DeFi Kingdoms Team AMA (Development Team) — January 31, 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.
I will update this article with a link to the live recording once available (usually the day after).
This week, the AMA was from members of the core 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:
Bolon Soron — Community Manager — moderating this AMA
Frisky Fox — DeFi Kingdoms Executive Director
Dreamer — President
Professor Tango — Back-End Director
Beetle Dude—Front-End Director
Sunbear—Impact Initiative Director
Team Updates and Opening Statements
Frisky Fox
We always joke internally that the weeks here feel like months and the months feel like years because so much happens each week. We continue to add new people. We have a new solidity dev and a new marketing lead. We have another project manager who is very experienced and will help us all stay on the same page. We also did some reorganization of our team. We’ve continued to grow since the beginning of this project, starting with 4 and now around 50 people and about 35 knights. We want to be the premiere gamefi out there and we feel we are well on our way there. With that we saw the need to continuously change our org throughout those periods of growth. We’ve decided it makes sense to make two sections of our project team. One that focuses on building (dev work) and the other side to try and work on growth (marketing/bizdev). We changed that up a bit to ensure that nobody had too much on their plates and so that we are able to work 40–60 hours a week and reasonably expect to get everything done that we need to. I’ll be sharing an image in voiceless chat that shows how things look right now.
We have one wing focused on marketing, creative, events, grants, etc. Then we have the stuff with game creations, front end, back end, solidity, contracts, on the other side.
We think this organization will more effectively allow us to focus on the areas where we can provide the most help. With this in mind we promoted Dreamer to the growth side of things and he will be the president. I will be the executive director in charge of the creation side of things. Congrats to Dreamer. Excited to see how this will translate into our growth this year.
State of the Project
We launched land last week which was a huge release. A ton of work went into that. We also launched land auctions (land sale board) on Friday. We had originally wait until this Wednesday for that but Beetle Dude was able to get it launched earlier and we have more things coming soon such as adding names to the lands instead of just a number. There are other lands there as well that haven’t been claimed and so adding the ability to have those be “competed” for will be coming soon as well.
80K members is big.
Bolon Soron
Just a reminder that once we get through questions submitted over the past week we will do live questions. My one ask is that if you raise your hand and your question gets answered, please remove your hand raise.
Turning time to Dreamer and Sunbear
Dreamer
We’ve talked about a number of programs in process, here’s update on grant program.
We see so much talent in the community and so many projects that people think about doing but maybe don’t have funding to do so. When in discussions with partners we are asked if we are worried about people using our NFTs for other projects and our response is no. We want people to build around and on top of our assets and we might just pay you with a grant to do it. If you are a coder or an innovator, we now have a program where we’ll be listening and processing and including the community to make it a reality. Turning it over to Sunbear for details on that.
Sunbear
I am here to help you get your grants! We are going to post all this information this afternoon, it will be on our social medias. There will be a website you can go to get all the details. We want to inspire innovation around anything around the
project or connected to the community and the blockchain experience overall. We are excited about this process. I’m going to be working with folks through this whole thing. You’ll be able to submit an application, fill out details, who is on your team, what you are looking to do and what you need to do it and then the community will vote to give their voice on it. Going to work closely with a ll these folks like we have with the bounties. We’ve got you, and we are going to make some fun stuff happen.
Dreamer — between filling out applications and votes, there will be an internal review and we’ll have the proposal posted in discord in a thread so that community can review it before vote. Process may be revised over time. Apply, internal review, post on discord, community reviews, then we vote to see if proposed grant amount is awarded. We are all about transparency and the community will see everything in this process.
Frisky Fox (additional items)
Very excited about the grant program. It’s been a long time coming, and we’ve put a lot of thought and time into this. I’ve always like the Harmony style grant program and Avalanche did something similar. We are at the point where we want to do the same thing and we want people to build around the ecosystem that we are creating. There are already a lot of great tools like Kingdom.watch and DFKtracker that could qualify for some of these grants in the future.
