DeFi Kingdoms Team AMA (Game Mechanics Team) — January 17, 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 game mechanics department. 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 the AMA
Hubert Cumberdale — Game mechanics department lead
nonlinearpenguin — Game mechanics department
dagmor — Game mechanics department
Team Updates and Opening Statements
Hubert Cumberdale: Normally fox is here to give a state of the project update and he’s not here so I’ll do my best on the game mechanics side. This last week we had some issues with the RPC server and Harmony that slowed down our update but we were able to get to the point on Friday to get things pushed out. We did a lot of refactoring of things on the back end to make sure things were working the best as they could as well as prepare us for future editions. There’s one thing about stamina that didn’t quite make it in and we are still working to get that in but we’ll talk about that more later. We got the remaining potions live. There are about 10 different potions and always the possibility that we will be adding more but for now these 10 are the ones you can be looking forward to using as we get into combat. We have a lot we are working on for the future. We’re excited to talk about what we can and we have the two other members of the game mechanics team and I'll give them a moment to introduce themselves.
Dagmor: Thank you, appreciate that! Glad to be part of the time. This is an amazing project as you all know. This has been a tremendous opportunity to work with penguin and Hubert and the rest of the team. Looking forward to addressing questions and game mechanics with the team.
Penguin: Thanks for the intro and the opportunity to be here. I’ve been on the team for a little over a month and its been an incredible opportunity. My background is in modeling very complex systems and this is exactly what this is. It’s interesting to see how all the work on the mechanics influences the game and hopefully makes it more fun for everyone to play.
Written Questions
I’d love to see a rare item implemented where you can change a hero’s primary job.
Hubert: there was another topic about changing a profession gene before and at this time we aren’t planning on anything that could change the genetics of a hero. The whole summoning and gene system is designed to have that luck of the draw feeling to it and any item that bypasses that would break the intent of the game. Very likely this is NOT going to be a feature in the future, but we always leave all doors open in case we see a use in the future.
Miners XP and profession points compared to fishing and foraging.
Dagmor: There has been some questions and concerns about how we distributed these and how the XP and rewards (including profession skill) are credited. We went in to double check to make sure that they are as equitable as possible. These are unique professions and there will be differences between the two. We checked and feel they are equitable and are appropriately placed as far as game mechanics and probabilities for different outcomes.
Bolon: Part of the outlook is on overall rewards, not just XP and profession points. So when we look at quests that receive jewel rewards that has to be accounted for compared to a bloater.
Dagmor: yes there’s a lot that goes into each one of these and there’s a much larger picture that comes into play other than what you immediately see.
Right now owning more heroes pays off linearly. Any quest that requires multiple heroes should pay out more for a full party. Will we implement more rewards for questing with parties vs solo?
Penguin: With these first quests especially we want to be very mindful about the rewards mechanisms so that we are creating any major differences in play demographics that already exist. While these initial quests are more linear, we do have a lot of quest lines or other quests in mind where having a multitude or diverse set of heroes will be more beneficial. I.e. traveling around the map or the PVE and PVP mechanics coming up in the future. We are very mindful of it.
How long in the future will the additional profession quests be implemented. Will there be a new fishing quest at the docs?
Penguin: great question. Last week the creative team shared some teasers for how we are going to be adding to the current Serendale map. I think there was a teaser on the Crystalvale map. There will be a larger map and you’ll need to be able to travel around it. We are looking into what traveling mechanics will look like and what will come with that (i.e. questlines, professions and story driven quests). Your hero will have to travel around the map to complete them. it’s with those mechanics that we expect those higher level profession quests to be put out.
With level 5 heroes available now, will there be some kind of visual indicator or filter with heroes with boosted stats?
Hubert: Yes we do want to be able to show so that you can see the hero has been augmented or enhanced. We have given the devs a list of requirements of things we need. We don’t have a timeline available, but as far as things we want to show: anyone that has a bonus for extra tears spent with lvl 5 or higher parents, bonuses from enhancement stones used and then further along the line when we start getting story quests there are details that we think will be helpful when buying and selling heroes. We are working to make upgrades there. Excited to see it when it comes but it’s not quite there yet. When we get closer we will try to tease it.
We heard there is a balancing change for gardening. Timeline and details?
Penguin: With the gardening quest it was very special when it first came out. It was the first quest that gave direct jewel rewards and also the first quest to be pulling from the quest fund. When we first released it we wanted to be careful with the reward scheme and make sure it was still rewarding but that it wouldn’t put too much stress on other aspects of the game. When it came out we reviewed data around the rewards for gardening and we wanted to rebalance it so that it would benefit the majority of the player base. We made a few major changes:
- there will be a minimum jewel reward per stamina used gardening. This is mainly to address the situation we saw a lot of, players getting almost negligible jewel after hours gardening.
- On top of each set amount of stamina spent, there will be a 10% chance of some flat rate jewel bonus, and if you have the gardening gene that bonus will be larger.
