DeFi Kingdoms Team AMA (Project Updates) — August 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 the transcripts/summaries of the prior AMA’s in my index of DeFi Kingdom’s Articles.
Link to the recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDV4L95WYeU
This week, the AMA was from members of several teams relating to updates on the project. Go to the website https://dfk.rapidr.io/ and submit AMA questions there and Join the discord to also see responses to AMA questions not covered on the weekly calls.
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
Project Updates
Development (Beetle Dude & Frisky)
Yesterday (Aug 10) Training Quests were released on Crystalvale (“CV”). 8 new quests sprinkled across the map.
Also released Vendor on CV along with several UI improvements as well as a new pricing system that allows for more dynamic pricing. The prices for items will increase/decrease automatically based on demand.
Focusing on parity, but where possible also trying to improve (like the dynamic pricing).
Item bridge still on horizon, testing should start next week. Magnus is building item bridge and expects it to be ready next week. Needs layer 0 to finish. It’s DFK’s first foray into Layer 0. It’s also a pre-req to getting duels into CV. So that shouldn’t be too long after. Once item bridge is done can pretty much move everything back and forth.
Push for parity is close. 2/3 of the way through parity. Castle zone is on the horizon. Hatching as well.
Every new feature on CV increases the transaction volume more and more. Jewel used for gas has increased 40–50x since launched.
With parity approaching, starting to put other items on radar (they are still very nascent) but things like achievements, in game chat, etc.
Game Mechanics (Hubert Cumberdale)
Big thing right now is gardening quest on CV. Makeing a few changes for CV, one thing looking at is that the CV quest fund didn’t have a big Gen0 mint fueling it and many people still summoning on Serendale, so considering moving some quest funds from Serendale to CV. Also working on multi queuing, which will be a big quality of life improvement, especially for those with hardware wallets.
You’ll be able to quest for Jewel and Crystal in CV!
After feature parity, lvl 10 quests and pet bonuses will pick back up.
Build Program (Sunbear)
Working on co-marketing requests and raffler applications. Also reaching out to partners more and more, creating slack channels with 3rd parties and other partners, working on ways to collaborate and build our roadmap out in creative ways and Sunbear is jumping more into that.
We have good and talented individuals in the community looking to help build. The strength of any decentralized project is to be able to leverage the community like this. Team has been discussing what features are self contained enough that the community could build and then the team could audit.
Other Feature Updates (Raffler, Duels) (Frisky Fox)
Wholesaler program, for duels we have the raffle system which has been going really well. It’s a self-contained and regulating system. Working on building this out so that it can more easily be integrated into other projects so that we can earn raffles playing other mini games, generating more transactions and utility for our heroes. This will start with Duels season 1 and then opening up with other projects that have been approved an qualified.
Duels season 1 will be coming. Rewards for pre-season based on your rank. Then another raffle for your raw score. Fore the seasons will probably have a reward system that is more automatic.
Business Development Update (Dreamer)
Ava labs has built out a great explore for it subnets. You can see the transaction volume kicking up with parity. Volume is ~1M per day now. DFK Chain has been incredibly fast and reliable.
Day to day communications between Kingdom Studios and DFK Chain is increasing every day. We are important to them and they know its important to the community. Excited to see duels launch on DFK Chain.
The move of Serendale is big and important. So much time has been invested in this. The name drop won’t be dropped casually on an AMA. It will be a big marketed announcement. Last month has been prep for a committee, and that committee is working on a grant that will be sizeable and help take on the risk of the new chain and a new partner and to help pay for development and have a marketing budget. It’s a two-way interview, we also need to like them. The committee met last night and they are waiting for the results. If answer is positive and if the KPIs can all be cleaned up, then expect an announcement of a round table meeting of sorts where we will announce this, as well as tokenomics shift.
Written Questions from Talk.DefiKingdoms.com
Reminder you can submit questions on https://talk.defikingdoms.com/.
Feature to warn people when they sell below the floor price, particularly when people mean to rent but list for sale?
Hubert — would be a nice QoL feature, but everything comes down to priority and what we can get in in a given week.
