DeFi Kingdoms Team AMA (Project Updates — September 8, 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=ZVB5HbRuWSQ
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
Frisky — Been a busy week. Had the vote for Serendale 2.0 tokenomics pass. We’ve been busy moving forward with the things that have to happen for that (there is a lot). First steps are planning what to turn off and when. Then move things to Klaytn chain. Getting all features on DFK Chain is a big part of this process.
Have hashed out what we’d like to turn off the next couple of weeks, and will discuss those later in the AMA and also hopefully have an infographic that can be shared that lays this out.
Duels were turned off last night. Interface is turned off and smart contracts won’t allow any new duels to be started. Existing duels were all matched and only a couple left, which will be manually cancelled with the Jewel fees refunded.
Duels on Serendale was a preseason test so there will be a lot of improvement launching with Season 1 on Crystalvale.
Have been meeting with counterparts on Klaytn and meeting about integration with some of their tools. Coordinating efforts on what we can do and also on some upcoming events. Nice to have this dialogue with them. Not something we had with Harmony but have had it with Ava Labs and its nice to have that support.
Dreamer —
Meeting with our counterparts at Klaytn and efforts are progressing. Also getting exposed to other projects or planning to be on Klaytn. Exciting because one of the big benefits and areas of growth is the gamified visualization of what is on a chain, whether its DFK chain or any other chains that we end up on. We want to open up our arms to other projects to reach out and talk about how we can work out together. What DeFi Protocols are there that we can bring in. Up to this point I’ve been doing 2–3 meetings a week with projects reaching out to start these conversations.
There was an initial sentiment at the time of the announcement of us moving to Klaytn of “oh this big blue chip is coming to Klaytn, what does that mean for the small projects?” But we’ve been working to manage that and show how we are trying to help gamify all projects on blockchain through our UI.
Starting to collab with a “Move to earn” project.
Want to work with all sorts of projects, DEX’s, Aggregators, etc, but obviously games.
Deal terms progressing. There are incentives, can’t disclose those yet. Hoping to solidify those by the end of the week, had to wait until after the vote ended because needed to know how tokenomics would land to finalize all the plans.
Beetle Dude — Gardens and duel are top of the docket to move over to CV. After gardening next considerations are pet things like hatchery, bridging, pet sales. Also starting to think about Serendale 2.0 updates as well.
Secondbestdad — Everyone already saw the new NPC drop in the Tavern. Then there’s the story line progressing with the cultist in the castle. Hoping to give people a reason to come back just for the world evolving and not just features, as characters move around, talk to each other, have opinions about the dwarf king, etc.
Working on Dark Summoning chamber and the Dark Summoner NPC. Everything else has too much spoilers.
Pieface — Crypto Asia week happening in Singapore at the end of the month. We will have a DFK presence at the Klaytn booth. Will have merch, hope to meet some of you on that side of the world.
Working with Klaytn marketing to not only generate hype with Serendale 2.0, but also focus on taking care of everyone, new users, Klaytn users, current users, DeFi only users, gameplay (summoning/questing) users, and working on lots of informative content and shareable infographics.
We have a merch update — plush bloater in Secondbestdad style should be hitting the website in the next couple months.
Magnus — Hard fork completed successfully with no network disruption. This allows us to change network fees going forward. If still having issues with nodes syncing, check out the DFK Chain twitter account.
Polishing up gardening and the dual reward quest fund. Will be deprecating v1 of the quest contract. There was an important security update on the item bridge. Layer Zero also announced an explorer soon that should help with tracking the status of transactions on that bridge.
Sunbear — activating our adjuster and archivist next week, so when you go into the castle you’ll be able to see the first few games that have applied for co-marketing, you’ll see a screenshot of their team and of their game and have a link to go to their site. You’ll start to see more of those coming in. You’ll also see some helpful tools developed by community members.
AMA Questions
Lore — whats the story with Ents? Are they tree folk related? Are they related to Spriggans? Is CV their home?
Jakx — The ends in CV are unique. Those particular ones that you see, like Shaman Ironroot, what they are is reserved to Vithraven and Crystalvale. They were assigned to protect, and due to the Kraken looming out there, these Ents are ancestral spirits that have chosen to have their essence be used by the citizens of Vithraven. They maintain some of their personality from before, but mostly remain their own being, but they stay there to help protect against nasty things out in the frozen landscape.
