DeFi Kingdoms Team AMA (Game Mechanics Team) — April 11, 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 recording of this AMA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLZLPQaO-hU.
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.
DeFi Kingdoms Website
DeFi Kingdoms Official Medium
DeFi Kingdoms Discord
Team Members Present:
Frisky Fox, Dreamer, Hubert Cumberdale, Hapabelle, Nonlinear Penguin, Bolon Soron
https://defikingdoms.com/team.html
Team Updates and Opening Statements
Frisky
Frisky — thanks to everyone for coming. It’s been 1.5 weeks since we launched Crystalvale [referred to herein as CV]. It’s been an amazing launch. We’ve done one of the largest airdrops I’ve ever heard of, if not the largest one. I haven’t heard of one that was bigger. Excited how as a team we have these notches under our belt and can pivot into shifting gears to hit all of the things on our timeline really hard. We have some really exciting upcoming features such as pets, new profession quests, new stat quests that will be cool, dueling (which I’m really excited about, I spent the entire weekend working on that). There’s a ton of exciting things there that we are working on in Tandem. Gen0 launch on Crystalvale coming up too, which I think they’ll talk about here shortly. Our approach isn’t to do one of these at a time, it’s a shotgun approach. We’ve opened the floodgates for them to work on all of these and race to see which can be pushed out first. We are trying to balance communicating as much as we can about launch dates earlier. We want to give as much information as we can, but want to make sure that we don’t over promise. There are things that come up, especially in this solidity world where there are unforeseen things. We want to make sure that if something isn’t 100% ready we won’t launch it. We want to do our best to say here’s something we think could launch in 1–3 weeks if all things go well and try to be open about when you might be able to expect. We have a better process in place with a project manager who’s been setting up processes with sprints and trying to track things and are trying to get a better feel for how long it takes for our team to build some things. We’ll see some of the fruits of our labors on that soon
We have some Jewel airdrops we’ll be doing over the next couple days. It will be similar to how it is on CV where you go to the bank to claim that. Going to be working more on that and will share an update on that soon.
Sunbear — Charity Update
Sunbear — we announced matching up to 250K USD in donations to UNICEF. I wanted to say a huge thank you to the community for showing up and working together to make a difference in this world and help people with less privilege than us. We’ll keep it up through the month of April. For any charity that we work with, we note that it’s coming from the community, and we want to know where all of this goes and that it goes to good and needed causes. So I’ll be reporting back to you to let you know where it has gone to. Really excited about what we are doing there and well on the way to matching the $250k.
AMA Written Questions
I know there will be limitations for combat based on blockchain tech, one might be a gambit system like in FF12?
Hubert—we are planning on doing something like a gambit system for combat. We have a working prototype we are testing with now. It’s pretty far along, there’s a lot more to go with it, but that is generally the direction we are going with the combat system. As far as what you will do with your hero, you will set up their AI and what they will do in PVP and PVE. That hopefully answers most of your questions.
Bolon — Yes we are looking at a gambit like system for combat.
Why have a transfer function put in for Locked Jewel?
Frisky Fox— we need the ability for people to be able to switch assets, whether unlocked or locked from one account to another because sometimes your wallet gets compromised. Other times you just want to move to a hardware wallet. There are legitimate use cases for that to be there. Another option we had was to make it 100% centralized and make it go through us when someone wants to transfer, but it also opens a lot of cans of worms (support ticket system, having a way to verify that all those things are working, that someone isn’t lying, etc.) couple with the ideology of wanting to be as decentralized as possible. However we made some key changes into there, one of them is to add a time lock so that you can’t do that too often in a row. That helps address some of the exploits with players that would move those around multiple times every few minutes to try and game some of the mining and things like that. Another thing we are currently working on is a block list so that if anyone is doing things that are basically taking advantage of exploits we’d be able to say if you are going to do something against our terms of service, you won’t be able to interact with our quest contracts. It’s just another way to enforce that players are playing with the rules in the game. There’s a lot that needs to be built in around enforcement and election of enforcers, adoption of policies, etc. But that is the plan right now. Any game has to have some level of moderation and we are trying to find the right balance with that.
