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Note from Kujo
While I transcribe, I am not aiming to make them 100% word for word. I will cut out various banter and things that may not make sense, or things that I think are unneeded. I will also tweak verbiage used from each speaker, if necessary, to help with clarity. These are transcribed with ~90%-95% accuracy.
All speaker names can be clicked for their timestamp. Mostly everything underlined is a link.
You can find the original recording here (the talk starts at 3:25 timestamp):
Speakers: Frisky Fox, Magnus Ironroot, Beetle Dude, Hubert Cumberdale, Bear of Sun, Dreamer, Bolon Soron
Community AMA
READER NOTICE: Enjoy! :)
Bolon Soron
We’ve got everybody here. We can go ahead and get started with this week’s AMA. As is our tradition, we’ll start off with Frisky Fox.
Frisky Fox
Thank you Bolon and welcome everyone. Happy to be here again, it’s been a busy week, there’s been a lot happening. As you know, we’ve had a mini-feature release last Thursday from Beetle (maybe Friday?). We had some good QOL things that I was really please to see go out. The meditation auto-select was something I needed with so many heroes!
Then, not even a week later, we had another huge release with deferred payment and locked token spending. Since then, we’ve had over 100,000 Crystal burned in less than 24 hours. That’s amazing and blows me away! It’s going to be a great feature moving forward with our economy, incentivizing the behavior we want to see. Lot’s more coming to that.
Duels Season 2 is now over, as of last night at midnight. We are hard at work on Season 3. We are targeting at two weeks to launch, that should tentatively be February 22, if all goes well.
I had a couple of things I want to talk about, but there are questions in the AMA channel — so I’ll wait for Bolon to get to those. Something else I wanted to bring up was that Magnus and I appeared on some twitter spaces last week, and Pieface as well I think. There were a lot of attendees and that was a lot of fun.
We had a big meeting on the road map either this week or last week, there’s a lot of work and thought put into it. I’m stoked for what’s coming on it.Welcome everyone and with that, I’ll pass the mic back to Bolon.
Bolon Soron
Awesome! If you haven’t heard those twitter spaces, definitely check them out. Magnus and Fox were incredible on them and they were high quality. With that, let’s go to Dreamer.
Kujo: The first two links are the direct Twitter Spaces recording, the third is the transcription.
Dreamer
Hi everybody! I’m excited about the recent addition to our ability to burn things. If you look back at the year, we initially made a plan: what do we need to do differently in the bear market that we are finding ourselves in? This has been on the top of our mind in many meetings. It’s exciting to find new and creative ways to find ways to implement and put into production those ideas. If you haven’t seen it yet, check it out on Crystalvale for ways to burn tokens. Not only is this something that’s leading up to the Crystal unlockening, but it’s something we can scale with — with the tokens we have and the realms in the future, trying to find new ways to incentivize token spending in game. Thank you for those who have already supported it and hopefully we can find more creative ways to make token spending fun and maintain this momentum.
The topic of Centralized Exchanges. I know I’ve been giving an update on it each week. So, this past week we did the initial run through all of the target exchanges that we have so far. We went back to our market maker to see if we can get closer to finalizing our agreement, since things are looking positive. Not only from our perspective, but as we’ve talked with various options of exchanges, and our previously mentioned market maker that we are looking to work with, they’ve seemed excited and impressed as well. Soooo, we have refined an agreement from where it started initially — to a point where we are comfortable moving forward. Now we’re in the hands of their process, including KYC amongst other steps. We then sign an agreement, and then there will be an announcement. Not sure if that will be one week, two weeks, or more, but I just wanted to announce that we have internally decided on that option. It’s an important step and when we’re through those steps that we can announce who they are, we will. More to come on that.
Also wanted to mention a concept of a legal opinion, so we’re going to work with our own legal council, Ashbury, to get their feedback on what to do with onshore and offshore. I believe they can provide a US opinion on that, but we’re gathering information on that. That isn’t a bullet proof opinion, it is a third party opinion, but it will strengthen the view of a lot of things. And what that opinion is, is essentially reviewing Jewel, the token we want to ultimately list, and have an opinion on other precedents and other laws — whether or not it will be seen as a security. You want an opinion that Jewel is not a security; for many of these exchanges to be confident in listing you, that is a requirement, I believe Crypto.com requires a US or offshore opinion before listing.There are some exciting things coming that we just can’t announce this week, it’d be a bit premature, so we’re not going to be dropping any big names or anything just yet.