Pet feeding — it was said in a prior AMA that it wouldn’t be a daily thing. Would it be bound by time? Or by quests completed? Would doing more quests and using stam pots mean you’d need to feed them more often?
Hubert — Time based, so if you used stam pots, you’d get more benefit out of your pet than otherwise.
Level 10 mining — are we prepared to give an idea of what that looks like relative to lvl 0 mining?
Hubert — It’s a bit difficult to give straight percentages. As far as the equation goes it generally uses the same factors, but there will be about a 3% increase in the base values that it uses, but by being lvl 10 quest it also allows heroes to increase their mining skill further, closer to 30, so that will increase the amount of rewards to be gained.
Along with lvl 10 profession quests we will also have pet functionality that will come out that can also help out with rewards.
So there’s a lot of factors that go into it.
Will mining threshold for maximum locked crystal rewards (5k) change in connection with token cap changing?
Hubert — with mining already being out, there may be some that were only in on Crystalvale and not on Serendale, we think it would only hurt if we changed that cap and it doesn’t really benefit anyone so the plan is to keep it as is.
Dreamer —for anyone hearing that and not understanding, there is a minimum amount of locked crystal to receive maximum rewards. If we doubled that, it wouldn’t change the yield, it would just increase the minimum threshold to even participate. So the comment of “it doesn’t really help anyone” isn’t an opinion, it’s fact.
Hubert — to say it in another way, the cap we are talking about is the threshold you need to get maximum efficiency when you are mining. When you are below the threshold your rewards will be scaled down based on how far away you are from that cap. If we increased the cap, i.e. lets say you had 6k locked crystal then suddenly you’d be getting less locked crystal, but for anyone over 10k it wouldn’t change. So it would just hurt anyone with less than 10k locked crystal, so no plans to change that.
Bolon — It’s not increasing yield, only what is required to get that yield.
Gen0s 1–19 — what about cosmetic genes. So not the skill genes, which we’ve said will be rerolled, but do we have plans on rerolling the cosmetic genes.
Hubert — to be clear the color genes associated with hair, back appendage and eye, we allowed ourselves to use any of those, including advanced and above. That was by choice, unlike the skills which was inadvertent. Our plan is to leave those as is, that was part of the customization that we allowed for the appearance of those heroes.
Guilds — any details on benefits planned for them? Size cap for players/heroes? What is the priority level for this as a feature?
Hubert — Fox can probably add more. We planned to have limits. The limit would be tied to land ownership. As far as how many users, those haven’t been fleshed out at this point with all that’s going on with CV parity and now move to Klaytn. This is not the highest priority but we do think it is something very important to the game and something we want to have well integrated with a lot of features. It’s just a matter of taking the steps to get there.
Frisky — It’s the highest priority in my heart. There’s a lot of things tied to it though. It’s like if you give a mouse a cookie then all these things. If you want to have guilds then we need to have land, and travel, and achievements and chats in place. So we have to ask what are the things we want/need to have in place first. Some of our thoughts on it though, which are very nascent: what I would like to see is a very tight integration between lands and guilds where if you want to have a guild you have to have lands. And if you want a guild to support a lot of people then you’d have to have multiple lands. We opened up the brainstorming on this again last week, so its high on our mind, but Serendale 2.0 is the priority. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about decentralization and the importance of that in any blockchain project. I’m a huge fan of it and I’d like to have a more decentralized approach to this as well, so that its not just necessarily one studio deciding everything. We want to have more dialogue and more back and forth input and maybe even have some people build some of the ancillary things.
Inventory while traveling? Will there be a backback? Carrying Limits? Mounts?
Hubert — no plans on backpack limits. But for combat there are planned limits for the amount of potions that you can bring.
Tokenomics — Have the thoughts on Jewel and a CEX listing changed with the tokenomics changes?
