Introduction
Well met, adventurer — welcome to The Hero’s Hold! 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 2/21 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
Announcements from DFK Day at ETH Denver dominated the news this week, and there was so much it’s hard to keep track of!
Here are a few notable things that happened this week:
Profile Picture Updates
As part of the gradual rollout of a new game UI, this week’s patch gave us the ability to change our profile pictures, with a selection of updated PFP options by Atlas Parker.
Additionally, we can now also use our own Heroes as PFPs. All of these can be changed by Stylist Sandra in the Marketplace — currently free, but in the future, this feature will come at a small fee.
DFK Day at ETH Denver
Tuesday’s DFK Day at ETH Denver was jam-packed with detail and info — and that’s just what we got to experience at home! Here are transcriptions of the four main events from the day, all of which are worth reading:
- Opening Remarks — FriskyFox, Dreamer
- Dev Panel — Frisky Fox, Mr. Faun, Nonlinear Penguin, Professor Tango
- DFK Grant Program — Dreamer, Sunbear, Frisky Fox
- Alpha Announcements — Frisky Fox, Dreamer, Hubert Cumberdale, Bearious Rex
Alpha Announcements
But, of course, you’re all here for the alpha, so here’s a quick summary of what we learned:
- The Perilous Journey — coming soon, the Perilous Journey will allow you to send your Heroes off on a voyage of discovery to Crystalvale. Few of them will survive — the base survival rate for a Level 1, Basic, Common Hero is 35%. Rewards for success will include CRYSTAL, a full XP bar, a special achievement, access to tournaments for a subset of land, Gen0 raffle tickets, and more. Rewards for failure include JEWEL, Runes, and Enhancement Stones and Attunement Crystals. Gen0s can be sent and will increase the survival rates of other heroes, but cannot die themselves, and will not earn the rewards.
- Champion Program — Dreamer introduced the first details of the upcoming Champion Program as a way of lowering the barrier to entry to players who don’t immediately have the assets to purchase a Hero. While full details are still to come, initial implementation would allow somebody to pay a Champion to quest with their Heroes, subject to the terms of the smart contract, and without the risk of the Hero leaving the owner’s wallet. Champions will be able to build up their reputation, leading to future interactions with guilds.
- PVP Gameplay — finally, Bearious Rex, DFK’s relatively new Game Design Director, gave us a preview of what PVP combat might look like. As expected, PVP will be 3v3 combat, but many were not expecting the announcement of idle combat, in which decisions are made ahead of time and combat plays out according to how the teams are set up (auto chess style). This is primarily due to the team’s decision that all of the game logic exist on the blockchain, rather than simply recording the results of a more interactive (and potentially exploitable) battle later. What this does, however, is place increased emphasis on hero roster, the skill trees that we keep hearing about, and other future modifiers like equipment. Bearious’ announcement also noted that PVP combat will be coming before PVE — a notable change from the published roadmap.
Game Mechanics AMA
Weekly Community AMA — feat. Game Mechanics Team (Video | Writeup)
Another AMA filled with essential reading/listening, the Game Mechanics team previewed a number of upcoming features:
- Travel Time — something we’d heard only a little bit about previously, nonlinearpenguin laid out how our Heroes will need to travel to other places in the world in real time. The team is planning on connecting Land Tournaments to this mechanic, making it impossible for a player to send the same heroes to multiple tournaments at once. We’ve also heard previously that higher-level quests could take place in other areas of the map, and this mechanic would certainly affect those too.
- Land Tournaments — beyond the discussion of Travel Time, Hubert gave us the first details about Land Tournaments, which will be a simplified version of combat with best of 7 matches based on Hero stats (with stat genes potentially coming into play as well). This will also for building out some of the mechanisms for larger-scale combat (as above) later.
- Hero Skills — more on combat, and as above, we’re starting to get a fuller picture of the scope and role of Hero skills in combat. It’s clear at this point that Heroes will have a full, class-based skill tree that can be unlocked and built up with the Skill Points earned through leveling. Additional skill options will be available through the Hero’s genes (Active/Passive), and subclass may play a role as well, though the details of that are still being determined. These choices will significantly affect how combat plays out across Hero teams.
- Crafting — something we’ve always assumed was coming, but with only minor details, we confirmed that crafting by Heroes will be coming, and that the team is currently working on all of the level 1–20 resources for that system. In fact, this is one of the reasons that higher level profession quests have been delayed.
In Smaller News…
Some other news, announcements, and content from the past week:
Governance Votes
- In accordance with the new DFK Gardens policy, DFK is holding votes for whether to keep the incentivized JEWEL-SUPERBID, JEWEL-MIS, and JEWEL-XYA pools. A 75% vote threshold is required to retire any of them. At the time of writing, there is strong support for ending SUPERBID and MIS, while Freyala (XYA) is putting up a strong fight. The voting ends on Wednesday afternoon.
- FriskyFox announced last night that as a first step toward moving toward more decentralized governance, there would be a vote on whether Heroes would have votes toward governance. Options range from weighting Heroes between 0 and 10 xJEWEL. The vote closes on Wednesday at 9:15pm ET.
