DeFi Kingdoms Team AMA (Dev Team) — May 23, 2022
For those unfamiliar with the project, the DeFi Kingdoms leadership team holds weekly AMA’s with the community on the discord server.
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 (mostly a transcript tbh). You can find the transcripts/summaries of the prior AMA’s in my index of DeFi Kingdom’s Articles.
Here is a link to the recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAMjsIEDVLI
This week, the AMA was from members of the Development team. AMA’s have different teams present to address different topics. Join the discord to follow future responses to questions they couldn’t address on the call! Go to the questions-bus-contacts-suggestions channel in the DeFi Kingdoms Discord server to submit questions!
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.
DeFi Kingdoms Website
DeFi Kingdoms Official Medium
DeFi Kingdoms Discord
Team Members Present:
https://defikingdoms.com/team.html
Team Updates and Opening Statements
State of the Project Update
Frisky Fox — I love the AMA with devs. We have to pry them away from the code they are working on, but we are working on a lot of really cool things. Just the technology aspect of it excites me and with our team pushing the envelope of what's been done and what is possible on blockchain. For a programmer like myself, its exciting from a nerd aspect.
We are writing these ups and downs in the space. As always in the crypto world there’s so much excitement and innovation and its very new. It’s a really fast-paced place to be and it’s exciting. Our team is continuing to prioritize high priority and high ROI projects, especially in these times when the markets are doing their things. We created a tokenomics committee meeting a couple weeks ago and have been meeting regularly. We talk about each individual feature, whether its inflationary or deflationary on various game aspects, whether ERC 20 tokens or hero NFTs. We ask if its adding new utility, if its adding a burn mechanic, and just having this extra pass where we really look over it 2–3x and make sure the measuring is right before cutting.
I feel like its made a difference. Pets and Duel are two big things coming out in the short term that have had the full experience of this committee and they are very well set up in terms of tokenomics and adding utility, versatility and playability. Duel I’ve been doing a lot of the solidity side of the coding. It will be the first time we’ve used Diamonds, the new ERC standard. That allows us to do some really cool things on the blockchain where you aren’t constrained by the size limit of the contract and can make a lot more complex things that are a lot more fun. Then on top of that, with tokenomics and having raffles on top of that that players can drive more and the whole combat-ish elements. This is our first Foray into PVP type combat. Axie built during the dip in 2018, more than a dip, it was an extended bear market. They continued building, they built NFTs, but it wasn’t until they added combat that it really exploded, that’s because it adds that whole element of competition, because what is more fun than being able to dunk on your friends. The economics of this are going to be really cool. We haven’t done anything like this but it will add really good utility for gold or jewels and will result in them being very deflationary while still incentivizing them to play.
Even though things are uncertain in Crypto, we are still very excited about what we are building and haven’t slackened their pace in terms of what we are putting out as quickly and effectively as we can.
We teased over the weekend some big things coming that will involve eggs. Having seen some of the demos I’m really excited and want to go pick up some more eggs. We’re going full speed and pushing and continuing to build, build, build whether markets are up, down or sideways.
Dreamer is at an event right now and wasn’t able to join for this one but will be here for our next one.
Other Development Team Updates
Mr. Faun — Great to be here, excited for this one because the no. 1 thing I can provide you is that in solidity space I’m still here, magnus is still here, Kastorp is still here. I’ve seen things being said in chat and concerns and we’ve had to make changes to ensure long term viability of this project, but those changes have been done as a team, specifically within the solidity group. It’s been rewarding to feel the support from them as we enter into times of uncertainty. I’m very excited about the next few releases and also our technology as we become more cross chain. Excited about CV and more that we can put into DeFi kingdoms, including things that aren’t just gameplay related. I posted over the weekend that I’ll be focusing on the developer’s page so that we can give our community that are those core developers at having a chance to have the access to info they need to build their product. I’ve worked a bit with Thanpolas. So if you are in the DFK devs server, I’ll be communicating with devs there directly.
There’s a lot to be excited about. I know that’s hard to say when the token is in a downturn, but the number one thing I can provide is that we are still here and we aren’t planning on leaving.
