DeFi Kingdoms Team AMA (Development Team) — December 6, 2021

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. You can find summaries of the prior AMA’s in my medium index.

You can find a link to the actual recording here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yp7yBM3fxcE

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 Community Updates / suggestions channel to submit questions! https://discord.gg/bDwN2WYqy7

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 the official DFK tutorials here.

Team Members Present:

• Frisky Fox
• Professor Tango
• Xeno
• BeetleDude — been with project for two months. First time on the stage. Been a blast to work on the project. Comes from a web development background and is mostly what he’s been focused on here. Anytime there is an issue that involves web development he is right on it. Many of the improvements that happen from our feedback are spearheaded by him.

Team Updates and Opening Statements

Frisky Fox: The format for our AMA’s is always evolving. One thing we like to do at the start of every AMA is give a recap of the past week (which can feel like a lifetime in the crypto space). Last week we had an AMA where we experienced with a format of inviting people to come up on stage and ask questions. Those can be hard because there are so many people that would like to ask questions and never enough time.

This last week has been really eventful. We announced our plans to expand into Avalanche with Crystalvale along with some details on economics. There is still a lot to hammer out in terms of airdrops and we’ll be sharing some of those things in the coming days and weeks so stay tuned for those. We will make sure to give everyone enough heads up so that you have an opportunity to put yourself in the best situation to take advantage of these details once announced. Avalanche is obviously a strong chain, lots of users and liquidity and strong tech.

We launched our NPC shop and you can start selling items for quests and saving up for those eggs. This is just the first foray into the NPC stores and and upcoming Alchemist and crafting where you’ll see actual utility for the items that you are harvesting from these quests.

We also launched our quests on Monday into production. It’s been about a week so far. There’s been a few issues with API (which is strange because the API hasn’t been able to index all events, because it seems not all events are being sent to the node (might be too many events going to the node)). We have implemented some fixes so there’s always a fall back method. Our team has been amazing on this, one of which is Beetle Dude. He has been very instrumental in making that work even without the API being the primary source of information.

We’ve added a new talented person to help with API matters. He has so many ideas and we are very excited to see what he comes up with. It is going to be very important for us to revamp the API so we can scale horizontally and especially as we go cross chain so that we can have a unified API that can store information across all these individual ecosystems. There is a lot of stuff he’ll be working on and we are looking forward to what he’ll be doing (Pinecone is his discord name).

We also hired a new solidity developer from the Avalanche ecosystem. He writes really good unit tests and has already been overhauling that stuff. He’s going to be instrumental with meditation circle and land mechanics.

Professor Tango: Echoing Fox, we are taking the issues with RPC and API very seriously. We have new team members to help address these types of issues.

AMA Questions

Are there plans to add more safety warnings when listing your hero for sale?

Tango: This is already live. You now have to type “Sell” when selling or “Hire” when renting out. At some point we can only do so much. We don’t want you to run a marathon to sell your hero. We feel like this is as far as we can take this without being cumbersome and should address people accidentally selling. Always open to suggestions on this though.

Are there plans to add more volume control to the game? When I use headphones it doesn’t go low enough.

Tango: This isn’t high priority, but we are upgarding our howler module and try to do some advanced things to highlight the work that Pogo (music artist) has done for us and to allow users to have some more control. We’ll take this and see if we can have some more granular controls. Not a big priority but we will look into it.

Any plans to balance fees to rent and summon?

Fox: Currently when you hire you pay the rental fee and then also the cost to summon (as though you owned the hero yourself). Some of the Gen0’s have hit their cap of 30J. As Heroes have later generations and less summons available it will get more expensive. Part of this is that there is a big risk/reward structure where you might get a hero worth many multiples what you paid, but might also have to sell for less than you paid.

We have other things in the works, such as renting heroes out where you can have control of that hero for a few days or a week and pay a rental fee and then have the ability to send that hero on a quest and keep the rewards. This will play into our future foray into scholarship.

