DeFi Kingdoms Team AMA (Development Team) — February 28, 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. You can find summaries of the prior AMA’s in my index of DeFi Kingdom’s Articles.
Here is the link to the recording:
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 index of many other DFK articles here.
Team Members Present:
https://defikingdoms.com/team.html
Team Updates and Opening Statements
Frisky Fox — State of the Project
Welcome everyone to the DFK Dev AMA. We have a lot of people here that we’ve seen before. Mr. Faun has been here before and is our talented solidity dev manager. Then we have Dreamer and Sunbear with some cool updates.
It’s been a busy week. We’ve been hard at work on Crystalvale and Perilous Journey. A lot of those are behind the scenes types of things that will be released all at the same time. Really excited about the coming days and weeks where we actually have these things launch.
Perilous Journey — Expanding Gen0 Raffles from 50 total to 200 total!
We did the Perilous Journey AMA with Hubert last Wednesday. There is an update there. Early on we had a lot of crazy ideas to incentivize this, some were included and others didn’t make the cut. In the end we had to take away some of those really cool incentives and replaced those instead with other equally cool incentives. Generally we’d like to scale up the number of Gen0 heroes awarded. Part of this is because of our transition to instead of just having a blanket sale for these Gen0s, we are in a situation now where there’s a lot of players, everyone knows the value and there’s a lot less speculation and a lot more tried and true ROI. We want to reward the players of this game with this sale rather than just going into the coffers of the game like the prior Gen0 mint. We wanted ways where the majority of the Gen0’s for CV are given out for in game actions to incentivize playing in game. With that in mind, we had announced 25 heroes would be raffled for the players that had heroes that died and another 25 for those that survived. We’d like to scale that up to be more aggressive to reward those partaking in this Journey. So we would like to increase this up from 25 each to 100 each. That is a 4x increase for a total of 200 Gen0 heroes that will be raffled off to the survivors and the casualties.
I’m stoked about more regular players being able to win these rather than just an auction that usually favors whales. This should give everyone more equal footing.
New Voting Website
We had a DFK vote where we added a new subdomain vote.defikingdoms.com. This will be the portal for governance votes going forward. We had our first vote there in terms of what amount of voting power should holding heroes have? This is an entirely new concept, previously it was only xJewel that had voting power. We’d like xJewel to be the primary one, but we also want holders of heroes and land to have a vote as well so we held a vote to see how much vote power they’d have. Majority of votes said 10 xJewel of voting power for each hero held. I’m excited about that because as a game its important that we give our players a voice in what is happening with gameplay and balancing and any proposal that impacts the value of your assets, so that is part of the intent there. Really excited to see what we can do with some of those votes.
We also have secret snapshots that I’ll be posting the results of later this afternoon along with the prizes. We have all the information for those. You should see those airdrops happening later this week.
Dreamer — Growth Update
Also just wanted to add some clarification as well. It’s really exciting that we are increasing the overall rewards in PJ. Imagining that you could send a common hero and whether they survive or die you could potentially win a Gen0 hero that will have new classes and new genes. We are not increasing the amount of Gen0 heroes for CV, only the allocation that are being given away for perilous journey. If you thought it was worth it to risk your heroes before its even more worth it now.
Two things from me today:
Results of the Garden Votes: we had a few votes where we are trying to partner with the community on these decisions, maybe not as fun as perilous journey but still fun votes. Three of the gardens were clearly no longer in scope of the recently approved policy. Mostly due to size as we are trying to keep and incentivize blue chip tokens in our gardens which adds stability to Jewel. As new projects come up, we want to have to ways to support them and that's why we have grants and bounties. We aren’t removing liquidity. We are just turning off the incentives to Artemis and SuperBid. Freyala required 75% and only 68% approved. We want to make sure we have a lot more than 51% for decisions like this. By end of day today, we will be updating allocations. We should not expect the Artemis and Superbid pools to have incentives anymore.