Bolon Soron
Thank you! Let’s go to Magnus.
Magnus Ironroot
Hey everybody! This week I have been primarily working on QuestCore v3, which, as we’ve mentioned before, we are converting to a Diamond. Streamlining a few things in the contract that will free us up to set the stage for Level 10 profession quests as well as Pet feeding, amongst a few other cool things going forward.
Secondly, as you all know, security is always our top priority. We’ve been working with multiple partners on that front. Both for our suite of smart contracts, as well as for the validators on DFKChain. I’m also voting out some scripts internally to make it easier to interact with gnosis/safe. Maybe not the most exciting point, from the outside looking in, but it’s very critical for our internal operations.
Lastly, we appreciate everyone’s feedback on the Request for Comment (RFC) document. Your voice is tremendously helpful as we consider the best path forward on DFKChain. Thank you again.
Bolon Soron
Let’s do Bear of Sun!
Bear of Sun
I don’t think I’ve heard my name quite like that before, thanks Bolon! As Dreamer said, there’s a lot happening and possible things coming. But not a specific announcement that we can put out today. But, I did want to say, to give you an idea of what our attention is right now — what our focus is. A couple of things that come out as themes in some of the relationships that we’re creating.
1) We’re seeking out partners that enrich and add to the user experience in our game. You’ll hear Beetle talking about in-game chat, or last week we announced price feeds with the trader. Things that make your experience better.
2) We’re also seeking partners who are finding success in the bear markets, like we are. Finding people, games in particular or protocols, that are doing something that’s really working. Finding ways to integrate with them, collaborate with them.
3) Then of course, another big one that’s showing up, how do we acquire more players? How do we get into new regions? Working with people in marketing and attacking marketing campaigns that are going to help us do that.
4) How do we increase the value and utility of our assets. NFTs and tokens and finding partners that help us do that!
Bolon Soron
Thanks! Moving on to Hubert.
Hubert Cumberdale
Hey! So, I don’t have any major updates at the moment. Same thing as what’s been on my plat so far. Level 10 profession quests and pets. At work getting that ready. Also a generic tournament system and working with Wisdom Labs with PvP. I’m sure there will be a lot of questions about some of that stuff soon here in a little bit. So, I’ll yield my time until then!
Bolon Soron
Haha! The Hubert section of the AMA. Beetle Dude then!
Beetle Dude
On my side, I mostly spend my days thinking about the road map, dreaming about the road map … deciding on whether or not I should build the road map… JUST KIDDING! It’s coming, I promise!
On the application side, we are continuing to build a whole bunch of stuff! Like Fox mentioned, we had our small release last week and another one this week. Everything seems to be going smoothly mostly. Want to give big props to our testing team. Windston, Sashei, Zipper, all the Knights. You all make the releases better and better each time.
As far as future things, we’re getting to a point where we’re working on bigger features now — which are taking more time. But, this doesn’t mean we’re going to stop releasing smaller things like we have been in the mean time. We have gardens reworks coming (UI), all the dark boxes from the beginning. I’ve been seeing more and more green pets personally and they’re awesome! There should be a new tier of pet as well. Can’t wait to see the reactions!Other than that, super excited about our PvP progress. Hard at work on my end for in-game chat and personally excited about it. This will definitely help it make it feel more like an online game. All these things take time, we’re progressing with everything as we can.
Bolon Soron
Before we dive into questions from the talk site, we have a couple of things we queued up as our own questions. The first one is to Fox, which is on the locked crystal airdrop.
Frisky Fox
I sort of mentioned it a little bit last week, after speaking with AvaLabs about the precompile, which we have a PR up on their repo for. It was decided that it would be a better approach to do a state upgrade system, because a precompile wasn’t an exact fit for the functionality we were doing. The problem is that the whole system hadn’t been built yet. So basically I met with AvaLabs and they asked us if we would be willing to build that system. So that’s what I spent my weekend doing! Which has been really cool. It’s essentially a whole new part of the subnet EVM, that allows for network upgrades that are able to do things like having contracts get deployed or updated. As well as state changes and etc.