Hubert: As far as implementation, we are trying to be careful about giving a specific date, but this is something that is very close to being done on the mechanics side. We’ve already defined all this, just needs to get into the smart contract and be tested. Likely within the next two weeks, but that’s not certain. Hopefully sooner than later.
Bolon: Sounds like the bonus system might be similar to the mining jackpot?
Hubert: similar concept.
Stamina rework on gardening and mining referenced at the beginning?
Dagmor: currently stam recovery does not resume until after the quest is “completed”. So now heroes complete the quest timer but stay in limbo until you go in and click on complete. We wanted to address that because it feels bad when they haven’t been doing anything for a while but have 0 stam after you complete. In the future we will have stamina start to recover after the quest timer has completed so that there won’t be this dead zone where the heros don’t recover stamina despite being done because you didn’t click on complete yet.
Bolon: And heroes regenerating stamina while queued but when you quest its based on the stamina they had WHEN they queued?
Hubert: We were looking at what we could do here and that’s one thing I was hoping we could include, for example you send someone gardening that has 20 stam and it will take over 1 hour before his queue is ready to pop and people would like the quest to based rewards on stamina at the time their queue ends rather then when you queue them up to allow the benefit of the recovered stamina after queuing but before starting the quest. Unfortunately, looking at what that would take to implement in the smart contract, it has too many pitfalls associated with it. We won’t be able do this specific feature, but we will make sure that the other stamina changes are included.
Using Gloomhaven combat system as a basis for our combat system, is Hubert familiar with this?
Hubert: I own Gloomhaven and have kickstarted Frosthaven, I have probably put in over 400 hours playing Gloomhaven. It’s a great game and I like its combat system. It’s a great suggestion, however we aren’t looking at a strategy RPG style game with this, we are looking at more of a turn based similar to Final Fantasy/Dragon Quest and other Japanese RPG time based style where each person in the combat has an initiative and they have turns taking their actions and you don’t have movement as part of the combat system. Have considered something more strategy turn based, but its probably not in the cards. We are in the prototype of the combat system right now, I like the suggestion, it is a great game and if we could have something that would work like that it would be cool, but I think what we have now is a good system and has a lot of potential so we will continue down that path.
Live Questions
For combat, do you just initiate the quest and see what the rewards are? Or will combat have a bit more action involved in it?
Hubert: I didn’t mention how much player participation will be in combat, so I'll comment on that. One thing I’ll say is that what we are trying to do is to include a system where the player has some control over how much time has progressed during combat and then can make changes (i.e. 30 seconds pass, and then you can make some adjustments). Since it is a smart contract based gameplay, there is time required to submit your transaction and there are has fees associated with it so we don’t want you to have to set every action. We want sets of AI’s (i.e. three sets of AI for a knight and one is full on attack, one is defensive, and one is heal) and the hope is that you can set it up, time will pass, change the AI of heroes, let more time pass, change the AI again and see where it ends. We are prototyping so don’t take that as a for sure how this will work, but that is the direction we are moving right now.
Would be cool if the skill of the player will decide if you win a fight or not.
Hubert: we agree and the intent of this model is to give the player some chance to control the course of combat, there will just be some limitations on what we can do.
Most of the community know and understand that the developers have some say in how they wanted their Gen0’s to be when they minted as a reward for the developers. Given the recent new information about what potential future game mechanics may come, there seems to be some mud in the water. There is a small part of the community that the skills that will most likely involved in combat are discoverable from the blockchain — i.e. two active skill s and two passive skills that have gene sets. I’m sure you won’t want to spoil the mechanics, but what we found is that the hero’s with mint ID’s 0–20 have the basic gene levels at dominant level but they have advanced genes as recessive genes, especially where transcendent is extremely rare. So can you elaborate on how these skills might work so that we can understand the impact the developers had when designing these or can you make a statement about the level of control that were able to mold their Gen0?
Hubert: Thank you for bringing this up. We were not aware of first. There was no intent to have the recessives be anything other than the basic genes and we aren’t sure what caused that. Yes you are right, the randomness allowed for ability genes above basic to show up in the recessives. That is something that we want to fix and we’ve been discussing for quite some time on how we will fix that. When I was made aware of it, I stopped summoning with my hero. For each hero created using those recessives it furthers the problem because they were created not using the mutation gene. For purposes of tracking the lineage of any hero back to the first 20 heroes it takes time but we want to make it right.
As far as what they do, they are mostly intended to be used for combat, but I had some of them planned to be used for something else that I don’t want to disclose yet, kind of like how you have a profession gene or stat gene that might give you a passive or active. There will be advanced ones just like you can get advanced classes. The advanced ones will be more powerful than the other ones. As far as details of what they do I’m not going to disclose that right now.
Community member: I don’t think its a big issue that these genes were different, thank you for the transparency and making us aware that you are trying to solve it.
