Celebrity Smack Down (CSD) — A User Experience— Nervos Network
The Nervos Network is a full ecosystem blockchain aimed at solving some of the most challenging interoperability issues. One project currently underway on the Nervos Network is Celebrity Smack Down or CSD for short. CSD is a collector card-based game inspired by the MTV classic, Celebrity Death Match. At first glance, CSD may seem like many other one-off NFT collections adding a small and seemingly trivial gaming element. However, by the end of this article, you’ll see why Celebrity Smack Down is anything but one-dimensional. Let's dive into the good, the bad, and the future pipeline.
CSD can be accessed by navigating to https://celebritysmackdown.gg. For this overview, we will select the “STORE” button located on the top banner. From there, you will see two options for card packs. The first is a starter pack with the following cost and characteristics:
For increased odds at rarer cards, the collectors pack is another option albeit at a higher cost.
The first question you’ll be faced with is whether or not it is worth paying more for the collectors pack. Let's take a look at the numbers:
Starter Pack
Cost = 2820 ckb // Common = 70% // Rare = 25% // Epic = 4.5% // Legendary = 0.5%
Collectors Pack
Cost = 10590 ckb // Common = 0% // Rare = 60% // Epic = 35% // Legendary = 5%
This means that for ~3.75x in price, you get increased odds of Rare at ~2.4x, Epic at ~7.78x, and Legendary at 10x. Initially, this seems like it's not a bad price for the improved odds you receive, but we will revisit this later.
IMPORTANT NOTE: You will need an additional 65 ckb to purchase your packs. This means that for a Collectors Pack at 10590 ckb, the total amount required in your CSD account is 10655 ckb.
Once you buy your pack, you will receive 3 cards of either Common, Rare, Epic, or Legendary rarity based on the type of pack you purchased and luck. The benefit of the Collectors Pack is that you are guaranteed to receive a rarity higher than Common for all three cards. For our Collector Pack, we received the three Rare cards shown below:
You can see from the unwrapping that I received three cards (two of which are the same, more on that later). The first number beside the red circle indicates that card’s Attack. Similarly, the second number beside the blue circle is that card’s Defense, and the number by the yellow circle is the card’s Initiative. The final number on the card is located within the green bar at the bottom and signifies the card’s Life.
Once you have your cards purchased, it's time to build your deck. A nice overview video is provided by CSD on how to complete these steps:
Once your deck has been created, click the “Play Now” button in the top righthand corner of the screen. A new window should launch with a button in the center to enter the Arena.
Once clicked, the game will search for an opponent.
The actual gameplay itself is fairly quick. You are shown your cards, your opponent's cards, initiative order (right side), and your consumables (left side). Each player has a limited time to use their consumables during their turn. These consumables provide enhancements to your cards based on their type. For example, the Darack Ovama card had a “Vote” consumable that gave that card a boost in stats during gameplay. Now I must say I did not fare particularly well in actual gameplay and all of my cards were “Cancelled” before I could cancel any of my opponent's cards.
The good news is that I don’t see any lasting repercussions for the loss. This may be different once you accumulate points from wins and with future updates to the game, but at least initially, the loss doesn't seem to negatively impact future gameplay. I was able to quickly reenter the Arena and search for a new opponent. I did notice a few “reconnecting” issues when searching for new opponents (a variety of factors could have caused this and fault cannot be placed with the game).
I told myself that I would continue to play until I won a match. Unfortunately, it took over a day of gameplay (over 10 matches) to win a single match. Ultimately I think this comes down to having 2x Darack Ovama cards that lack any useful offense in the game and are strictly defensive cards (it's impossible to win without adequate offense). Luckily my cards were free, but for the average user, this means that for a collectors pack costing over $200, the cards received netted over 10 losses in a row and were not able to generate a single win against any opponents (I didn’t think it would be THAT bad and it continues to be a frustrating experience). It would seem that the only way to get a victory in the game is to buy more packs to have more options for your deck if you weren’t lucky on your initial purchase (not really what you want to do after dropping $200 on a pack). It also doesn’t appear that having a rare card offers you anything more than having a common card during gameplay (at least for the beta version). It is for this reason that I would not recommend buying more than starter packs unless you have the spare ckb to part with and want to support the project.
