DeFi Kingdoms Team AMA (Project Updates — January 5, 2023)
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.
Note that this isn’t a perfect 1:1 transcription so if you need to double check anything said please see their recording linked below.
Link to the recording:
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. Note: Don’t be an idiot and make crypto decisions based off of others on the internet. These guides and AMA write ups are provided for informational purposes only. Always do your own research and be safe with your crypto assets.
DeFi Kingdoms Website
DeFi Kingdoms Official Medium
DeFi Kingdoms Discord
Core Team Members Participating:
https://defikingdoms.com/team.html
Project Updates
Frisky Fox (General) Updates
Fox — Happy New Year! There’s a lot of really cool things on our roadmap and we have an excellent, efficient and experienced team now to work on these. Seems like every release we get better, we have infrastructure now to quickly iterate on things so that's paying off. Excited to see all the major things on Serendale and Crystalvale in sync. We just launched Duels on Serendale last night. Its the first time we’ve had duels on two seasons at once, and we had to do some work to keep the wallet in lock.
We have plans for cross play for other chains in the future. It’s important that we have things in game to allow for interaction across chains. Excited to see more features come up as well. Beta for PVP is getting close and I’m stoked about that. We have some other exciting things in the works and I will let others talk about that, don’t want to steal their alpha.
It’s been a great holiday season, a lot of the team was able to unplug a bit and I myself am feeling recharged and hitting the ground running.
We had an internal team meeting as part of the new year and we refreshed our org chart and reaffirmed everyone’s roles and how that fits into the big picture and also set up some new committees to make sure we know what's going on and working towards roadmap.
We’re going to really start focusing on new things now, rather than parity. We have the foundation built, so now we want to see what we can build on this foundation. Things like in game chat, guilds, and other things that can improve the social aspect.
Dreamer (Business) Updates
Dreamer — Fox gave a good beginning of year intro. I want to point out that people got time off during holidays but they’ve also delivered and performed at an incredible rate. A lot of things that have been released recently have been a lot of work so please giv ethe team a pat on the back. They were able to take time with family and friends and also deliver, which I think is a great quality for a team.
On bus dev side, holidays slow that down, but we still have an inbox full of people that want to meet with us. My personal focus is going to be on a few boring things like working with lawyers closely, in talks with Deloitte to help us with filings for taxes, continuing to refine structure, governance and so on. Sunbear has been stepping up in a big way on bus dev relationship management side. We have a part time resource to help there as well. Someone who goes by Strider. Really focused on relationships, the ecosystem, the chain, the game, and everything that we are. It’s a lot for 1–2 people to take on and keep everyone happy and everything progressing so we are allocating a few resources there. More updates on that to come in the coming weeks and months.
Excited about the new year, and the talent that we have. Impressed with what we did last year and excited for the years to come.
Even right after the new year we had a tokenomics committee meeting for 2.5 hours. We are keeping up, even in the holidays and now that we are through them we’ll keep it up.
Pieface (Merch) Update:
Pieface— I’m here to share today that its the last day of the 12 days of DFK. We’ve had the graphics change each day on the launcher and also announced the contests each day on twitter. The winners each day are contacted through the platform they submitted, so if its a retweet its through twitter. If its a discord react, then you’ll be contacted through discord if you are a winner. We will be announcing the winners tomorrow.
We’d also like to thank the generous members of the community that donated prizes. This is such a great way to give back during the holidays.
Not sure if everyone noticed, but the graphics from all 12 days combine together for one big graphic. Mthrbrain will drop that into AMA voiceless for you guys to look at. There’s some pretty fun easter eggs going on in there. It’s kind of like a where’s waldo piece.
Beetle (Builder) Update:
Beetle — I think that most of my updates went out yesterday. I think we had a successful launch yesterday with Serendale Duels and other quality of life improvements. It was nice over the holidays to relax a bit and go back over and fix a bunch of things that had been bugging us on the UI.
Things I’m excited about that we’ve talked about before, PVP, in game chat. We’ve been talking to some possible partners in that space and looking for what would be the best route for that. Making some forward progress there. In game chat is going to make things feel a lot more connected. It will make people feel like they are playing an MMO or something along those lines. 2023 is the year of the game, that is what I’m pushing for and excited for. Stay tuned. Keep your eyes peeled, we’ll continue to bring great things as quickly as we can.