Frisky — we do have several things in place such as you have to type “Sell” if you want to sale. At the start we had no safeguards. In practice maybe we could create an API that stores the current floor price.
Beetle — Sounds like it would be a bit of a lift on the API side. Pinecone probably has thoughts.
Pinecone — We have the prices of auctions in the online database, but the problem is determining what criteria you should use for the floor price. Just one thing (like class or sub class and rarity) wouldn’t be bad.
Sunbear — Maybe this is something someone in the community could build as well.
Frisky — There’s a lot of cool things that can be done with Chrome extensions, i’m surprised we haven’t seen anything build like this that would operate with out interface.
Will all future gameplay continue to be smart contracts and on-chain or can some of it be off-chain?
Frisky — my views have changed a bit over time. Initially the thought was that everything should be on-chain and was the driving force. To date, everything is one chain, but it does add a lot of constraints to the game process. For example, duels was difficult to implement because you couldn’t have a lot of real time action because people could see the on chain data and react. Considering hybrid elements that are partly on-chain and party private APIs and whitelisted apps.
Hubert — We’ve tried to do what we can with blockchain interaction. But anything requires real time user input you have to be careful so that savvy people can’t just take advantage of those that aren’t savvy because they can look at the inputs on chain. We’ve looked more towards what we can do as a hybrid model to make the gameplay more fun. That’s the direction we are heading with combat. I wouldn’t call it an ARPG, more of a traditional RPG.
Frisky — I see Thanpolas posted some links to some proposals with chrome extensions and Looks like Matt has some alert extensions already.
I think we will start seeing more hybrid things like with achievements and chat, you can’t submit a transaction for every chat message. It would be hybrid where you sign in with your wallet, and it creates a sessions, the chat would be off chain, but it could say this is dreamer from the in-game address xyz and people would know that its actually you and it could show what guild you are in, etc. PVE and PVP will probably implement some of these things as well.
Will community get to vote on front runner for Serendale?
Frisky — its tricky, we want to come up with the clear strategy and put that up for vote and see if the community wants to ratify that proposal.
Dreamer — we discussed marketing, restructure, tokenomics of what would be Serendale 2.0. I think the question here is more about which chain is the front runner. The issue is that we are having in depth conversations that would be nearly impossible to inform everyone on the inputs. People would just start voting on uninformed bias of their favorite chain. Need to make sure the move is worth it. I don’t envision a vote about the chain options, but we could do something like hey here’s all the inputs that went into this. Here are the pros and here are the cons, and it would be more of a ratification to see if the community agrees.
Frisky — a lot goes into this decision and a lot has to happen behind the scenes. We will have proposals and votes where we can.
How will voting work for upcoming proposals? Currently its xJewel as well as heroes and land in Serendale, but there’s nothing for Crystalvale currently.
Frisky — working to get Crystal included. Until then, votes will be held based on Serendale holdings. So you’d have t hold xJewel ON SERENDALE.
Pet XP Bonuses — can we have clarity on the XP bonus from pets, Dreamer said at Dcentral that pets can increase the amount of XP gain.
Hubert — the XP bonuses will be available from the start once we get pet bonuses activated. They apply to whatever quest is associated with that pet type. If its a fishing pet you’ll get an XP bonus plus whatever bonus it has if you are doing a fishing quest. XP bonus is purely based on the rarity of the pet. The more rare, the bigger the bonus.
Hero skill genes — how to the genes relate to skill points. Will heroes spend skill points to unlock the active/passive skill genes? Will it cost more skill points to unlock a higher passive/active? To passive/active relate to main class? Subclass?
Frisky — A lot of these relate to PVE/PVP things that haven’t been decided fully or released yet.
Hubert — It’s still in development so things are subject to change but I can tell you current trajectory (but it is subject to change). Right now, the idea we have is that the skill genes don’t require skill points. THey are default skills the hero gets by nature of their genes. Use of skill points would be used on the class/subclass of that hero. Right now there is no linkage between skill points and the skill genes.
Profession questing expectations. Lvl 0 quests — those with higher stats relevant to the profession quest are not necessarily superior at those quests. Seems like the profession quest stats will just be drowned out by the profession skill level. Will there be any benefit to leveling up profession skill oriented heroes?
