DeFi Kingdoms Team AMA (Development Team) — January 3, 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 a link to the audio recording of the AMA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xq0azEGong
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:
Team updates, then written questions, then community members invited up to the stage to ask live questions.
Team Updates and Opening Statements
Frisky Fox:
This is our first AMA of the year, welcome everybody. Super excited about all of the amazing things we have planned this year. If you look at last year and how far we came in about 4.5 months its amazing to see the progress and growth of the community and our team and all metrics basically. That was just 4 months, we have a full year ahead of us now with a fully staffed amazing team and I’m stoked to see all the amazing things coming up.
We hit a lot of cool milestones. Jan. 1 we hit 50k members in Discord. Usually when you get that big it usually starts to get hectic and crazy. I’m blown away by how supportive our community is of new members to the community. It’s one thing that really sets this project apart from other projects. There isn’t toxicity. Everyone is friendly and kind and I really love that.
We also hit some cool milestones in terms of Jewel. We surpassed 1B market cap — that is mind blowing. We are almost a top 100 coin by market cap. We have a lot of room left to grow because we are only about 1/4 of the way through our projected roadmap. We have expansions, land, PVP and PVE coming up. Even just this week we are releasing the locked jewel mining which has always been a big P2E aspect we’ve always been anticipating.
We added some more people to the team, seems like we are always adding people to the team. As we get larger and larger we want to maintain the pace we’ve set and accelerate that pace across the board.
We have these every week. We try to maintain good communication with the community. This is a project in the crypto space, which means all of you are owners in this project. We want to make sure you feel part of the team and that we are all going into this together this year.
Written Questions
There have been a lot of challenges with heroes and the tavern, could you go over that?
Frisky: This has been high on our priority list for a while. We’ve made a lot of efforts on this. About a month ago we hired an API guy to overhaul our API because we could see the signs that we were hitting the limit of our existing API. Our existing API stack uses the Graph, its a cool technology that allows you to index events on the blockchain. its used by almost every DEX out there. While it is really cool, it was built for Ethereum and Ethereum has like 15 transactions per second and they are generally very simple transactions. With the amount of use we have on our game, we have orders of magnitude more transactions being pushed through. So we currently have it so that we have a few nodes that are running on max specs that are trying to index, as one of them gets fully synced we switch it over to that node and as soon as it receives that extra load and falls behind and then we have another node start syncing. Right now its a bit of a poor mans round robin. Tonight we’ll have a better round robin version going live, but its still a gap fix. We are going to be using noSQL and his own custom event indexer. It can scale basically unlimited horizontally. We are in the alpha stages with that. Hopefully in the next day or two we can push it into beta, and then after that into production, which would put most of these issues to bed. One of the major reasons we did this is that it lets us do cross chain even indexing, which wasn’t possible with our old stack and will be very important as we expand into the other realms. We are close to getting to a solution on this.
Any plans to add a tagging system to heroes?
Beetle: Hi everyone good to be back, this is a great question. We do have a task on the board to be working on a tagging system. Up to this point we have been limited because we’ve been trying to keep every transaction on the blockchain so we haven’t expanded into our own database structure yet, but with the new developer who is working on the API we should be able to have our own internal databases that we can maintain and this would be a great addition to that piece, to be able to associate a wallet with their tagged heros. Favorites is a big one, and then maybe favorites by profession, etc. These are definitely something we have in mind and hopefully once we get the new Tavern released we can start working in earnest on quality of life improvement items like this.
Are there any plans to allow your hero or your avatar to move throughout the world with manual controls like WASD?
Beelte: We discussed this a bit at last AMA. This is on the roadmap as a potential item. We’ve done a little bit of testing with it so we know its a possibility. Part of it is getting heroes into a spot where we can pull them in and use them wherever we need to so there’s a big effort going on there. We are trying to gamify more things. We have some tasks on the board to do things like full keyboard control and control the game like you would a traditional game with menu support. Down the line we have eyes on doing game controller support and use the game pad API that browsers have built into them. Definitely on the roadmap and something that we are looking towards to try and make it feel more and more like a game.
Raspberry: We have a few unity devs and have discussed using Unity to make a better game experience. We want to make it feel like a game as much as we can. I’m excited about it.
Are there any plans to have a ranking page inside the town crier showing the best foragers/fishers, etc or something to track the best heroes?
Raspberry: I haven’t heard this feedback before, but I love it. I think it would be well used inside the castle once we release that map. We will consider it and talk more with Sinstar about this and try to flesh something out that would work with the game.
Frisky: I have thoughts on this as well, it was high on my list in terms of achievements. I’d like to see some of those rankings and shouldn’t be very hard with what we are architecting.
Any plans to add implementing additional details about how long until stamina is full or the next tic?
Beetle: We could probably do something that might show the time that it will be full or time until the next tic. It’s not on the roadmap but we can think about folding it in. The more we can make it so you don’t have to think about things like that it will be better.
Are we looking at total liquidity provided for Crystal or just the Jewel portion?
Xeno: just the Jewel portion.
Any plans for a reward history?
Raspberry: We already have some tasks in the pipeline to display quest reward history and has been in the pipeline for a while. Just need to fix other issues first, but it’s coming thoon.
When is the hero crystal recharge fee going away?
