DeFi Kingdoms Team AMA (Game Mechanics Team) — February 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.
Here is a link to the recording of the AMA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SmcxQtgewE
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:
Frisky, Dreamer, Hubert, Bolon, Non-Linear Penguin.
https://defikingdoms.com/team.html
Team Updates and Opening Statements
Dreamer — Project Update
Just two quick updates on growth side.
- Our proposed policy has been decided with 99.8% support for the proposed gardens policy. This is in an effort to refine our approach on gardens and to also involve the community. There are a few parts of the policy that will need some follow up on. For those that participated and gave their views, we want to make sure that the DEX serves as an on-off ramp, is stable, provides healthy token pairings, etc. So that everyone participating can do this in the safest way. There are a few tokens live today that would not fit under the policy o there will be another vote to see if we should grandfather them in or if we should phase them out.
- DeFi Kingdoms day at Eth Denver — starting all day with breakfast working with Harmony — will have some words from Frisky, alpha drops potentially, panel with devs, then traditional hackathon planning style session to feed into the grant program and figure out how to incentivize the bounty program.
Merch — we have some unique merch for free!
Frisky Frox — State of the Project
DFK day is going to be a lot of fun. I’ll be wearing a mask and some glasses. Still trying to be anonymous as much as possible. Looking forward to seeing a lot of our devs in the community and offering technical advice and figuring out ways that we can partner. There are lots of opportunities in the metaverse where we can have our NFTs be used in other people’s games, spend stamina, earn XP, earn items. There’s lots of cool things and I’ll probably be hacking up somethings myself to see if we can get some cool features added.
A lot of us are involved in that. We will be busy this week especially. Looking forward. If you see me there, come up and shake my hand, I’m okay with hugs, we can take pictures. Looking forward to meeting you guys.
Bolon —
While we have 2:30–6pm we will have a set aside dedicated area for community meet and greet. You don’t have to be a programmer and be hacking, come hang out with us and get some merch. Its cool to put faces to names and meet people.
Going to try and keep this short. Most of us are in Denver and have events we need to get to. Raise hand if you have a question to ask. If your question gets answered, please unraise your hand.
Hubert —
Lots of things we are working on right now. Haven’t been announcing them because as soon as we do people start asking “WEN”, so we’ve been keeping things a bit closer to chest but do have a few things we wanted to mention that we are working on.
We have briefly in passing mentioned some of these things:
- Perilous Journey — we will talk about this in a lot more detail at the event, but to give you an overview: there was that promotional video about what happened. Someone in Crystalvale arrived in Serendale, so now they are aware of Crystalvale but they don’t know how to get there, so there’s a call to heroes to help chart the path to Crystalvale. This will involve hero burning and a lot of unique rewards that I think you guys will be excited for. If you ask questions about this we aren’t going to answer them on this AMA. This is coming very soon.
- Land Tournaments — there are in work. Can’t give you a deadline. But as far as the way its going to work, it will be our first foray into pvp. It won’t be combat, but it will be PVP in a simplified tournament where it will be stat based and it will be a best of 7 match. It will allow us to start prototyping things we need to do for the combat system. need to be able to display what happened in a contract interaction in a sequential approach. This allows us to do that and gives the players something fun to do and to compete for land ownership. You can ask questions about that if you’d like.
Bolon — quick follow up on this, perilous journey not going to say anything more about this today, it will be at DFK day tomorrow. We likely won’t live stream that and have doxxing as a concern, however we are going to record it. The audio will be available for everyone to listen to. After its available we will post a specific Q&A sheet for perilous journey. Then we will put a special AMA on the books with Hubert for Perilous Journey specifically. We won’t leave anyone in the dark and we will have an entire conversation around this.
Penguin —
As far as things in pipeline, Hubert mentioned Perilous Journey, Land Tournaments, combat system, and one other thing in the pipeline is Travel. So we have this big beautiful map that the art department worked on and they put out the first expansion (the 100 lands). One thing we’d like to have with that is the ability to move around it and do quests specific to that region and fight enemies in those regions. To do that we need a good travel system that is blockchain compatible. There might be some mockups that may get posted in the voiceless chat that we are prototyping with. The ideas and technology here are pretty novel so we are excited to get this out to you guys. This isn’t what final product will look like.
Written Questions
Will competition happen for all available plots at once or will it be staggered? One big tournament for all lands or 50 different tournaments?