Hubert — There is probably more noticeable different over time than it appears. A lvl 15 hero with 55 luck would get far more eggs than a lvl 1 hero with 9 luck. With each profession quest higher level, its gated by skill level, so you could stay at hero lvl 1 and still do it, but we do plan to have these higher profession quests linked to the travel system and having to get your hero to the applicable zone and there may need to be some PVE content you’d need to do before you can start those. I don’t think its unbalanced between low level and high level, its just that we need things like PVE and travel to come into place for it to click and for everyone to see how it will all play out.
Frisky — It was my understanding but as they level up their questing skill level it will unlock access to higher profession quests and those higher profession quests will have better rewards is that right?
Hubert — Yes.
Item price in vendor are mismatched. Why are the prices of 3 eyed eels different despite some other items being the same drop rate?
Hubert — 3 eyed eel has other intended utility planned, whereas crabs are just gold farms to be sold for gold.
Question about someone thinking some EVM chains (Arbitrum and Nova) would be good candidates:
Frisky — a lot has gone into this. Matic is something I like. Eth 2 is exciting and something to watch. As an on-chain game its important we have cheap transaction costs and speed.
Transferring items — will we be able to send pets, eggs and items to CV?
Frisky — Item bridge will solve a lot of this. Eggs are just items so they’ll be part of that, but you can’t hatch them over there.
Beetle — Magnus is working with Synapse for a pet bridge as well, but no timeline for that right now.
Why are potion prices so high? Its alway more expensive to buy them rather than make them.
Hubert — until combat is in place, we probably won’t see much movement on them other than on making enhancement stones. The intent was that if you bring the ingredients it shouldn’t be a expensive as the alchemist.
Duel ranking mechanics are bugged. When will the bug allowing higher ranked players to queue against lower level ranked players.
Frisky — depends on how many players are playing at a given time. If not many people are playing then its hard for system to match you and its a bit of a balance of whether you’d rather play quicker or wait longer. We have plans to add things in season 1 that allows for sliders to express some preference here, as well as some calculations that look into the level of the hero used.
Closing Statements
BeetleDude — Excited to bring parity to CV. Making good progress and aligning faster than we thought. Looking forward to continuing that.
Hubert — Echoing what Beetle said, excited to see CV coming alive, and we are almost there with all of the quests that currently exist.
Sunbear — Thinking about what do we want people to know about us and the things that drive our team. Community is one thing that comes up this is why we build. Transparency — another big priority for us. Producing excellent product — we won’t push out something that isn’t going to have the best chance for success or that won’t run well. Thinking about the amount of thought that is going into the home of Serendale 2.0, we are striving to make the best business decisions. I know you want it faster, but if you could see the time being put into this and the responses from potential partners, its amazing. Bullish.
Dreamer — I’m a big fan of motivational quotes. There is one that stuck out to me. I go by Dreamer. My mind is very logical. I worked almost a decade as a risk manager where you think of worst case scenarios and you constantly question everything and are overly realistic. Sometimes that can be detrimental to dreaming and the creative process. Everything we have live in DFK started with an idea from someone on the team, the community or a contributor. The quote I’m thinking of today is
“What is the best advice that you’ve ever heard? To accept that it might be better than you could ever imagine. What is the worst advice? To be realistic”
I’ve been a realist for so much of my life that to counter that I’ve tried to push limits and set realistic goals and wake up every day trying to accomplish those. Everyone here so far that has stuck around, we are building in the bear market, but we are also dreaming. We aren’t just surviving, we are setting the foundation. We are still so early in this process. We are trying to take all of these pieces and make something better combined than anything we could have imagined. We have to remember to dream even when we aren’t in the middle of a bull market. Bullish.
Frisky — Have to dream. Have to see where we are, what steps we need to take, but also what is possible and what this could all be. My updates are the same, we’re here, we’re building. It’s been almost a year since we built this project. Its amazing to see all of the stuff that’s been built. It’s a blessing to work with all of you guys. Especially this week. I hit the ground running and had all of these amazing ideas for achievements, and thinking we have to implement achievements, and guilds and lands. We just don’t have enough time in every day. Excited to still be here working on this project.
