DeFi Kingdoms Special Announcement and Mini AMA— March 16, 2022
This was a special announcement outside of the typical weekly Monday AMA cadence!
Not everyone has time to listen to the recording or wants something they can just read instead so I’ve been writing these written summaries. You can find summaries of the prior AMA’s in my index of DeFi Kingdom’s Articles.
I will upload the link to the live recording once DeFi Kingdom’s publishes it on their youtube channel (typically a couple days after the AMA).
If this is your first exposure to DFK and you are looking to learn how to start participating in the game/economy, you can check out my unofficial beginner’s guide here and index of many other DFK articles here.
Frisky Fox Announcement
Frisky: Welcome everyone. This is a special announcement. Not a traditional AMA like we typically do from this stage. It’s a special thing we haven’t done before. We want to share with the community first. We have some tweets and other collateral to be sent out as well.
It’s been a big day. We had the Perilous Journey return. Quite a sage. Heroes paving the way to Crystalvale, their sacrifices opened the way to have Crystalvale — coming March 30, 2022. As part of that we are also doing a blockchain, DFK Chain. Not only are we creating the largest and most fun blockchain game, we are creating a blockchain itself, which is amazing. We will have extra utility for Jewel, to be used as gas. All of these things blow my mind on how we are committed to staying on the cutting edge. We aren’t playing catch up. We are always innovating. As we start to add these additional responsibilities onto our plate its becoming more and more apparent that we are needing an entity to represent the team and our relationship with the project.
To that end, we are pleased to announce the creation of Kingdom Studios. Our team has been operating with a Kingdom Studios Email that allows us to stay more cohesive as a team as well as several other items that are helpful.
Here is an announcement around some of the reasoning and the link to our site:
Frisky Fox:
Hey @everyone, we’ve got a special announcement today. We are getting very close now to our first ever expansion into Crystalvale. This expansion not only brings a ton of new content and utility into our ecosystem, but also entails the building of an entirely new Blockchain, the DFK Chain!
This is a super exciting new development, further increasing the utility of our native JEWEL token so that it can be used as gas to pay for transactions, with portions of the gas spent going to the quest fund, validators, and being burned, adding an additional deflationary mechanism to the token. This new chain also allows us to begin building out a more in-depth metaverse for the project, with new opportunities for partnerships and collaboration.
As we expand on the responsibilities of the team, we have been thinking more and more about the unique relationship between the Core Team and the DFK Project. The Core Team is now being tasked with things like game development, blockchain development, merchandise, events, ecosystem growth, etc. To better enable us to deliver on these various things, we have identified the need for a more official entity for the team itself.
As such, we are very pleased to announce the creation of Kingdom Studios, which represents the Core Team building services and functionality for DeFi Kingdoms, DFK Chain, and future expansions. Kingdom Studios was created to show that the team that brought you DeFi Kingdoms is here for the long term. The creation of Kingdom Studios will help us achieve the goals on the current DeFi Kingdoms Roadmap, as well as other new features for years to come.
Check out the new website here: https://kingdomstudios.io/
We are excited to continue to support and build out the amazing DeFi Kingdoms ecosystem in this new Multichain phase of the project. Thank you everyone!
Kingdom Studios is similar to other blockchains where you have an ecosystem being built and you have a studio and team built around that to help progress the timeline of that ecosystem. We are Kingdom Studios. It’s the same team members, we are committed to the long term of this and this is a big step towards the staying power of this project.
I’ll hand over the Mic to Hubert here to talk about Perilous Journey and some of the results from it. Looking forward to continue serving you guys and building extra features as we work on that timeline.
Perilous Journey Update
Hubert: Really exciting news. We’ve known about it for a while but its exciting to see it announced.
As far as details about Perilous Journey, Mr. Zipper did a lot of the work on this but I wanted to talk through some of the statistics. There was a bug with the rewards for Elite and Exalted heroes that died, that made it so they got the lesser versions of the enhancement stones and attunement crystals. That is now fixed. Anyone claimed since that has been fixed will get the correct ones. Anyone that already claimed will receive an airdrop of the correct ones and can keep the ones they incorrectly received. Everything else went up without a hitch. Results have been a bit surprising!
