DeFi Kingdoms Team AMA (Game Mechanics) — March 14, 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 upload the link to the live recording once DeFi Kingdom’s publishes it on their youtube channel (typically a couple days after the AMA).
This week, the AMA was from members of the Game Mechanics 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 State of the Project
The mechanics AMA’s are some of my favorite because I’m excited to hear more about how the game is going to work. It’s been a big week. Last week we opened Perilous Journey and announced the Crystalvale launch date and also announced DFK chain. That is huge news that we’ve been working on for 3–4 months behind the scenes and have tried not to tell anyone about it. It’s out in the open now. DFK chain is a whole other level for us. We’ve added a bunch of resources to our team to manage the servers and the subnet. Mr. Faun has been amazing for that. We’re getting close to the time where we are planning to launch our mainnet (already running on testnet). Aside from that we announced Crystalvale will launch on 3/30, a week after the Avalanche summit. We have the Perilous Journey coming to an end this Wednesday the 16th, I’m excited to see if my heroes survive or not. There will be some immediate rewards from that and there will also be some airdrops and Crystal that happen after the fact.
A lot of the Crystal airdrops that we’ve announced will be dropped on the 30th after we launch Crystalvale because they’ll be airdropped in that realm.
On the 16th of this week I have a special announcement I’ll be announcing at around 8pm ET. We’ll be putting out an announcement with some more details about it. Can’t share more details now, but stay tuned for more details this Wednesday.
Dreamer — Avalanche Summit Update
The trailer for DFK chain has gotten 13.4k views with 15.8k impressions. For us announcing our PJ trailers has been exciting, but one request is that if you have social media, please go and share it and it would be greatly appreciated. DFK Chain tweet got 666 retweets and 66 comments with 338k impressions. Really great, if you are on twitter, not only follow but if you can help with retweets and comments that would be appreciated. Medium article also got 13.4k views.
For the summit coming up. We’ll be showing up in a very big way. It’s more than just being another contributor where we have merch and connect. We’ll have multiple people speaking. I’ll be speaking. Faun will be on a panel. We’ve really partnered with AVAX and want to highlight Faun and his work there. We’ll have some workshops. Pieface will be running a UX workshop. We might even have some team members helping with MCing. The Avalanche expansion is a big deal. The merch is high quality stuff. I’ve seen some of the stuff, including the Chaos Cast, whoever jumped in on that and saw some of the hats and stuff, its high quality. We are excited to give stuff out to people who are there.
Everyone going should be really excited. For those not going we will do our best to document and share it.
Introductions
Everyone other Hapabelle has been on the call.
Hubert Mechanics Update:
Pets — we’ve been making a lot of good progress on this. A lot of work because we want them to have a major role in many parts of the games. There’s many interdependencies that require us to have other things defined too. Seeing some really awesome art for the bets from Secondbestdad. No announcement on dates.
Land Tournaments — made a lot of progress and have had several iterations. We’re setting it up in a way that will require a lot of interaction and won’t require a lot of waiting and will have a lot of use even outside of land tournaments.
There’s more but I’ll save for other people on the team.
Hapabelle Intro:
New to the team, been here for a couple of weeks. I’m working on a new type of quest, like the profession quests, where you can repeat and get rewards and experience.
Nonlinear Penguin:
Hey everyone, great to be back. We’ve been doing a lot of very exciting things. What’s been most exciting is that I’ve become the leader of a gang, the penguin gang.
Dagmor:
I have been working on the crafting system most recently. I’m developing the crafting framework. This will interact with combat, professions, buildings, etc. We are planning to soon have new resources that will be used in crafting.
Land Tournament Teaser
We will have unique banners for each type of tournament. Atlas Parker has put these banners together and we want to share a few of them. Won’t see them all today, but we are good to share those now in the chat.
Written Questions
A limit of profession skill level up in regards to hero level? Requiring your hero to reach a higher level in order to reach higher profession levels?