Frisky — From a tech. standpoint, what are you most excited about to be working on, something that’s newer or cool from a tech. standpoint?
Faun — It’s so easy to say, but the whole project. I shared with the team an experience i had with a friend who wanted to get into crypto. They knew I was involved heavily and asked if I could help them get in and they asked if I could help them buy an NFT. As I helped them, i thought, this NFT is lame compared to what I feel like you can do and how it can develop and progress, especially as it regards to all the work we’ve been doing with pets. I enjoy working here and the overall vision. I’m very excited about DFK chain. I know its been a bit of a lull for some people, but the more Ican work on that in future expansions is exciting for me. We’ve learned a lot of lessons on expansions and how we can improve that process going forward.
Frisky — We’ve been working on nodes that can index and react to events on the chain. We did that to help address the jewel mining thing. Having that extra tool in our tool box will also help with the match making for Duels.
BeetleDude — I would echo what Mr. Faun said. We have a strong team. I have my night commander Typicool who does awesome work get features out. We added a couple of new folks to the front-end team that haven’t been introduced yet but excited to get them in. They are great additions to the team and excited to have them on board. Based on what I’ve been working on, heads down 90 hours a week, it’s been amazing. I’ve been working on pets and every time I add something new I get super excited. I actually just incubated a pet and will hatch it here in a bit. Looks like I just got a turtle, won’t say what type because that might be too much alpha. The new pet catalog is amazing and being able to scroll through and see all the amazing art and everything that was put together to make this work.
I’m also super excited for duels. Fox showed an example of that the other day and it was pretty amazing. I’ll be working on duels now.
Frisky — every feature we put out needs solidity work, front-end work and then something in the API. There’s a three development prongs to every feature, and that doesn’t even include art.
Faun — if we are going to drop alpha here then I’ll drop a little. We are aware of the need for in game transactions for our tokens, outside of just using the automated market maker marketplace DEX. Since that doesn’t fit the need for many of our in-game assets. We are working on deploying what I imagine will be the first major order book system on DFK. We are excited for that and excited for what that means for in-game experiences as well as the potential external ROI that that could bring in for the game. I’m not going to go into too much detail on that. I’m really excited about that. You asked what I was most excited about, and I wasn’t sure how much detail to share, but if its accepted and if Harmony can work with that, as well as DFK chain and C-Chain we could have an alternative presence for our ERC20 and ERC1155 assets that have lower liquidity.
Chonk Norris — You guys want to know some cool stuff about the new API we are working on? Moving to the new architecture will make things more event based, which is nice because we can update things in real time as they happen on the chain rather than pulling that info. That will enable a lot of cool things for community to get into that type of information. If we get events from the blockchain and index that data then we send that data to be mutated and once its saved it triggers events from there (so if you are subscribing) then once that data saved it says hey here’s new information for anyone that is listening.
Frisky — Nice so instead of having to pull over and over you just wait for it to be sent.
Faun — I’m excited too, once we get started rolling with the dev docs we’ll find a nice happy home for API integrations on our developers page.
AMA Live Questions
(Thanpolas) I’d like to make a suggestion for leaderboards, especially ones that pay out and the daily one that resets at 3am local time (which isn’t really fair for me, considering the daily ones get filled up within an hour). Jot that down as an item for how leaderboards work.
Frisky— that’s good input, maybe we stagger by 18 hours. For Duels, there will be different prize entries that can be put in. Some will run hourly, some every 12 hours, some every few days. You’ll have some where if its on in the middle of the night it will be middle of day for someone else. There will be opportunities potentially to hit less traffic competitions.
(Thanpolas) There are three topics I’d like to illustrate to show the environment we are working under. (1) Blocking of allowing interaction with in game contracts by non-EOA wallets — this was blindsiding and the rationale for it being a preventative measure from mining.
Frisky —It actually is still a protection until we get the other thing in place with Jewels, because of the way we set it up with the listener, there is still a risk from the smart contract vector and that’s why we did that to mitigate the risk.
Faun — if you want me to spend the time to explain why it was necessary to block the exploit, I can or I can lay it out in the DFK dev discord.
