DeFi Kingdoms Team AMA (Game Mechanics Team) — May 9, 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 (mostly a transcript tbh). You can find the transcripts/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=lP4kJKV3B4w
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:
https://defikingdoms.com/team.html
Team Updates and Opening Statements
State of the Project Update
Frisky Fox— It’s been a crazy week, always is at DFK, but this has been one for the books. The entire market seems to be having troubles today, which it tends to do in the Crypto space. Ups and downs, that's kind of what we sign up for. In terms of what we do as a project, we are always cognizant of always ensuring that what we do always adds utility and value whether we are up down or sideways we build build build. We want to hope for the best and plan for the worst. We are smart and want to make sure we have what we always need for the project to be successful long term. We talk about that a lot and have some things we’ll share here in a little bit.
Last week we had the action plan we shared and several things we are doing and will be doing. One of the things was the grant program and making sure that we have a healthy tokenomics system and people are spending and using our tokens in a healthy way. We also mentioned things coming up like stone carver, pets and duels. We have the mechanics team here to answer questions specifically related to those.
We had a momentous event last week with nearly half of our team on camera. We’ve been anonymous to that point but as we move to this new phase with Kingdom Studios being set up and having us adopt more traditional business things, we felt it was the right time to stand up with and for the community and let you know that we are here for the long term and wanted to send a strong signal to you guys to let you know we aren’t going anywhere.
Last week we also launched Gen0s on CV which was a huge moment. We also had to build a lot of things to support that, such as bridging for Hero NFTs. We already has bridges for Jewel and other tokens, but traditional bridges just generally wrap an NFT and create a new NFT that represents that NFT on the other chain. What that is just a wrapped NFT. It doesn’t have the same data and originality that we needed. So the solution we built with Synapse was a very custom solution and I’m proud of our team for being able to put that together and having it be so seamless. Our current game is cross chain in a very real way and can cross chain and do things on both chains. This lays the foundation for some of the things we’ll be launching over there on Crystalvale soon.
Game mechanics team will be talking about upcoming features and answering questions. One of the big things is the Gen0 reroll coming up.
I’ll also have some items about current market later on.
Dreamer — maybe just a little with what's going on in the world. This isn’t financial advice and its also not an excuse. If you look at Jewel and Crystal prices, obviously selling and buying impacts it, but if you assume no outright activity, we have Jewel routing through a majority of our pairs. As the value of larger blue chips adjust up and down that does impact the price as well. Fox gave a good overview of the markets. There’s a lot of articles out there as it relates to the overall market and the Fed and global conflicts. Oil is an interesting topic right now with the demand and restrictions in large countries like China. There’s a lot of fundamental info out there on how these things impact lending, stocks, tech, which also move crypto, which moves the large pairings Jewel is paired with, which impacts the price of Jewel. We’ll circle back with comments on this and what we are thinking about doing with respect to this after the AMA.
Frisky Fox — either time is fine, I just want to respect the Game Mechanics team’s time and updates on this. There’s two parts to every AMA, the state of the project update and then the specific group’s updates. Would you rather do it now?
Dreamer — I think so, we can address topics like solvency and pay. I’ll give a quick overview. I’ve been doing a lot of time, since the last regularly scheduled AMA, someone was asking about solvency and payouts. Yes we are looking at that, we just refreshed the solvency analysis a few days before that was asked. I personally am laser focused on global markets and overall health of economic markets an dhow they impact the crypto space and DFK. I think it was mentioned the 5M initial minting of Dev fund. As we’ve paid out those that have been building and growing the project grow over time, we’ve watched that number stay at about 5M. It’s been self sustaining and keeping that initial amount relatively the same. Last week we saw for the first time that it dipped just under that. So we perked our ears up and are letting you know that the health of these wallets are our #1 priority. So some things include continuing to review how much we are paying everyone. Another one, is how are we paying people? We usually track how much someone has earned and then pay that in Jewel and we look at the previous range of Jewel and do a number that is fair and generally lower than current number. In the past that has worked out and we haven’t had to eat into reserves. However now, at current prices we are trying to adjust to say “hey let’s identify a floor” and this floor will move over time, in which we do our USD calc and that floor needs to be a number that suggest we promote stability to the wallets. Just wanted to share we are working on that and figuring out the best way to promote optimizing this wallet and remaining sustainable.
