Introduction
Well met, adventurer — welcome to The Hero’s Hold, and Happy Valentine’s Day! In this series, we track the details about heroes in DeFi Kingdoms, with game news, statistics, metrics, and more!
The snapshot for all of this week’s data was taken on 2/14 at 8am ET.
In this Issue:
- Heroic Happenings (Game News)
- The Crystal Ball (Upcoming Features)
- The Summoner’s Circle (Hero Stats)
- The Adventurer’s Guild (Wallet Stats)
Let’s dig in!
Heroic Happenings
As always, it’s been a busy week in the Kingdoms. Let’s see what the team has been up to!
Achievement System Teasers
During this week’s Design Team AMA, we were given some teasers for the new Achievement System that will be launching in the future, presumably somewhere alongside the UI revamp and/or PVE quests.
From the sound of it, these will include achievements and badges for a variety of in-game activities, including collections as well as events and PVE quests.
Based on the image above, it looks like the major focus right now is on professions, with achievements for what appear to be doing a certain number of profession quests or collecting a set number of items from those quests (100/500/1000 Silverfin, for example). There’s also a badge in there for collecting an egg, so rare items may also award achievements.
The other focus here appears to be on hero collections — perhaps for owning or summoning, with a series of badges that appear to align with hero classes. In order, these look to me like they might correspond to: Warrior/Knight, Priest, Archer, Thief, Pirate, Wizard (?), Monk, Summoner, and Ninja.
But the other thing about these achievements that caught my attention was Sinstar’s comment about achievement utility:
We want it to be more than just a badge, we want various utility provided into that. — Sinstar
While he didn’t elaborate on that point, we could potentially see certain achievements providing small buffs, or even opening up quest lines in the future. There’s a lot of possibility here, and I’m excited to see how it develops!
Enhancement Stones
Another long-awaited item, this week we finally saw the release of the very first Enhancement Stones. These are one-use items that can be added during summoning to permanently increase your hero’s stats and stat growth scores.
This release corresponded with the airdrop of Lesser Chaos Enhancement Stones. These stones choose a random stat and add:
- +4 to that stat
- +3% Primary Stat Growth to that stat
- +5% Secondary Stat Growth to that stat
On average, this would be equal to 12 stat points at level 100. And, of course, lesser stones also imply the existence of greater stones that have yet to be released…
Around 100 of these stones were airdropped to a small handful of raffle winners from back in September, but there will likely be more ways to obtain them in the future. Although it’s been awhile, Hubert did note at one point that both Chaos and Attunement Stones would eventually be craftable at the Alchemist:
Also working on a further trade up to trade in potions and other things to get Enhancement Stones and Attunement Crystals. — Hubert (11/23/21)
Hopefully this is still the case, and a wider range of players can begin to summon boosted heroes soon!
Heroes of the Week
It’s been a little while since we’ve featured any heroes here, but we’ve got two today that are worth close attention. Not to always focus on DreadKnights, but here we are…
Déor Shadowhunter was summoned this week as our very first Mythic DreadKnight. With a great name to match, this guy is gonna be a beast on the battlefield.
This second DreadKnight, though Common, was summoned with a Lesser Chaos Enhancement Stone that randomly selected Strength as the bonus stat. This means that not only was it summoned with 19 STR right out of the Portal, it also has an 88% Primary Growth Stat for Strength, and an additional 12.5% for Secondary Growth!
It’s clear that these enhancement stones are going to be very important going forward!