That was able to get to a point where our tests are internally passing for that. We’re just trying to finalize any final tweaks or things with AvaLabs and the direction they want to go. Because what we want to do is that we don’t want to have to maintain our own fork of subnet EVM for the long term. We would like to work hand in hand with AvaLabs on that and have the way that we go reflect the way that the subnet EVM repo will go as well.
So, once we get their blessing on that direction we will then push that change to our fork on testnet. Test it there. Then, once it passes there (which could be as early as next week), then we will schedule a network upgrade for mainnet. Schedule upgrades for those, we have to give a week or two of advanced notice. Because anyone who runs a node that is indexing our chain has to update, or else they will not be able to continue to receive updates on the chain. So, when you think about things like DappRadar, or others indexing us, if we were to do this then they would have to update their nodes as well so they can continue to work. So we do want to give advanced notice on that.
We’re looking right now at a (rough) time line of about 3 weeks to get that up. I know it’s been longer than we’ve expected, but I think it’s good that we have made sure to be hand in hand with AvaLabs with this. This way we don’t have to maintain our own fork long term and still have all the benefits of all the security with the new features that AvaLabs is actively working on. I’m excited about this and I think it’s the right direction, I will be hard at work on this over the next few weeks as we are able to coordinate that.
Bolon Soron
The second question, for Fox and Magnus or however you would like to tackle this. We moved the meditation to a “Diamond Standard” contract, with more of that coming. I wanted to take a minute and have them explain what that actually means to be a “Diamond Standard” and why it’s beneficial.
Frisky Fox
I’ll take this one. I’m stoked about this one! I think it was last summer that we first started experimenting with writing contracts in the Diamond Standard. Up until then, we had been struggling against a size limit on smart contracts. On the Ethereum blockchain standards there is size limit of around 24kb for each smart contract. If you go over that, it simply won’t deploy the contract. So, it’s limiting in what you can do in individual contracts. You need to create an architecture around that and sometimes that architecture ends up being overly complex or convoluted. Simply because you can’t fit it all in one contract.
So we experimented with the Diamond Standard first with Duels. I was the one who pioneered that and tried to sell everyone else on the team on it. Since then, we’ve done a few other Diamonds. Magnus, if you can remind me, I think it’s the “flag storage” that’s diamond?
Magnus Ironroot
Yes, flag storage is one of our Diamonds.
Frisky Fox
Right! So, as part of that we’ve been trying to create a bunch of extra things around the development experience for creating Diamonds. This way it’s easier to manage those with multi-sigs and make it easier to do upgrades in a very safe and secure way. We’re sort of investing in that standard.
The problem is — up until this last week, we thought it was impossible to upgrade a none Diamond contract, that’s already been deployed, to use the Diamond standard. I’ve been asking on the channel for that standard on Discord if there’s any ideas on how to do that. I haven’t heard anything for the past 6+ months since I asked. We just assumed it wouldn’t be possible. Then I had an epiphany. “Hey, what if we did this?”
What precipitated this was implementing the deferred payment feature to the meditation circle (which was at capacity for contract size). So we thought, “I guess we can’t do this for the meditation circle without refactoring it.” So I just spent some time thinking about it and thought, “what if we do this and this and this??”
I experimented with it and it ended up working! So we can upgrade old contracts up to Diamond. Things like hero summoning, crystal core contracts, hero core itself, etc. There’s a bunch that we have these core and crucial contracts that we can’t easily create a new one. Like hero NFTs for example. Everyone in this audience probably owns a hero and there’s a bunch of others out there that own them. So, if we were to create a new hero contract then everyone would have to migrate. Which would be extremely disruptive.
But, if we use this mechanism to upgrade the hero core to a Diamond, then we’re able to add as many new features to it as we want to! The standard for Diamond allows you to create a bunch of different smart contracts that are all tied into one address. In each of those smart contracts you have a 24kb limit, but each one of those is a facet of the one smart contract. So we can have one for Duels for example that will handle entering a Duel, another that can handle admin functions, matchmaking, API side, etc. For meditation circle now there’s 6 or 7 that handle it.