Botting Situation: I had about 20 people DM me about this and whether the blacklist would be retroactive. Most of them agreed that bots shouldn’t be used and its better not to have it. The answer is no, we won’t create a policy and retroactively enforce it. Until now we’ve had an ambivalent stance on it and as we look into rolling out a scholarship program and lower the barrier to entry and to make something like that work we need to have policies against botting. We would like to create an ecosystem where that is not something that regularly happens. Its not scorched earth where we will create a taskforce hunting people down. It will be a policy laying out the sentiment and what the community has said what they want, then all the good actors out there can follow it. Not trying to create a Spanish inquisition here. As far as timeline goes, its something we’ll create an official policy proposal for and have a community vote on it. That will take time. Looking at least a month or so before we get to that point. Just wanted to let everyone know how we are currently feeling on that.
Pending Airdrops: We always have a bunch of airdrops that are going one. Atonement stones — there will be a few different kinds. We have some that are basically ready to go that we will be trying to get out ASAP. There are others we need to dig into. There will be greater and lesser atonement crystals. We’ll have a spreadsheet saying what it is, what it gives you, and everyone that qualifies for them so that its more transparent to you. We are actively working on those right now and I’d expect to see those very soon.
Amulet Snapshot: Tango — is there a qualifying spreadsheet? Yes, its something I’ve been putting together but just having a few issues with my database. Hoping to get that out in the next day or two. There’s a couple others I owe the community. There will be some details out very soon.
Written Questions
Hero Staking or longer term quests, will you be able to set your hero to do a task for a week rather than a few hours?
Frisky Fox: I’ve had a few messages around this and the DFK Dev discord has talked about this a lot. What I can say is that the current thing you can do with heroes is just a small fraction of what you can currently do. Everyone sees professions, but there's going to be combat, story quests, pvp, competing for land and staking has also been something we’ve brought up. Profession quests are essentially just staking for a short period. Longer period staking has been discussed and you’ll even see something with this new expansion. The whole concept of hero NFTs is so ground breaking and there’s so much synergy on what we can do and I’m just very excited for it.
Will there be a way to change avatar or name without creating a new account?
BeetleDude: This is definitely on the roadmap. There’s some exciting things coming along with it, such as sneak peaks of new profile pic artwork from our very talented AtlasParker. Basically we have the previous profile pics in a new style and then also adding some additional pics you might be able to choose from, including some of our favorite items from the game and some other special things. I wish I could say more about it. It’s on the schedule, plan is to have that be available to update their profile pic. Haven’t heard much on updating the name, but can talk to the contract devs to determine if that’s a possibility.
Frisky Fox — it is a possibility to change your name. We’ll probably have an NPC that can do that for a name. We’ll put some policies in place that can be voted on so that there’s no illegal things put into names. Well put a policy in place that the community can vote on and then give power to admins to remove things that are against that policy. We want to make sure it's something the community drives, however.
Regarding Jewel unlocking protocol, will unlock be based on a block or a date?
Professor Tango — originally when we started the journey and laid out the epochs, the number of blocks for each epoch was based on a weeks' worth of time. That goes up and down based on what Harmony is doing. As each Epoch has a specific block section (you go through a certain number of blocks to get through an epoch), and the end of Epoch 51 is when unlocking begins (31,470,366 is the block it begins to start unlocking). It will hold to that regardless of what RPC does. If something crazy happens if those block times start to take like a week instead of two seconds, we can reevaluate. But in the meantime the plan is to hold to that block number.
Eggs — any though on adding a marketplace for eggs?
BeetleDude: First — why would you want to get rid of your eggs? Second — we do want to make a place where we can allow people to trade these items from within the game without having to use LP or go P2P. We’ve discussed an auction house of some sort. It is on the roadmap, not sure on timeline, but we would like to allow that to be done within the game similar to our tavern and land auctions. We have contracts in place that would allow people to trade any items like this. Not sure about timeline but we’ll def be allowing you to trade your eggs.
The further in we get, emissions go down, gardens offer lower APY, with those lower APY, what is our outlook on having a sustainable game economy, what are our plans on that front?
