Open Letter: Recent Changes

Dear STEPNers

We would like to address the concerns raised and explain the reasons behind the decision on some of the changes made in our recent rollout.

Why introduce Health Points (HP)?

The way nature restores its balance on earth is through its cycle of life and death — imagine all the species on this planet not dying! That system would never be sustainable. Anything without a lifespan is a curse — to itself and to the ecosystem around it.

HP now introduces a lifespan to STEPN sneakers. Without HP, the sneakers have an infinite supply and would never be worn out which is a recipe for inflation and eventual price drop.

In the long term, the HP system protects the STEPN sneakers by controlling their life span which is super important for a realm. Once the sneaker is worn out, now there is a choice to

— Stop using it → which leads to a decrease in the supply

— 5-in-1 enhancement → which leads to a decrease in the supply

— Restore → contributes to the GST ecosystem

So what are the benefits?

The HP bar is an additional sink for GST and gems.

The benefits that come along with this introduction are:

• Comfort gems are given an additional layer of value (Users benefit as now they can sell these gems for a higher price)
• Comfort stat is no longer completely obsolete for anything other than GMT earning
• More GST is burnt, thus regulating GST supply and reducing sell pressure
• Prevents the massive frequent buying and selling of sneakers (just for the sake of buying and selling)

We are also constantly monitoring the feedback and response from users; and will continue to do so for the health of the app. Our recent announcement regarding introducing a free full HP restore is an example of that.

Player Concerns

1. HP restore eats into earnings

Any new mechanic implementation is made with the game’s longevity in mind. Same with the increase of mint cost previously. It increases the game’s sustainability in the long term by introducing a lifespan to the STEPN sneaker.

For GST mining, users will have a chance to fully restore the HP for FREE (as mentioned in our recent poll)
At lower levels (say 0 to 25) users don't even need to spend anything on HP, because there will be ample HP to take the user to those levels after which FREE full HP restore will kick in as per the above poll results.

2. Sneakers become useless if I do not restore their HP regularly

HP mechanic is a long-term gradual decay of the sneaker. It doesn’t affect the usability until it drops to 0% (or 20% if you rely on the sneaker for energy).

Even then, there are ways to circumvent the cost of restore (Like using the sneaker for enhancement)

The only time you really need to restore your HP before it hits 20% is if you intend on transferring or listing the sneaker.

3. Non-optimal stats for sneakers due to allocated points

Stat reset will be available once GMT earning rolls out, or possibly even earlier. This is only a temporary concern.

4. HP restore is expensive

We are aware that the first iteration of the HP mechanic was a bit costly, which is why we decided to remove the GMT cost from it, as well as increase the HP recovered per gem. We constantly monitor and review all rollouts to ensure the implementation is sound.

Why have mainly the higher-level mystery boxes benefited from the latest update?

Our main focus here is to provide users with multiple ways to play the game while ensuring that all strategies are viable.

For instance, efficiency is the tried and true method of earning GST. Consistent but not necessarily the most exciting. We want luck to be a viable strategy in the mix, where players can potentially reap better rewards by getting lucky, albeit more inconsistent.

The only way to do this was to improve the rewards for the higher mystery boxes. At the same time, we have taken this opportunity to increase the cost of opening these boxes, so although their rewards are more substantial, they will be required to pay an equally high GST amount. This way, we kill 2 birds with 1 stone — make luck a viable strategy, and introduce a massive GST sink.

GST price does not seem to have benefited from the recent updates

Unfortunately, mechanic changes don’t yield instant results, especially with the current overall market sentiment.

While it was a tough decision on our end to roll out these updates, eating into users’ returns, even more, it was a necessary evil.

We expect things to turn around when the market conditions change, and these updates will help solidify that rebound.

The team needs to do more to help the game!

We have always reflected on every update we did, in an effort to improve future updates. Every update since June has been made to address existing issues within the apps ecosystem:

Minting farms were flooding the market with sneakers without actually taking part in the main aspect of our game — we introduced minting scrolls to address this, as well as allow users without the capital to mint to earn a share of minting margins.

Cheaters are unhealthy for the game, as well as inorganically adding to the sell pressure on our token — we rolled out SMAC to work towards combating cheating of all kinds, from bots to multi-miners.

BSC Realm showed how ugly and unrealistic things can get with a standard minting cost — we introduced dynamic minting to ensure that minting costs stay in line with token prices.

Our initial sale of ASICS sneakers showed that a poorly controlled release will lead to an unfair distribution — we decided to airdrop sneakers to the community through holders of Genesis/OG sneakers.

Coming up, we expect partnerships on older realms and the introduction of new ways to play (involving all attributes equally) will bring sustained longevity to the game.

Closing thoughts

We cannot emphasise this enough — every feature we implement, every mechanic tweak we roll out, has STEPN’s sustainability in mind.

We may not always get things right off the bat, and sometimes there are even decisions to be made that go against the common narrative.

But, we always aim to listen, monitor and incorporate our community’s feedback.

We want to assure you that with everyone’s help and feedback, we continue to work hard behind the scenes, striving to build a sustainable and balanced ecosystem for our users.

We’ll let our actions and results do the talking. We have a lot planned in our pipeline and are excited to unveil it as we go. Thank you from the bottom of our hearts for sticking around.