It’s really cool because we can add more cool features to the hero contract. You can see things like being able to have others have permissions to have actions taken with your hero NFTs, like a champion program and etcetera.
In a nutshell, it allows us to have as much space as we want to into one smart contract address. I guess you can say. It opens the door to huge new features and possibilities.
Kujo: For those familiar with programming, it sounds like we can retroactively add new “classes” or “methods” in separate contracts that the main contract can extend or call. Neat!
Magnus, anything you want to add to that?
Magnus Ironroot
Yah! I will quickly give a big shout out to @NickMudge who originally put out the EIP 2535 for the Diamond standard. He built it for AaveGotchi and, instead of keeping it closed source, he was kind enough to make it open. It’s been a boon! Especially for gaming.
Frisky Fox
I’ll probably be writing a medium article or something explaining how we did what we did. Because I think it’ll help other projects in the same situation as us. If they want to migrate to use Diamonds but aren’t sure how. Hopefully in the next week or two.
Question #1 — Dreamer
Q I read an article today that a South Korean court ruled against a P2E Klaytn game Five Stars. Essentially a court had ruled against a P2E game on Klaytn. Just asking, how does that impact our plans, our offerings, and our relationship with Klaytn?
A I’m going to be light on opinion and focus more on observable facts. But the actual company is called “Sky People”, they are a Korean developer. First, we are not currently located in or regulated by South Korean regulatory authorities. The initial ruling was in 2017, but they recently had an appeal rejected, so that’s why maybe this came up now? We were aware of Sky People and Five Stars when we were considering Klaytn as an option. We had a number of talks with on the topic. A few of those discussions talked about the various companies in Korea, even after this ruling, that continue to make blockchain games. I think the environment we’re in now infers any game that is using blockchain to be P2E. Although many consumers of that knowledge interpret P2E as the intent is only to have a gamified financial experience rather than focus on the game itself. I think it’s a term that will probably evolve over time. Even on our side, as we get closer to full combat and other features, we’ll likely start branding ourselves as a tokenized RPG blockchain game. Just like historical RPG games had people that were “playing to earn” intent, such as World of Warcraft where they would buy a bunch of items and then sell it Peer to Peer or Over the Counter. There’s always been that aspect of gameplay, since you spend time collecting resources and crafting at higher levels that others might be willing to pay for. Blockchain makes it easier and a lot safer and more predictable and scalable. The P2E genre has felt, to many regulators, similar to gambling. If you look back to the history in Korea they kind of have a risk on risk off relationship with anything related to gambling. I don’t know all the specifics, but when I lived there, I think it was during election season. One of the candidates was pushing hard to re-legalize a form of gambling and another candidate was pushing hard to make it harder to have any type of sports betting and so on. So, I think in 2017, prior to Klaytn’s launch, with the many unknowns that were out there, I think they were just trying to make sure, at that time, that developers local (my opinion) were being cautious with the new technology and not just dive head first in. This is pretty consistent with how South Korean government works when it comes to business in general. Whether or not we choose to call ourselves P2E going forward, there will be that option always considering that the tokens we have hold value. In the article I read there were a few good points I thought they were focusing on. One of them being the fact that the NFTs carry value and are traded on exchanges. I imagine this is something that might be open to appeal. Not for Sky People, though. But the current Korean president, last year, when he was campaigning, one of his promises was to abolish the P2E genre. These are some of the reasons we’re not overly concerned with Klaytn. Just a reminder that they’re backed by some very very large names with some very very conservative legal teams which advise to move forward with this partnership and collaboration, among others, and to continue to market their own chain to P2E games. Hopefully that was informative, trying to stick to observable facts, rather than say, “I think we’re ok, we’re fine!” It’s difficult to predict.
Question #2 — Magnus Ironroot
Q Oracle providers on DFKChain — Chainlink vs supra, why?