83.7% of Heroes sent have been claimed. Hopefully we can get that to 100% before the deadline. There’s been some confusion on what happens if you wait until after that deadline. It’s generally not good. You’ll receive Jewel instead of Crystal and we’ll count them as though they had died for the Gen0 Raffle, and the casualty raffle has a lot more entries. Also you won’t receive the attunement crystals and enhancement stones, those are only if your hero actually died.
For the +5 to 3 stats, you have until April 4 to claim that. If you don’t before then, then you will lose it.
Right now with what has been claimed:
~45% of Heroes have survived (higher than I was expecting) I expected more commons to be sent out, but looks like more people were aiming for the higher rewards. Suprising, not a bad thing, but I assumed there would be a flood of floor heroes being sent.
Frisky: I was suprised by that too, but as players want to maximize their best heroes, they have to risk it for the biscuit.
Hubert: 25 Dread knights did not make it. A good 58 did make it.
The rest of the %’s are starting to even out. It’s interesting to see that people weren’t sending their miners, probably because they like the unlocking that miner’s provide. The other three professions were pretty well balanced. The miners that were sent were generally better (had a 46% survival rate, slightly higher than the other profession heroes on average).
I don’t have a breakdown of what kind of miner’s they were, but you can look forward to a lot of different displays of data and how everything went with the PJ and we want to encourage members of the community to put the data together in interesting ways.
Frisky: Huge shout out to Mr. Zipper and the bot commands he’s been making for the community! Thank you very much.
Hubert: I second that whole heartedly, he came in really clutch as I was asking for some extra data 20 minutes before this started and he gave me a good set of data. I wasn’t able to get fully through it, and I’m not exactly sure at what point he took the snapshot, but based on that so far the total amount of CRYSTAL awarded is ~406k as of the time of that snapshot. JEWEL total was ~150k. These could be higher if the snapshot was taken.
Misc. Updates Re Various Gameplay Mechanics
Frisky: Quest fund should have received a good bump then, since we put 400K into there (since only 150k Jewel has been paid out so far).
Hubert: Yes I wanted to be conservative.
The other two stats from that data set is that there have been ~80k tickets for the survivors, and ~98k for the casualty raffle. There is really no good reason to claim before the deadline. You will be making it more difficult to win one of the Gen0s if your hero survived and you wait until after the deadline to claim.
Frisky: A part of the launch was a foreshadow of the achievement system because part of PJ we gave the very first achievement.
Hubert: That’s right you can see the PJ achievement badge on any hero that survived. Also you won’t see this yet, but we have flagged each wallet on how many they sent and had survived.
Frisky: Those achievements and flags could be used for unlocking quest lines and snapshots in the future right?
Hubert: Yes, one thing we’ve already announced is that the heroes that went and survived will have access to a unique quest line. We don’t have details on that yet, but it also lets them participate in some PJ survivor only land tournaments.
Frisky: What about the dead heroes, we have the memorial, do we have any other plans?
Hubert: Yes, we’ve been talking about a graveyard zone. It’s subject to change, but hopefully we have other ways for heroes to be burned in the future and we’d like to have a way for people to see heroes that have been burned by events like this and others in the future. It’s a small thing, but we see some value in having a Graveyard zone.
Last thing — Land Tournaments — we talked about this on the AMA on Monday — there were some questions on more information about how to determine what would be the best allocation of those three +5’s so I wanted to give some more details. Things are still a bit subject to change but to at least help with making decisions for land tournament: What we are planning, each hero you submit to a tournament (they will be a tournament for each stat) you’ll have a point value for the stat value, with modifications if you have one or both of the stat genes (which will give it a boost over the numerical value). It will be a best of 7 match (currently planned at least). Will give you numbers — even match between two stats of the heroes and modifiers it would be 50/50. If one hero had 5 higher stat points, the lower side would have 47/53. If it was a difference 10 it would be closer to 40/60. If you were 20 higher it would be 25/75. It never goes to zero. So if you were 40 difference it would be around 10/90, and all are best of 7. So it would make it hard, but with RNG you can get all sorts of different results. Even the strongest hero may get unlucky and get kicked out of the tournament. I think you’ll improve your chances by increasing stats, but it won’t be a guarantee.