Tango: Sometimes it might be cheaper to just use your own heroes to summon. I don’t have a diverse gene pool so I end up running into the same issues where I keep getting the same heroes or they are related and so Its worth it in those cases to go find a good rental. It needs to be worth it for someone to rent out their hero, so no current plans to change anything.

Are there any plans for holiday themed maps?

Tango: We’ve already done some holiday stuff (Halloween). We’ve definitely talked about this and making it ever changing. The reality is that we’ve over booked ourselves and over stretched ourselves on a few things so we are focused on other items. A lot of those assets could be better spent on game mechanics and expansions to other chains rather than holiday themed art. If there are fun things we can do int he meantime we will definitely try to fit that in. Nothing official in our roadmap on this.

Fox: You saw some things for Halloween, you may see something for winter holidays.

Are there plans to be able to control/move your avatar through the DFK world?

Beetle: Definitely on our long term roadmap, no specific timeline though. Initial steps of research have started. Group of unity developers that are looking into this. We all have a preference for being able to control your heroes directly, so its definitely on the roadmap and we’ll keep people updated on this as we get more ideas on how to make this work with what we currently have so far.

Tango: We have some amazing devs looking into this. We definitely don’t intend for everything to be like the current foraging/fishing quests, we want some engaging real time stuff to happen so its absolutely on the roadmap.

Fox: Yes, things like exploring on the map and entering into a dungeon, etc.

Tango: In addition there’s this idea of passive vs active questing. It would be cool to be able to walk up to a bush and start foraging by doing that.

Whale measures in place for land? How will regular people have access?

Fox: It won’t be an auction or flat sale. There’s a lot of people that might have a presumption of how this will play out, but you’ll have to have heroes of a certain level that will need to be qualified to complete a quest to obtain the land. So you’ll have to be playing the game and able to complete the quests to get the land. By doing this it will give you the right to join the sale for that land. It will still cost x amount of Jewels to do it, but if you are the first to complete that quest, then you’ll be the first to access that opportunity for a certain amount of time. It will still be an expensive opportunity and as such whales will end up with a good amount of it.

Can you elaborate more on what utility profession genes have other than reduced stamina cost?

Tango: We want to make sure that if your profession is a miner, then they won’t be the best forager/fisher. We wanted to make sure it made sense contextually so that people can start getting more immersed into the story. As the game progresses, you’ll see a fisher who is really good at fishing start being able to do more active fishing quests, etc. Generally we will follow what other MMOs do on this front. So mining might be able to smelt some things and make ingots useful in crafting, and certain profession may be better at different crafting's. Other things will all come to play such as elements, etc and help identify your hero.

On Stage AMA Questions:

Are you still thinking about that “commoner” hero or “commoner” type NFT? Is this something you are still thinking about and considering adding?

Fox: So the commoner idea was the idea of having a player be able to come in for a very small entry point and be able to play, but not be able to earn as much. We’ve talked about it and haven’t headed too far down the road on that.

Tango: There are a couple of concepts on this. As was mentioned we are looking into the concept of being able to move around in the game. Once we implement that, it doesn’t make sense for all 50 heroes to be in the game running around (although there are some cool things we are going to do with that). One thing is that you are not any one of your heroes, you are you. You just utilize your heroes. You are a very important character in the game and we want to reference that somehow. It’s a basic idea we’ve tossed around and so instead of having lesser heroes that come in, but rather some sort of avatar of your profile. If we implement this, there should be plenty of things you can do without having to have a hero. Why make people go buy a hero (commoner) to do basic things if you already have a profile created. You’ll need heroes for advanced things and any professions/combat and that is just the way the game is designed. Very basic, nothing legitimized here, but something we are thinking about quite a bit.

Fox: Also there’s the whole play to earn concept, you are supposed to earn more the more you put into the game. Further we continue to look into scholarships as well as the previously mentioned idea of allowing people to rent heroes.

