DeFi Kingdoms Team AMA (Project Updates — November 10, 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=JSw7_vg0RsM
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
Core Team Members Participating:
https://defikingdoms.com/team.html
Project Updates
Frisky Fox (General) Updates
Frisky Fox —it’s been a busy week. Everything always goes at break neck speed. It feels like all the weeks are actually months and the months are actually years because there is so much going on. It’s been interesting in the past few days on general markets, I’m sure most here are aware of what's going on, but its just a reminder of the volatility in the space. We hate it and we love it. This space is cutting edge and what we are doing hasn’t been done in the past and it feels good to be in this space with this team and this community to support all of that.
Last week we had a surprise release on cJewel. Huge adoption rate. Over 27M Jewel have been locked, which is about one quarter of the total circulating Jewel supply. Cool to see the adoption rate there.
We had our first cJewel vote as well on the rebalancing of the gardens, since xJewel pool was replaced. As part of that we rebalanced some of the gardens and did it via a cJewel vote. You’ll see a lot more of that in the future as well. It feels good to use cJewel for governance because it is resistant whales that can just buy a bunch, vote, then dump it.
Someone in the community, Longzai has pulled some metrics. The average locking period is almost 1 year, so that’s cool to see as well.
We also have a launch date for Serendale 2.0, which is November 21.
We have a lot to prepare for that, the biggest being the SPLITTENING, which is everyone’s locked Jewel on Harmony being split into the various buckets.
A lot of what I’m doing is getting the contracts ready for that. 4 of the 5 buckets
(1) Locked Jade, (2) liquid Jade, (3) Jade that will vest on the schedule of old Locked Jewel, and (4) Jewel that will vest on the schedule of old locked Jewel. Then the locked crystal will probably be 2–3 weeks after that because there’s a few things we need to do like raising the cap on crystal, which will require a hard fork. Which isn’t that scary of a thing, we recently hard forked for the chain to start the process to remove whitelisting.
Speaking of our chain, we had some things that we changed last night, do you want to talk about those now Magnus?
Magnus — we saw some metrics spike on DFK Chain and in abundance of caution changed some gas settings. It impacted multiquesting a bit, metrics look better, and we have some upgrades on our side and on the avalanche side of things. We’ll be changing the gas limit back to 25M and then 30M so you can get your full set of heroes in on the multi questing.
Frisky — huge kudos to ava labs, they were helping to monitor those spikes and they’ve been working on things that can optimize that and had it ready so we just needed to upgrade our nodes. So all of our nodes are now on the latest version. As a part of monitoring that our plan is to slowly step that back up from 20–25 and then monitor that over the weekend. If that works then we’ll up it back to 30. Its a pleasure to work with them, they are responsible, and they help make us look good. Anytime there is any updates our team is very responsive to make sure we get it updated ASAP.
Back to Splittening
In order to do this we need to do a snapshot of the locked Jewels on harmony. That has a final cut off date where after that date nothing will be recognized for that. Our plan is to have that held on November 14, this next Monday. We’ll announce an exact time, but be aware that there probably isn’t anyone doing anything with those anyways, but that’s when we’ll be doing those. So keep in mind that if someone is trying to send locked Jewel after the 14th, it won’t count for anything. if you have any questions about that feel free to ask.
Market Conditions
Dreamer would normally be the person to weigh in on these things, but what we’ve seen over the past couple days is a lot of ups and downs, mostly downs. Most of the big events over the past several months have been related to centralized exchanges or centralized protocols. Its an argument for if its not stored in your wallet its not your coins. That’s been the ethos and mantra in this space for a long time. It’s another argument to be using fully on chain mechanisms for trading and things like we do on the DEX, so that you don’t have to trust anyone with those.
I think we’ll see more people moving towards trustless situations.
I have had a lot of questions on if we are exposed to anything in the recent news, specifically if we had any holdings in FTX.
We don’t take any loans or have our assets stored on any centralized exchanges. We are pretty risk averse with our approach and are very careful to ensure everything we do is low risk and sets us up to be able to build. We are still set up in a way where we can continue to build, even in a big slump.
I was also asked if this will impact any of our launch dates, the answer is No. It doesn’t impact us at all really and it feels good to be in the position that we are in because we’ve already prepared for the worst.
