DeFi Kingdoms Team AMA (Project Updates — October 20, 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=xl25_210Yjs
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 — there was a release this week. We’ve been having a release every week for the past 3–4 months, which has been necessary because we were trying to get parity for CV and also move off of Harmony. There was a lot to do in a short amount of time and the team has done an amazing job with that. We announced with the last release that the next one would be two weeks. We are trying to move back to a more sustainable two week release schedule. So we’ll see larger more feature packed releases, but also spaced out more, to allow for more QA and audits and sustainable schedules. It will come out around Halloween time, and i won’t spoil much but there should be some exciting stuff.
As we shift into this new phase were Serendale has an outpost and the rest of the functionality goes, and we are fully functional on CV, and are going full speed on relaunching SD on Klaytn. Will involve a lot of new things and a lot of old things. It will make a great stage for our multichain game.
Been working on cJewel, vote passed with over 99%. This offers so many additional features over what xJewel could do for us and makes the protocol more secure. It’s more intentional to reward those willing to put more skin in the game. It will be those that believe in the game the most that can benefit the most by staking their Jewel for longer periods. It incentivizes the right behavior. It will also have some cool in contract features that we can do on chain, like a time lock and governor contract that will allow us to hold votes on chain that can automatically be executed on chain after the vote has passed. E.g. we want to change an allocation for a pool in the gardens and if enough people say yes it would just automatically happen. Stay tuned for that, it’s a huge step towards the trustless decentralized nature of the blockchain that we love.
cJewel is still being created, also working on the front end and a bunch of tests to make sure its solid. Also in process of moving team treasuries from Harmony to DFK Chain. Most of those treasuries consist of Jewel, so you’ll see transactions on the chain where we are moving a chunk at a time to put into multisig wallets on DFK Chain.
We are officially rebranding subscriptions from cJewel to be called power ups. I already mentioned this a few times, and our medium article already have that change, but just so everyone knows, the intention is that the stuff you activate with cJewel balance isn’t you actually paying and losing any tokens, its just you allocating those to activate some in game power ups. Not really a subscription so calling them power ups.
Dreamer (Business Development) Updates
Dreamer — first exciting update is on events. Which events are we going to? For any event we go to we are very cautious about budget and doing it effectively. There are some international events that have higher costs we are careful on. In November we have Dcentral coming up in Miami. We did get a way for us to have a presence there. We are looking to gear up a bit to possibly have a booth and maybe have a speaker as well. With the speakers at these events, like we did with Frisky and Magnus at Smartcon. We are looking at having Beetledude speak and trying to secure that spot.
We know the organizers well after having been at other events so it is looking positive and likely.
Gen0 Serendale 2.0 allocations
Dreamer — Two weeks ago we gave an update on Serendale 2.0 Gen0 allocation plan. To recap the current plan has a large amount going to Jeweler snapshot, we’ll release the applicable dates. Gen0’s will be awarded to the early adopters and users of Jeweler 2.0.
We will also do a summoning event, and will give more details on that but this will go on for 4 weeks. And as we lead up to dark summoning, it seems like its as good as time as any to start that clock. We want this to go until the 15th of November. If we start today then some people might be at a disadvantage with cooldowns, so we’ll start it retroactive, so 10/18/22 at midnight and going until the 15th at 11:59pm.
Frisky — there’s going to be lots of opportunities for these and we’ll put an announcement in the announcement channel with all of the details.
Dreamer — just a quick recap then, each summon gets an entry and each dark summon is expected to get an entry but likely will get higher weight for the dark summon. If you are summoning right now you will have entries to the raffle and once dark summoning is launched that will also count and will likely have a higher weighting. Proud to continue to find ways to reward people and continue to keep playing the game. So those supporting the jeweler and summoning will have a chance.
The last two buckets are related to Duels. The first related to playing and ranking up, but will figure out best way to reward players, and the fourth way will be raffle tickets.
Magnus (Chain/Development) Updates:
Magus — on subject of opening DFK Chain for contract deployment we hare doing a fork to test and make sure everything is ready for mainnet. Ava has asked we hold on mainnet changes so they can tune a few things. Main net hard fork could be next week but might be a little later on. Pay attention to the DFK Chain twitter account for updates. It’s very much top of our mind to do that whitelisting change but we’ve been asked to hold for a minute while Ava labs sorts out a few things.
Sunbear (Build Program) Updates:
Sunbear — no major updates here. Excited for the various teams we are meeting with, games, partners, etc. as we move to Klaytn. Lots of meetings and development. Also coming out soon the build site will be the ability to display art, stories, YouTube, videos, content creation. Excited about what Secondbestdad created and the artist and being able to feature members of our community.
