DeFi Kingdoms Team AMA (Development Team) — November 15, 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 the DeFi Kingdoms subreddit or my medium page (for the more recent ones).

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

Development Team Present:

Updates:

Fox: Milestones

All the new hires are hitting their stride. We launched updates to the map last Wednesday and it blew us all away. Along with that there were several UI changes for things like Gardens and the seed box. Several zones got updates. Then we had 4 new pools (MATIC, AVAX, FTM and LUNA) that were introduced for the DEX. Our plans for those pools will be to increase the allocations to each of those pools over the next several week — as we are trying to ease into those allocations since the liquidity for those pools was low on Harmony initially.

We are at 21.5k on discord now. Twitter we are at 32k followers. Reddit, Facebook and Telegram are all growing. We have an instagram now but haven’t posted on it yet.

We also had our recent Harmony ONE AMA recently and there were over 300 questions asked and we addressed as many as we could over several hours. Harmony mod running the AMA said it was the largest Harmony has had.

Started the second snapshot for the land snapshot and lowered the minimum requirements to 1,000 xJewel rather than 5,000 xJewel. Also it will now be an average of what you hold over the period. Also we did the lottery draw for the first snapshot.

Sinstar: Also want to start producing some video content on youtube soon. We’d like to start doing some behind the scenes type spotlights with individual devs to show how various products are being made.

AMA Questions

Raspberry, when can we expect a flip all cards to back button? Sometimes we just want to see all the back information.

Raspberry: Wasn’t planned but I love this so I’m adding it to the list for Dev’s to tackle.

The ability to quest while a hero is listed in the marketplace, will this be possible?

Fox: Currently they can quest when listed for hire but when listed for sale it cannot because the Tavern is essentially is an escrow so that when you list the hero for sale the ownership of the hero transfers ownership to the smart contract. This is how it has to work for the NFT standard and allows for an extra layer of security and instantaneous in one transaction. There aren’t currently any plans to be able to have heroes on sale be able to quest. Theoretically we might be able to have a smart contract allow for this in the future but no plans now.

Sort by Stamina — Ascending/Descending, is this a feature in the game or planned to be put into the game?

Tango: You should already be able to sort by stamina. In the upcoming patch there will be another feature to automatically default sort when questing or anything that would be relevant to stamina.

Fox: In the next patch there will also be another feature that should speed up that view.

Reset button for tavern filters — is this in plan?

Raspberry: Yes this is coming in the next patch along with several other new filters. Reset is coming.

It would be nice to have some kind of line to describe when selling a hero?

Fox: I think it would be cool but there are some concerns. We have to think about what happens if someone puts up a link to something inappropriate or they say something insensitive? Always have to be careful when allowing users to put input into the game and with blockchain gaming we are aiming to decentralize and not have to have a heavy hand moderating it. What we might be able to do is to have some pre-curated tags that people could flag heroes with. Internally we’ve spoken about auto generated flavor texts that would be auto selected based off their stats (i.e. someone good at one profession might auto have a line saying “Me like crushing things”)

When you filter in attributes and select two different attributes, its showing every hero with one of the stats or both, can we filter to make it show only having both stats.

Tango: Very good point. We’ve modified the way filters work multiple times and whether they are “and” or “or” filters. There are always new ways for us to streamline this and make it look better. We’ll have to continue looking at this and we can see the value in this so even if its an additional toggle or something. We will see what makes sense without making this too confusing. The more filters we add the harder it gets to keep it all straight. We do see the value in this and will look at it.

Note from Sinstar: There are a LOT of filter questions submitted.

Can we get a filter and sorting option for number of remaining summons as this is becoming a significant value stat, also when hiring at the portal would it be possible to sort by total summoning cost, so not just by hire fee, but also the summon cost?

Raspberry: This is valuable and we are looking into making filters for summons remaining. We didn’t consider the total summon cost when looking at this, but we can see how this would be valuable and will look into adding this so that its more transparent. We will add this to the list.

We know that land isn’t require for play but that it will be required for gameplay. What does the average person who will never own land have to look forward to at its release and what value will land owners be able to capture? Are there ownership or P2E opportunities there for average players or not? How much Dev time should be spent on something that only a tiny fraction of the player base will ever get to do?

Fox: We haven’t spent a lot of time explaining how its going to work because it’s not out yet and a lot still in the works. Land is rare and there will only ever be 1,000 in each world. There are a lot of play to earn opportunities and those will be for the land owners themselves. Just like any p2E game, the more you put into the game the more you get out of it (which is true of crypto and investing in general). Opportunities will exist for non-landowners when it comes into alliances and guilds. For example, if you have land you have the opportunity to create your own guild and players in that guild will be able to receive benefits from that land and interact with them as well. Most of the P2E aspects will revolve around producing resources and improving the land to increase efficiency of those resources. Those resources will be used to create active and passive bonuses for your guild and to make items that can be crafted and then sold. A lot of exciting stuff like ability to have events such as a dungeon that spawns close to your land so that anyone that quests there may be sent over to your land for special events. There will also be opportunities for land wars and similar types of events. We will look to spread out benefits to other players of the guilds too.

