Habbo Avatar trait editing: a pitch to the community

Habbo
7 min readApr 8, 2022

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Gm frens!

The team and I have discussed giving you the ability to edit your avatar’s traits several times over the past couple of months. However, the proposal hasn’t been the most popular and I’ve seen a fair amount of concern, particularly with regards to rarity rankings.

After reading the feedback and competing ideas that were posted in our Discord, I decided to focus on an idea that I believe will have an even more positive impact on the project and achieve a goal similar to the one that was set out originally.

In this blog, I will pitch the idea and explain how you can help decide whether or not to do it or not with Snapshot voting.

First of all, WHY oh why would we do this? The short answer is that we want to do what we believe is best for the project, and that is to increase the interest in and utility of your avatars!

Our original idea was to allow specific, targeted trait editing. So, if there were traits that didn’t combine well and made your avatar look less aesthetically pleasing, you’d be able to remove them or change them for another trait. The goal with this feature was to increase the aesthetics of all avatars and give more utility to the avatars — particularly the “ugly” ones: if there are avatars that are less desirable than others, overall it will decrease demand.

Utilising the new crafting feature to give utility to avatars

I’ve seen people proposing alternatives to the trait change feature described above that I really like, and I’ve been considering them as alternatives.

My favourite was a proposal to use the recently released crafting feature: burn two avatars and get a new, better looking one. This would have a similar or even a bit more of a significant effect on avatar rarity rankings, because we’re removing avatars from the collection. But if we added these new avatars back into the Habbo Avatars collection, they’d completely overhaul the rarity rankings.

To minimise the effect on the Habbo Avatars rarity rankings, my proposal is that newly crafted avatars would be added to a brand new collection as opposed to the old one. As mentioned above, removing avatars from the genesis collection would still affect the rankings. However, in my humble opinion, the benefits of this proposal outweigh the drawbacks.

We would rename the current Habbo Avatars collection as Habbo Avatars: Genesis and create a new collection called Habbo Avatars: Master Genesis. This new collection would exist on Ethereum mainnet. The Master Genesis collection would consist of a maximum of 3,500 Habbo Avatars. When and if the maximum number of Master Genesis collection avatars are minted, the Habbo Avatars: Genesis collection would consist of roughly 4,600 avatars. Crafting a Master Genesis Habbo Avatar would cost 1,000 credits, two avatars from the genesis collection, and ETH for gas fees.

Avatars from the Master Genesis collection would be considered as two Genesis Avatars. Because the collection would be minted on the Ethereum mainnet, the cost is actually greater than just two avatars because you’d need to pay gas fees. So, in my view the benefits should be slightly more than just double: they’d give you double airdrops but they’d also accumulate 30 NFT credits per day.

In the new NFT-focused Habbo server we will build, the plan is to give bonuses to Genesis Avatars in terms of earnings (I’ll be able to share more about this when we publish the actual design for the NFT hotel). So, at least the same bonuses would apply to the Master Genesis Avatars. Depending on the balancing we do, we may even increase the bonuses slightly for avatars from the new Master Genesis collection.

Getting a Master Genesis Avatar

I want to ensure that those of you that own avatars with rarer backgrounds and effects would be able to get a rarer Master Genesis Avatar if you wanted one. That’s why I’d like there to be two different cases for creating a Master Genesis Avatar:

Case 1: Master Genesis avatar is created by burning two avatars with Basic, Golden or Diamond effects.

In this case, you would need to combine two avatars that have Basic, Golden or Diamond effect. After doing this, you would be able to cherry pick the traits you like from the two avatars and create an entirely new one. For example, you’d be able to choose the Avatar 1’s face, Avatar 2’s shirt, Avatar 2’s pants, and so on. The traits that are available for you to choose would be from the ones on the original two avatars. You’d even be able to leave some traits out completely if you wanted. This would be the most common use case.

Both Genesis Avatars would be burned in this case.

Case 2: a Master Genesis avatar is created that has several completely new traits (using at least one Rainbow, Trippy or Ultra Trippy effect avatar).

To get one of these, you’d need to use at least one avatar that have a Rainbow, Trippy or Ultra Trippy effect. IMPORTANT: As it would be daunting to burn a very rare avatar, Trippy and Ultra Trippy avatars would not be burned, but you’d only be able to use them to create a new Master Genesis avatar once. Rainbow avatars would be burned if they are used.

The main advantage of using a Rainbow, Trippy or Ultra Trippy avatars would be that you not only get to choose which traits you use from each avatar, but you’d also be able to include a limited number of brand new traits we’d design for the Master Genesis collection. How many of these new traits you’d get to use depends on the effects of the avatars you use: Rainbows would get one new trait, Trippies would get two and Ultra Trippies would get three. These numbers would also stack, so if you used a Trippy and a Rainbow you’d be able to put three new traits on your Master Genesis Avatar. If you used a Basic and a Rainbow avatar, you’d get to choose one new trait.

Only the avatar with the Rainbow effect / pink background would be burnt in this case.

Important points:

  • ALL avatars in the Master Genesis collection would have a newly created background colour and corresponding effect. What these would look like is to be decided.
  • Trippy and Ultra Trippy avatars would not be burned if they are used to create a Master Genesis avatar. But you can only use them to do this once.
  • Rainbow avatars would be burned if you used them to create a Master Genesis avatar.
  • To get the new traits, at least one of the genesis avatars you used would need to have a Rainbow, Trippy or Ultra Trippy effect.
  • You cannot make an avatar that is exactly the same as someone else’s.

As we have only 10 Ultra Trippy avatars, 54 Trippy avatars and 580 Rainbow avatars there will be a maximum of 644 avatars with new traits. What these new traits will be and what they look like will be presented later if this feature is approved by the community.

What I like about this approach is that it:

  1. Decreases the collection size.
  2. Gives utility to “ugly” avatars.
  3. Gives extra utility to Rainbow, Trippy and Ultra Trippy avatars.

In previous blogs and Twitter Spaces I’ve said that we aim to treat all avatars equally, and this pitch makes some of the rarer backgrounds better than the others. In my view, we have to do this as otherwise they would be even more unequal and unusable with this feature. In addition, I think giving more perks in a feature like this makes sense and helps the project overall.

Please note that this design may change when we get further in development. Particularly the finer details like the collection size and number of new traits are likely to change as we balance things out.

Voting

In the end, this is a big decision for avatar owners. I have made it clear why I think these changes would benefit the project. I could be completely wrong about this, and I’m aware of it. I have also explained roughly how the crafting system would work. Combining two avatars to create a new one would take avatars out of circulation and would create a new set of (hopefully) good looking avatars.

As this would affect rarity rankings of the genesis collection, I leave the decision to you, the community.

We have set up a Snapshot proposal, click here to see it. For more information about Snapshot voting, click here.

Some further points:

  • You cannot vote if you don’t own at least one Habbo Avatar.
  • Owners get one vote per avatar they own.
  • We will keep the voting open until Friday April 15th.
  • We have also opened a holders-only channel in our Discord where you can chat about this proposal. Regardless of the outcome of the vote, please be civil.
Holders should discuss the proposal here.

Looking at the big picture, this proposal and vote will be a great experiment on how we can give you more control over the project. Let’s see how it goes and how we can improve the process!

-Muumiopappa

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