Grant Program — working hard on getting this finalized. Sunbear has been working on submissions. There is one that we want to progress starting today. Let me recap the process. Essentially what we will try to start doing and we may adjust, is that we will announce in the AMA new grant proposals we will submit to community. These have been submitted, reviewed by Sunbear with the applicants. Usually its a 5–10pg PDF. Its reviewed internally and we are going back and forth with many of them on how to refine and how we can support them on their proposal. Today we will open a channel, we will drop in the proposal from the team, as well as details from us on what we’ve done. It will have the amount, the proposal, how the grant will be used, etc. Then on Friday a vote will open and remain open until the AMA on Monday and we will announce on the AMA if the vote passed. So every AMA we are thinking about announcing a new proposal, and then concluding that by the following Monday. That is to recap the process. I’ll pass to Sunbear for this proposal.
Sunbear — New grant proposal
We are proposing a DFK arena. This is a combat game that utilizes our hero NFTs, gold, its a 1v1 combat situation. It’s very exciting. When I get it posted in the channel you’ll be able to see the proposal put together as a collaborative process by the team that has applied. Of course our response to that, what we’ve done and the allocation will be there. They have a landing page that describes the combat, how it happens. There will be a link to a video that shows some of the logistics of the combat and the animations connected to that. Lots of neat examples to see with this proposal and whether or not the community wants to support it.
Dreamer — this will be a good example of the ways that we can look at the tokens and the resources in DFK and find something fun to do. Whatever you can dream of and can do, put a good plan together, submit the grant and we will get back to you. We aren’t just giving out money, we are trying to work with you. Links to NPCs in games, fee sharing, smart contracts, etc. We want to make DFK better for everyone.
Bolon
Keep your eyes open for that new channel on grants and come ask questions!
Written Questions
First I wanted to go back to Fox for a moment. We’ve had a variety of questions about both private hire functionality as well as the sales auction functionality.
FriskyFox—I spent some time this morning on auctions actually. I love working on this project its so fun. We are actively working on reactivating private hire auctions. We are also working on a new smart contract functionality to add new auction functions. i.e. setting a price at the high end that will reduce over a set amount of time. We had that set up before, but had issues with how it worked on timing. We didn’t want anyone paying more than they should. It’s currently being reworked and is on the “soon” radar. Working on a lot of PJ stuff and some other things that weren’t announced, including the stamina rework, which I spent most of the weekend working on. That is what I spent most of my weekend working on.
Bolon — Listening to people who know how to code it sounds like the stamina refresh is an interesting one.
I think it would be great to be able to add notes and flags to heroes to be able to better manage and filter an individuals heroes.
Beetle Dude — yes we are working on this so that you can sign in with a wallet address and be able to tag your heroes with a system that allows you to look for all heroes that fall under a certain tag or whatever category you want to set up. That is one of them. As well as getting notifications into a better spot where you can manage notifications based on a wallet and keep it on a database. No timeline yet, but its definitely on the roadmap and we know people would enjoy having this in the future.
Bolon — also wanted to give you a shout out for heroes automatically sorting by a profession when you go profession questing!
In the smart contracts for quest time, are we using block times or seconds to measure completion of the quest? So if block speeds extend, does the quest time extend?
Mr. Faun — This if my first time up on stage for the AMA, great to be here. Stamina is calculated with a time stamp for these, not a block number. Its independent of the block speed.
Would be a great time to plan time sink games to give people something to do in between quests to have more entertainment value in between stamina refresh.
SunBear — there are a lot of grant applications related to this. So you will probably see some stuff on this in the next few weeks that might meet your need.
Dreamer — More directly and immediately, the DFK arena. I see a lot of people speculating on what might be involved in terms of modest betting, etc. They’ve definitely thought of that and we’ve thought of that with them and these are just examples of things that we can do both natively as well as building relationships with the community via the grant program.
Bolon — we do have things in the works ourselves. We have a lot we plan on adding. But this is also a big part where our grant program comes in where they can make things that interact with our game but aren’t built by us. If you have an idea, submit a grant proposal. We want to keep things going even outside of our own personal bandwidth.
Live AMA Questions
(Mettez) You already started discussing on this a bit, but wanted to ask from a more general view, specifically for the gameplay aspect or the perspective of quests as they exist right now, you notice that the PJ is a form of quest but has a completely different format from the currently implemented form of quests. You’ve said current quests are not at all what the long term game will be. Can you tell us more about long term vision of the gameplay? Will they be longer quests?