Bolon — Noon eastern on the 14th is the snapshot time. Here is the article relating to more details on the Klaytn launch.
Hubert (Game Mechanics) Updates:
Hubert —just recently this week finished up everything regarding Gen0 reroll event that will come along with the release of the new Gen0s, for those that remember what happened with CV it will be the same reward structure and the same gene sets that will be rerollable. This last time only the original Gen0s were eligible, now its all gen0s that are eligible for the reroll. That will be a bit after the initial launch, but just so you are aware its coming. It will be a 30 day event when it happens.
Been working closely with Wisdom gaming on PVP and looking at our timeline and where we can fit in some features I’d like to focus on in the short term. Won’t go into many details on that for now but more details to come in the future.
Pieface (Marketing and Merch) Update:
Pieface — we’ve been planning a lot of marketing with Klaytn for the upcoming launch. We are really excited about that. I’d love to share that there is a DFK community gathering event going on next week in California. If you’ve been on twitter you may have seen posts and videos of bloaters:
If you make it to SoCal for this event, you may be lucky enough to grab your own bloater.
Of course we are working on getting them into the merch store. It will be around the end of November.
Another thing I’d love to share is that crypto.com has a university section. It’s where they house a lot of educational articles. They posted one called “What are four NFT games to play in 2022” and along with Axie, Gods Unchained and Sandbox, DeFi Kingdoms was features. This is not paid, and is fully organic. Crypto.com has a huge reach and is a great way to onboard people. We’ve made sure that the info in the article is accurate as well.
Frisky — that’s really exciting about that article. I think at first it had a few outdated things, but Mr. Zipper and Pieface were really good about reaching out to them and I think they had it updated within less than a day.
Sunbear (Kingdom Builders Program) Updates:
Sunbear — I have to say Pie, I’m super excited about Bloaters for Christmas. I can see them on the tree, on the mantle, or however you celebrate.
On the KingdomBuilding committee update front we have expanded our committee. He has joined not only the committee but will also be leading it with me. He’ll be focused on building with the community and getting community members the resources and being a liaison. He’ll be heading that up and I’ll be focusing more on partner relationships, especially as we move into the partnership with Klaytn and the multiple partners there and the people looking to build with us.
We’ve been brainstorming about how we can expand this program and I think you’ll be excited with what we have been planning.
I’ve talked about Level which is a social gaming platform. You can sign up with them to reward on chain gameplay. We are pretty much their premiere service that they want to promote, so you can earn their tokens by playing DFK. We will be putting them in the castle and also integrating into the Jester.
Mr. Zipper
Last time I was on an AMA I was asking questions and it was probably last November. Excited to be joining the team officially and to be joining the build committee and leading it with Sunbear. He’s been doing a great job during the past year through all the adversity to get where we are now. Following in his footsteps and building with him and the community to make some really good stuff happen in the future.
As part of that, I get to announce that last night the committee approved one new application to the Archivist, so happy to announce DFK Alerts will be coming to the Archivist in the next release. Their extension has been popular and Matt’s been a great person in the community so congrats to Matt and his team.
As Sunbear said, we have some great ideas coming, so stay tuned for future updates.
AMA Questions
No intention of changing Serendale Launch based on market conditions?
Bolon — No.
Plans to return leaderboards?
Frisky Fox—I’m a big fan of leaderboards and its a big part of competitive play. I think we need more of the game in place though before we can focus a lot of those. Rather than launching right back into those, we are trying to prioritize some of the ancillary things that should be in place first like achievements and some of the more social aspects of the game because those will be a big part of the recognition that we want to give players. It’s about recognition and we’ll build back up to that, but not right away.
When Serendale is out again, which realm will be prioritized for new features or will they be simultaneous?
Frisky Fox— it’s hard to give a hard and fast rule that will always apply. There will be features that are realm specific, so in the case of those, it will launch in one and not others. Some might launch on one and then expand to others. By and large, we want to keep them in sync with the generalized features. For a lot of those and for the majority of what we do you’ll see that a lot of features would get realized in both zones at the same time. That will be our general approach but there will be exceptions.
Updates on Jewel getting a CEX listing?
Bolon— Dreamer not here today so we’ll table this for next week when we have Dreamer with us.