Frisky Fox — We want to avoid having to really dip into this. We want to figure out what we can do in the short term, maybe that means accepting less, and having more sweat equity in the project and exploring options there. Making sure we can address anything well in advance of it being an emergency. That is part of our commitment to the project and the community, to always be forward looking and conservative in our estimates. Dreamer any last thoughts there?
Dreamer — some may be asking, does that mean people are paid less and the devs will be less incentivized? We will have the floor and track what someone would have earned but for that floor and we’ll put it into a bucket for deferred compensation. This is what companies do outside of crypto, they have deferred compensation packages. We are very aware that we need to make important decisions to continue to build and be relevant and innovative so that when the global conflicts to do look for resolution and solutions and there is a smoothing of reaction to the Fed reserve moves, we’ll be well positioned to rise even more aggressively than we otherwise would of if we weren’t thinking about all of these things.
Frisky Fox — When you look at the macro environment with the fear and greed index, and I think its extreme fear across the entire index, that usually signals something is oversold. It’s during these times that projects get weeded out and you see which ones can stay it out. That’s what we’ve been setting ourselves up this whole time is to make sure that we can withstand. I always point to Axie, some see them as our competition, and I always think healthy comp is good, but in the past they would build through the bear market, setting themselves up for success when the market came back. We have everything we need to take the steps to do this. Another quick thought that is part of what we are doing is redirecting funds from the founders fund (bonus f und) to the dev fund to further unsure longer solvency for the dev fund. Things like that where we are trying to be creative.
Game Mechanics Update
Hubert— right now we have pets launch up and coming. That’s the big thing we’ve been working on very heavily. There are a lot of things interdependent, because pets will provide bonuses to heroes to impact different systems in the game, the biggest one being the profession system. Pets will have bonuses that will help make the profession experience better for the hero that has the pet equipped. There’s still a bit of mechanics works to go on the bonuses themselves, but in terms of how they work and how they are defined are to the point of testing. There’s a lot of art assets involved with these pets and that’s just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what has been shown. A lot of really cool upgrades to our display system as well that I’m really looking forward to having out.
Also level 10 profession quests is right on the heel of that. You can look to that coming right after that point. Around the point of Lvl 10 profession quests is when you’ll see those pet bonuses applied and usable. When pets launch they’ll have the quality of bonus and number of bonuses, but the actual bonus won’t be identified until the actual bonus can be used (so profession level 10 will be the first). But there will be crafting system bonus and combat bonuses as well, but until those are useable you’ll only know of its a rare, legendary or mythic combat bonus, and not know what the actual bonus is until that system is usable. It’s a bit of a stagged launch there, and we are further staggering it by doing Blue and Grey eggs first, so you can look forward to those being the first to be hatched. We’ve announced that before but wanted to reiterate it.
With Gen0 reroll we hoped to get it out last Friday, we didn’t think we’d finish resolved Friday night and in the interest of getting the team rest we pushed it off to today and so far it looks like we’ll be able to do that so look forward to an announcement on that front later today.
AMA Live Questions
(Mettez) I have a topic for you guys I’m curious to hear your opinion and maybe how it relates more to vision and tie in on how grants and mechanics will work. Since intro of stam pots there’s been a strong argument (right or not) for saying that DFK game mechanics have become more pay to win, in the sense that yes stam pots boost economy, but in terms of game mechanics like stats and HP/MP its becoming more pay to win. Regardless of said topic, I wonder how that balance of growing towards more pay to win mechanics ties in with how other third parties will work with the grant program. Will you ever allow outside parties to leverage HP or MP potions to gain leverage for pay to win mechanics. Wondering how you are viewing that and how you want to balance PVP since mechanics seem to be going more towards pay to win.
Hubert— As far as how stam pots drive a pay to win scenario. I see where you are coming from. In terms of balancing, its clear if you are the highest level hero your chances of winning will be higher unless we do some sort of level capping or dividing the hero population into different categories. Things like that we are definitely considering. For ex. Land tournaments, which are still a way out, to make sure those are more of a level playing ground, some won’t be open to all heroes, there will be level restrictions to some and exploring what we can do to make it a more fair space for those not using stam pots. There are things we can do to target specific players, and be rewarding in all ways — its something we are always trying to do our best on.