FriskyFox — this is mostly a question for game mechanics and game devs. Hubert has some really cool ideas. Bearious and Sinstart have ideas. Profession quests are a small subset of what you can do. We are working on an achievement system where you track progress and other quests unlock once you hit prereqs. There will also be quests that require certain stats. There will be storyline quests. There will be combat quest. Ther are all sorts of things. I can’t give too many specifics because they are being worked out.
(Nous) I think the devs have done a great job that benefit everyone in the ecosystem generally. Some have complained about stam pots and the lvl 10 race but I’ve repeatedly pointed out that the ingredient for the pots became more valuable. However, one thing I don’t understand is how the opacity of the land tournaments available to survivors benefits anyone other than the whales? Unlike a raffle where we don’t know the denominator. But if you want people making risk reward calcs, its important to know more about the selection of land tournaments. How many will be available only for survivors? How much will stats be given weight for this? These are the things that mid level players need to know to make decisions for PJ. Is it truly just RNG and basically a raffle, then it certainly doesn’t make sense to send ones best heroes. Non-whales need more info about the land tournaments and the special quests you’ll be able to do to make this decision.
Frisky — land tournaments haven’t released a lot of details. Similar to a pay 2 earn game, rewards will be proportionate to what you put into it. But we are trying to make it so that average players can get it. Do you have a higher chance if you have more assets to throw at it? Yes. It’s hard to get away from that completely. But Hubert has some pretty cool ideas about that and he might have some things that he will want to say.
Hubert — So to try and clarify a few things. We haven’t solidified the number of tournaments that will be exclusive to PJ survivors. It won’t be more than 8 and it will be the first 8 available in the map and not ones that are revealed in the future. We aren’t going to be able to release the equations that drive how that land tournament works now, but they are set up sot hat there will never be a 0% chance for a hero to succeed. You could be the underdog and chance will be low if there's a significant difference in the stat that matters. We’ve seen all different things happen with RNG so I do expect to see that happen in these tournaments, but the heroes with higher stats will have a better chance.
(Nous) but that’s exactly the tournament, most people don’t have a lot of great heroes to send. Without the details they can’t make that decision whereas a Whale can send a lot of them. So while your response speaks to the general rationale of pay2earn economics but doesn’t give people the details that they need.
Hubert — that is understandable. We are working on it, there’s only 8 going to PJ survivors and the rest are available to everyone. If there’s not enough details for you to make that call, then save your best hero for the other land tournaments. We are in the middle of testing and can’t prematurely disclose how this works.
Bolon — a quick reminder that we do have a specific PJ questions form where you can ask questions about PJ. I’ll be gathering all of that and going through it and getting with Hubert to try and get questions to some of those out. Nous — if you do want to put your question into that as well, if we get enough information by the time we put it out we might be able to put it int he response. We want to make sure people have information.
For PJ and crystal rewards and some of the bank snapshots. Are those going to be airdropped to us and will they be locked in any sense or will it all be fully unlocked before the official liquidity pool launch on AVAX? Additionally we’ve heard before that the single sided jewel staking will be for a limited time period, for those of us planning ahead, can you tell us more about what the mechanics of that may look like?
Frisky — the first Q about airdrops for crystal. Our plan is to get Crystal in the hands of people along with launch. Going back and forth if any of it will be locked. We haven’t talked about it much, but airdrops were intended to be most of the initial liquidity. So those of you winning this Crystal will probably be the ones that can provide most of the initial liquidity. There’s also more we plan to announce in terms of incentives. We are getting close to the point where we can lay out the timeline and all of the details about how that is going to work here in the coming days.
Dreamer — just wanted to point out and highlight and emphasize something. We’ve talked about Gen0s, we’ve talked about Crystal. There is a theme here. We aren’t trying to avoid direct sale of new NFTs and valuable tokens, but we are trying to find ways to cater to all players (whales, gardeners, jewelers, questers) to incentivize them for playing in this game. We see lots of projects asking what else they can sell. We are trying to create a strong culture and a multi-year roadmap. I welcome the questions and comments about how everything can be more fair. But we have to be aware of what we are trying to do. It’s not just hey we know people want Gen0 so lets sell them a bunch at a certain price. We want to reward people actively playing. Making it a possibility for someone to win is still a benefit to small players. While you don’t have as much as larger wallets you at least have the possibility and we hope that is appreciated.