Hubert — when we came up with profession quests we didn’t tie it to hero level limit. As we’ve looked at this more and with intro of a travel system coming up soon, we also have the opp. for some areas that are more dangerous than others. These higher level profession quests might not necessarily be capped by hero level, but might have a higher level of danger where you have to complete some fights before you can profession quest there or something. For now, the profession level though will be the primary means for gating higher profession level quests.
What is the team’s outlook on hero burning?
Hubert — until now we’ve only had one hero burning event, PJ, and its not even done. 27% of the hero population joined the journey. With future expansions we wil definitely be looking at if we want to do something similar. In the meantime, for regular in game activities if we ever have hero burning events we will make sure we are very upfront with how it takes place. Generally burning events like this would be reserved for bigger events rather than smaller events but we will always be looking at opportunities to do something like this.
Cooldown on tavern listings going live? I.e. you have a period to cancel it before it goes live?
Frisky — We’ve heard about this feature request for a while now. Some things we did to add extra checks to make sure the player knew what they were doing before executing the sale have helped, but I’m in the process of rewriting the tavern contract right now to add some additional features as well as to reinstate the private hero hires, I could add this as well, so that maybe there’s an option where you list it and could check a box to have a brief cooldown before the listing actually goes live. That should help with some of the sniper bots that are out there so yeah I think that’s something we could do.
Rewarding item collectors through questing: I.e. rewarding people who have different/larger amounts of loot:
Penguin: Sounds like this is geared towards people collecting the most items. This hits close to home for a new mechanic we are working on, leaderboard. This is a well orchestrated effort between game mechanics, Kant, UI, Pinecone, Goma and other team members integrating it into the contracts and API. What this would do is breed more competition in the community and give people an opportunity to be rewarded for collecting items like this question seems like its getting at. This should be rewarding for smaller wallets as well because we can normalize and equalize the playing field for larger wallets and smaller wallets. What we envision so far is that every period of time there may be some randomly selected leaderboard, and over that period of time everyone will be incentivized to go and do whatever the leaderboard prompt is and at the end of the time we will reward varying things, but we are thinking that at first some of the prizes could be Gen0 heroes over in Crystalvale and then going on from that there could be Jewel rewards or item rewards. There’s a lot that we can do there and we are excited about that.
[SNIPPIT FROM THE VOICELESS CHAT ON THIS: Nonlinear: There are a number of ways we can normalize the “leaderboard of the day” to shift probability distributions among wallet/hero demographics. There will definitely be competitions that skew towards large wallets, but our goal is also to have a large number of options that normalize out traits typical of large wallets (e.g., higher level heroes, 10s-100s of heroes, access to endless stamina pots) and shift the probability distribution of winning to be more uniform among all wallets. We plan on launching with several options for each type of competition, but a big part of this mechanic is going to be looking at the data to identify new behaviors/metas people use for these competitions]
Locked Crystal — how will we be handling this compared to the locked jewel contract?
Frisky — we had a governance vote about a month ago on adding a new Jewel locking mechanism to help with this. All of those things that we have planned for that are also things we are planning to put into CV from the start. There are also some bugs being fixed. There will be improvements to the Gardens contract. Nothing huge but yes we are planning to have some of these things built in out of the gate.
Bolon — we have learned some things from Serendale and will implement them in CV.
Live AMA Questions
(Pumpskol) With all the items we’ll be receiving for heroes that die in Perilous Journey, all these things we can use to level up our heroes, etc. what I’m curious about is that we’ve all been speculating about what stats to use for the best in Meditation Circle. These items will be valuable and there’s no way to obtain these other than through this PJ. Can we find out how land tournaments will work so that we can start planning on how to use these items and make educated decisions on how to use these items when we summon or when we level up? I know you can’t give us specific timelines, but I think we may have swung too far in the opposite direction of replacing a month and day with “soon”. Could we be somewhere in the middle (i.e. Combat will be this fall, or something like that)?