Leaderboards update
FriskyFox — with respect to botting and leaderboards — we obviously want actual people playing because part of the fun is interacting with other real players because this is an MMORP of sorts. We do have things in place that will hopefully alleviate the need/desire to bot, and that will be the champion program that we are hard at work on. This will basically provide an acceptable avenue for those finding not enough time to play but wanting to participate. Once we have that in place, we’ll have more of an official policy about botting. Until then we don’t want to have too much in either way, because we want to have champion system as an alternative avenue first. We do frown on botting and we want policies that are ratified by the community. We want all of us to make the rules for the game. This is blockchain game and we all should have a say in what is expected from everyone.
Nonlinearpenguin — the only other things I’d add is that we released this initial version of the leaderboards to create friendly competition. It’s still very young and in its infancy so continue to expect improvements on it. If you have questions on it, please ask. Otherwise expect it to continue to improve as a system and to breed the type of competition that is constructive for the community.
Egg hatching
Hubert — with hatching we are getting very close on pets. Right now we are working on 3 things — training quests, pets, and lvl 10 profession quests. IN particular the lvl 10 profession quests and pets have a lot of tie in because some pet bonuses will affect professions. To give you a sense of what's coming:
There will be an up front cost to setting your egg up for incubation — it will use some of the lesser used resources in the game and not a giant jewel cost. Time will be an element as well where you’ll wait for it to incubate and then hatch. Hatching will be a transaction and like summoning where you wait to see what you get.
With this comes a very large amount of work for the art department to get everything together and we want to make sure there’s a large variety of appearances so we are giving the art team a lot of time to do this. Not all eggs will be hatchable from the get go, we are going to focus first on the blue and the grey eggs. Green and yellow after that. Then gold will be the final one. There will be a staggered approach to that. We’ll be getting those out with each big patch if we can. Some may require a little bit of extra time just so that you are aware. This will allow you to get some of the content and not have to wait for them all in one patch.
FriskyFox — I’m so excited about pets because the original plan/vision that I had for pets was a lot narrower in scope. A large part of that is due to Hubert and Kant and others who said if we are going to do it, let’s do something awesome. I’m excited about what they have in place for that. It does take more time to build something more involved and fun and we want to make sure we are doing it right. It’s getting very close too.
AMA Live Questions
(Pumpskol) So far the only think outside of summoning that is a token sink is alchemist and its gold and other items. Will there ever be other mechanics that require a jewel cost. I’m thinking about as we get to the end of the emission schedule, will there be an incentive to have jewel to spend on things for in game mechanics other than just gold?
Hubert — We have a lot of things slated, once we have combat out, there’s a lot we can build out of that system. As far as building resources, yes for potions and alchemy that’s one source and combat will drive that a lot. For Jewel usage [Hubert cut out due to discord issues]
FriskyFox — in other games, Jewel would be like the thing you pay for and it can do more powerful things and provide more premium things. That’s kind of the intent with Jewel. There will be player to player things, where player’s can sell some of the services that they invest in for lands and earn Jewel back from other players directly. It will in a sense be a real world economy.
Would there be a scenario where someone will spend Jewel for an action that does not have a guaranteed return?
FriskyFox — everything has some type of return even if it's just cosmetics for your hero or land. Raffling/gambling, etc., we want to stay very far away from that, we aren’t trying to be a gambling game, however there will always be chance and RNG involved in every game. Something we have to be very careful about. We also don’t want this to be a pay to win and want people to play. But how much money you put into this game and how far you get with that will always impact that.
Could we got a secondary AMA about bot policy once you explore it further, because right now the Bots win all of the leaderboard competitions.
FriskyFox — A lot of people will be pumping stam pots as they work through the leaderboards and that’s something we kind of encourage, because its encouraging them to go the extra mile and its also not the game selling those stamina potions, its the other players playing to earn that are selling the stamina potions and materials for the stamina potions, so it is somewhat symbiotic. There will also be other types of leaderboards based on other metrics and there will be some that are very different in terms of how far ahead you can get on it based on how much you spend (pumping stamina potions).
(Mettez) wanted to touch on the topic from last week about Gen0 CV recessive genes. Can you give an update on where you are with that?