Frisky — we spend a lot of time thinking about this. As a p2e game everything we do is to add utility to the game and add to value of assets of the community. When we have new things that could be sold, we are trying to add 100% of the value into the community (rather than just being sold) so that the community are the recipients of the value (rather than the dev team).
Faun — also on how we plan for this, I’ve been working with Raspberry Swirl and a few team members on how to prepare for all of this. We aren’t providing these as financial advice, but we will have clear documentation for you in the next coming weeks on exactly how this will all work and how you can employ certain strategies.
People have expressed concerns about liquidity drying up in Serendale and making sure Serendale can stay alive once Crystalvale launches.
Frisky — Dreamer can probably talk to this. We are always trying toa dd utility not just to new assets but the existing assets. We want to make sure that Jewel is stronger because of this and not weaker.
Dreamer — To say that there will be no disruption in Serendale is not accurate. But the way that we’ve structured to buy and hold Jewel in order to participate as one of the founding participants int he birth of Crystalvale is the first step in stability. You can’t just dump jewel, you have to buy and hold it. For liquidity its a direct input of the farmers. Those that choose to reallocate from gardens in Serendale to CV, that will cause APR’s to go up and that will push others to go into the gardens. We don’t want to see a whipsaw between the two, and we don’t think you’ll see a giant exit, because all things equal, APRs would get very high if everyone left and others would come in and balance it out. With the launch of CV and the highly attractive emissions we will see and how well funded that is, it will impact the APRs there, you’ll probably see some redemptions in Serendale, flow to CV, but not to the point of seeing liquidity dry up. Serendale and CV gardens over time might be interesting at first. Once they are in a mature stage we should see a lot of balance between the two between active traders and farmers bridging. Another thing, its not just buying Jewel. We haven’t given all details, but one option is to include xJewel as well. xJewel you only get from buying and leaving in Serendale. So away from liquidity, but leaving Jewel in Serendale could be incentivized since xJewel may play a part in earning Crystal in CV. This is another part in ensuring stability in both realms with extra focus on Serendale.]
(Thanpolas) I remember when quests came out for the first time (wishing well) they mentioned that time for questing and stamina regen was extended to 8 hours (can’t be at computer 24/7). With the champion system, it sounded like the current questing system was not going to change. What I wanted to ask is that its been established that questing as it is today is tedious and time consuming. It forces players to mindlessly click. If you can outsource that is a great solution for large wallets. I’ve seen that narrative used by other gamefi projects. While many hold DFK in high regards, they say DFK isn’t a game because its just a few clicking. I find this a narrow view, because DFK is a much wider than just these profession quests. But a few questions: (1) are you considering changing how quests happen? Recognizing that the current quests could become obsolete some day and replaced with other things. So are there any plans to change that? A simple solution would extend quests and stamina regen from 8 hours to days. (2) For champion system will it be focused on profession quests or more on future functionality? (3) whether the champion program will be the only way to play if you don’t own a hero.
Frisky — Quests right now you can see as staking your hero for short periods of time and receiving rewards from that staking. Many people have brought up the idea of staking for longer periods of time and just stay questing. We’ve considered this and there are other ways to think about this and staking for rewards that are more residual. We haven’t come to a concrete conclusion of exactly what we want to do with this yet. It’s ever evolving. We trying to find more ways to bring game aspects to this. Bearious is our game director and has a lot of experience creating games. He has a philosophy about what makes a game fun. Some people like it for action. Some people like it for social level. Some people want to be the best and to strategize. Game can be fun for various reasons. If you look at idle style vs strategy vs mmo, they all target different aspects of that scale. Ours is probably going to be focused on trying to win tournaments, trying to summon the rarest heroes, trying to have the best hero, social aspects with guilds. As we build more and more of the game you’ll see more and more of these come into play.