(Thanpolas) (2) anyone developing anything for DFK, there is a rule on the DFK dev discord that there are no third party sites allowed to be linked and there’s a lot of confusion around that, there’s no process on how someone can get on the allow list. We don’t know what is borderline and problematic and what is not. So people have no means to advertise their services to the DFK crowd and I think this should be addressed. (3) last item, I was pleased to hear that about the first automated order book. There are a lot of websites that are very sophisticated for this, and they act like escrows. They are trustless engines and they are an innovation in the entire crypto space. It is the best solution for item trading and they’ve been implemented by community members in DFK already. We all know LPs don’t work for low liquidity items. What has been the case that those websites are stigmatized and consistently banned from being mentioned in discord. They aren’t malicious. You get confused players and confused moderators, even mod commanders, where you’ve picked the community to fight between each other and you have confused players conflating third party websites and the exploiters, and now you have to prove to everyone you aren’t an exploiter. The question I have is a simple one then, how are you going to remedy the situation and bridge the community and bring them together to move away from this toxic mob mentality.
Frisky —Okay so concern is there’s a strong community of devs building things, and the feeling is that they should be more integrated into the narrative of things? I want to say I agree. The devs in our community are what I really like about this community. This is why we have the grant program and the community program. Part of that is once you are approved for that, it's essentially like us saying that we think this is something that could provide a lot of value, and perhaps there are options for more integration, even in game, or maybe having a channel in our discord. This is something we’ll be improving more. We have policies about sharing outside links because there's the risk of new players knowing what is legit and what is not.
Thanpolas — but you need a process, you can’t call everyone a con.
Frisky — agreed. This is something we’ll need to talk about more on the leadership team. Maybe we can create an area on our website or discord where those things can be shared. We’d have to be very careful though because there are risks. Risks that there are bad actors that could share copies of sites or things that appear good, but then provide a malicious website that will drain their wallets.
Faun — biggest concern for me is that there's sentiment that we are accusing our community devs of being malicious and I want to fix that. several items in our action plan is to build out our developer page and some of that could include highlighting some developer projects that are, hard to say trusted because we could become legally liable, but that’s a key part of everything going into the Kingdom Builder program. The Kingdom Builder program is meant to solve for this. Not just funding, but also process for projects to become endorsed by our group and to allow for there to be a resource for our communities to see what projects are out there outside of DFK. I think an easy win would be that everyone approved should be posted on some consent list and anyone wanting to use them can know that they went through that kingdom builder process. If you want to be a community dev outside of that, that will be hard for us to slap an “approved” stamp on it. I do want to finish by saying though that I’m personally being tasked with trying to bridge the gap between our community devs and our project. I think we have a lot of room to grow and we can improve a lot on how we treat our community devs. I hope that gives you some hope.
Frisky — even options to be whitelisted to interact with our contracts and APIs, there’s a lot of opportunities for a lot of developers to come together into a single metaverse and build together. We just need to make sure it's done properly. It just takes a lot of time. It’s at the top of our list.
(FaultyPoker) What are the item drops rates for training quests, and will they be released soon if you don’t know them off hand. Shvas runes, eternal pages, lesser attunement crystals. All the profession quests have the drop rates but TQs do not.
Frisky—that’s a mechanics question. That’s a good comment, we’ll raise to Hubert to see if he can get that added to the docs.
(Mettez) I wanted to pick up from the Q on the unlock schedule from weeks ago. Last time I brought this up we had an entire discussion and the conclusion was to say that we need an analysis on comparing theories of time on how the unlock will actually look like and to have an actual idea of what the sell pressure would be compared to prior times. I did some analyses and was wondering what your thoughts were on how to handle the pressure. Right now the current pressure is Jewel being emitted in gardens and then the mining. I’ll ignore the Jewel being emitted because its going to relatively stay the same, so I’ll compare jewel unlocking due to mining quests and jewel that will unlock due to unlocking. We se ~40–45k jewel unlocking per day from mining. If you look at the unlocking schedule though, that will go up to nearly 800k per day. How does the team plan to deal with a nearly 20x increase.