Hubert — 949 plots in Serendale, but then also plots in Crystalvale and other expansions as well. The plan is that each land will have its own tournament. We will try to stagger the start times of those tournaments out so that we don’t favor any time zone. There will be concurrent tournaments, so you won’t be able to send the same heroes to concurrent tournaments. We hope to rope in the travel system so that you’d have to travel to specific lands to be able to participate in the tournament there.
Would be cool to see a system where those with land can create output but need substantial hero quantity so can hire people to assist:
Penguin — We want lands to provide a lot of utility to land owners but also want social aspects around them so there’s utility for a larger set of the player base as well. We have discussed resource management systems, heroes contributing to gathering resources, guild systems, these are all things in the works for different types of utility that land will have.
Crafting Stat feature and probability of having one?
Hubert — Dagmor has been heading up a crafting system for us. We have this in mind where we want to have crafting and we want it to be hero based with a skill system in place. To be able to make the best things you’ll need to put in the time and energy to increase the heroes skill to get to the point where they can make the best equipment. We have that and there's still a lot of work to put into that. These are complex and a lot of balancing needs to go into this, but we want to have a first level 1–20 of resources needed for crafting and then work on the rest. That is why the lvl 10 profession quests have been somewhat delayed is because we are trying to get some of the resources that will be used in a crafting system built in.
Drop rate calculator specifically for heroes based on their profession skill so that players can plug in their hero and see their likelihood of rewards?
Penguin — Great suggestion and I like the idea of showing players what they can expect to get. I’d like this to be done int he game’s UI itself. With the mining quest that came out we have expected unlocked jewel rewards when you go to start the quest. I think for gardening that's also something we could tie into the UI so that you can see what you could expect. As far as the other quests like fishing and foraging, we haven’t released the drop rate probabilities for all of the items, if we do I’d want that to be tied into the UI, but until then, that’s something we will keep discussing.
Hubert — We have released the base chances, but those chances grow as you increase in skill and stats and how much they grow has not been released.
Live Questions
First wanted to talk about heroes and hero market. Without compelling reason, older heroes aren’t selling for a premium. The exp from wishing well has been washed away and nobody had the benefit of hero bot. So those heroes are almost at a disadvantage. With liquidity being expected to be supplied on the lower side and where you need xjewel in the bank, we need price discovery on the upside. In the rare event that you get a good card you don’t have a bidding war and since Gen0 are the only assets (with the rest being commodities) can you talk about how you envisioned the tavern working initially and plans? Secondly can we get a big concept dump on what you were thinking when you made the genes, the mutation rates, etc, so that everyone is reading from the same book. Its hard if you are looking through the tavern to find a recessive gene you want, so it makes a seller lower their price to sell more quickly. Lastly could the wishing well be reformulated so that older heroes could have an extra benefit so that they could have an extra benefit. The summon costs were likely built with some model — is that something that can be shared?
Dreamer — lots of good questions, may not be able to hit them all. On the view of Gen0 being assets and other being commodities, if you think only of summoning you can see all of the non Gen0 as consumable resources, but they all have their primary or secondary utility of questing. Questing will continue to evolve and then combat and other bits of utility. I don’t think that just because you are not a Gen0 that you are totally different in terms of asset/commodity. Have to look at net present value. There’s a lot of good points on transparency of a marketplace. Marketplaces have different forms. There could be some deep value assets that are listed that don’t get highlighted and some that actually do their research and dive in and see the over and under valued that aren’t sniped. Having other options like a bulletin board in the castle or bidding are helpful options being looked at. Just wanted to share my thoughts on the non Gen0 being commodities.
Frisky — You asked how it started, the vision and where its at now. Heroes are always seen as assets in our model. There's the question of ROI and how long it takes to win back what you’ve invested. yes we have spreadsheets and simulations and charts and graphs, but it all comes down to how long does it take you to get your ROI. Gen0 have strong ROI yes, but they have that because the heroes they are producing also have a strong ROI.
Are you using IRR or NPV on exit to calculate ROI?
Dreamer — You’d have to use IRR based on your own participation. In the real world you can buy a gold mine and not mine it. If you hire x amount of workers that have y yield and you look at your inflows outflows and its the same with our heroes, how efficient you are with questing, putting the right heroes on the right quests, trading, etc. In my mind it would be IRR but its not a perfect science being in a high growth environment with so many moving targets.
On advance stats and recessive genes — I envision these being an equalizer so that 3 mythic dread knights wins the game and its over? Can you shed light on it so that people playing can understand what you are thinking?