Dreamer — to answer it really simply, you don’t have to have a hero to stake with Jeweler or gardens, but with the quests you need to own the NFT and so yes the champion system allows us to bridge that gap. Some people might see it as tedious and clicking. I think that if you completely remove that, and you go fishing and go for 5–20 minutes, you want to see what you caught. If you go mining you aren’t go to go mining for 10 minutes and find gold. The time it takes to do each thing and the rewards for each really is intentional. I don’t know that it would be as fun if everything were to operate in the background. Gamefi sometimes becomes more tedious. For example, bridging, could be something as like a new UI, or to bridge you have to actually go to a new realm and send your hero and take actions. Both do the same and one has more clicks. Some might like one and not the other. For now, the champion system will be the only way to use heroes if you don’t own any.
(Thanpolas) In terms of governance and the last vote for heroes having votes. People who voted the last choice — question remains on whether they wanted more votes for their heroes because 10 xJewel which is like 16 Jewel and a hero is worth way more than that. Could we have a forum to discuss these types of things?
Frisky — yes, but heroes have a lot of utility. xJewel just sit there and accrue. It’s not trying to represent how much a hero is worth in terms of voting power, its just adding something additional a little additional value. We would like to create a forum where if the community wants to see something come to a vote they can propose it. One option is a discord channel, another option is a google form. But we don’t want to gatekeep that because we want this to start acting more autonomous like a DAO. We are thinking about how to consider this on our new vote.defikingdoms.com website.
Dreamer — if you think linearly, yes a hero is worth more than 16 jewel. But what if we say we want a hero to be worth 50 xJewel voting power, then who would stay in xJewel if they were in the Jewel for purposes of voting. None fo these votes are ever final. We want to make sure we make small calculated adjustments. Limit adjustment and get to the right place mid and long term.
Bolon — Also as we started these numbers, we wanted to avoid making commentary on hero value. Yes a hero doesn’t sell for 16 jewel right now, but if we set a xJewel value for a hero relative to its market value, then it could influence that market value. Another thing is the xJewel ratio changes and it only goes up. 10 xJewel may be close to 17 Jewel now, but will be 20 Jewel eventually.
Dreamer — Maybe I’ll state it a different way. Prior to vote, community puts value on hero per supply and demand. After the vote, the community has added 10 xJewel voting power vote to each hero. This is incremental utility. It isn’t cutting down value, its just adding some incremental utility.
Closing Remarks
Sunbear— we have a lot of fun things ahead. Stick with us, we care about you!
BeetleDude— excited to release some of these awesome features for you guys!
Faun — Our team is made up of so many different people from different backgrounds, mechanics, financial, development, smart contracts. It’s impressive how much we take community input.
Tango — I’m more just here for support today. I have to give a shout out to everyone on the team. Day in and day out we hear your questions and concerns. You have no idea how many hours we spend discussing what is fair for the community and what is right for whales and smaller players. I’m really impressed with quality of conversations and the depth of discussions for every possible avenue and what people need and what people want. We could just release new heroes and content and sell it, but that’s not what we are trying to do. Thank you for being an awesome community.
Dreamer — with everything going on in the world right now and the market the past couple months. It’s really important that we always build. Part of that is building the community, friendships, our ideas and trust. Amazing to see and feel everything that is going on and to come to AMA where great ideas are brought forth. There’s an unlimited amount of support in the chat. We feel we have an army of dreamers that want to innovate and play. We aren’t forking. We are building something new and its beautiful. Many people on the team don’t get to come up and talk, but they are all working their butts off and wanted to say thank you to everyone. Keep up the positivity, keep up the questioning and the building.
Frisky Fox — just to echo some of those. I think Dreamer stole my notes because I was going to say a lot of the same things. The reason I wake up in the morning is because I’m excited and get to work on this. We are not doing what everyone else is doing. We aren’t copying a trend. We are focusing on innovating and doing the next big thing. We are going to continue doing that and being at the forefront. Expect that from us. We have roadmaps that are years long. We are planning for the future and the long term. It’s always a blessing to be here with this amazing community. I think we’ve earned that trust from you over the past few months. We have a lot of people here that will tell their friends and family. Excited to be here and to be building and the features that are really close with the expansion and perilous journey. Stay tuned, have fun, stay frisky, and stay bullish!
Bolon — Thanks everyone on the stage and in the audience. These AMA’s mean a lot to me, the community and the team. Thank you all for being here and participating. We look forward to our AMA with the Creative department next week and there might be a surprise (it’s not Crystalvale) but there may be an unrelated surprise in that AMA! Appreciate you guys and see you later.
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!