In Smaller News…
Some other news, announcements, and content from the past week:
- Weekly Community AMA — feat. Design Team (Video | Writeup)
- Side Quest: NPC Sculpture Contest — deadline Feb. 14 at 12pm EST
- DFKDay Meetup at ETH Denver — Tuesday, Feb. 15, 2–5pm MST
- Behind the Scenes: Overworld Map Timelapse (feat. Purple Onyon)
And from the community (including an article of my own):
- Carlo Infinity took a stab at working out the Gold Mining formula
- Weghuz introduced a new approach to scoring heroes based on their stats and growth rates
- JEWELCAST, Episode 6 — feat. JEWELBOYZ
- The Inner Grove Podcast, Episode 10 — feat. Petrify
- Adventures in DeFi Kingdoms Podcast, Episode 15
- Crypto with Tosh — DFK Hero Summoning Secrets
- The Hero’s Hold Special Edition #3: Deep Dive on Active & Passive Genes
The Crystal Ball
A few things that the team has mentioned we can expect in the coming weeks:
- Stamina Changes — Upcoming changes to stamina regeneration will allow heroes who have finished a quest that hasn’t been Completed (i.e. pressing the complete button) to begin regenerating stamina!
- Additional Gardening Changes — Still anticipated, the team ran into some contract issues that prevented this being released last week.
- Updates to Locked JEWEL — In accordance with the passing community vote for Prop 14, there will be updates to the way that locked JEWEL can be interacted with, limiting wrapped locked JEWEL trading, and putting a cooldown (length TBD) on the transfer of locked JEWEL. These changes will be made before Mining is moved from Beta to Production.
- Broader UI Updates — The new UI frames that we saw this week marked the beginning of a broader UI overhaul that we should continue to see roll out in the coming weeks. As mentioned last week, part of that will also involve setting new profile pictures.
- CRYSTALVALE — at this point, it would be silly to say that Crystalvale isn’t on the horizon, and while there are still 6 weeks left in Q1 2022, it’s clear that a lot of focus and attention is placed in that direction right now, including the Perilous Journey event that has been teased as accompanying its release.
The Summoner’s Circle
Let’s take a look at some statistics for all of the heroes that have been summoned so far.
Total Heroes: 127,357 (+6,306 / 5.21%)
Hero Growth
After weeks of explosive growth, Hero summoning finally began to slow down this week. The total number of heroes increased by 6,306 — 5.21%, with an average of around 900 new heroes summoned every day. Two weeks ago, that average was nearly 1300.
Total Heroes (Weekly Change / % Change)
• Feb. 14: 127,357 (+6,306 / 5.21%)
• Feb. 7: 121,051 (+8,325 / 7.39%)
• Jan. 31: 112,726 (+8,990 / 8.67%)
• Jan. 24: 103,736 (+7,091 / 7.33%)
Tavern Volume
This week, we’re also tracking tavern sale volume. I’ve pulled data for the past few weeks, and hope to continue to fill this out further going forward.
While it’s hard to say without going back further into January, initial impressions to seem to confirm a slowdown of tavern sales, though perhaps not quite as drastic as some have claimed. The real question is whether ~1200 sales/day represents a standard baseline, or if volume was already higher than usual at the beginning of the month.
Note: As with the other data, the daily numbers represent the 24 hours prior to 8am ET on the listed day.
Hero Stat Breakdowns
Two interesting developments in the Hero Leveling chart this week:
- For the first time, we’re really starting to see Level 1 heroes fall behind in numbers — it won’t be long until Level 5 starts to catch up with them!
- We’re finally starting to see more Level 6 heroes appear from natural progression, rather than from Stamina Vials. It’s still a small number, but should grow significantly over the next few weeks.
I know I’m beginning to sound like a broken record, but I continue to be surprised by the discrepancy in hero class numbers, with Knights especially, but also Warriors, far outpacing other basic classes. Perhaps this is a result of the particular focus on Mining right now.
But interestingly, Advanced classes are really starting to become a significant percentage of the hero population, especially with Paladins reaching over 50% of the number of summoned Wizards. And, despite the disparity between numbers within the Advanced classes, Sages and Dragoons continue to be exactly even, with 1694 of each this week.
The Adventurer’s Guild
In this section, we track heroes as they’re held in various Harmony wallets.
Total Hero Wallets: 18,026* (+493 / 2.81%)
Note: As of this morning, only 133 heroes were held in custodial wallets, and are not included in this data. This change is almost certainly because of the various snapshots ending today, but gives us a much better picture of hero-holding numbers.