Hubert — It’s a good point that you need more information for the land tournaments so that you can make more informed decisions. Then also for the application of stats in combat as well. May be good to give another overview of that since we now have a prototype that we are starting to get comfortable with. I don’t think I can say right at this exact moment what each thing is going to do, but for land tournaments, its generally a comparison between one stat for each of the two heroes in the round. If you have a higher stat then them you have a higher chance of winning. I want to release the equation so you can see how it works. It’s not linear. If you are close in stats its close to 50/50, but the further the disparity the chance to win/lose grows greatly.
Bolon — The stat that will be measured is randomly decided at the beginning?
Hubert — No I think we want it so that players know which tournaments they are signing up for and we’ll try to have an equal distribution. For future tournaments we could make it more random, which could favor more generalist classes. For now though we think its important that players can make the best decisions about which heroes they will send on these tournaments.
(Pumpskol)This is exactly the type of info we’d like to hear more about. But also the “when”. Like I need to know do I have two weeks to acquire more STR on my hero, or do I have less than 2 weeks. My decision could change quite a bit depending on how much time if have, like should I be spamming stamina potions now and would it be worth it for me to go for it? Similar to the Gen0 race to lvl 10, more people might have participated had they known how it would work out.
Hubert — Thanks I’ll talk to the team about how soon we can release those details. A lot of these details are finalized but we need to get this information to you and will discuss.
Bolon — We are also working on an entire Roadmap revamp to move a bit back towards where we were with timelines rather than too general. We also want to get you information you need to make decisions.
(Nightcookie) I see a lot of the game mechanics aren’t being applied to the main game. A lot of new players don’t even know about the beta and they are waiting on content they don’t even know is released yet. Any updates in general on that?
Frisky — Everything is finalized except for gardening, where we want people to be able to queue up multiple gardeners at once. Another thing we need to do though is that in order to move it over we have to re-architect a few things because some contracts are too big. I’m working on that now. It’s not just little tweaks its a rewrite from the ground up. We don’t want to release into production until we are sure that it won’t change much. The main difference will be able to queue up heroes in bulk and collect in bulk so you don’t have all the tedious clicking.
(Thanpolas) First — great job on working on a roadmap, needed for trust. Wanted to go back to Heroes needing to be incentivized vs xJEWEL. Last week when we briefly touched on this, it was discussed that Heroes are a productive asset, but so are xJEWEL. Discussing with community, it feels that hero holding members are much more aligned with the game than xJEWEL holders. This turned me off back in October because I felt like I would be committing my Jewel liquidity into heroes where I couldn’t get any airdrops, so what are your thoughts on this going forward?
Frisky — there’s a lot of different things going on here. xJEWEL earns you interest, they are also used for things like governance voting, and there has been a lot of similarities drawn between them and Heroes. Recently each Hero was voted to be able to have 10 xJEWEL worth of votes. We’re trying to incentivize both. Heroes you can quest with and earn rewards. They may be less liquid than xJEWEL, but they can also earn you a lot more rewards than xJEWEL.
Thanpolas — so is your thinking that with Heroes you benefit more than jewel so that is why you incentivize xJEWEL holders more?
Frisky — in part, but I wouldn’t say we incentivize xJEWEL holders more.
Dreamer — It’s a fair point, we actually have been thinking about it independent on this. How can we be creative about how we are rewarding people. Like penguin mentioned with leader boards (and there will be more at the summit) if we think about heroes and questing and ways to incentivize and reward them rather than static snapshots, the leaderboard feature should help a lot, its almost like Snapshots 2.0.
Frisky — a bit of alpha drop there, we were planning to expand more on that at the Avalanche summit and we will more, but all of this stuff in the game now is just part of the picture. Everything being added to the game directly impacts the value of the heroes.
(Raist) Do we have any more info about the mechanics the pets will support and how they will support the heroes. Are the bonuses related to professions, combat, both?
Hubert — Hopefully Bearious doesn’t get on me for saying too much. We are looking at them to have the potential to provide benefit for both combat and professions as well as some features we are planning to add to the game. The goal is to make them dynamic. Two pets will very often not be the same. They might look similar, but the benefits they provide will be different and will also be tied to a rarity system.