Can you tell us some of the utilities of land and is there a limit of how many people can be on one plot of land?

Fox: I just answered most of that, but as far as limits, we will have limits on how many people can be in a guild. We haven’t zero’d in on what those limits are (i.e. 100 people, 1000 people). We’ve talked about the ability for areas in the land set aside for others in your guild to be able to help and harvest.

Will Dreadknight be able to show up soon on the menus? Can’t sell it or search for it because it’s not showing up in the UI?

Raspberry: We released a hot fix this morning. Just need a few eyes to make sure it didn’t break anything else, but it should be fixed very shortly.

When hero has a CD for summoning it shows the CD timer. What about adding a button to add this to your calendar to add notifications to remind you when you can summon again?

Tango: we are always thinking about how to integrate aspects of the game with our real world assets and integrating this into our day to day life. I like this idea a lot and we will take a look at what we can do to get this out there, including other notifications of some sort. At some point we’d love to have a mobile app that can pop up notifications on your phone for you. We’ll have to look at it and its unproven but we will explore it.

Is there any plan to collaborate with the money markets to make xJewel to use as collateral? It will appeal to more players to put money in the bank.

Tango: This is similar with the above where we want more real world utility. I really like the idea. This is something that we have several people who are very familiar with the crypto space and the banking environment that we can look at something like this. This hasn’t been on our radar as of yet. It will go into our backlog and we’ll look into it but our main focus will be getting quests up and running.

Fox: Our project is very interesting because we are trying to be a game but also a DEFI platform, where peer to peer swapping and lending is very important. Having real world economy that lives within the context of the game so we’ll for sure be looking at things like this.

Tango: Agreed we will be looking at this, the hard part will be determining how something like this will live within the game.

Any plans to launch DFK on other chains such as AVAX, FTM? Right now you have 25% of the volume of Harmony, which could be alarming if Harmony can’t fix the congestion.

Fox: This is a pretty commonly asked question (i.e. why did you launch on Harmony). Short answer is yes we have plans to launch on other chains. You’ll notice the ports on our world map. Those are setting the stage to allow for us to travel to other lands, and those other lands will be on different chains. There will be other hero traits that show up in other lands and other themes of the environment. From our strategy standpoint, we are trying to be a metaverse where we will be cross chain and have all sorts of interactions between our own in house bridges, but also the ability to experience this on other chains and attract all these other audiences on all these various layer 1 and layer 2 solutions. there is a lot of stuff we are looking at and we are in high level talks with some other teams right now, so right now its more in terms of discussions on strategy and how that would impact economics. It should be very positive on price of our own Jewel token. Most of these other chains have orders of magnitude higher amounts of liquidity and it would be great to capture some of that. There are teams we have set aside internally just to focus on these efforts.

Would we get to see day and night depending on our time zone?

Sinstar: It’s one of those things we’d love to do, but more of on a wish list type of thing. We will get to those types of features as we develop out the core of the game. The core is front and center and we don’t want to get lost in the weeds on some of these smaller features that would be really cool, but we really need to focus on the heavy lifting of what the game is.

Raspberry: I do add a backlog of things for the devs so that they have something they can look at in down time or if they need to take a mental break from the core projects. I’ll add this to the backlog but this could go onto the art department logs as well.

Tango: Whether or not a feature like this works will depend on if it works, but we will definitely look into it and we love suggestions for these types of conversations.

Are there plans for an expert economist to join the team or consult? The in-game economy is a very delicate thing and it can be beneficial if we have someone to analyze and optimize in that area.

Fox: We already have one. Dreamer is a high level exec at a bank here in the USA and he deal exactly with this. He is good at analyzing and projecting aspects of how things will impact the marketplace, he’s interfaced with the SEC before and has a lot of this in his background. He is the mastermind to this latest expansion we had to add these new pools and having a scaled allocation of Jewel emission to them. He architected that and its played out like he thought it would. It has added stability and increased utility for our token as well as demand for Jewel. He’s spearheaded a lot of things like our budgeting and making sure we are going to be budget sustainable. We always want to attract the best talent for our team.

Additionally, with our original core team we have a lot of background and experience in projects and economics so we’ve been very careful to incentivize the right actions with our tokenomics.

Tango: Our entire team is constantly looking at what is the best for the entire life of the project. Even with the internal economics of the game we have people looking constantly, for example Hubert with in game questing mechanics. We have some very good people dedicated to these efforts and we’re always looking for the right thing to do.

I think a commoner (alternative to hero) might be cool to bring more people into the system. They could collect flower jewel, for example, at the same pace as the wishing will or something. Essentially an “intro” hero idea, and within the framework of the game are we thinking about any cheaper entry point?

Tango: We’ve always been looking at lower barriers to entry. We are looking at what other options we have. Right now we have Heroes, but heroes don’t have to be the ones to do everything. The idea of a commoner that can go out and do things would be cool. Obviously we are focused on our existing committed features, but we agree there should be things that can be done without a hero and we all have a profile whether we have a hero or not so we are looking at this. This is definitely something we don’t have any details on or any specific timeline, but we are definitely looking into ways for people to be able to do something and working their way up to a hero. We will see some fun things come to play as the game matures and progresses.