Frisky— I know you are ignoring emissions, but it does play a part because the way it was set up was that the way the unlocking would work there would be no big cliffs. Right now the garden emissions are 2x as high as they would be at the time of unlock period. For half of our project, the jewel being circulated from emissions will be higher than unlocking, but you are spot on that there needs to be mechanics in place to alleviate the pressure and other ways to creatively think of how we can use those Jewels in our system. That’s why up until now we’ve been focused on trying to acquire new player bases, as you do that you acquire more demand for the jewels so as there are more emissions or unlocking it helps offset with the increased demand. The other part we are focused on now is adding burn mechanics for JEWELs and other things in our game so that there’s a lot more utility. We’ve also looked at what we can do ahead of unlocking to see what we can do. Maybe summoning with locked jewels, or higher level profession quests that would help to increase the rate of those earlier rather than it all falling to the unlock period. We’ve also looked into separate tracts for unlocking, i.e. saying hey I’ll do it over 2 years and in the meantime I get higher immediate effects. Maybe increased mining proficiency now or land impacts. Lots of things we are looking at, but its one of the main things we are talking about in our tokenomics committee later this afternoon. Some of the ideas may require a governance vote.
(Mettez) Even with the emissions cutting in half, it seems they will be marginal compared to the Jewel that will unlock. At current rate I’m a bit worried to see how it will all play out, but I’m glad you guys are thinking about this and looking forward to what you will bring to the table.
(Stronghold) Difference between game mechanics and dev team, do you still discuss game mechanics or do I need to wait for one of those AMAs? [HUBERT JOINS]. Pets will obviously be massive and we are all looking forward to it and want information yesterday if possible. Will pets be on such a scale that they’ll be akin to heroes and if so will we get a specific channel for that? I know you’ve been hesitant to add a true hero channel, but would pet discussion channel be possible? Last thing we want to do is derail every other channel to discuss the next imminent thing.
Frisky— A month ago we were looking into a really cool thing on Discord where you could add roles to people based on in-game items they have and then they could have access to the channels that have those roles. I think having a specific channel for a pet-specific discussion on that.
Bolon — I do have thoughts on that, but all of my thoughts stopped talking once I heard Strongholds voice. Can we address that? Faun — I thought it was a recording. Bolon — chat has decided you will read all announcements going forward. Also everyone wants to know where you are from so they can go and find a spouse.
We do have room for a pets channel along with launch, but it probably make sense to put it out prior to launch. Also shout to MrZipper, who is working on an addition to hero bot for this. We’re going to have several pets channels.
As for the program Fox mentioned, I was really excited about it, they don’t support Harmony tokens though, so we’ll have to table that for the time.
(Stronghold) Looking forward to DFK Duel, naturally, you’ve mentioned the matchmaking system. It's wonderful to hear that this will be in place, the last thing I want to do is go against 9 dread knights. There are many people in discord though, that I’d like to mastermind in Private duels. Will this be possible?
Frisky — Glad you asked. There are two use cases. Those that want to play casually against their friends and then others that want to play ranked matches. Rewards for those have to be different as well. For those playing ranked matches vs private matches, you can’t have someone climb ranks doing private matches. At launch I don’t think that we’ll have private matches available right away, or at least in terms of having a wager, but that is something we’ll want to do towards the end, where you can challenge someone and put up a wager. There’s some stuff we need to keep in mind, like what if someone is luring someone in and taking advantage of them with a high wager and then trouncing them. At start it will be ranked matches and things like raffle rewards. You’ll be able to choose when you are going into duels and the lobby or if you’ll want to do a private match and only that address can join, and then you let them know and they can go and enter. Those just wouldn’t be ranked or have any rewards, but you could do some sort of off-chain arrangement.
(cryptonoob) Are we getting any closer to group questing for gardening quests?
Frisky — we talked about this this morning. In the context of players that have a lot of hero's and it takes them a long time and we want to make sure its easy to do things efficiently without having to rely on off-chain processes to help them with that. Its something we are actively working on. Faun has redone quest core from the ground up. I did the first one and he and Magnus completely redid it and it has a lot more flexibility there.
