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In Part I, we discussed our rationale for building BattleFly using $Magic, rather than launching our own in-game token.
As the creators of the game, not getting an upfront “sugar hit” for ourselves, early adopters and speculators by launching our own coin is a deliberate — and perhaps controversial — decision… one that has had a huge impact on our design of the gameplay.
Unlike typical DeFi games, we can’t simply manufacture more $Magic to reward successful players. So where does it come from?
To explain, we’ll share some alfa on the gameplay.
Season 1 of BattleFly is an idle strategy game that takes place across two arenas; the Garden and the Hyperdome. The Garden is a passive arena, in which your BattleFly lazily floats around and occasionally salvages BattleMods — weapons, shields and utilities that help improve its combat performance.
The Hyperdome is a combat arena, where every few minutes two BattleFly are selected to auto-battle head to head. To enter the Hyperdome, players must stake their BattleFly with an amount of $Magic of their choosing.
Throughout Season 1, when a BattleFly wins a battle it receives a small portion of its opponent’s stake. All of the non-combatants in the Hyperdome also receive a tiny portion of the losing BattleFly’s stake as well. The effect of this is that slowly, but inevitably, a non-strategic owner playing a poorly equipped BattleFly will see their staked $Magic gradually evaporate.
Every BattleFly, regardless of trait, rarity and starting Mods, is created with the potential of having a positive ROI; it’s up to the player to find and execute the right strategy to deliver it. Of course, we’ve given players a lot of agency in finding that strategy — they can move their BattleFly between the Garden and Hyperdome at any time, select their own Mod loadouts, and they can choose how heavily to stake their BattleFlys.
The upshot of all this is that we’re creating a game in which there will be winners and losers. While the redistribution of staked $Magic from under-performing to high-performing BattleFlys happens quite slowly, it is inexorable:
- A BattleFly in the top quartile will make a ~5% ROI every day 👑.
- A BattleFly in the second top quartile will make a ~2% ROI every day 👌🏽.
- A BattleFly in the second lowest quartile will lose ~2% every day 🙄.
- A BattleFly in the lowest quartile will lose ~10% every day 📉.
We’ve debated these amounts a lot, of course, to try and achieve the right balance between incentivization and penalties for winners and losers in our game. They’re not yet locked in stone, and we’ll no doubt continue to test and tweak them all the way up to launch in early February.
Over time, we’ll add additional layers of gameplay that dial up the risk/reward scenario for degens seeking a ‘winner takes all’ style game, as well as a more mellow experience for players that can’t bear to see their $Magic balance go down.
Time will tell whether ‘Stake & Kill’ will work, but we look forward to seeing how the community embraces our game, and the myriad different strategies that will be developed for BattleFly. We’re already thinking about the fun we can have in future seasons of the game.
And of course, there is a big twist in the gameplay too, which we’ll reveal in Part III — Putting equality at the core of what we build.