Frisky — To hit back on the first part, you look at traditional NFT’s which are just art pieces and speculation. We want to create a new breed of NFT’s that have utility and can be used as investment vehicles rather than just being held and speculating on price.
On equalizers — is there any one hero that will win everything? No, there will be heroes that have strengths against certain things and weaknesses against other things. Strategy will come into play. We will be monitoring things and having a ranking system of sorts to match you up with people of a similar rank. There will not be one that will hands down win every time. Hubert can probably speak more to this.
Hubert — I’m assuming you are referring the skill genes when you talk about advanced genes? If so there’s the skills you get from your genes, that's an extra set of skills where you can try and et the higher level versions to try and get a better hero, but each class has its own skill tree you can pick from. So it will be a game of what's the best combination and we have never had the intent that those genetic skills will be the one and only way to get the edge over a higher ranked class. We will have equipment and other items. There will be a lot of moving parts. A weapon you have might give you the advantage, or there will be armor. There won’t be any one piece that will be the complete solution.
What will the min and max guild sizes be per land and will subclass have any impact on the pool of skills?
Hubert — on guild size we haven’t come to a solution or any hard numbers.
Frisky — we’ve talked about adding multiples to it, i.e. having a larger guild if you have more plots of land, but nothing zeroed in.
Hubert — for the second question, we are int he process of prototyping a combat system and its a work in progress and we are making changes so can’t say its going to be one way or another, but we do want subclass to have an impact on combat and skills is one way to do that, but how we want it to end up is too difficult for me to say at this point.
Balancing of combat and how you see that in general? In the current population there are a certain people that are gathering high level and high stat heroes. Then there are new people coming into the game getting brand new lvl 1 heroes. How do we balance that?
Hubert — We have to look at that very closely. We are doing that, but if talking in terms of PVE and PVP, with PVP we can do a team score where based on your team build their levels and what they are we can do match making so that someone with new lvl 1 heroes isn’t go against a team with dread knights. With PVE its a different problem that we have to solve for and to do that we just can do easy quests and hard quests.
Surrounding current implementation of stat genes, we have green stat gene and blue stat gene. Over time the green stat gene is almost negligible, and the blue stat gene is less important that subclass stat growths. Any plans to change that?
Hubert — Plan to have that be an element in the land tournaments. You are right though that they are intended to be smaller bonuses. Green gene is a boost right at start and blue is a boost over time. Other than that, the fact that the hero has that as a modifier, we can use that for other things. Like I said I have plans to use these genes in the land tournaments.
Closing Remarks
Penguin — excited to keep pushing. we have a lot in the pipeline and a lot of big features. Hang in there you guys are going to love what is coming.
Hubert — I am very excited for what we have coming in the coming weeks. There’s a lot that is very close to being ready. Excited to see everyone interact with what is coming. We may have patches that are light, but there are a lot of moving parts and those weeks give us time to get the big features where they need to be.
Dreamer — To tie a few things together from open and some of the questions. I like how Hubert introduced the Perilous Journey and with one of the Q’s about are we careful about the economy? We are building out more and more features much more than a DEX and marketplace. Perilous Journey is going to be really important to follow and to understand the first hint to burning. I get lots of DM’s about the number of heroes, saturation, certain class prices going up and down. I hope everyone appreciates we don’t react quickly to short term changes, but we do want to make sure there are fun ways to have a healthy ecosystem. Stay tuned for Perilous Journey, not only from an economic perspective, but going from one realm to another and bridging. Not just to make it fun and beautiful and an interesting opportunity for someone to invest, but we want to innovate in the space. Apologize if there are good questions in our DMs we haven’t gotten to. Excited about DFK day tomorrow.
Bolon — Perilous Journey information is going to be available for everyone.
Frisky — Heroes, we started with 2k, now we have close to 130k, maybe more right now. Its a question of supply vs demand. We want to be a game played by hundreds of thousands of people and that pool will need to grow. The market is efficient and will balance things. You’ll see the floor prices go up and down as those things come into play. Our job is to create an ecosystem where heroes have utility and ROI is positive and its an enjoyable experience. That’s what we are hard at work at every day. Excited for the things to come. From the start we’ve done things that nobody has done and we aren’t stopping. Stay tuned we have some pretty cool announcements coming up. I always say it, but you guys are the best community ever. Excited to meet some of you. Thank you to everyone for coming.
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!