Professor Tango — obviously one of the main things we are working on are our heroes and questing and making sure its fun and rewarding. At start it was all based on dex, but we are wanting the quest to be fun and rewarding. We continue to look out how we can make gardens rewarding though. As we get into later epochs there are ways for us to continue making it rewarding for people in the gardens. One of the obvious ways is the expansions, but as we have new expansions, there will be new pools, new pairings and we can continue to leverage various methods of making the game fun and rewarding.
Dreamer — just a recap, there may be some people listening how those APYs are calculated. There are 3 inputs, (1) emission schedule — very transparent and set forth in the schedule but right now we are in a very stable period of epochs, where it isn’t even dropping every single epoch. There will be a couple more drops over the next year. (2) Amount of saturation int he pool The more pools we have and the more pools splitting emissions impact this. We’ve discussed removing some pools. 50% of these are at Harmony, but over time we might see more weighted towards Avalanche. (3) What the rewards are worth (i.e. price of Jewel), as price of Jewel moves the APR does as well. As pools are more saturated, TVL goes up and there is correlation with price increasing which also increases rewards which increases the APR. This isn’t something that we go in and change. These 3 variable drive the garden returns. To the point that Tango made, we are on the verge of an expansion. The exp will offer new schedule, new pools. Some will be funding with new money, some will be funded with money on Serendale. You could see pools on Serendale become less saturated, which would increase APR, you could see positive price impact, which would increase APR. This is a big economic speculation around APRs. They are not flat, they are not set. You need to understand these three inputs and understand how increased demand can impact these.
FriskyFox — We always get asked about this. At the start we had crazy high emissions to reward those willing to take the risk to provide LP. As we get more and more well known, those rates start to drop because there is a lot less risk involved. As of now, our next planned dropped is months away. Its pretty stable now. It’s basically a lot less risky now and traditional investors can come in and see if it fits their risk appetite. Unlike other uniswap dexes who have all these tokens with no real use, we are constantly adding new utility to Jewel, like in game transactions and summoning, ensuring that there is both supply and demand. This should result in sustained and stable growth and you’ll see more of this with each expansion. A good sign of maturity is that we are at the point that we are at and instead of seeing crazy explosion and then watching it settle back below a dollar like a lot of other projects.
Bolon — before we get into the live questions: Announcing our 2nd live Crystalvale teaser trailer:
Live Questions
Impact or team’s vision on stats of heroes. Currently we know that quests that are out now, are only the professions and for profession quests, stats only have about 1/3 of the impact on rewards. What is the teams vision on stats going forward. I.e. in Combat will it primarily be determined by stats, or will stats impact skills of the heroes in PVP? Another example, say you have a Pirate with 15 stats on everything and then another pirate with the exact same stats. Will those two heroes be equal in terms of combat and questing? Essentially how will stats impact entirely of DFK gameplay?
FriskyFox — yes stats will be very important in combat. The combat engine will look at stats to determine the chances for hitting, crit strikes, how strong the attacks are, how strong the skills or how effective the skills are. Also upcoming with land, we will have more of a simplified tournament that will look at who will be able to win the new lands that haven’t been claimed and it will be based primarily on stats. Stats will continue to play an impact on professions as well, and you’ll see that start to show more as heroes level up more.
You’ve mentioned that stats will play a bigger role in professions. As the current formulas indicate, its mostly weighted towards the profession gene, will this change with upcoming quests? Also you mentioned combat and stats, will stats be the primary driver of effectiveness in combat or will stats be the primary driver in the effectiveness of skills?
FriskyFox — There will be different quests. Pure combat quests will be about effectiveness of skills they are using and effectiveness of their attacks and vitality for example. There will be other quest styles, that will look at stats in comparison to the other hero and having a “who has the better stat” or “who would have the advantage over the other” type of system. Stats will have a big impact from here on out.
In terms of the future, will the team be focusing on hero class for specific quests or solely on specific stats?
FriskyFox — you’ll have storyline quests that may look at classes. Classes are important because of the stat growths, but also because of the available skills. Currently you don’t see the combat skills, but every time you level up you get a skill point and you’ll be able to spend those skill points to upgrade your skills. Having the ability to select which skills you want to level up will be a big part of that.