It is also a bit confusing what you get for winning a battle in the Arena. At least in the beta version, you should receive points that go towards your ranking. Your ranking in the leaderboard at the end of a season should determine your reward of “slammies” (I say should because I received nothing for my solo win and chalk this up to being between seasons, but remain unsure). Slammies are an in-game reward that can be exchanged for GG tokens or for powerups/renting land (more on that later, CSD 2.0). GG tokens are tokens that can be used on all current and future Gravity Gaming games. This leads into the next phase of CSD which offers additional ways to earn.
Future gameplay will include lands/boards that can be purchased by users to train their celebrities to power up. Both the cards and lands will be part of an additional game element called the Scholarship System. The Scholarship functionality allows a player to rent out their unused cards or land. In my example, since I have two Darack Ovama cards, I may want to rent one out and replace that slot in my deck with a new unique card (I would need to buy another pack). Similarly, land boards will be able to be loaned out by the owner and rented by users who do not own them but would like to use one for power-ups.
One planned gaming element that may have some additional promise is the tie-in to Twitter and the “owned tweet” that is received when you purchase your card pack (see below).
You can see from the above image that I own a particular tweet posted by Barak Obama. The CSD documentation also states:
“This functionality is the first step into what we are calling NFT 2.0 which are NFTs with external data attached to them that change their properties. How we achieved adding data into mNFTs will be documented in a technical write up which will be out before the end of the year along with sample code.”
It will be interesting to see how this functionality evolves and how it adds to the overall CSD gameplay experience. I think this is where the real magic of CSD will lie.
To recap, let's look through some of the game elements we’ve talked about and whether you can currently use them or if they are a planned feature.
CSD Currently Operational:
- Deck Building/Collecting
- Gameplay against live opponents
- Earning points to potentially earn slammies (was unable to verify)
CSD 2.0 Planned Features:
- Daily quests
- Renting out cards (Scholarship)
- Buying and renting land
- Exchanging slammies for GG tokens
- Added utility for GG tokens
- Live Twitter integration
Two final criticisms I have are the lack of wallet integration and the KRitiCal need for utility of GG tokens. Currently, you do not connect a wallet to play CSD. Instead, you create an account with CSD and are given a unique ckb address that you do not own or have keys to. In theory, this means everything you put into CSD, you don’t actually own, they do. You do have the ability to transfer out any ckb that you transfer into the game (before it’s spent), but you cannot move/sell your NFTs or make any ckb in-game to transfer out. It is essentially a one-way transfer of ckb into the game once it's spent. This ties into the last criticism regarding GG tokens. As it stands, the only planned output from the game is GG tokens and those are a future development. Having some sort of avenue back to ckb would make the game more useful to the average Nervos user who may not be a dedicated all-in gamer that wants to pump their hard-earned ckb into GG tokens. If we take a closer look at the GG token we see the following info is provided:
From a top-level perspective, every user on CSD will currently be trading ckb for a chance to receive GG tokens and improve their gameplay (win more, lose less). There will be some additional perks to holding GG tokens such as future staking and NFT drops, but I struggle from the user’s perspective to see how that would be advantageous over having ckb; which can be used to purchase whatever you need in the game and has usage across multiple platforms. I do caution myself because it is important to remember that the current release of CSD is beta and that many features are in the pipeline for CSD 2.0 that may expound upon the usefulness of GG tokens and make them worth the investment.
If you’ve made it this far, I encourage you to take a look at the CSD whitepaper where my info is sourced from:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OxmKXMc0I9iE91D4xTihUgOtHW1uszP8/view
In the end, it will be the users who decide the future of CSD in conjunction with the development team. For a beta release, I think CSD delivers on its basic functionality and is worth playing. But be warned that you may become frustrated if your cards consistently leave you in the losers bracket as mine have. I recommend going with starter packs to get your feet wet and increase your deck options and think about a collectors pack as features are added warranting increased rarity. The real excitement for CSD like many projects waits for future iterations and additional functionality with CSD 2.0.
What do you think? Have you played CSD? What was your experience? Let the community know your thoughts!