Xeno: As soon as possible. I’m not on the development team but we are aiming for this week if possible. It’s a high priority.
Raspberry: The solidity devs have been working hard on that one. There’s multiple things they need to do alongside that. They don’t know when it will launch but are hopeful for this week but can’t say for sure.
Live Stage Questions:
Curious about some of the recent congestion issues. Is that something that you are actively working on from the DFK side or is it more from the Harmony side? Would be curious to hear what you are doing to try and quell that as well as plans for the future:
Beetle: Bringing in the new dev to work on the API’s internally is going to free up a lot of that congestion. We are pulling quite a bit from the core straight off the contract. If we can index on our API’s and then pull from our API’s instead it should free up a lot more bandwidth and hopefully even limiting our transactions and our reads off of that should help with that congestion. We are doing what we can on our end to mitigate those issues and try to continue those optimizations. We are looking at performance. We know it drags a bit on mobile. We are working on it.
How many in total Gen0 Crystalvale heroes? If you don’t win them in the airdrop how will we be able to acquire them?
Frisky: Each expansion will add an extra 25% to the gene pool. That is one of the major drivers of the Gen0 heroes to basically be the genetic parents of all other heroes that are created. Harmony had 8 basic classes. Each expansion will have 2 classes. Harmony had ~2000 heroes, 50 for airdrops and another 50 for promotional reasons. Harmony is mostly used up at this point. For Crystalvale we are looking at 500 for the sale, and then another 25–40 for airdrops, raffles and promotional things.
With mining coming out, is there going to be a hard cap on how much locked jewel you can unlock per day?
Frisky: We’ve been running simulations to try and figure out this number. It’s not crazy high in terms of how many you need to hit the max. You could be at like 20–30K locked jewel and already hitting the max cap for the level 0 mining quest. I think people will be pleasantly surprised about how rewarding the quest will be.
What are your guys plans for mass adoption? Obviously the more users the more successful, the more people in it, and a generally better experience for everyone. We are all aware of the tavern issues and the cost, particularly with Jewel ripping over the weekend. The cheapest heroes are anywhere from 500–700. For the average person that may not be very attainable to just drop that. If you are buying a high profession score hero you may be dropping 4–5k. What are the teams plans for making it more affordable or more playable for people that don’t have giant bags?
Frisky: It is a play to earn, so the amount you earn wil always be tied to how much you put into it. However we do have solid plans of action to expand this to all types of players so that any price point could find something to do and have fun and earn something. We are working on a scholarship type program that other play to earn games have had so that people who have a lot of assets but maybe not the time could lend their heroes out to those with less assets but more time. We want to get as many people in as possible at every price point.
Are there qualifying snapshots for any of the airdrops (i.e. you have to have an initial amount by a certain time?)
Frisky: We are doing 5 different airdrops over the next few weeks. We do have a few rules and caveats we’ll need to flesh out. With the past ones we had a threshold amount you had to have included by a certain date to even be considered. These will be different so that anytime you want to get in you can, but you’ll still be averaged over the entire period. If you hold it in there for even longer you can up those numbers due to how averaging works, but if you only have it in there for a couple days during the period you’ll obviously have less.
Any minimums for the crystal airdrops?
Frisky: We’ll only be dropping those that have at least .01 Crystal. It can’t cost more to send than its worth. If you earn less than .01 Crystal it will just be dust and you don’t get it.
For the Pangolin LP on Avalanche and the Crystalvale expansion, you’d only get credit for the Crystalvale airdrop for the amount of Jewel staked, not the entire amount of your LP pairing.
Frisky: We don’t want to encourage people to move their holdings here to there for this, but we do want to reward people that are holding outside of Harmony, so it’s a small amount.
How will summoning and summoning costs work on Crystalvale? Will the summoning costs of summoning in Crystalvale be 1/4 like everything?
Frisky: Supply will be 1/4 but the price of everything will still be the same quantity. The reasoning for that is that we have all these expansions and bringing in so many new players and it would increase the price action on Jewel so much that we need to add a few power tokens. We want to ensure parity of price across all of our ecosystems so there is no clear area that on one ecosystem its 1/2 the price. If it is you’ll see arbitrage opportunities and people take advantage of that until the prices start to align. This will create an ecosystem where people will have arbitrage opportunities from all of our chains.
About the music contest, is there a limit of entries? Can we submit multiple entries?
Rissen: Do as many as you want, its more for Pogo and renaissance man to judge.
Consider putting more weight into LP stakers, have had to watch all the raffles go to xJewel holders rather than LP holders.
Frisky: that is our intent with these new airdrops. Single staking is always going to be the primary way though. We are always looking for ways to reward people playing. We’ll have special stuff for land owners. Rewards for heroes over a certain level. Lots of exciting stuff.
Closing Remarks
Raspberry: LFG!
Frisky: It’s very exciting at the beginning of the new year. So many fresh opportunities with potential. Our team is very well positioned to take this year by storm. We have such experienced people and at the current pace we are at we are just putting the pedal down. There is nothing holding us back at this point. Awesome team. Awesome devs. Raspberry, Beetle and so many others are just killing it. Wanted to thank them for everything they are doing. Want to also thank our awesome community for everything you do. I like looking through all the things like memes the community is putting together. LFG.