Dreamer — great observation and this was also part of the conversations we’ve been having in connection with repurposing Jewel. Jewel is meant to represent the tokenization of all things gaming and the metaverse we are trying to create. So a lot of the downsides we had about listing Jewel on a CEX are still there, but impact a bit less. One of the things was that if you take a game token that has all the game utility and you list it in many places outside of the game particularly with CEX’s with perpetual tools, it makes it difficult because then a lot of the people holding the token aren’t even playing the game. But now where Jewel won’t be the active in game utility (obviously you can still do things in game with it and have benefits from xJewel) but it won’t have the same impact of having Jewel listed on centralized exchanges. So we are revisiting listing Jewel on other exchanges. We had talks already with Binance and Coinbase, we’ll likely circle back there. A lot of the centralized exchanges have either internal fees or you have to work with a market maker to make sure the liquidity is managed. We will probably continue to focus on perp contracts being opted out (which a lot of CEX’s are already doing in this bear market). In recent conversations it looks like they are respecting projects that request that that not be the case. Our partners at Klaytn are going to be making several introductions to CEX’s in Asia as well. Definitely looking to get it listed in many different areas, but we still want to be careful with perpetual contracts. We want to see how that would go with Jewel before ever considering that for Crystal or the Klaytn Power Token.
Tokenomics — liquidity pools and APRs in the current structure. Can we reduce emissions and emit for longer to remove the locked mechanic around rewards and have lower but longer term APRs without locked rewards?
Dreamer — You can go and read the suggestion on rapidr site (https://talk.defikingdoms.com/contribute/ama-questions/e/38602/). It’s a good idea, but I don’t think its necessarily better than ours currently. If we considered this seriously, it would be a lot more disruptive than the changes that were in the last proposal. If we reduced emissions or allocated them elsewhere, it would be a big change to everyone’s allocations and related awards. If we adjusted unlocking and had no locked tokens, that would impact a lot of features deeply embedded in the game like mining quests. Even with the best ideas that we have, not everyone will be happy. This is why we have governance votes in place. We did talk about this live in connection with the move to Klaytn, but we worried it would be so disruptive that it wasn’t considered further. These discussions will continue to happen, if there are any other comments on this, please provide it on the talk.defikingdoms.com website.
Frisky — This is a thing that we did adjust a little bit in CV launch. We smoothed it out a bit and we’ll likely do something similar for the new Klaytn power token. Its in the best interests of everyone, particularly for a project like ours that is so well-known and people know its not a rug and that there is a solid team that is building.
As far as DFK Chain goes — why is whitelisting currently required?
Frisky — this is a multi faceted answer. There are a lot of reasons. We involved advice from Ava Labs and others while launching this subnet. We were the first real subnet to launch with a use case like this and have so many people rush in. We needed to make sure that the experience was a smooth as possible. We put in a ton of extra resources on the validator nodes. That was part of why we started out with us doing the validators. There is so much involved in setting it up and coordinating it. It’s a lot of work, especially with us being one of the first ones and not having a trial and error to point to. There were things that we were able to uncover. It was a great test and it was nice being able to work with Ava labs on that. Part of that is that we had to have a fork of their code, and it had some of the custom things that we needed in it. We actually made the change to move off of that fork and go back to the core subnet EVM repo maintained by Ava labs because they had added in all those features we needed. Then last week we did a hard fork to support the upgrade mechanism to make it more seamless for us to upgrade and opens up the future path to get more validators in. What I would love to see is more guilds as they are formed running validators and help to secure the network that they are playing on.
We are moving towards that. It’s still a process because we want to make sure we do it right, but that is the goal.
Duel Preseason Rewards — Do we have any insight on what those rewards will be and what metrics we are looking at? Jewel spent, duels fought? Overall ranking?
Frisky — I’ve touched on this in the past but haven’t announced any hard information on the prizes. Short answer, yes there will be prizes. I mentioned we’d look at all sorts of metrics, the main one being your rank. But can also look at things like the most duels played. I’m not ready to release those yet, so stay tuned, but what it will end up being is that I’ll put up a proposal for the airdrops and see what the community thinks. Airdrops are a thing that aren’t really from Kingdom Studios, its from the project as a whole so I think everyone should have a vote on that. I think I’ve hinted in the past that I’d like to do things that involve Gen0s, I think we have a couple that are still on hold from some of the allocated amount from the CV launch and we have some eggs and items that would be fun, so stay tuned.