Tango: The concept is that you are a player and you have a profile and we want you involved. So we’ll have this dichotomy of hero centric things and player/profile centric things. We will have a lot more specifics on these once land is out and we have some good mechanics on how this is working.

Foraging and Fishing Quest Levels — Hopefully we’ll be leveling up heroes soon, and Hubert has mentioned that the higher profession skill you are, it makes less sense to do the lower level profession quests — will those come out soon?

Fox: As you level up a profession skill you’ll get less and less skill up rewards (i.e. 0.1 increase to fishing) and you’ll get more rewards. Hubert is working on adding a new profession quest every 10 levels, so you’d have to be profession skill level 10 to even do one of those quests. This would entail potentially new zones. Can’t talk about timeline on this, but we don’t want people hitting these caps and sitting there for too long, so maybe around the time that we add land you may start seeing other zones outside of the capital with additional profession quests.

Rune Costs — as we anticipate the release of the ability to level up, the rune cost is unfeasible unless you have deep pockets. So for people that don’t have 30 heros or deep pockets to shell out all the runes neeeded, is there anything we’ll see like we did with tears where the economy might regularize?

Fox: Great question, as you start to level up it will cost more runes to level up. That will increase over time, and there will be other runes to level up. This is one aspect of the play to earn. You’ll have to determine to use those to further your investment or to sell to other players yourself. Having this strong economic drive for having those items is important. (1 rune for level 2, 2 runes for level 3, etc)

On the other hand we are always looking at how things are playing out and we will look into updating some of those things. Like with tears, we shifted some of the rates there. A reason tears were so expensive to start was because there were no quests to earn them.

Tango: Our intent is that it should be easy to level up at first and then should get progressively harder.

Fox: We are very cognizant about changes we make like drop rates. So anytime we consider doing something like that we’d like to hold an advisory vote to see what the community thinks. Everything that we do WILL NOT make it into a vote, but we would like to start getting some more feedback. Then we’d like to have the concept of a DAO at some point where everyone has a say in how things are altered in the game.

Are there plans on holding special events when we reach certain milestones (TVL, new blockchain, etc). Such as reducing stamina regen?

Fox: Hubert has been talking a lot about this where we could have certain times where Stamina regenerates faster or a few days where certain items have a higher drop rate (i.e. in game events). We’ve talked about these for sure. As far as TVL we aren’t very concerned with price points and TVL, but we do have airdrops from a marketing standpoint for these things.

Tango: On top of this, as we expand into new chains, we will have cross chain quest events where people will get to go in and explore the new realm. We could have some quests, maybe a bank quest, that happens once a certain TVL is unlocked. Those doors are open, nothing has planned anything on this front, but we are open to doing special events for milestones like this.

Later Generations and associated costs?

Fox: The way it works is that early generatios are for creating more heroes. Higher generation heroes have gone through several rounds of selecting genes so it gives you the opportunity to really tailor your heroes for certain types of quests and PVP. So in that sense, higher gen heroes could be more powerful by being able to tailor them. But at the same time they’ll have the ability to create advanced heroes. So ROI will be less for them in terms of creating new heroes, but could have a higher ROI for things like combat.

Tango: You’ll want to be very calculated in summoning with later generations, because it gets very expensive. So you want to plan it out. At the same time you can’t have a Gen 1 dread knight, that has to come through many generations. Don’t just mass produce later generations, be deliberate. If you summon correctly the later generations can be stronger.

Closing Remarks

Tango: We are super excited about the future of this game. There is a lot in the works. Just in general, the idea of what this game can be and this community is something that keeps me excited. In the meantime we have some very specific things that we know we will be doing (i.e. Meditation circle this week, additional profession quests later this month). Love the plans we have in place and conceptual ideas being thrown around. Thanks everyone.

Fox: I get to see everything that everyone is working on throughout the week. So many things in the works. Its amazing to see the amount of work going into this and the amount of talent. There are so many exciting things I can’t even talk about it all. Big thank you to the community. You are the reason why we are here.