Secondbestdad (Design/Art) Updates:
Secondbestdad — everyone requested a dark mode for DFK, and we wanted to provide that with the dark summoning portal. Its spooky and designed for people that are a fan of dark things. We know there are a lot of evil players out there and want to give them the opportunity to benefit by murdering heroes they don’t like anymore. This was a collab with our new artist JMW and Cinnamonbun and I.
Beetledue (Development) Updates:
Beetle — just working on everything that everyone else mentioned and trying to make little improvements along the way. Excited to bring them to everyone.
AMA Questions
Wisdom Gaming, love the update they gave us, can we expect more updates to be coming in a recurring fashion from Wisdom?
Secondbestdad — they want to participate in some stuff going forward. Workhorse will appear on Chaos cast and will also appear on future AMAs so you can hit him with all your questions.
Dreamer — I’ll elaborate a bit as well. We’ve liked working with them. Not only will it be informative to see updates that might be more visual and cater to all of us that are excited to play, but a ton of work has been going in every week. As you look at how games are made, there’s traditional approach of build all things and the guts and then beautify it. We’re not at the end, but we are closer to the place of having more frequent updates be excited and be something that everyone is going to want to consume. I’m excited to be in that stage and for Wisdom’s appearance on other stages. It’s really about the content and stage we are at now allowing for more things to be released or at least hinted to. These are great people, I hope everyone welcomes them once it becomes more public with having AMAs with them. Kudos to Secondbestdad and Hubert for working closely with these guys.
Raffles. Could there be a built in native refresh button, the amount of tickets that can be entered is constantly changing, can we just refresh that one raffle rather than having to refresh the entire screen.
Beetle— that seems easy, we can add that, I’ll put it on the list. We can also listen to events for when that updates, but I’ll look into it.
Duels S1 Matchmaking. How is it different in this season than Preseason?
Frisky — S0 was cool and was really an experiment, first time I’ve seen matchmaking on the chain. Used players score to determine matchmaking, it should balance over time. So if you had a team winning a lot you’d increase your score until you were playing against people that could also win a lot, so theoretically if you were scored 1250, you’d match against someone also 1250. The problem with that was that there was not a lot of players on at any given time for a specific ranking, so if you are at 1250 you might only get paired against someone that is 600. It also didn’t use hero level. So if you had a team lvl 5 and they had a team of Lvl 15s, you could match against them but the 15s would just trounce you.
One of the ways we thought to resolve that is to have a hero power metric, which is combined level of your heroes. That resulted in a much more equitable system so that your lvl5s don’t match with Lvl 15s, and that helped. Another thing was having more people in the pool, to resolve we switched to a system where its one active and one passive player where you get paired with one player that has played in the past season. So you enter a duel, and then your entry could also be used for someone else’s duel. Then there’s a system were if a passive team loses three times they could get removed, but if they win 5 times in a row they’d also get moved. There have been some tweaks that we made, like one this week is an additional weighting for score. So if you put your team in it will look 10 entries prior and ahead of your team and will try to find the best match within that that is the closest in score. So if you have lvl 5s and XP is 50, and someone else has lvl 5s and their XP is 6000 you wouldn’t queue against them. We’ll continue to monitor this and make tweaks.
For S2 we’ll make changes based on what we learn from S1. Hopefully that wasn’t too much information but that is how that works right now.
Raffles. Moving the quantity of raffles to a dynamic system based on the number of tickets being entered into raffles of that type.
Frisky — great idea, especially as we open up raffles to other projects, there could be more demand for tickets and more tickets circulating so to keep up with that we may increase the amount of raffles happening or increase the rewards. But we don’t want a hard and fast “how many raffles for a particular one” we want the markets to dictate that and not us. I.e. don’t want a hard and fast 100 tickets for one raffle kind of thing. We will look at it and rebalance especially as we get other projects that will be using the raffle system.
Migration referred to as a PJ, but is it a Perilous Journey event?
Bolon — No. We’ve used that term, but only as a description. There won’t actually be a PJ event. They aren’t discovering a new land, the land is just moving.
Frisky — Internally from a lore perspective, it feels a bit like a multiverse, there is SD that exists on the multiverse and there’s another SD that exists on another multiverse, and that is one way to look at it, and you’ll see a few things that look different, but a lot of similarities. As far as Heroes journeying across. It is perilous for some of our NPCs though, because they will not all make it.
Serendale 2.0 Launch vs CV launch of Jade Utility. What are we planning differently for Serendale launch and having Jade at launch?