Frisky Fox — I was just going to add a thought there. Internally we’ve spent a lot of time talking tokenomics vs gameplay. We have a lot of traditional game devs that have exp creating effective game loops that ap layer will come and do on a reg basis to get enjoyment or return off of progression. How that loop can be incentivized to allow those that are willing to invest more into the game vs those that are willing to grind more. There are lots of different types of people and we are trying to make a system that works for everyone. Another aspect on pay to win is you have to consider who they are paying. The assets in our game our crowd sourced in the sense that the player themselves are providing the assets, so the assets people are paying for to win are provided from the community itself.
Mettez I agree, especially in the crypto scene. You cannot prevent pay to win. I was specifically hoping to see your vision on how it played into third party systems. You are obviously thinking about this with your systems, but if you would then let outside parties (we are not there yet), to affect said balance in how heroes can get XP, does this unbalance the balance you are working on? Or what are your thoughts on power leveling via outside apps?
Dreamer — I think there’s two ways to think about this. The first one being outside game mechanics. Any project right now could think of an idea that uses health potions for example. They integrate it into their game. Maybe they use no other assets. And their NFts in their game benefit from and use DFK health potions and burn it. That independent platform can have added utility for the token and maybe they come and ask for a grant asking if they can be listed in our game and receive some support or marketing. This is something we’d be supportive of because they wouldn’t be spending stamina for experience. Pretty much any project can take DFK tokens and incorporate into what they are doing and those add incremental value. The other way is how the grant program could impact that. And there is a vote from the community and that is supposed to be a guard rail. E.g. project wants to do a game that has to do with Paladins, and they want to use DFK paladins and they can get XP in DFK for doing so. That’s not something people on this call could unilaterally even decide, that’s something the community would have to vote on.
Frisky Fox — the plan and vision for DFK, especially now that we have our own chain is creating an ecosystem where other projects can come and build on top of and adding added utility for heroes in other projects is something we are pushing on all fronts. Figuring out who can work with us and in what ways is part of the grant program and community is involved in that. Part of that is will we have something where outside programs can control without any guardrails? No. We want an intentionally curated system where economics are well thought out and if we do have integration we want limits that are set and standardized across all projects that want to integrate with us. It should be an extra thing you could do, rather than something you have to do to keep up. So in game they’d have to have ways to spend the resources that would offer more progression than the outside games could. So our intention hasn’t changed on that.
(Mettez) One more small Q, when patches launch and small things go wrong, sometimes community members find issues very close after a patch release. i.e. someone found an issue with stamina on queued heroes. I note that there’s no reward or bounty system currently in place. Maybe a combination of having very detailed logs even for the tiniest patches as well as a rewards system for finding things like this could help the team who is already so busy.
Frisky Fox — I’m a huge proponent of this. We don’t have an official bug bounty but have an unofficial bug bounty. Philippe is actually slated to receive one tomorrow when we make payments. I whole heartedly agree this should be something we push along with the grant program.
Mr. Faun — I just want to say I’ve received a draft from Sashei for an official draft of a publication for our bounty program. Thanks for raising this. I want to make this available and apparent to our community that are willing to help out. This isn’t weeks out. This is days (or small number of weeks) out to make sure we have this info available.
(Coolio) The way that heroes and NFTs have been accumulating over time (nearing 200k heroes). The PJ was a great even for burn mechanics and things like that, and Frisky you kind of touched on it with DFK chain being its own chain and being able to implement new heroes and other third party sites, but have you considered any further burn mechanics, via PVP or death?
Hubert — It’s def something we’ve been thinking about. It’s really a matter of our timeline and what would be the best system to do. I think there should be some form of burn mechanics for heroes. Be that some sort of conflict based systems or higher level difficulty quest that have some risk to balance out the high reward. We want to make sure we do this in a thoughtful way. A lot of these heroes did have a pretty large price tag and so we want to make sure any sort of burn event does have the right amount of award associated with it. So yes, we are thinking about it. Nothing to say specifically about what is coming or is on the horizon.
(Coolio) Have you guys thought about how eternal pages might impact other aspects of the game?
Hubert— at the moment we are focusing more on these being the lore item, and the final page will have a special event associated with that. As far as mechanics we have to figure out how the mechanics on that will work and that's in our pipeline, so the acquisition of the final page will have some aspect of that, and we are also wanting this to be a seasonal thing, so these won’t always be available and there may be an excess of some pages and what do we do with those. There’s also some thought about what we can do with those. As far as how they apply to heroes. That’s an interesting though and we don’t have anything planned at the moment, but we do have those in our tool chest on potentially adding further utility. We also wanted to add some collectibles to the game though beyond just potion materials and what you can do to make your hero better and this was a small step in that direction.