Everything we’ve said thus far about stats still hold true. We are still in the process of developing the combat system. As we have developed some things have changed somewhat, and Dex is becoming more of an accuracy stat. It will still modify certain attacks for certain heroes though. Combat is looking good. There’s a lot that needs to go into it. We’ve hired additional game developers to assist with this. Bearious is heading the combat design and then we hired a very talented game designer and programmer named Knox. That’s all I have to say, Fox did you have any questions about any of that?
Frisky: That’s really exciting news. I’ve been super excited about combat and anything that adds to the game concept. We’re always experimenting with new things that haven’t been tried before. To that end, we just appointed an internal task force (not something we’d normally announce) but we appointed this strike team to build out more mini games within the game. It will also include things like easter eggs, lore and content, more things between the major milestone features so that we can make the small things more and more fun. One of the things we are working on, I won’t say what it is because we are saving it for the Avalanche launch.
There have been some questions on whether we would be adding some licensing and terms of service. Those are some things we are now able to do. I.e. people have asked if they can use our Bloater image, so this would allow us to have a license for things like this. We are still working these things out with our lawyers so that we are doing what is the best for the community but also protected from a legal standpoint.
Voice Responses to written questions during this announcement:
Can we get an idea of whether there will be healers and what classes would they be?
Hubert: Yes, it will be what you would expect. Priest and Sage will have healing capabilities. I don’t think we’ve finalized all the abilities so we will probably see weaker heal abilities as well. But those are the two main ones I can share without saying something that I shouldn’t.
What about HP/MP how will that factor in?
Hubert: HP/MP — if you played an RPG this is the standard hit points and magic points. If you run out of HP you get knocked out and MP is what you use to cast magic and skills. They’ll both be very important to your heroes. Maybe there is more depth to the question that I didn’t follow?
Kingdoms Studio — anything to share on ownership model and xJewel/Jewel?
Frisky: Nothing really changes. xJewel will continue to vote on proposals. Kingdoms Studios will propose policies that can be ratified with votes. This is similar to what you are seeing other blockchains doing, such as Avalanche, which as the Avalanche chain which has entities set up to help support it, but the actual platform itself. E.g. Avalanche has Ava Labs, DFK will have Kingdoms Studios. Hero and Jewel ownership voting power remains the same and we’ll also probably have voting rights for land.
Any news on roadmap update?
Frisky: Not yet, we want to give it more thought and really flesh it out.
Are you hiring?
Frisky: Always things we are doing there, and we are working towards a job portal and job listings. It’s still in the works but we want to continue to find the strongest talent out there, and one of our biggest assets is our strong and professional community.
Rough Timeline for PJ Land Tournaments?
Hubert: It won’t be this month. From a mechanics standpoint we are very close to having it fleshed out, but we need to have a few other things in place. We hope to also have the travel system in place and that has UI aspects that will take some time. I don’t know if I even want to guess a date, but I doubt it will be this month. Fox if you want to say more than that?
Frisky: We don’t like to give hard dates because we spend a lot of time making sure we test things thoroughly. In this field more than any other field you have to make sure you spend enough time to make sure everything is thoroughly audited and vetted. It’s something we are all hands on deck for though.
PVP same class/hero or can any class participate?
Frisky: Any hero can participate, no real restriction yet, but all of these things are subject to change. Here in these AMA’s we are basically trying to give as much information as we can safely, because some things are still being worked, and we might say something that might be a bit off. Until something is released into production everything is still subject to change.
Update on Grant Application Process?
Frisky: It’s being reworked from the ground up.
Will we have the ability to put bids on Heroes on Tavern?
Frisky: We had a meeting about auctions today.
In game notifications and emails?
Frisky: The current architecture we are trying to build out could support this. You could sign a transaction with your wallet and then tie it to an email or a browser JOT token that would allow us to push notifications to your phone or your browser, I’m really excited about those things.
Any update on land utility?
Frisky: We had another meeting about this today to zero in on exactly the things we want to do for that. I can’t give a rough ETA other than to tell you that it’s high priority and we came to a conclusion on most things today.