A I’ll start off with addressing the Chainlink side of that question. First of all, Chainlink is a top notch team that we’ve had the pleasure of discussing the integration with DFK for quite a while. As many of you know, Chainlink is a huge player in the space. They’ve been providing oracle systems reliably to the entire ecosystem for quite some time. It would be great to integrate their services, however in our discussions with them, they’ve asked for things that we couldn’t give them at the present time. Though we’re still very much open to a partnership with them in the future. Also, on the Supra front, many of you who listened to the Twitter spaces last week [Kujo: Link above to the Twitter Spaces and to my medium transcription], heard that SupraOracles is an up and coming VRF and price oracle solution provider. They’re actually recommended to us by another partner who was very impressed with their technical acumen and price feeds. So, we decided to reach out to them to bring their services to DFKChain. Their technology is very open and it makes it very easy to go in and verify yourself that the price feed data that’s being submitted to the chain is being reflected on the outside world on the centralized exchanges. Their price feeds currently include crypto asset pricing, but they plan to add other cool things — like foreign exchange and other real world assets. One of the things that really impressed me about Supra is that they already integrated VRF and price feeds in their testnet, prior to going live in production. I was very impressed with how quickly they got that going on our testnet. In the first meeting they got the price feed going and in the next they had VRF going. Extremely impressed. Also add that Supra is very open to welcoming Kingdom Builders into their SNAP program, which basically is reduction in price to their VRF and price feed services [Kujo: See previous Medium for discounts]
To make this easier, we’re going to update our dev docs to show how to include price feeds and VRF. Currently for testnet on DFKChain, but when mainnet launches we will also be listing those addresses as well. As far as the mainnet launch is concerned, Supra is working through some final changes in infrastructure hardening before they launch in the next month or two. After they launch VRF on mainnet, they’ll be integrating price feed shortly after. I am really excited about both of those, price feed is really cool because it’ll be able to enable some cool DeFi functionality, like on-chain lending as well as some other innovative DeFi primitives.
Question #3 — Hubert Cumberdale
Q Gene Re-Rolls. A Gen0 with an advanced ability in recessive 1 went to dominant, that Gen1 mutated that advanced ability into an Elite, then mutated that Elite into an Exalted … So,
- Would that Exalted ability be re-rolled back to basic or are genes that got mutated on top of “lesser” tainted genes treated differently?
- Any decisions, speculations, or gleanings we can share about how the re-roll will be incentivized?
A …
- Yah, so, there’s a lot of it depends statements here. Because if you are mutating a lesser one with other tainted genes, for example, then that would still be considered as a tainted gene. Any time you actually get an actual mutation, we are keeping track of that. Long story short is, that for each legitimate mutation you get, we’ll keep track of that and re-roll to a higher level than basic. For example, if you had an advanced gene that you mutated up to an Elite, then for that one it would be a random Advanced gene. Then for the one you initially had would be rolled to a Basic. If it was an acquired Exalted gene, that would be re-rolled down to a Basic since it didn’t about through a mutation. That’s kind of our plan there, we are tracking that degree of complexity with the genes and how they came about. We do have that built in when the re-roll happens.
- Yah, so, we have made some decisions there. It will be somewhat incentivized, but it will be fairly minor. It will be minor stat boost applied to re-rolled heroes. That won’t be only for tainted gene heroes, but for every hero that gets a gene re-reroll. It will be for every hero that exists, since we will be re-rolling the crafting genes as well. But there will be a different boost for the crafting genes vs the tainted ones.
- Also, if you re-roll tainted genes and crafting genes you will benefit from both re-rolls.
Question #4 — Hubert Cumberdale
Q Perilous Journey Hero tournaments and the combat skills per class. Will the PJ tournaments work the same skill wise as what we’re currently building for PvP?
A It “depends statement” comes into play. Once we get to the point where we have tournaments in place I think we’ll have to look at where we are with PvP. I kind of expect our first offering of PvP to be not as balanced as I would be happy with. Just because of how complex of a system we’re building. My leanings is to have it be more of the simple tournament system that we had previously talked about, which was more of a stat based thing. Still planning to have it be interactive as you’re going through it, so it wouldn’t be all random. You will have choice involved. But, really kind of is dependent on where things are at. If the PvP system feels fairly balanced, then we may just use that instead. But otherwise, it’ll be one or the other.
Question #5 — Hubert Cumberdale
Q Mining quests currently have the least possible rewards out of all the profession quests. There’s Power Tokens or gold, depending on which you choose. Tears, runes and eggs as well. Are we considering adding additional items to Mining quests?