Hubert — first off, I have seen your messages Mettez, thank you for sending all of that over. This has been a topic we’ve been discussing for a while and how to deal with it. This issue is how to deal with the new genes we are introducing. There are many ways and each has their own drawback. If we did only CV genes, you’d end up with a lot of pure recessive genes and pure main class/subclasses. We don’t want that scenario where its just mostly pure Gen0’s of the new classes with poor distribution of their genes.
We are looking at an approach where all available genes will be available for the roll for the main class recessives and the subclass dominant and recessive genes. That will make these new genes more rare in the subclass dominant and the recessive gene pool, so there’s one more thing to do to make sure we have balanced genes and we’ll look to the existing Gen0 holders and give them the opportunity to help balance the gene pool, so what we’ll do is have a system that will allow Gen0 holders that hold from the original Serendale set to do a reroll of some of their genes (the main class recessives + subclass dominant and recessives). This would be a one-time thing. Every time a Gen0 will do this it will help balance the overall pool for all Gen0s. We’d do the same thing for all expansions so that by the end we’ll have as close to balanced set of recessive genes as we can get. Hopefully with the discord issues you were able to get a sense of where we are going.
FriskyFox — Just wanted to clarify on the CV gen0 as well. All of the new CV Gen0s will be Seer or Berserker, but the subclass could be any of the 10 basic classes in existence at the time.
(Mettez) I think I see the concept, excited to see more details on this. I would like to ask about one more detail and that’s about the recessive skill genes for the Gen0’s distributed to the team and that they have transcendent passives. Are there any updates on that situation and how we would move forward, particularly now that we are talking about rerolling genes?
Hubert — with those recessive genes that had higher tier genes, we plan to do something to replace those with legitimate genes. That would impact both 1–19 Gen0’s and the ones that had those carry on to them. I think right now there are about 3,000 heroes that were affected and what we would be looking to do is prior to combat being out we would have something in place where any hero that would essentially also carry these would be required to go and perform this process before they are allowed to do combat. Since these genes are combat related we are tying it to if you want to combat you have to have the legitimate genes. We’ll have a list that will block out any hero that needs a gene to be rerolled.
FriskyFox — we will err on the side of if it could be legitimate than we will assume it is, but we will need to retrain the others.
(Raph) I recently sold a stake in a Gen0 for liquidity. With the increase in supply of Heroes the return has gone down quite a bit. I know you focus less on price, but rather the ROI, can you explain any in game mechanics planned to try and bolster the value of Gen0s in the future?
FriskyFox— One was just referenced about how they can participate in this reroll (and potentially quest lines) for each expansion. This will allow for incremental utility on top of what’s already there. As for future there’s always opportunity for other things. Achievements, quest lines. Could be things like the PJ where you have maybe auras, or things in land that could help you guild or other heroes in your inventory. We are always looking for cool ways to do things to reward our investors and our players.
Hubert — we are looking at how we can gamefi the reroll for genes. As far as other features, we are looking for opportunities. In terms of near term, I don’t want to say we have anything right upcoming but we do keep this in mind.
(Drizz) The locked Jewel thing where people have been buying and selling on side markets like dirty laundry and we don’t want to talk about it, I think that it does create crazy sell pressure because anyone knows you can just go and buy a fat stack for $2 on the side and new whales looking to get in can just go and do this. I don’t think that in and of itself is a huge problem because it breeds other problems. I think the bigger issues is the looming natural unlock. Are you planning on doing things to stop that from totally crushing the price? Will there be incentives for whales to maybe invest a certain amount of locked Jewel to get in game benefits or something like that? Are there things where you are planning or ways that you can used Locked Jewel as a way to maybe lock it up in a different way so that there won’t be crazy sell pressure? Is that something you care about or are you just planning to build the game and see if that carries the price?