There have been six notable events in DFK’s short history that have caused turmoil within the community that were either not foreseen, band-aided over, or not addressed and these events have been magnified due to the poor price action of Jewel and the crypto market as a whole. The events are:
1. Sir Sapient selling off free mythic gen0 (#15)
2. Dev Heroes having advanced/transcdental abilities
3. Sarah/Freya drama (Sarah was contributor and DFK was partnered with Freyala and Freya also owns Hero #13)
4. Devs winning land snapshots
5. Sashei (prominent mod) participating in level up contest and contest rules was changed under the table to first to reach level 10
6. Contributors tweeting other projects. With DFK’s rapid growth, does the DFK team have or plan to create a code of conduct or employee/contractor/mod policy to address these events to protect the DFK brand image and build community trust?
FriskyFox — We always encourage asking the hard questions. As a team we are very transparent with our intentions, and we want what is best for the project and the community.
We have a code of conduct for anyone onboarded onto the team about the expectations about how our team will act. You can’t say things that would be damaging to the project or the community, you can’t be involved in other projects. It's more of a core team internal document but we’ve discussed setting this out to the community. With that said, it does draw a line between what it means to be on the team and what it means to be an advisor, moderator, or knight. Those latter people aren’t held to the exact same high standard due to their relationship. We want to work with other people who have other things on their plate, and the understanding is they can be a contributor but don’t have the ability to speak on behalf of the team. The contributors and moderators aren’t held to the same standard. We are looking into ways in how to distance ourselves from risks to the project. We actually just barely spoke about this in our leadership meeting to create a public facing code of conduct and if we can tighten up things with raffles and snapshots.
What you see with other projects is often rewarding devs with special items. That’s what we did with the Gen0, and we planned to do that with land, but decided not to do that. We walked that back and said dev team doesn’t get land automatically and instead they have to participate in the raffles. So that is the step we took to put them on the same playing field as everyone else. Now we are at the point of determining what we need to do to set ourselves to an even higher standard, such as potentially making core team member ineligible for certain things. Whether we create a proposal for the community to vote on, although seems that most are okay with Devs playing and participating in the game. We want to be squeaky clean, and show you we are 100% committed to that. So we may push the envelope and go above and beyond anyone’s expectations here. We are careful about codes of conduct and about being careful about the longevity of the project.
Bolon — our contributors and moderators also have a code of conduct. It’s not the same as the core team members, but they are also held to standards.
What can we know about pets and eggs and how close are we to release?
FriskyFox — we should save this for the game mechanics AMA. We as devs and builders create what they tell us to create. You can look at the timeline on our site and see how things fall into that. Currently we are very concentrated on combat and the expansion and pets do play into that a little bit. Can’t say any dates or timelines, but we are discussing these a lot and have plans. We had a meeting just recently exclusively about pets.
BeetleDude — as soon as they give it to us we are going to build it as fast as we can.
As someone who is shamelessly illiquid, it would be nice to have some sort of swap or trade proposal. The market hasn’t caught up to a lot of stuff yet, such as how certain heroes will level up over time. If there was a way for us to connect via discord and people who are very into the hero market, and then we could push trades/swaps through via the marketplace that would be awesome.
FriskyFox — creating these aftermarket ways to swap heroes might be something that could qualify for a grant. The advantage of the in game tavern is that its accessible and its a quick way to sell or buy heroes that isn’t hands on. For more hands on hero swaps there might be website out there for those. Our position is always to be careful with these, but from our perspective on whether it will be available in game, its a possibility.
Bolon — we sunset the hero trading in discord because it became the same dozen heroes with their tavern posting screenshot and just posting it on repeat. To bring it back, what we are figuring out is how to have a healthier channel for that rather than just being a shell station for tavern listings. Having something in game would be cool, but its something in the works from a couple different angles. Just wanted to clarify on the discord side, we aren’t 100% against having any form of it, its just a matter of figuring out how to make it healthy for what its meant to be.
