of all - fun.