FriskyFox — Great question, first of all it’s not a cliff. Many misunderstand the unlocking. Basically the amount that will unlock each week will be equivalent to the amount that was unlocking each week earlier this year. It’s not a huge thing we haven’t seen before. It will reduce more and more over time until very little is created and then the unlocking will start and it will go back to how it was earlier. The game was intended to always have a constant flow of unlocked Jewel. As more use cases and utility come out for Jewel (like Gas being used for DFK Chain) it adds more utility and need for Jewel. In terms of plans to incentivize people to hold Jewel — Yes, we always do. We always try to keep this in mind with our releases and the type of behavior that we want to incentivize. I’ve personally been thinking about things we can do around our locked jewel balances to incentivize people that are more long on it than others. We will be announcing more of those things as it gets closer, but we are still 4 months or so out. We want to make sure price is healthy and that we incentivize gameplay behavior.
(Ogre) I may have done a thing on twitter trying to talk about utility of our power token. Just wanted to confirm it will be the same number of power token on any chain to summon?
FriskyFox — Yes.
(Ogre) Over time is it expected that the price of Jewel and Crystal will meet? Not that Crystal will go down to Jewel, but that Jewel could go up to Crystal, so its not doomsday, but can you speak to it?
FriskyFox — power tokens will have very similar utility, that said there are things at any period of time that could impact one more than another. For example, right now CV has really high APR’s and having higher emissions as well right now. There are things that are exerting some external force on the price as well. You’ll see a lot of the same utility of these power tokens, with the exception that Jewel is also used for gas. It will be interesting to see how it plays out. We don’t set prices, that’s up to the community, but as far as mechanics go, the power tokens will have very similar in game utility with the exception of Jewel as gas.
Dreamer — agree with everything Fox said. Another thing is fee sharing. We have 2 realms, ongoing partnerships, multiple relationships on DFK chain. and these partnerships need to benefit community, like Ramp. Then we have things like Synapse and other partners in the pipe. WE have partners that might be much more active in CV rather than SD, the fees for those realms would be over x period of time, put them in a contract and pay them out in the specific jeweler. That’s another inconsistency in realms. Summoning is one thing, but there could be different fees over months that could cause a change in basis. Then you’ve go the APR’s and unlock rates. That could impact the overall price as well. 60% unlock in SD, with 7% in CV could impact the price as well. These are all speculative inputs that could change the price and why one might be lower or higher. Fee sharing that would impact overall payout to people staking in the applicable jeweler and then differences in APR and unlock/lock in the various pools in different realms.
(Ogre) So its a paradigm shift then, people are looking at the token supply and saying hey its 1/4 the supply so price should reflect that, but you are saying power token utility will be roughly same even though supply will be different and then the other items noted about with fee sharing with partnerships and what not that could specifically drive price differences in power tokens?
Dreamer— Summoning utility equal, but gas is paid in Jewel. As we get into later phases of CV with summoning there could be more weight on that.
FriskyFox — Lots of variables in play. There will be lots of arbitrage between realms. We added 1/4 of the supply but an entirely new chain. Idea is that we bring in an entire chain of TVL but 1/4 supply token. We will follow a similar model for future expansions. It’s a really good opportunity for existing players to have existing utility for their power token and be able to get in on the ground floor.
(Bolon) Mettez posted in the AMA a follow up to Drizz’ question if you don’t mind can you go in and follow up on that question I’d appreciate it:
“Should you want to expand more on the topic, I believe that @Drizz wasn’t referring to the specific mechanics of unlocking Jewel, but intended to ask about how the serious increase in (probably) selling pressure could be offset? The amount of tokens unlocking vs the tokens now in circulation is quite a big discrepancy, and we’ll need quite a big ‘jewel sponge’ to handle said downward pressure. Could you perhaps elaborate on this topic a bit more, if you have time? Are there mechanics in development to help increase Jewel demand? How did CV affect the ‘active’ player base on SD, to help increase continued J demand? Will we push more players from expansions to SD? etc.”
[Samichpunch note: Will revise this and post a response from the Discord once available]
Closing Remarks
FriskyFox— a lot of exciting things on the timeline coming up to the point where they are almost ready. I just want to reiterate how proud I am of the expansion, the team and our community. All of the markets are down right now. That happens in the crypto space. From our standpoint, nothing has changed, if anything we are just accelerating how hard we build. Whether its up, down sideways, we build. We are excited about the long term future of this project. Thanks for coming everyone, hope you have a good day. Bullish!
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!
