Holo everyone! Another @holozing related post! While I wish I had more time to do more regular off-topic posts, I've been quite busy going through the structure of the game while awaiting other parts of it to be developed.
<br>
Today I wanted to give you a quick rundown on some of the planned game modes we want to offer players in the beta of Holozing. Some things I mention here may already be old news to some of our followers who've been reading posts on @holozing and the more non-official/not yet concrete thoughts and plans on this account. Some of the things mentioned in this post may be old news but there may be some new things surrounding the old concepts as well. 

We will of course begin with the already expected "wild encounters", as we've mentioned before, players will be given the chance to set a daily timer on when they'd prefer to receive these wild encounters. Let's say for instance the average amount of encounters per player would be 10 per day, you could set them happen from 6 to 10 pm on your time-zone. Keep in mind there'll be a minimum amount of hours for your encounters, i.e. you can't just place it between 6.30pm and 7pm and expect to do all 10 encounters in a row. This idea is mostly to avoid people "having" to play when they are busy with other things but give everyone a chance to not miss out on encounters compared to those with more free time. At the same time it'll give us a buffer to make sure everything is working properly in the beta before we'd open the "floodgates" by allowing players more daily encounters.

These wild encounters basically mean that when the time hits that you're supposed to get your encounters, you will get a notification on the website/app that there's a creature in your vicinity. You then open the website up and are logged in and click "battle" which places you in the battle against a wild creature of unknown stats that you have to fight for xp and drops or choose to capture if you think it has high stats and you'd want to use the creature in your party/trade off/etc. This is where you'll be spending quite a bit of healer mana daily, healer ability points, creature moves, capture ammo, potions, elixirs, etc on the battles. 
<br>
Another thing we have planned for the beta is of course PvP. 

This we will introduce in a ladder system that'll be divided based on healer and creature levels. To start things off it'll be restricted up to level 10 for one ladder, then 11-20 for the second, etc. This means that when you are playing your healer with a party of creatures, you will be able to challenge other players in your ladder and "rating-reach"(other pvp'ers rated close to yourself) for weekly rewards with a minimum amount of battles required and a minimum variety of different opponents required. There may be more restrictions and penalties if we notice some types of abuse to cheat this, but for now that's the ruleset's we'll start off with. 

Here are some examples on restrictions and battles we'd like to see. 

Player A has a level 14 healer with creatures from level 11 to 14, he is rated #15 in the lvl 11-20 pvp ladder, the player is able to challenge other players in the lvl 11-20 ladder who are rated #5-25 (example). They may not challenge players of lower level healers and teams or players that are outside of their rating-reach (in this example #1-4 and #26-XXX) but the challenge zone may adjust as the rating of the player changes upon each game.
<br>
Now in terms of win-trading and other abuse-vectors.

There's been a lot of discussions I noticed recently on another game on Hive about certain accounts win-trading with their alt accounts, I.e. giving their main account wins so they can earn more rewards. This is of course something that's been seen before in previous games such as Arena's in World of Warcraft, thus it's been something on my mind quite a bit on how to combat. While I may not have read up on everything discussed surrounding this on here, I think the way we may start things off is this way: 

Players for PvP, will similarly to wild creature encounters be given the option to pick when they play their battles, i.e. preferred time span during the day based on your timezone when you believe you'll have time to play them. This can happen at the same time span as your wild creature battles but won't occur at the same time. Players will simply opt-in to when they can play pvp ranked battles and our system will do the matchmaking for them with others eligible to play at the same timespan based on if they match. There will have to be further restrictions and potential waiting times on certain things to prevent alt-farming, for instance, if you get a notification that there's a battle waiting for you on both of your own accounts at the same time you will know that you're facing your own account and will proceed to accept the challenge if you're trying to win-trade and dodge the challenge if you notice the notification didn't pop up at the same time on both accounts meaning you'd have to challenge another player. To combat this there may be a mixture of things we can implement such as notifications going out at different times and potentially giving you a heads up of 1-5 minutes when the battle will commence after you have accepted it along with penalties to not deny battles too often each week, etc. We hope to continuously evolve this when the time comes and look deeper into it to prevent any sort of abuse. 

Up until you've accepted the battle and entered your team for the fight you will find out who it is you're going to play and no-shows may be penalized as well if they occur often in attempts to dodge battles. This means with the way blockchains are, that you'll be able to look up your enemies inventory and history, being able to get a feel of what creatures he may play with but not knowing if they've changed the roster up for this particular battle. We want these advantages of being able to check what your opponent has in their team, what healer they usually play with and history to be available to everyone and not just those who bother to go check on the chain-level/website/invetory/etc so to even the playing field we may just give people the info directly.

<br>

Now as some of you may have figured it out, wild creatures will of course have an "AI" playing and deciding moves for them, this means that we will also be able to do "PvE" battles against other healers that aren't players. They may not be as good as other players but there'll be other factors involved there for players to face a challenge with rewards on the line and entry costs.

Depending on how well we can make the AI play, the different difficulties we can implement, etc, this also opens up other game-modes such as "survivability" modes, where you attempt to go through many PvE AI battles against healers and their teams to see how deep you can go without being able to restore ability points, creature moves, mana, and only rely on your heals and current mana pool and skills. 

Something to be said here, we as the project behind holozing will always be looking to bring value to the players. This means that aside from spending hive/zing ourselves on leasing healers off the delegation markets for trial accounts we may even go as far as leasing _your_ healers for PvE battles that AI play against you as well. Now these will most of the time be the cheapest we can find, but we believe that giving the healers and creatures that may not be bought or leased as often use-cases and demand drives for a healthy economy and gives players passive returns for having purchased healers and opened starter packs for starter creatures they may not wanna play with and others may not wanna lease to play with because the stats may not be as great but if you have to beat 10 of them in a row it may be harder than you think. Thus giving value and usage to the lower end of the stats as well. While all this isn't nailed down yet on how much we may lease, when we may start or how much extra funds we may have available for it, we do want to make it known that other than paying for developers and having runway for further development, the project will focus on keeping the value they may get in different forms within the ecosystem in many different ways when we are able to. 

<br>
Other future game modes we may add will also be restricted in different ways, it won't just be based on what level your healer and team is and where you're placed on the ladder, but imagine a ladder that only allows teams where the healer has mainly blue rarity items and epic, legendary and holo items aren't allowed, along with creatures of max blue rarity stats. 
Or Game modes where creature rarity is restricted but not healer items, or both. This would give more casual players who haven't bothered leveling "the right way" a chance to try out PvP to see if they like it enough to try better at leveling their next healer along with creatures. 

Other modes you could imagine are also ladders where you can only play mirror matches where both healers have to be the same class but creatures won't have any restrictions.

"Sealed Mode", a term taken from tcg's where you enter a battle blind and before the game begins you randomly get a healer class, get to pick between some creatures and healer items to use to see how far you can get playing against other players starting off in a similar fashion. 

Many of these modes will also require you to burn zing to enter as "tickets", where if you do well you may get rewards that make the ticket price worth the spend but if you don't you know the entry cost only ended up burning zing so the in-game economy thanks you for your contribution and wishes you better luck next time. 

<br>

Alright, that's it as an overview of some of the game modes we've had in mind and have been thinking about while we're awaiting the closed alpha release of the game. We hope it gives you some insight on what to look forward to and how just the first iteration of the holozing game may offer a lot of different varieties and iterations of play and fun!

Thanks for reading! 

As always feel free to let us know your thoughts on it, we appreciate your feedback and potential improvements!