Faun — It’s always a fun balance of demand and resources. That will have to happen before profession lvl 10 quests can happen and profession lvl 10 quests are right around the corner. If you want more detailed context for what is needed for that to occur, we have quest v1 system and v2 system. V2 handles fishing, foraging and training quests. We’ve pushing gold and jewel mining into testing. Actively being migrated is gardening. once that is migrated it's a matter of building out the front end. There’s not much left. it’s actively being worked on. We’ve had discussion this week about specifically attempting to make it as easy as possible for humans to play this game and there’s different ways in which we are looking at that. If it's so hard for humans to participate with high quantities of heroes and gameplay then it innately incentivizes action that we aren’t trying to do. We want to make it as easy as possible for a human to do this.
Frisky — this is stuff that wasn’t possible under the old architecture but now is. We want humans to be able to play it in the most efficient way without being painful.
Faun — once we’ve migrated gardening we should be able to start rolling out CV quests. So CV quests will be fast behind the Qv2 quests migrating
(Malience) As we go into having an official game loop, a small one with Duel and hopefully a bigger one with PVP, generally when these gain traction, they get mass adoption. If we go into 3v3 hero competitions as PVP, then we don’t currently have enough heroes to hold mass adoption. While many are wondering what we are doing with these excess heroes, some bullish people are wondering how we will get to a number of heroes that would support mass adoption of PVP.
Frisky — If you look at Axie and when it went mainstream, everyone wanted to get 3 heroes. It will end up similarly here. You’ll need a party of heroes that have synergies. People say we need mechanics in place for heroes to be burned and we agree some are good, like Perilous Journey, or maybe even a dark summoner (something that hasn’t been discussed before). We’ve talked about these types of things and always wanted to hold our ground on. There will be a lot of options there for teams, and there will be different metas and styles of teams. I agree that you’ll see a lot more new players that are looking into trying to create certain types of teams to be the best at that.
Faun — I’ve seen prototypes for PVP and this ties a bit back into Mettez’ comment with unlocked jewel and the greatest thing we can do is provide mor utility to our heroes and Jewel and I would say PVP is kind of like the icing on the cake and then its like okay what is next. It make me shiver to think it wouldn’t be this year. I’m not excellent on giving exact estimates, but its a huge part of our game. I agree it will drive huge demand. We do need to take into consideration though the markets and making sure we can launch this successfully into market headwinds. I agree on heroes, that if we can get the adoption that it deserves, we’ll need a lot more summoning, and we are built in a way that can handle that.
(Malience) Will equipment be before PVP or after and will there be seasonal equipment?
Frisky — Pets are very much in a way like equipment. They will be equipped and augment aspects of the hero card. Part of equipment needed building out the system where you could attach something and augment stats, which is what we’ve been doing with pets. I personally would like it to be very close to launch of PVP.
About having enough heroes, Axie has almost 6M heroes and we have a fraction of that. There’s a lot of upside there and the demand that could come from something like combat. Axie really took off once combat was added and it was at that point that everyone wanted to get some Axies. I totally agree that once we launch there won’t be enough.
Closing Remarks
BeetleDude — super excited for pet release, you guys are going to be blown away.
Chonk— I just want to hear stronghold talk again.
Frisky Fox —I just want to echo Beetledude’s sentiment. I’m in a lot of meetings and heads down in the code so I don’t often get to see some things until ready to launch. I saw pets and I was blown away. It is way cooler than I thought it would be. With me doing the DFK Duel stuff I am more aware of that and I think a lot of people on our team did get to see it in our team meeting last week. There’s some really cool hard features coming out that will be like a 1 2 punch. Excited to see how it will be received. Thanks to the devs for all of the hard work. They are all moving mountains in the blockchain space and doing things that haven’t been tried. That’s our MO, trying to be on the cutting edge and always trying to push the envelope. Excited to be here and part of the team and part of this community. Just wanted to say thank you to everyone. Bullish.
Check out my Index of Samichpunch DeFi Kingdoms Articles For a list of all of my other articles. You should definitely bookmark this index. Follow my medium account to get updates when they go live!