Can we save Duels Team loadouts so we don’t have to select them every time?
Bolon—mostly a Beetle question and he isn’t here but we’ve talked about this and having a grouping system for heroes for all types of purposes is on our radar but don’t have any update for this right now. I know its something he’s thinking about and working on though.
Frisky Fox — He has been spending a lot of time thinking and talking about that as well. We also have other things we’d like to use that for, including quests and some of our upcoming automated things.
Tavern and Hero Catalog filters for now permanently deceased heroes, PJ heroes, Dark Summoned Heroes.
Bolon —being worked on, along with some other filter options and markers.
Frisky Fox — For upcoming things you’ll probably see some badges or markers to see if a hero participated in a particular season of duels. We’d like seasons to be set up such that heroes can only play in a specific season under 1 wallet at a time, and that will prevent multi walleting per seasons. With that being said, the ramifications there are that if you’ve purchased a hero from someone for duels then you can’t use it for that season either, so we’d want that to show up in the filters as well and so that will also be added.
Tavern — why is it that when a player lists their hero for sale, they do not see it in the Tavern results.
Frisky Fox— its just the user experience. Most players shopping on the tavern are trying to find a hero to buy and wouldn’t want to see their own, because you wouldn’t be trying to purchase or hire your own. If you want to see your own, you have the my heroes page for that, It’s just a user experience decision.
Duels — When is the last day for Duels Season 1, is it exactly 6 weeks from the first day?
Frisky Fox—great question, we initially discussed 6 weeks and last week we talked in tokenomics committee about how that might be too short and we had a vote to increase it to 8 weeks. But we didn’t specify whether that would apply to Season 1 or not. If we did 6 weeks, then that would put it ending on the 19th of November, next Saturday. If we did 8 weeks that would be the third of December. I will get back to you guys on that and I will put an announcement in today on the channel so that its official, but it will be either 11/19 or 12/3.
Duels — how will rewards be given, per rank? Not wondering about the rewards but how they will be granted.
Frisky Fox— for S0 we did all the above, but S0 was a one-off special case, because it was like alpha and we were trying to reward players who were early adopters. We’d still like to do rank rewards, where each rank you hit you get something. Our plan this time though is a smart contract that will facilitate those. For future season you’ll see it get added into the UI for duels as you hit those ranks you’ll be able to get the items. For Season1 you still need 500 Xp per rank, but for Season 2 we’ll be adopting a new scale so that its a lot easier to rank up at the lower end (so 40–50 points to hit Rank 2, then it scales up). That will be the case for S2 and onward.
The way we did the prizes for the top 3 in S0 we’ve decided isn’t very effective. Instead we will allocate amounts towards a raffle system, which should still prioritize and rewards the people in the top ranks. We’ll scale up the rewards for that part. Another note that each season is going to be a little different. We are using each of these as an experiment to see what works and what doesn’t so that each successive season will be a better experience for our players as we go.
How do you feel about Duels S0/S1?
Frisky Fox— I really liked a lot of things for S0, a lot of people said we couldn’t do it but we did. There were some pain points we addressed in S1, like getting matched with teams of similar power rather than a lvl 1 going against a lvl 20. Lots of things i really liked, but still lots of things I’d like to improve on. A lot of it is around what is the weighting we want to do around hero level vs player score. But I think we need to change it so that it weights more towards player score so that if you are rank 8 with lvl 5 heroes and everyone at that lvl is rank 2, you’d be queued against teams with higher level heroes so that you can’t just climb the ranks with low level heroes. Also a handful of other things so that we can work on the teams that are passive so that they don’t stay there too long, so they get removed, plus a max duel amount. So hopefully we have the passive teams circulated in and out with more variety. Stay tuned for Season 2 I think it will be better than Season 1.
Guilds — Anything you can share at this point?
Hubert— don’t have a lot we can share right now. Lot’s of ideas. It’s tied to land and the next stage of the game where you have heroes traveling around and interacting with the map and the map doing different things. It’s a complex decision and a lot needs to be done on that so we don’t have a lot of information to share at this point. If people have suggestions though, we are consdiering opening up a discussion topic on the talk site for people to share thoughts as well.