Magnus (Chain) Updates:
Magnus — It was nice to have a few days of chill time over the holidays before heading into this big year for DFK. I’m currently working on power ups as our next big feature, then after that there will be a lot of big impactful releases. ON the solidity and back-end side, we’ve been doing some cool things with cross chain data sync. That’s where we are headed on the tech side, and where we can make some updates on the bridge side with Synapse and Layer Zero. Excited for that groundbreaking development and we’ll weave it into game architecture as well.
Hubert (Game Mechanics) Update
Hubert — First wanted to remind everyone that Gen0 rerolling event ends in a couple days. If you wanted to do that, there are benefits to doing so. Once that timer is up, there won’t be another one until our next release of Gen0s. It could be a while. Rerolling helps the overall gene pool. For everyone Gen0 that rerolls, it could introduce some of the new genes into the Gen0, which helps balance the genes across the board. So if you have been holding off until the end, its almost up.
As far as things we’ve been working on, Magnus already mentioned power ups. Also have pet utility, and profession level 10 quests. Have been revamping bet bonuses that go with that. Brbrbrb has been fleshing a lot of that out and helping to get to a point where we can release on that a little faster, at least the big full picture, compared to when we had planned this before and had to switch to parity on CV.
Also looking forward to this year. A lot of work going on with Wisdom and PVP. I’ve been trying to help answer questions in the PVP channel from time to time to give you a little more info there. It’s going to be a really exciting year. Looking forward to all of the things we have coming.
Bolon — For anyone that doesn’t at the very least lurk the PVP channel, I highly recommend it. It’s a lot of fun, and both Hubert and Workhorse answer questions in there regularly. If you have any questions I recommend posting them in there.
AMA Questions
Duels — What are our projections of people being able to hit the highest ranks.
Frisky Fox—This season has seen a lot of new changes to how we do duels. There’s a lot of changes to the matchmaking engine. Which leads to tighter matching. We also overhauled the rank system, so that they are easier to hit at low end, and harder to hit at the high end. High end ones can be seen as stretch goals. We relied heavily on data from last season. We ran a bunch of simulations to see how it would translate. What you should see is a lot of people hitting middle ranks that wouldn’t have been able to last season. This should be more rewarding for the average player, you can also immediately claim your rewards.
We also added hero limits for how many times a hero can do each duel type per day. So if you were to use the same strategy you used last season, then you wouldn’t be able to get even close to what you got last season. With the hero boost system, there’s more strategy and you have to decide how to use your heroes. Rather than have one team you spam a bunch you have to spend some time and think about it. you will need multiple teams to hit those higher ranks. In simulation it was possible. In practice it depends on how many teams someone has. We’re monitoring how it goes, how Squad does vs Warr, how Solo is doing, etc., and seeing what things we might need to adjust during the season. A lot of the changes we’ll probably wait until next season, that way we will have a full picture of how things played out for this season. We do reserve the right to adjust things in the middle of the season if it becomes apparent that its too high or too low. Most of the times we’d probably only do it 1x with ample warning.
Lvl 30 — Organically leveled heroes are around 11–13, with the XP bonus from power ups and pets will we expect a bump in the rate to hit 20, and then any rough idea on when we would open up lvl 30, is there a lot outside of adding a rune that it takes from a development perspective?
Hubert— As far as development goes, its just a matter of having the rune and releasing it. The system is already set up for that. With that said though, the idea of when we would do that is more tied to PVP and the desire has been to keep things a little bit more controlled until that point and once we have PVP out you can have more growth and so maybe you can expect to see those runes when PVP comes out. With that comes equipment and crafting, and other pieces that we’d like to have more in place before we got to the 40s. There’s a lot of design work on that side to get it to a full scale RPG. I would say expect it to still be a slow step up with a lot of time in between. The experience system itself was also designed with that in mind where you do need a lot of experience. New features will give more exp, along with power ups and pet bonuses, but the amount of XP you need each level goes up fast. That was intended and in mind as we developed. We’ll need to make sure we are careful every 10 levels and then expanding out from there.
Alchemist and Stone Carver — Can we have them use locally sourced produce, i.e. the loot from that realm for their recipes?
Hubert— I can say that you are likely not going to see something like that. The fact that there are different ingredients on different realms is by design. The idea is that you can’t do everything on one chain. You’ll likely see more of this as we expand out, i.e. some crafting ingredients only in CV or only in SD. That helps us have a more robust ecosystem and gives people more options on how they can be successful int he game. We definitely don’t have plans to make each realm more isolated.