And from the community:
- Mettez released his long-awaited tome, “The Facts on Hero Stats,” which is the must-read of the week
- Weghuz expanded on his Hero “Class Score” with a “Growth Score,” and popped both of them into a new website: https://dfkanalytics.com/
- JEWELCAST— Live, feat. Brynly
- The Inner Grove Podcast — Play DeFi Kingdoms With Us
- Adventures in DeFi Kingdoms Podcast, Episode 17
- Crypto with Tosh — DFK Land Tournaments
- Crypto with Tosh — ETH Denver Livestream with Bolon, Rissen, and Purple Onyon, w/guest appearances by Dreamer and FriskyFox
The Crystal Ball
A few things that the team has mentioned we can expect in the coming weeks:
- The Perilous Journey — Given the announcement of upcoming details about The Perilous Journey, we can expect that the event itself is right around the corner, probably landing with the patch next Wednesday.
- Crystalvale — Still clearly a few weeks out (the Perilous Journey event needs to begin and end first!), but Crystalvale is definitely coming, and it’s coming soon!
- Stamina Changes, Gardening Updates, Locked JEWEL Contract Updates — All things that I’ve mentioned previously and that are very much still in the works, as Fox’s announcement last night made clear.
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: 133,302 (+5,945 / 4.67%)
Hero Growth
Hero summoning continued to slow this week, now that the various snapshots have all come to an end (it hit the bottom on 2/14). The total number of heroes increased by 5,945 (4.67%), with an average of around 850 new heroes summoned every day.
Total Heroes (Weekly Change / % Change)
• Feb. 21: 133,302 (+5,945 / 4.67%)
• Feb. 14: 127,357 (+6,306 / 5.21%)
• Feb. 7: 121,051 (+8,325 / 7.39%)
• Jan. 31: 112,726 (+8,990 / 8.67%)
Tavern Volume
Initial concerns about last week’s tavern slowdown seem like they may have been unwarranted, as purchases picked up quite a bit again this week — having bottomed on 2/14 at 762 sales. The average this week was 1045 sales/day, vs 932 from the previous week. We’ll continue to track this data going forward, and see how the Perilous Journey announcement later this week impacts the tavern.
Note: As with the other data, the daily numbers represent the 24 hours prior to 8am ET on the listed day.
Hero Stat Breakdowns
As the Hero leveling competition ended yesterday, the top end of the level chart also separated quite a bit. While 36 Heroes hit Level 10 and will be entered into the Crystalvale Gen0 raffle, we find that there are no longer any Level 9 heroes, and only one Level 8 — suggesting that everybody who chose to power level in this way, indeed, made it to 10.
The Adventurer’s Guild
In this section, we track heroes as they’re held in various Harmony wallets.
Total Hero Wallets: 18,598* (+572 / 3.17%)
Note: As of this morning, 578 heroes were held in custodial wallets, and are not included in this data.
Hero Wallet Growth
Hero wallet growth continued slowly this week, increasing by 572 (+3.17%) — but slightly higher than last week’s all-time low .
Total Hero Wallets (Weekly Change / % Change)
• Feb. 21: 18,598 (+572 / 3.17%)
• 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)
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 2.64% — just slightly higher than last week. The share of hero wallets to profiles during this time ticked up very slightly to 15.3%.
Hero Wallet Stats
This week the average number of heroes held per wallet increased by 1.1% to 7.14 heroes, while the median wallet held steady at 3.
Relatively speaking, it was a very quiet week for hero holding. The biggest shift is in the number of heroes held by the Top 50, but as with last week, these numbers are significantly skewed from week-to-week because of custodial questing services.
On the lower end of the spectrum, wallets holding only one hero increased by 1.7%, but the overall share of one-hero wallets nevertheless slipped by -1.1%.
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, 200–299, and 300+ 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: 856 (-2)
And as we’ve come to expect, not a lot of movement on the Gen0 front, with the total number of wallets declining by two, and +5 among the Top 50 holders.
And again, very little significant individual movement this week, with only Sefi-Mingdoms (-3), yojimbo (+2), Cookie (+2), HtoTheIzzoBLT (+2), and Aenea (-2) standing out.
Whale Watch
Finally, let’s check in on our hero whales. These numbers continue to be relatively stable, though a few names have dropped off the list since last week and heroes were re-shuffled to other places. This week, we do, however, welcome Ansem — also a Top 10 Gen0 holder — to the list for the first time.
Account Name / Hero Count (Change) / Gen0s
* New this week in bold
- DmblDoresNutsack / 367 (-7) / 0
- leon / 303 (+21) / 8
- Pikul / 300 (+0) / 6
- ぷでぃんぐ / 269 (+3) / 0
- holmes / 245 (+0) / 12
- Boek / 240 (+4) / 15
- Le Ogre / 234 (-8) / 26
- VeVeVEILVI / 222 (+1) / 0 [21 Gen0s on main account]
- Pr_Belbie / 222 (-10) / 0
- Ansem / 211 (+6) / 14
Total heroes held by Top 10: 2,613 (-35 / -1.32%)
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
- The Hero’s Hold #14 — February 14, 2022
- 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
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- Lost Annals of Gaia (Vol. 1 / Vol. 2 / Vol. 3 / Vol. 4 / Vol. 5) (Samichpunch)