What about unknown stats?
FriskyFox — yes we have some stats that haven’t been announced yet, those are mostly related to combat or going to be used with integrations with other projects (metaverse style). There are other genes that have already been planned for and we are just waiting for other systems to launch.
We know that the cost of summoning Gen1 basis with 10/10 summons will be 60 jewel for the two Gen0 parents. based on statistics of getting a Dread knight and probabilities I get to around 20k jewel to hit a dread knight. If the plan is to attract people on t he lower end of the scale, will there ever be an incentive of whales to put their locked jewel when it unlocks back into the system or will we be limited to new people coming into the game?
FriskFox — so are you asking about economic plans for future of the game?
A lot of the incentives have been for bigger accounts to stake their jewel, taking it out of the ecosystem. You can’t get max value, because if I have a hero worth 2k jewel, nobody can buy it, because all the big wallets are locking their jewel up in bank or gardens.
FriskyFox — as we grow in player base, the economics have been set up so that you don’t have a surplus of jewel when its not ready for it. As our player base grows you’ll see more and more demand for Jewel and more and more jewel unlocking so theoretically they should keep pace with each other and the entire economy will grow but also unlocking to keep up with that demand. You’ll see that as we grow as a game, you should see a much more liquid economy. As far as the prices themselves, that is something the players and the market set. I know I’m probably not answering your question explicitly, but its something we can’t control directly, but we try to incentivize behavior.
But will there ever be an incentive to have the whales to do something other than restaking it?
Friskyfox — the way the real world investments work is that you are incentivized to grow your money. We will have things with awesome prices that will require higher level heroes and land and the hopes would be that we want people with large amounts of jewel not only earning money but also having a good time playing the game and fueling the economy. We are always looking for new avenues for utility for jewel so that theres more options to make money than just staking.
Also in the taverns we know there are recessive genes, will we ever get an interface that will allow us to see those in game without using a 3rd party website?
Friskyfox — you’ll see extensions for browsers that can augment things like this. Some of them may be able to apply for grants. If it makes sense for us to do this natively and internally we will definitely pursue it.
Bolon — Taven filters are one of the most discussed on what can we keep doing. A lot of the filters that have been added have come from community requests.
Closing Remarks
Dreamer — thanks for comments on the upcoming program. Spread the word and looking forward to the grant submissions!
Sunbear — Same thing, really looking forward to looking at your grant submissions. If you know someone with talen tell them to look into the grant program.
FriskyFox — I will say we’ve got a lot of things currently on the burners, working very hard on the expansion. We have some really really cool things to annoucne there soon. As far as play of the game goes, land will be a big thing and combat is going to be a big part. Competition aspect is something we are really excited about. You guys are great, really a pleasure to work here with you in the community, which I think is hands down the best one out there in the entire space. Happy to be here and excited for upcoming few weeks.
BeetleDude — Got a great community, we’ve got a great team and hang on to those eggs!
ProfessorTango — Going to infinitely echo what everyone has said here. I love this team. There’s been several comments about these things brought up by our contributors, but I will say the core team, the one driving this team, will never be shilling anything and pushing anything other than this project. From the inside, and having an inside perspective, that’s just how it works. Even internally we aren’t talking about other projects or investments, if we do its in the context of saying hey look at the success they’ve had is there anything we can incorporate? All we ever talk about is how to make this project better. While you may see others affiliated with other projects, the core team is ONLY affiliated with this project. That gives me hope seeing that level of commitment from this team. I find confidence in that, hopefully you do to.
Bolon — you guys are amazing. You are the best community around without a doubt. Thank you for your questions and being here with us.
FriskyFox — We have an amazing team and an amazing community, but also amazing contributors. They are involved in other things, but they have done a lot for us, so we don’t want it to feel like we are sticking them in the corner. These contributors help keep our community running and I want to give them a big thanks, also to all of you guys. Again, we have a lot of big things planned. We are doing things no other project has done before, and we are going to remain at the cutting edge. Thanks for the questions and hope everyone has a great day and week.
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!