(Coolio) Have you considered a lending/borrowing protocol with Jewel
Dreamer— We’ve been asked this a number of times and the answer hasn’t changed but progresses every week. Benqi will be in the short term our first lending partner. They will build solutions for lending on Jewel at first, and then likely Crystal as well if trading supports it. The theory is to have lending options available in the map. Will they be offered through DFK? No, they’ll be third parties. Same with Options with DPX. There are a lot of protocols out there, and what we want to do is to use DFK chain to gamify other protocols, one of which is a lending protocol, the first of which is BENQI. I don’t want to say we’ll never do it. But eventually all participants will have a lending option available via BENQI, with a fee sharing structure in place.
(Cryptonoob) When should we expect Leaderboard Jewel payouts? For some of the smaller wallets that may have made a significant investment, they may be hurting for Jewel to do other things at this point.
Frisky Fox— the leaderboard we had the rewards for (Gen0 raffles and some Jewel payouts), I have a clickup task on our priority system and I’ll bump that up on the priority.
(Cryptonoob) Going forward, is this something where you’ll pay out every couple weeks, or just when you have a moment to do it?
Frisky Fox —there’s a few airdrops we do regularly, such as tilt proof Tuesdays and side quest sand its been when we can do it, but we want to make it more regular. I’m not sure what that looks like right now but I’d like to say we have a certain amount of time so that every week, all those ready to go would be done at that time, so that you wouldn’t see more than a week, maybe two in between.
(Cryptonoob) For Gen0 reroll will it be identified immediately so that if someone rerolls and lists someone wouldn’t buy without knowing that the reroll has been used?
Hubert — the way we are doing the identifying attribute of whether someone has done this is requiring an alpha test on our API. With that, I think at this point we want to get the reroll out sooner than that feature can be ready, so the way you’d be able to tell is to see how many summons it has. Most Gen0s at this point are well above where the summons will be reset to, and then we’ll have more visual indications come into play. So we’ll have a bit of a gap between rerolls happening and when it will be obvious for players.
(Cryptonoob) So rewards will be immediately available?
Hubert —yes the rewards happen upon completion of the transaction.
(Cryptonoob) Have you thought of Gold becoming too expensive as new features come out that require gold?
Frisky Fox— Weve thought a lot about this and even have created a committee about tokenomics impacts like this. Our plan and approach is always to try and add more utility to assets, whether ERC or NFT assets. You’ll see utility go up and that utility will lead to price increases, which should incentivize people to run those quests and provide the supply for those. It will eventually meet at a healthy place in the market. That’s what drive the play to earn, the utility. If any items get too high, players will shift their focus to get more of that to sell it and that’s where the balancing happens.
(Cryptonoob) Others have speculated about things like moving from land to land requiring gold, so someone who might not pay for Stam Pots, but would NEED gold to do something in game, just wondering if it would prevent someone from doing that in game action?
Frisky Fox — Travel is being worked out, I don’t think we’re currently planning a if you don’t pay gold you can’t travel. But we have other things planned to provide gold utility even in the short term.
Dreamer — I’d also add to those trying to follow this. If something gets really expensive because of some new utility and someone sees that they can buy the potion and play that part of the game, or they can go quest for materials and craft the potion, or I don’t have any miners but at these prices I could buy a miner and mine gold and sell to those wanting to craft, they all can add value with incremental utility. One activity in the game might become more or less profitable in terms of time spent and deployment of resources. Prices will always have rediscovery and new equilibrium between supply and demand and that all depends on the community. We do pay attention to new features being largely disruptive though, unnecessarily to the economy. So part of the committee is to test and make sure we aren’t hurting the economy with a big imbalance and how can we solve for that with release or at a later point?’
Frisky Fox — We as a team are providing a steady flow of value and utility to this ecosystem. It’s a steady gradual addition of utility that will continue to flow into the game throughout all of its life.
(Syrus) My question is more on PVP and PVE mechanic. Most stats are well known. Two I have a question about, AGI and DEX. IN other games AGI is usually a big focus, but I don’t know if a Ninja with AGI 33 would go 2x before a DK with AGI 15 or would he just go before the DK during a set round of turns, could that be clarified?