Frisky Fox — I think this will be a big part of the game from a social aspect. We have a lot of cool ideas but are interested to hear other people’s ideas as well. We have a lot of opportunity to integrate into different aspects of the game. We are interested to hear everyone’s ideas.
Bolon — I’ll be getting that board set up on the talk.defikingdoms.com site and that will be live shortly today after this AMA.
cJewel — as more features are released, crafting, PVP, PVE, etc, will those distirbute fees to cJewel holders?
Hubert— in general anything that charges the power token will use the same fee strucutre. So if there’s a fee for crafting a portion would go to Jeweler, a portion to quest fund, etc. It’s always possible that we may have some features where we want to do some things differenlty, Duels for example. I won’t rule out that we will always follow the general distribution, but that will be our standard approach.
Questions — Lvl 10 profession quests and pets. Will level 10 profession quests be launched on both realms at same time?
Hubert — Yes, that is the plan.
Will holding cJewel provdie power ups towards lvl 10 profession quests?
Hubert — Yes, one of the first powerups is an experience boost power up, which would affect all quests, not just level 10 profession quests. There is also one associated with pets. More details on that.
Frisky Fox — I’m going to put a plug for my idea, which is a daily login reward, where every day you log in you can claim something, I’d like that to be a power up as well.
Bolon — I’m excited for the AMA where we make Sashei talk a lot about power ups and what you can get from them. I’m sure he’s looking forward to that.
Reminder on Jade Fake Tokens
DO NOT BUY JADE TOKENS THAT APPEAR ON KLAYTN, THERE WILL BE A LOT OF SCAM TOKENS. THEY ARE NOT DFK JADE UNTIL WE HAVE RELEASED OUR CONTRACT. THERE WILL BE FAKES FLOATING AROUND. BE CAUTIOUS AND WARY.
Closing Remarks
Magnus—I’ll just say i’m really looking forward to the Klaytn launch. Been working on the testnet contracts this past week.
Secondbestdad— super excited that people liked the Dark summoning. Beetle isn’t here, so I win by default. Yeahya!
Pieface—I’m just so grateful for everyone int he community. A lot of people are coming up on their 1 year of being in DFK and it’s been quite a year. So much more to come. Feeling a lot of gratitude for everyone. Love you guys.
Sunbear — I’m sneaking up on my one year. I was hired part time right before DCentral Miami, so excited to be going back there again this year. I have to say, more than ever, this team is a well-oiled machine, more than I have ever seen. We are being efficient. We are being creative, we are making decisions in a productive way, and even the meetings in prep for Klatn launch its great to see the leadership and preparation. Lots of excitement in the team. Grateful to be a part of it and a part of this community.
Bolon — Thank you for plugging Dcentral. We have a lot of community members coming too. Excited for that.
Hubert — Echoing the same sentiments as others. Team is pushing for the launch of serendale to be done rapidly but correctly. Since most of the assets are existing assets it allows us to soon be able to turn our focus to new content, since we’ll have been done with feature parity and transitioning features to Klaytn and I’m looking forward to turnging things back to the future of the product and we are ramping things up. Community has been super supportive. There’s a lot of stress working in this environment and we appreciate the good vibes.
Zipper — Why do I go second to last?! I am excitd to be here, excited to build and grateful to this team and this community. I am not a Dr. yet, that will be next week but we are getting ther. Thanks to all of you and see you on the other side.
Frisky Fox — Everyone said it already. I am excited about Miami. We are sort of a mainstay there and I’m proud of Rissen for getting thigns set up for us. Some of our community members were awarded tickets to attend. Super stoked about Serendale, it will feel really good to get that up and running again. A lot of effort and care has been poured into that. Also having a new expansion is really exciting because there is a whole new group of players that will hopefully be coming over to see what we are all about and see what we are all about and stay. Having a new power token and new heros its really exciting to have this opportunity with new players, new content, new snapshots, the splittening.
To echo some of the points Sunbear made, it feels good to be on this team and see the professionalism of this team and see how people are experts at the things that they do. We probably have the best team in the world on expanding to other chains. We are now experts at it, we have all these things figured out and planned for.
Kudos to the hard work for our team. Amazing things happening there internally. I know all of you here can’t see all the things happening internally but there’s a lot going on.
I’ll turn it back to Zipper to close it out.
Zipper — BULLISH!