(Raist) Do we know if they will be 1:1 with heroes or work for a group?
Hubert — Mostly 1:1 with a hero, but some bonuses might impact a full group.
(Caseysan) Will there be a feature like meditation circle with the pets?
Hubert — we are looking at a unique location you’ll have to go to for hatching pets.
(Caseysan) What about rarities and summoning?
Hubert — current iteration we are looking at pets coming from eggs, and not from a breeding system.
(Caseysan) Could we have something similar to being able to hire and quest with a hero to selling a hero and also questing?
Frisky — so you are asking if they can quest while available for sale? It is possible conceptually and I’m looking into it as I rewrite those contracts, but what you could do is authorize the tavern to pull your hero at any time and if they are in a quest then whoever receives that would just be able to collect the rewards from that quest.
(Warr King) Two quick questions, more QoL Improvements. First one is (1) are we going to have the ability to have pre-made groups that we can send on a quest, let’s say you have 6 miners that are great at mining and we want to send those 6 always? and (2) is there any way to minimize the amount of flipping we have to do on the cards, I.e. if on the back could we be able to see the main class, sub class and summons remaining so that we don’t have to switch between back and front?
Frisky —On the second, we should be able to do something like that. For the first item, we have talked about for combat having certain setups be able to be saved like a bookmark. I haven’t heard anyone say that about quests yet, but I can see how that would be really helpful for mining. I think that’s a cool idea. I’ll bring it up with our team and see what we can do about it.
Bolon — Beetle has mentioned before about doing some customizations to flag and leave notes on certain heroes.
Will there be higher level mining quests to unlock more of the locked jewel?
Hubert — Higher level profession quests are intended to be better than the lower ones, that does mean by extension then yes, it would have a higher unlock rate.
Kory — Any idea within the next month or so when we might see the next level questing, in regards to rewards we know it will be higher rewards, but can we just assume it will be more experience and the same items, but just more of them, but what would the difference be?
Hubert — In general, more experience, more rewards (of the same ones) but we are also trying to include the first set of the item that will be used for the crafting system. As far as timeline goes, what we have prioritized and closer, we have some new types of quests like Hapabelle mentioned that we’ll be able to get out sooner (which will have more XP gained than the lvl 0 profession quests). The next level profession quests will probably come out after these quests mentioned by Hapabelle.
Closing Remarks
Dagmor —great meeting, crafting system is looking great, we are excited to continue to develop this.
Nonlinearpenguin — really grateful to be working on this project and alongside a community as supportive as this one. Always excited to see what is to come.
Hapabelle— looking forward to being more involved with everyone!
Hubert— always happy to be here and always enjoy my interactions with everyone in the community. It’s always a good time and you guys come up with some amazing memes. I’ve been looking through the art submissions and some have been very impressive. I like that we have this platform that people can express their talents like this.
Dreamer — I’ll just echo some comments from the begining. Really excited about next week. I wanted to draw to everyone’s attention how high quality these AMA’s are. Most AMA’s are people who haven’t done homework, instead these are things like “I’ve been thinking about this a lot, have you considered this?” This is so helpful for us. This is a partnership for us to brainstorm and enhance where we can. Very grateful for everyone listening and for those sharing afterwards on social media. So thank you to everyone.
Frisky — Just exactly what Dreamer said — we have an amazing community. We get all these amazing ideas and suggestions. it makes the project higher quality and it makes the community higher quality. Amazing to wake up every day and work on this project. This project is ground breaking and so many exciting things planned. Super stoked about DFK Chain. Jewel for gas blows my mind. Super excited about pets and land tournaments and few things we haven’t announced yet that will be little things in between. Just wanted to say thanks everyone for coming to the AMA. Wednesday I have the announcement and then we’ll see you all in Spain.
Bolon — Thanks stage and audience. Thanks for taking the time to answer these thoughtful questions. We’ll see you all next Monday I think we are still trying to do our AMA from Barcelona but stay tuned because we’ll need to organize some things on our end. Hopefully you can just come to Barcelona and just ask us questions in person.
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!