Update on Raffles for Land and Gen0?
Frisky: The Gen0’s will launch with Phase 2 of Crystalvale. It may not be a full month between Dex/Gardens launch and Hero launch, but we have done all of this before. Those will come probably shortly after Crystalvale launch.
Written responses (after the Announcement) to various questions asked during the Announcement
Hubert Cumberdale can we get a new picture of a pet that can hatch?
Hubert: I think we are planning on teasing a bunch of things in Barcelona.
Is there going to be a limit to the amount of hero’s each wallet can enter into each stat land tourney?
Hubert: I will say that is likely just due to the timed nature that tournaments will entail. If we didn’t put a cap then many would likely forfeit due to not getting their transactions through in time.
Hi Hubert, Take a knight/wizard. With the knight being its main class, will the subclass wizard have spell casting abilities? Kind of like a dual-job system? Or will the subclass just focus more on the stats we already know(str/dex/wis…etc)
Hubert: It’s too early to get specific, but we are trying to include more than just the stats from subclasses in combat.
How does luck play into the tournaments?
Hubert: It will play a lot into the luck tournaments. Otherwise it won’t play a roll in the other tournaments. Keep in mind that we will likely not always do these single stat tournaments once combat is out.
Any update on level 5 summoning boost on summoned heroes?
Frisky: we got it all working, and then the contract size was too big, so we had to go back to the drawing board with the architecture. We’ve got some really cool things going now though with some new models that could solve this contract size issue for good.
There will be an airdrop to give people some atonement crystals that will make it right
What incentive do non-whale players have to participate in PvP, if they cannot afford to boost a high-level Mythic hero? Will there be different “tournament tiers”, for different rarity or level floors/ceilings? (in order to give different players of different investment level / experience a chance to compete?
Frisky: we talked a lot today about matchmaking and how to balance the PVP for players of different levels
Will we be able to single stake Crystal on the 30th?
Frisky: Yes
So with the tournaments do we have a roundabout date like middle of april or whatnot? also are your heroes that survived pj auto enrolled in all stat tournaments or can they only pick 1 or 2 like my paladin can it go into strength, end, and vit tournament or do i have to choose one?
Hubert: One hero can only participate in one tournament at a time. We may also add other restrictions, but I’ll save those details for later.
Thoughts around other prizes for runner ups on Land Tourneys?
Frisky: runner up prizes are an interesting idea… we could bring this up in our next meeting.
I will say that I’m really excited about the tournament reward model for lands. SO many other projects simply sell lands to their community directly, but we are doing something really amazing to give back to the community and make it not just a whale’s game
Hubert: I actually have been planning on runner up prizes
What does “crafting” even entail? will the new quest hapabelle is working on kind of jumpstart that?
Hubert: Crafting will be vital for making equipment, and it will be performed by Heroes. They will have their own crafting skill level like profession skill levels, and will need to input a set amount of ingredients to make something. Hapabelle’s quests are something else.
While you’re here I wanna try and squeeze some info out of you about land utility? Right now it remains that pie in the sky over inflated asset based purely on speculation, you might not know anymore about utility than we do, however it’s getting harder to get excited about winning something we know nothing about which may or may not have some future value. Do you have any specific plans you can share?
Hubert: We plan to release more details about our plans for lands prior to launching tournaments.
Can you expand at all on how you plan to make monks useful in PvP/PvE? What would make me want to use a monk in these scenarios?
Hubert: Each class has their own set of skills, and we are ensuring that monks have their place just like any of the other classes. Skills are going to be key to combat.
Conclusion
Hubert: Thank you all for joining us and thank you to everyone that participated in the Perilous Journey. I think it was successful. A lot of heroes got burned but it was an exciting event for the community.
Frisky: Would just like to second that. Loved to see the energy and the amount of people that participated blew me away. Kudos to Hubert and everyone that helped with that.
For Kingdoms Studios, I’m very excited about this new development and the ability that this gives us to serve the community and build out the ecosystem and the roadmap not just the game but the whole chain. Thanks for being the best community in the entire crypto space hands down.