Dreamer — CV launch was while we were working on a lot of new features in SD, and a busy time of the market. A lot of activity and upward price action in the industry as a whole. So there was a lot of balancing in terms of resources and release timelines and so at the time we opted for a staged release. The release timeline was extended due to the world falling apart a bit. After that we thought about how we can improve on that. Feedback internally and externally is the more utility close to launch the better, even if it delays launch. So rather than having a DEX only launch that ramps up, then Gen0s, then Taverns and march to feature parity, we are looking to having a much closer to Serendale parity at launch as we can. Utility of Jade will relate to gameplay, so we should expect there to be Gen0 releases near launch, coupled with the ability to use them and summon. We should have in game tavern NFT marketplace. We are expecting to have Duels there, maybe not at launch though. Still TBD if we will have Raffles there or whether raffles will be a centralized reward system on CV. Nothing is out of scope, anything you can use Crystal for will be possible for Jade. rather than a multiple month ramp up, we are looking at a launch with a lot of features at launch and then maybe a week or two for a few last major features then a month or two for some remaining minor features.
Serendale 2.0 — allocation of Jade to current locked jewel holders vs emissions in the Serendale 2.0 gardens. Is all Jade going to current locked jewel holders? What does the math look like.
Dreamer — Will all Jade emissions be a result of the locked Jewel? No Jade supply will not 100% a result of the locked jewel splitting. 125M will come from that give or take. If you look at the infographic, 44% of the supply of locked Jewel will be allocated to that. 44% into locked crystal. Some of the remainder into jade liquidity.
With that math, where does the remaining 125M or so of Jade supply come from? Well if you look at the remaining garden emissions on Harmony when we paused it, there was about 125M of Jewel left, that is essentially where we are getting the emissions for Jade. We are including new hero classes, but we are also relaunching something that was in play that we weren’t expecting to relaunch. So Jade gardens emissions will not come from the locked jewel splitting, and will instead come from the Jewel emissions essentially that didn’t get emitted from Serendale. This is done so the total supply of tokens remains unchanged. If we didn’t do this, there would need to be a burning mechanism or a 2 for 1 situation. We didn’t want this to be inflationary or create new sources of emissions. Took what was left over, plugged it in. There is no more Jewel supply other than the small amount from that 12% bucket. So about half the Jade is coming from the locked Jewel splitting and about half will be future emissions leftover from the jewel that never got emitted in Harmony but that will be converted to Jade.
Frisky — going forward we will stop calling it Serendale 2.0, because there is no Serendale anymore, so this will be just launching Serendale.
Marking AMA questions as answered
Bolon — We’ve been trying to link the AMA when it responded to this, and then also as we respond we try to mark them as answered.
Frisky — would be cool if we can copy paste from Samichpunch’s write up that we can refer them to.
Bolon — Yeah that is better. Right now I’ve just been linking the transcript as a whole. If people have good suggestions on how to make it better, let us know.
Botting, if others can create bots, we should have native mechanics to allow users to do the same thing for a subscription or ban botters.
Frisky — this gets asked a lot, and I was on a youtube show with Cryptogrady where he asked that in the past we noted we don’t like bots, use bots at your own risk but at the same time haven’t done anything very heavy handed. It’s kind of a two -fold thing, he asked if it was because I secretly support bots, it’s not really that but more of a fact that its the nature of the blockchain, and anyone can interact with your contracts however they want, you don’t even have to use the website. Someone could make their own interface if they wanted to. It’s very much possible to interact with the contracts directly without any interface. It’s hard to stop that and its also hard to even tell that its happening.
People have asked about Captcha, but that doesn’t work with blockchain because you can interact directly. We’ve always noted its risky and cautioned that you should be careful using third party tools just like any game. With the blockchain its even worse, because if you get hacked there potentially all of your assets could be gone. We don’t recommend anyone do that or to use anything besides our interface. That’s the only wayt o guarantee that you will be safe.
That said, we recognize that there are things we could offer in our game that would allow power users to more effectively use and play the game. There are a lot of games that have things you can pay to automate things. It’s also a good use case for cJewel. You could see things where you active power ups to allow for certain things in that realm of automation.
Dreamer — from a risk management perspective. Whenever people make new rules and draw lines in the sand, e.g. saying lets just ban all bots, if we aren’t able to police a rule then the rule isn’t really worth establishing that clearly because we don’t have the resources or technological capability to do that. So the question is less of whether we like bots and should we ban them, its can we effectively manage this and put all of the resources into this uphill battle that nobody has really found in Web3. The conclusion is that its not really worth the resources to find (hard) and punish everyone doing that and that we should try to build some automated solutions. We announced a month ago that Sashei was leading the charge there. A lot of builders, even that have their own services have offered a lot of help. We’re in a different place than we were last year, where questing was a new and novel thing. Now we have crafting related to quest rewards, pets, pet hatching, duels, and people have a higher number of heroes than they can manually quest, and we are open to creating in game solutions for those.