Hubert— I wouldn’t say a strict doubling is the correct way to say it, we’ll also be getting into hundreds of stats points of agility over the course of the game. Bearious is leading game development on this, so I can’t say, but a strict doubling would be extreme. With the combat equations and our two game devs Bearious and Nox who has the main focus on that and I have not seen exactly how they are implementing that.
Frisky Fox — But if you have a higher AGI stat you will go faster and have a turn that is more often than other player characters or enemies that have a lower AGI stat.
(Syrus) just wanted to make sure it wasn’t a 1 for 1, your turn my turn and the higher AGI only impact who goes first.
Frisky Fox — It’s not just 1–1, you could go 2 or 3 times in the time one character could only go once, potentially.
(Syrus) In Dex its usually associated with hit chance and dodge. But we’ve said it will impact some characters damage? How will the play out as a damage part of the equation or is that more of a Bearious and Nox question?
Huber t— Bearious and Nox would know better. Dex is an accuracy trait, which has shifted over time, but does have a damage multiplier with some types of damage like with Archers and Pirates. So it does play a role in both. Also with our accuracy system, we also have a quality of hit mechanic, so higher Dex would be higher chance of a direct hit rather than a “glancing” blow or a miss, so there will be degrees of damage depending on how accurate your hit is so it does play into that as well.
(Malience) sounds like AGI will work like initiative plus haste in most other games? And Dex will work more like combat expertise? But going along with pets being able to go on professional lvl 10 quests, is there any expectation on timeline for that?
Hubert— its the next thing. As soon as pets come out, as far as major features that mechanics is responsible for, that’s the next big thing that we are pushing for. It’s definitely going to be a much shorter turnaround between the time between Prof lvl 0 quest and training quests. I can’t say an exact date but its the next big piece and we are working on now. Its something we are targeting to get our fairly quickly.
(Malience) Are heroes required to be lvl 10 to do the quest?
Hubert —It’s the profession skill, not hero lvl 10.
Closing Remarks
Nonlinear — thanks for being here and asking these questions, especially the hard ones. Internally we discuss these extensively and its nice to see we are aligned on thinking about these.
Hapabelle — I didn’t speak much on this AMA but I enjoyed the detailed questions and appreciate the thought going into mechanics from the community and looking forward to more questions.
Hubert — sorry Penguin and Hapa about not giving you much time to speak. I think with mechanics and where we are with the game there’s been a shift where we are moving to this next phase of gameplay. With each new thing we add, there’s more complexity and more over arching interdependencies, but I think we are trying to hit our stride and get faster at releasing content and making sure that we are designing things the right way. Everything is a growing experience and making sure everyone understand our processes. I’m looking very much forward to what we have on the horizon. Pets will be a great addition and there will be a lot of diversity among pets, even though they don’t have genes like the heroes do. I think there will be incremental utility coming to them as we go along, including as combat comes out. We are trying to make sure that we future proof those as much as we can. Also our team and how its grown, the art team and the talents it has. They are allowing us to do a lot more visual things we haven’t done so far. The game as a whole is going to become more interactive, have better graphics with more and more things that you can do with your heroes and your tokens. I’m excited for the future even with all the negativity in the market. We aren’t slowing down on the mechanics team and development in general. I hope that release of pets shows the level of effort we are putting into this. I remain bullish as ever.
Dreamer — I’ve loved this AMA. Loved that Q’s were on point and relevant. I game some comments at the beginning so I’ll make this really short. There’s that meme out there that I’m going to adjust a little bit, “We’re not only here for a good time, but we’re also fully intended to be here for a long time.” I hope that the plans, the roadmap, but also the reactivity of the market and a lot of forces we can’t control, and our way to make sure we’re solvent and sustainable were made clear. I love this team and I love this community. Bullish for me.
Frisky Fox — This was a great AMA. It’s a testament to this community and the maturity of the members here and our team. Even when things are down, we aren’t panicking. We have plan in place. We are doubling down on our plan and our responsibilities as a team to add value and utility to the project. That’s a constant flow of value over the weeks with all of these new and upcoming features being launches, especially Duel and pets, and eventually equipment and travel and then combat. There’s a lot of exciting things that will add interesting things and play to earn aspects. Creating an ecosystem that others can come and build on top of on our chain and interacting with our player base. I’m proud of our team and our community and excited to be building for the future and I’m super 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!
