I've been thinking about something recently, and after a few days of not being able to figure it out, I decided to write it down.
On the construction site, there is a subcontracting method called 'old leads new'—an old foreman brings in his own team, and newcomers who want to enter this construction site must first pass the old foreman's test. On the surface, it seems to ensure quality, but in reality, over time, the good work is mostly handled by the old team, leaving newcomers to pick up the leftovers. It's not that there are no opportunities, but the threshold lies with the old foreman, not with the client.
Recently, I was looking into the Guild mechanism of Pixels and found it to have a somewhat similar structure. The acquisition of high-level resources in the guild is theoretically open to all members, but the actual distribution weight is highly related to the time you joined the guild, your contribution level, and your reputation score. I checked the description in the white paper, and it states that a reputation score above 1000 has a 10% reward bonus, above 2000 has 20%, and above 3000 has 30%. This gradient itself is not a problem; using it to differentiate between real players and those who are just farming accounts is the right logic.
But I am stuck on a specific issue: the accumulation speed of reputation points is strongly correlated with your entry time. Early players had a lot of tasks to complete for points, but after Chapter 2, the task board changed, and new players have many fewer sources of reputation compared to old players. This means that now, for a newcomer, even if they play seriously every day, how long does it take to catch up with the reputation points of a player who entered in 2023? I have not found any official numbers on this.
This is not to say that there is a problem with the mechanism design; the logic of reputation points is to reward long-term players. But if new players can never catch up to the reputation threshold, the resource allocation in the Guild will gradually solidify into an old boys' club. Newcomers will find it difficult to pick up good tasks, retention rates will decline, and the bottom of the entire funnel will shrink, ultimately affecting the consumption side of $PIXEL.
What I want to know is whether Pixels has ever provided data on the speed at which new and old players can catch up with reputation? If so, this design might not be a problem; if not, this black box is worth monitoring.