A Short answer is yes. Long answer is more involved. At least in the Level 10 profession quests those will be very similar to the Level 0 ones. But, the vision of the crafting system, once we get closer to that, is to have crafting ingredients start to be available through all the different profession quests. So, there may actually be special profession quests, like how you have a gold mining quest, an ore mining quest, still have to work through the details on that. The general idea though is yes, you will have key ingredients you need to craft anything. You will get those through profession quests and other ingredients will be through PvE and potentially PvP. Once we get to that point then you can see things expanding more, but for the time being it will remain as you are used to.
Question #6 — Hubert Cumberdale
Q Expanding on that, with another question along that same vain. Any ideas for having things like Gold Veins or various resource deposits around the map with limited quantities?
A Yes, that’s been something I’ve been planning on to some extent. I can’t really go into details since it’s not completely designed. The general idea is that once we have traveling in place it gives us leeway on time events and location specific events. Where crafting resources will be available in a specific mine, or potentially gold, and whoever can get there and mine it in time will get that resource. It may move or may not respawn for a while or show up to anyone else. That’s the general idea or feel I’d like us to get into place once we have travel or other interactive features in place.
Question #7 — Hubert Cumberdale
Q Matty I hope you’re listening — clarification on PvP terms:
- Shield / Barrier: Is it the same for all types, does it have a duration, and are the two terms different?
- Dispel: I’m assuming this is a anti-cleanse to dispel buffs from your opponents?
- Spell Block: Assuming it’s the same as block, but for magic damage, but does that also mean that Block is only for physical damage?
- Pierce: Wanted to clarify if Pierce and Block are separated and if they don’t affect one another. For example, can an attack with Pierce get through a Block? Also, assuming that Pierce applies to magic damage, assuming a hero has magic damage resistance, can Pierce cut through that and that there’s not a magic Pierce?
AAnswers —
- Shield was the first term we used, then we changed it to Barrier. Any document that still shows Shield should be changed to Barrier and have the same meaning. However, we also expanded Barrier to fit three different types. There’s physical, magical, and pure barriers. So if the name isn’t descriptive enough, physical blocks physical, magical blocks magical, and pure blocks either.
You’re all seeing us release things as we develop them. Everything is actively in development, take everything with a grain of salt as we flesh it out. - Yes.
- Correct, yes. Block is separated between the two damage types.
- Pierce isn’t a check. It’s a reduction on how defense works. If it hits then the Pierce will affect how much damage you can do. Two, it depends on the attack. But generally, the term Pierce means that if it’s a magical attack it’s going to go against the opponents magic resistance. Pierce is just a reduction on how their defense works. If it’s a magical attack with pierce it will reduce their magical defense as it goes through and vice versa for physical.
Question #8 — Frisky Fox
Q Any updates on the Klaytn gas plans?
A On Klaytn they have a feature called, I think it’s called, Fee Delegation. What it does is that it allows you to sign a transaction then have someone else pay for that transaction. That’s a way for them to incentivize apps to come and build games, or other things, that want their players to not have to spend as much gas, or any in some cases. To coupled with that they have a gas rebate program for projects that qualify. For the projects that qualify they can receive a rebate of X amount of gas per month. So, if that project were to subsidize fees, they can then apply for a rebate every month on that. We’re still in talks with them on that in finalizing that to be approved — and also for having us create a system to implement it, we have to change a lot of things in the app. You would basically be signing a transaction and submitting it to us via the API, then you would have to wait for our one of executors (which we have to build) which would then see that and have it be executed and front the Klay tokens for gas, or subsidize it. That could look like you put in a certain amount of Jewel into an account that we can draw from and subsidize it in Jewel. That’s sort of the plan we have right now, but it’s pretty nascent currently. I can’t say how long it’s going to take, but that’s the target. Once it is done, not only will it reduce the cost, but we could theoretically apply it to our own chain as well so that you can hold a Jewel balance and submit it without signing it. With that it would basically be routing through the API and drawing from that balance you committed. There’s UX experiences, there’s improvements to the costs that we’re actively trying to build. Hopefully that answers that, but we’re still a ways out and I want to be transparent with the plan to approach that.