Eternal Story Page 10 — Any update?
Hubert— Focus is on PVP, once we finish that we can turn to tournament system and then page 10. If the choice were to delay PVP for page 10, I don’t think anyone would want that so we will prioritize the most important things first.
Lvl 10 mining — will lvl 10 mining also be able to mine tokens, will it double the amount of locked tokens you can mine?
Hubert— you can mine locked tokens from lvl 10, however for the locked tokens and same with gardening, the queues are shared. So you could queue up a lvl 10 and lvl 0, but the lvl 0 would start after the lvl 10 finished. So they share the queue and it won’t result in a doubling of the amount of locked token you can mine.
Cap on fees — could we put a cap on the fee in the tavern to lower the impact on high value trades?
Frisky Fox— We did talk about this back in 2021. It is still an option, we just haven’t prioritized this. We can solicit more feedback from the community on this.
Bolon — 2021 was like 4 years ago right?
SD Heroes — there are still heroes in the SD tavern, which is inaccessible, could we make it so that active players could purchase them at their listed Jewel price?
Frisky Fox — We don’t really want to support that realm anymore because its already been sunset. Players can still remove them from there and do things with them. For existing sales, I’m trying to remember but there was another reason why we had paused those. I think what might have been a concern is that if, for some reason or another, that chain goes down, and then the bridges stop to work, we’d have snapshots, but if the bridges go down, which we don’t control, but the chain continues to run, then we’d have a snapshot and could airdrop them, but other might still be buying them and selling them, then it creates a weird situation of who owns the hero. I believe that is why we had decided to pause the sales.
Dreamer — If I could add a clarification. Those heroes aren’t lost. If the original lister, who likely forgot about them, or the account isn’t active, they still have the ability to delist, bridge to CV and then relist there.
[Samichpunch Note: People noted in the discord that its still possible to buy them using https://dfkquester.app/.
Frisky Fox — We wanted to avoid scammers trying to sell things that aren’t valid anymore and we want to make sure assets are secure and that everyone is being cautious.
Tainted Hero Traits Plans
Bolon—We’ll hold off on this until next week where we will have more information to share on this.
DeFi Aspect of DFK — we are using Uniswap v2, what are plans to v3
Magnus—V3 and trader joe liquidity book do great things, both reducing slippage and adding features like providing liquidity in a range. In terms of licensing, uniswap v3 switches to open source on April of this year. We’d start looking potentially at that date to switch. Liquidity book by trader joe is open license, however there are things to consider before we’d implement something like that.
The first is compatibility with analytics tools that show TVL and transactions. Most don’t support Uni v3 and fewer support Trader Joe’s Liquidity Book model. I suspect once the v3 license rolls over this year that may accelerate that transition.
Another feature is that several features of our game are built around the v2 model, such as mining, as well as cJewel and sJewel. It can be done, but it is quite a bit of work. Definitely something we are keeping on radar, but want to make sure we are doing it in a measure approach because the DEX is pretty central to our game.
Fundraising — is it the case that DFK is not currently seeking fundraising?
Dreamer— I’m going to interpret this question in two ways. There are different ways to raise capital. This past year we had started a traditional raise for Kingdom Studios. That’s when the bridge event happened and we went down a different path for development and crisis management, which was successful as well as for fundraising. Rather than looking at the chains we wanted to build on and looking at chains we could move to and incentives, whether related to milestones, or agreements and partnership support. Won’t go too much into that, but with the question of whether we are pursuing build incentives on existing or other chains? We are still working on the milestones for the Klaytn build incentives. We have hit 2 of 3, to have those paid out, but once we are complete on that agreement that we have as it relates to build incentives for other chains. We won’t be actively pursuing for some time. Some time in this world coudl still be later this year, but not until other milestones are hit and focused on. Also depends on what market is doing. Expansion to a 3rd realm needs to be timed with features that are ready in a stable environment with a lot of external interest of people that want to work with us. We don’t want to prematurely go out and seek fundraising promising full built realms because we need money. We want to make sure that is timed well. Everything we’ve done so far has been timed well and we want to keep that going.