Frisky — a few more points, we want to and have always had in mind to set up our game mechanics such that you don’t need a bot or anything to keep up with those that do have bots. That has been the intent. I don’t use bots, and I feel that I’m able to get the enjoyment out of the game that i want. Some take it to the extreme though, and they have 1,000 heroes and I don’t know how I would handle that. I think we’ve taken a big step in leveling the playing field with things like multi-quest, its at the point now where I can spend 10 min every morning and evening, which is awesome, but each player has their own way that they want to play the game and enjoy it, so we want to offer options that want to do things differently. Sashei is hard at work with some cool things in tandem with people in the community and we want to offer more options in game that will improve quality of life.
How are bots not hurting Duels?
Frisky — the way its set up, there is an equilibrium of how high you can hit in score, because as you get high enough and if you lose to people below you, you lose a lot more. So even if you spammed duels, which you can do under this new system with the active and passive, you still reach an equilibrium. The only benefit they get out of it is that they could get more raffle tickets, but that is beneficial to the ecosystem as well because half of the spend for those get burned and the other half of the crystal gets sent to the quest fund. Playing more duels doesn’t really hurt more people around you is how I see it.
Bolon — what was the amount burned and put into the quest fund from Preseason?
Frisky — something like 96 thousand burned and another 96k in quest fund.
cJewel — being able to put your heroes on a week long quest without needing to reassign them.
Dreamer — I’ll speak for Sashei. This train of thought is the direction we are going with the working group that is focused on auto-questing (but will expand to other things in the future) not sure automation is the right word either. Dynamic quality of life enhancements, but yes, being able to have benefits like this on how often you have to quest and how having enough cJewel staked could allow you to do things like this with your heroes. I won’t speak too much for Sashei, but this seems consistent with the direction that we are headed.
Bolon — we should just have Sashei in every AMA going forward.
Closing Remarks
Bolon—Appreciate everyone listening and everyone on stage. WE had Chaos Cast this morning and talked about how important community is in a down market. You guys are essentially the reason to keep going in a down market. I’ll be in a twitter space with Ogre in about 30 minutes as well.
Sunbear — I just want to say, can you feel it? Can you feel the energy? I can, must admit i was playing a few duels, but as we get close to the Serendale 2.0 launch and hearing how you can summon to get tickets for Gen0s, and there will be the chance to do dark summoning to do this. We hit parity this week. I feel a lot of excitement and can’t wait to see Serendale launch.
Secondbestdad — Everyone up here is great. Especially Beetledude, I’m not just saying that to sow discord in our ranks. Excited for everyone to see the art coming up for the next infinite time, because I’m here forever.
Beetle — we have an excellent team. Excited about new features we get to work on, seeing some awesome stuff from art, contracts, and API. Everyone is doing a great job and excited to be bringing it to you guys.
Bolon — note he did not return Secondbestdad’s comment.
Dreamer — I feel it too. I like all the memes in chat. As it relates to the summoning event, we should also keep in mind that we also need to announce what the new base classes will be prior to launch. I think that the marketing community is thinking about that, so I’m looking forward to that. I don’t know if that will be in the next 1 or two weeks, but it has to be soon! We won’t announce all the new advanced classes that result from those, but excited to be able to share the base classes soon. Hope everyone is excited about these new classes and the new gene sets as well. I’m excited and bullish in our discussions with partners and old friends and new friends. We’re seeing a lot of that same energy being expressed. We’re having the highest number of partner meetings week over week.
Frisky Fox — Didn’t we tease outlines of the classes yet?
Bolon — Nope, you are just teasing.
Frisky Fox — excited for the new classes and how they are going to play into PVP and PVE, a lot of the genes are just sitting there waiting to be used. As you all know, our team is hard at work, every day we wake up and yes we get this long list of things to do and its actually fun to do and I’m stoked to be able to wake up and code smart contracts. Beetle is doing his stuff, Secondbestdad is doing his art. We are all hard at work, we appreciate the words of encouragement and the patience. Love all of the memes, they brighten our days. Make sure to keep on sharing.
Gen0 incentives, we have a lot to give away and we’ll be doing some cool things for those so stay tuned. Also a lot more snapshots in general too, especially after we launch cJewel and can announce them in a more sustainable way and have airdrops and snapshots related to cJewel.
Last thing, we are hard at work on Serendale 2.0 and ahead of schedule is how I see it right now. The expansion into a new community and demographic. There will be new languages and its cool for us to be able to expand there, and its great to see how great of a partner we have with Klaytn and some of the partnerships we are forming with projects over there. Bullish!