Hubert: as far as the level of control, we only had control over the dominant genes, none of the recessive genes.
Regarding Locked Jewels — when the game came out it was supposed to be locked until the unlocking period, but now people have been able to trade their locked jewels, which is going against the core game mechanics. What specific steps is the team taking to prevent this impacting the integrity of the game?
Hubert: As far as the moving of locked jewels goes. We did implement that in the smart contract to be able to move locked jewel to another wallet with the intent that you needed to switch wallets because it was compromised or because you wanted to switch to something more secure like a hardware wallet and we wanted to be able to allow that. As a consequence of adding that as a feature, some are now trying to sell their bulk locked jewel to others at a much lower rate than current trading price. As far as what I will say is that the feature is there and this is a decentralized game so there’s not much we can do. It wasn’t our intent to create an economy in this. You have to send it all at once, people can’t trade it or send small batches. In the end the amount of locked jewel doesn’t change, they are just changing location of wallet so when the unlocking period starts the unlocking will just go to different people now. We didn’t intend for that to be what was happening but we also can’t force people not to do it. There’s a lot of risk in this if you use the tool incorrectly and there’s nothing we can do on our side if you lose these. We suggest you use it as intended and that there’s definitely risk involved if you do it wrong so please be careful in whatever you do.
Bolon: we do have our NPC coming soon that will have the transfer locked jewel function to allow you to move to hardware wallet. That NPC is specifically being designed to address the security concerns of losing your locked jewel. As a reminder we don’t recommend or endorse p2p trading so please don’t try it. As Hubert said, there generally is a lot of risk. I won’t even try to count the number of DM’s who’ve lost their locked jewel balance entirely.
What steps is the team taking to lower the barrier to entry for those who don’t have a lot of money so we can take some players from Axie?
Hubert: One thing we are working to do is having something similar in other projects to have a scholarship type program where players that have a lot of heroes could allow others to use their heroes and pay them some amount to do so. Another thing we are always doing is a LOT of contest with rewards high enough to allow you to purchase a hero. A combination of those two things are the best bet and then with each launch of a new expansion there will be a lot off opportunity to get in right at the start.
Bolon: Our version of a scholarship program (which will not be called a scholarship), we are working very hard on it, its a high priority and I’ve said it before and will say it again, that we didn’t think we’d need to be concerned about the barrier of entry as fast as we had to. Part of the delay is that we knew it was something we’d need to look at but further out, and we’ve moved it HIGH on the priority list and Dreamer is working on it and trying to address the pain points that other scholarship programs have.
For combat, as far as details on the card vs information on the blockchain — will we be able to change things to our molding? Passive and active abilities — say basic 8 with a dark hero, does that make it a dark ability? Or would basic 8 be like the actual dark ability if that is how it interacts?
Hubert: Each of those passive and active skills will be pre determined, not based on the class combination, on its own it stands as an ability. There will likely be some class combinations that work better with certain abilities (just like some classes work better with certain professions and certain stat genes). You’ll have hits and misses and then some where abilities and other aspects of the card to align for min/max strategies.
Any update on the tavern?
Hubert: I know we are testing apiv6 right now and we are wanting to get it out as fast as we can. It’s definitely a very high priority for it, but my department isn’t the one to say when that’s coming but we are working on it as hard as we can and we understand its been painful to work with recently.
Bolon: I’ve been able to participate in testing. It’s going well. In grand scheme of things there are a few kinks we are working out so that its fully functional coming out rather than putting out apiv6 with some issues — that would be counterproductive. It’s being tested and going well and hoping to have it out very very soon. It’s top priority for our API devs but no exact time frame yet.
Closing Remarks
Bolon: when we talk about upcoming features and timelines, it’s always subject to change so keep that in mind. We try to give info and timelines as best as we can, but everything can shift and things may not be as balanced as intended, so always bear that in mind as we continue with future development. Nothing is every set in stone.
Hubert: Echoing the same sentiment of others on the team, very happy to be here and do this AMA with you guys. I really enjoy our community so so much. Even though I don’t come in and comment all the time, I am often reading. Any time I make a comment it turns into an AMA, so often I just have to read what is going on. It’s a weird problem to have but its fun and you guys are great. Happy to be on this project and here with you all.
Dragmor: A lot goes into this and its amazing to see the talent going into this. Appreciate the input from the community.
Penguin: Along those same lines — I’m sure you realize a lot of the people on this team are incredibly talented. It’s nice to see all that talent supported by such an amazing community. Being a part of it to the extent that I am is an amazing experience. I’m looking forward to keep pushing forward for all the amazing things we are going to keep putting out in the game.
Bolon: As someone that gets to spend a lot of time with you guys in discord. Ya’ll are an amazing community. Best community without a doubt. Can’t stress how much its seen and means tot he team with how much input you are providing. We hear and see everything, not everything can be implemented, but we take the community feedback serious and want it to continue.
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!