Accidental Hero Listing — 5 months ago an open letter was sent to help mitigate damage caused by accidental hero listings. It was handed to Fox and Dreamer. Essentially a response to that suggestion was made in an AMA about introducing hero floor price warnings. But that idea had also been presented in this letter. The summary of suggestions from the letter can be seen here: https://talk.defikingdoms.com/contribute/ama-questions/e/38623/. Basically just looking for a response to these suggestions.
Frisky — I remember a couple of weeks ago there was that suggestion about the floor prices and I said that’s a good idea. That’s not the first time I’d heard it. It is a good idea but we have to be careful about that, like does that open us up to risk in us advertising the price you should set it at. We’ve had back and forth on this and we want to remain very hands off and agnostic on what the price is. But it should be fair to show the last few sales with heroes with similar sales. I noted it would be cool if there’s an extension that does it and I think someone mentioned that there already is one similar to that. These don’t have to be built into the game, these are also great things that could be built as a chrome extension for example.
There’s a few other points in this question, and I think moving hero hiring to the portal is a good idea and we’ve internally agreed that would be a good thing.
Beetle — Re tagging system for heroes, we are looking into ways to allow people to log in with their wallets and would allow us to do things like tagging and user preferences. Things that we are using local storage sometimes for we could maybe move to a more database structure to store that. It doesn’t need to be all on chain, but just so people can have a better user experience. There’s a lot that goes into that. Focus has been on in game features rather than quality of life, but its on the roadmap and we are looking into when we can add some of these great things.
[Samichpunch note: Discussion continued about some of these ideas, but pretty insignicant.]
What about Gen0’s that don’t get bridged or claimed on Klaytn? Would we eventually pull them back and allow them to be reissued?
Hubert — No plans on doing that. If a Gen0 goes unused, then it goes unused and so be it.
Closing Statements
Dreamer — it’s refreshing to get so many build/feature/lore related questions. There was a mention a few weeks ago of how we are normalizing to levels of where it seemed we were before all the crazy stuff happened in the world, particularly in light of our limited resources. This is reflective of partnerships with the community and partners like Wisdom Gaming (as it relates to PVP). I appreciate everyone’s patience, on the team side and the community side. As we progress we’ll try to be more transparent about roadmap items on what's on deck, what's in the hole.
On the event side, we don’t have a huge unlimited budget to show up in Singapore like we did in Barcelona or Miami. I don’t think anyone should expect that to be the case. We are being very cautious on all spending. But having our partners with their own booth and willing to allocate a portion of it to us in such a crucial week and area we are going to do everything we can to make that impactful. This will help us to increase overall adoption as we try to form partnerships with other projects that can help co-market and spread awareness and add utility in game. Things are progressing well as it relates to Serendale 2.0 launch.
Frisky — I mentioned that there would be some features we are closing out this next week. Obviously we did duels this week. We’ll be shutting raffles off next week. We’ll close down any new raffles being started next Wednesday. I think that there are the weekly ones that end on Friday. So that is how that will work. We are also planning to turn off questing across the board. That will include mining, gardening, foraging, fishing, training quests and wishing well. We are also planning to turn off meditation circle start (you won’t be able to start new ones, but can complete ones that were already started until the following week). The final thing that we are looking at is that we are turning of the withdrawal fee for the gardens. There is a fee that starts high and gets lower. We want to turn it off to allow people to more easily move their assets from Harmony to Crystalvale. We will keep the 25% flash loan fee if you put something into the garden and withdraw it in the same block. That is to prevent flash loan attacks, so if you try to do that you are going to get wrecked. The other ones will be removed though. We have a lot of things the following week that are going to be coming. As things get further out it is more and more tentative, but the plan for the following week will be a lot of things with heroes like auctions, etc. So next week you won’t be able to start any more quests starting on Wednesday, then you’ll have one week to complete, anything after that you’ll have to use the cancel feature and won’t get any rewards for completing that. Then we are eyeing things like stone carver, item trader, pet hatching, etc. We will be putting together some form of cohesive and easy to consume thing for the community.
With that out of the way — there’s been a lot going on. It's starting to feel like a flashback to last year around this time when we were rapidly ramping up our operations and doing all kinds of things all at once. We have that same energy right now where there’s lots of dedicated team members. It’s good to feel that same kind of energy again this year. See you guys in chat!