Hero Wallet Growth
Hero wallet growth continued to slow this week, increasing by only 493 (+2.81%) — an all-time low since I’ve been tracking since the beginning of November.
Total Hero Wallets (Weekly Change / % Change)
• Feb. 14: 18,026 (+493 / 2.81%)
• Feb. 7: 17,533 (+798 / 4.77%)
• Jan. 31: 16,735 (+1,590 / 10.5%) (Note: two-week data)
• Jan. 17: 15,145 (+507 / 3.46%)
In terms of overall DFK profile stats — recall that these are the number of profiles created in the game, not necessarily all wallets that have interacted with it — we saw a wallet growth of only 2.44% — even slightly lower than last week. The share of hero wallets to profiles during this time remained static at 15.2%.
Hero Wallet Stats
This week the average number of heroes held per wallet increased by 3.1% to 7.06 heroes, while the median wallet held steady at 3.
The most notable shift this week is in the number of heroes held by the Top 50 wallets — a 4.4% increase to 8755. However, this is almost certainly because most players have removed their heroes from questing services and are holding them in their own wallets while the wait for the snapshots to complete.
Wallet Rankings
Please note the logarithmic y-axis scales of the charts below, and that this first chart groups wallets holding 100–124, 125–149, 150–174, 175–199, and 200+ heroes. If you have better ideas for how to display this data, please let me know!
Gen0 Wallet Stats
We’re also checking in on Gen0 wallets, in order to keep an eye on potential consolidation.
Total Gen0 Wallets: 858 (-5)
A bit of consolidation this week, as five fewer wallets hold Gen0s — seemingly all from smaller holders.
And although there was lots of single-hero change this week, there was much less larger Gen0 movement this week, with only Littledwf (+6), YePeX (-4), Greg (-3), Aenea (+2) standing out.
Whale Watch
Finally, let’s check in on our hero whales. While most of these numbers are relatively stable, we do see two major returns to the list: Dunsparrow and Veilvi (on an alternate account). Notably, Veilvi’s heroes are quite split up across multiple (obviously named) wallets, totaling at least 486 heroes.
Account Name / Hero Count (Change) / Gen0s
* New this week in bold
- DmblDoresNutsack / 374 (+8) / 0
- Pikul / 300 (-7) / 6
- leon / 282 (+3) / 8
- ぷでぃんぐ / 266 (+16) / 0
- Dunsparrow / 250 (+126) / 1
- holmes / 245 (+0) / 12
- Le Ogre / 242 (+7) / 26
- Boek / 236 (+15) / 15
- Pr_Belbie / 232 (-46) / 0
- VeVeVEILVI / 221 (+221) / 0
Total heroes held by Top 10: 2,648 (-16 / -0.6%)
Thank you Hero Whales for your support of DeFi Kingdoms!
That’s it for today! Thanks for reading, and please subscribe and stick around for future editions of The Hero’s Hold. If you like what you’re reading here, I’m happy to accept tips at: 0xf543311360d1072873D627B06ffe85587e8fc41a.
Questions, comments, suggestions? Send them to me at MrZipper#7564 on Discord or @MrZipper7 on Twitter.
Recent Issues
- Deep Dive: Active & Passive Genes — February 9, 2022
- The Hero’s Hold #13 — February 7, 2022
- The Hero’s Hold #12 — January 31, 2022
- The Hero’s Hold #11 — January 24, 2022
- The Hero’s Hold #10 — January 17, 2022
- Deep Dive: Hero Genetics — January 5, 2022
- Deep Dive on Advanced+ Class Summoning — November 27, 2021
Quick Links
- DeFi Kingdoms Official Site / Discord / Medium / Whitepaper / Charts
- Beginner’s Guide to DeFi Kingdoms (Samichpunch)
- DeFi Kingdoms Quick Links (Albus)
- Kingdom Watch (Magg)
- Lost Annals of Gaia (Vol. 1 / Vol. 2 / Vol. 3 / Vol. 4 / Vol. 5) (Samichpunch)