For traditional fundraising the market is difficult. There are pros and cons to it as well. During the summer we were seeing a lot of deals for blockchain games, even without proof of concept. After that its been a bit of a drought and not sure there s the same liquidity there. What we’ve don in the bear market is successfully pivot, release new features, complete parity across tow chains, one that is completely new. Essentially surviving with style. We need time to show that we’ve progressed significantly on the game front. So for traditional fundraising are we actively pursing? No.
We are focused full steam ahead on game. Having a game is directly related to being in a strong position to fundraise. We want to go out with a good argument to potential partners that this product has value, the team is strong, and that we have a roadmap we are already delivering on.
So we are seeking to hit milestones on incentives already in place. Other chains have reached out, but a full realm is not in focus. Focus is on features like PVP and combat.
Bolon — Surviving with style is going to need to become a hashtag.
Dreamer — pulled it from toy story where he said he wasn’t flying he was falling with style.
Regulation and Security Classificaiton — chance it happens when regulations come full circle, is anything being done in this regard?
Dreamer — something that has been on my mind since I joined full steam ahead last year. It’s been apart of our strategy all along. All we can really do is look at public information that includes both regulatory laws, precedent, and what people are doing and choosing to do, whether good or bad behavior and learn from them and avoid doing the things that are clearly bad. Interpret what we can with professionals, such as our external legal team advisign on this.
Specific things are selling token and NFTs at a fixed price. If you notice, even when we released the Gen0s for CV, there was no price, it was a reward for participants in the game. When you look at land we provided it to people playing the game. In the future we’ve talked about land being linked to tournaments. People obtainint and receiving tokens by playing a game that is based on skill an strategy will directly support our argument that any DFk token is not a security.
One important thing to follow is the XRP case. There are arguments that utility adds to the argument that it is not a security. What have we been doing by way of utility? Constantly looking at tokens that represent game resources. We look at what lacks utility. How can we add utility to heroes, how can we add utility to pets? Anything we add in the future we’ll look to how we can add utility?
How would we react if its deemed a security? I would image 3 letter agencies aren’t going to come in and shut down the industry with how major companies and banks have announced tokens. I think there will be a precedent and maybe an example made out of a few projects that were very clearly bad boy behavior, we will look and say ok does this impact our ecosystem.
Possible to create one click button that populates a duel under the parameters of your last played match?
Beetle— This is a great question. I won’t just say yes because its not built in yet, but we are in the process as part of our PVP integration whcih will involve having a log in, which will associate off chain data with your wallet account. That would open up a lot of these types of options where we could keep track of what you had done preivously, even things like creating PVP teams that you can quick select. Goes hand in hand with hero tagging which we’ve talked about before. The bigges hurdle is a ton of UI needs, what does it look like when you select a group, where do you select a group. I think its a great idea and we are moving in that direction. With the quick select it would be nice to have a multi select to queue up all the previous quests that I did. There are a lot of improvements that can be done with duels and other areas.
Closing Remarks
Dreamer — Thank you for the great questions everyone. We mentioned questions were light back when updates were heavy, and now we really appreciate those Qs. Hopefully people can feel the energy, excitement and movement. We may not be focusing on items ABC because we are focusing on the game. Appreciate everyone’s support.
Bolon — just want to say I apprecaite the commuinty. Been a lot of fun through the holidays to have people in there interacting and chatting even during holiday times. Its a nice environment o be a part of. Appreciate everyone up here as well taking time to be a part of the AMA.
Frisky Fox — wanted to correct something I said earlier. There was a Q about heroes on the Harmony tavern. A few of the contracts were not upgradeable or pausable, so we just turned off the UI, but others were paused like pets and land. So theoretically you can use other means to interact with the smart contract directly, we just won’t put any resources into supporting that sunset realm.
This was a great AMA, there’s always good questions asked. I try to spend more time on the talk site. I answered a few questions this morning. Want ot make sure that site receives the love it should, lots of great things both asked and suggested there. Big kudos to everyone interacting there.
We are getting into the well-oiled machine territory where everyone knows that they are doing and are good at it. We’ve had to pionoeer a lot of the processes because there really isn’t anyone out there tryin got do exactly what w eare. Its unique. Shout out to team. We have really smart and professional people on the team and excited to start the new year with them.
There are some upcoming events that we are starting to plan out with the event managers/coordinators. I’m excited about some of those, stay tuned for more updates in the future. Also looking to how we can integrate with other projects int he space. Lots of opportunity on Klaytn where there’s already a lot of other projects. That is what this is about, how can we interact in a metaverse way with other projects. Bullish!
