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Transcript begins at the 5:30 time stamp.
Source Video: Official Recording
Note from Kujo
While I transcribe these, 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 to navigate directly to their timestamp for their transcription. Really anything that’s underlined can probably be clicked.
It’s been another week, can’t believe it! It flies by so fast. There’s been a lot going on, I’ve been working hard on duels scoring updates. I had some people ping me in the discord channel about that for updates. It involves a lot of data crunching. We look at historical data for season two, which is very nice that we have mechanisms in place now to see what those are. We can add those and put them in a spreadsheet and a script for a calculation. What i’ve been doing is tweaking some of the variables and analying the queries and seeing how each tweak chagnes those lines. That’s been a long process and it’s been really good, as well as setting us up for season 3. Season 3 won’t be quite as drastic as a change from season 1– 2 was. We’re getting close, I have a few more simulations I want to run. I plan on releasing those updates to the scoring model later today. That will be live under a new scoring regime (so to speak) for a few hours while I monitor it. If all goes well, I will execute a script to update everyone’s scores reflecting your scores retroactively. Everyone should see a bump in their score to some degree. It’s getting close and I’m excited for that. There’s some interesting ideas from Hubert and others that we’d like to implement for Season 3 as well.
Updates for the pre-compile: I put up a PR last week with Avalanche to get some eyes on that. We had some of their team reach out to me and talk about it, but no real hard decisions yet to merge that into the upstream. If it does get merged, that’s great for us because we don’t have to maintain our own fork. We were considering maintaining our own fork regardless, because it facilitates some of our own randomness and metrics; particularly with opening it up to others to build on it — will be more insightful from Magnus.
First off, power-ups are starting to look pretty good for release. We’re doing some final testing on that. We’ll have some updates this afternoon on mainnet in preperation for that. Really excited to ship this patch and hope you all like it. In preperation for this release we’ll be doing a ton of updates to mainnet on DFKChain and Klaytn. A few of our contracts will likely be reverting during that 1 hour change window — this is temporary. It’s going to be about 75% of the multi-sig transactions as the Klaytn launch. With this update we’re looking at limiting questing to 5 heroes at 5 attempts — specifically for Klaytn due to the computational limitations. Hopefully this is temporary — I am working with Klaytn to see if we can work on those computations and tune them. I’m also putting some finishing touches on the DFKChain RFC section document that we will be releasing soon. Hubert wanted me to mention that it’s strictly for Fishing and Foraging, everything else will be the same so far as far as quests go.
Fox, anything else?
Yes, I ahve a few more things. One of them is data again. I mentioned last week we’re having a new internal push to collect as much data as we can about our contracts — it’s very useful for creating metrics and analyzing snapshots, campaigns, airdrops etc. Good for auditors, taxers, etc. It’s really been eye opening to see how much data we generate on the blockchain. I think this is really going to pay dividends down the line. We’re potentially thinking about opening this data to the community as well (similar to APIs). We’re currently trying to automate and optimize the collection and create an internal dashboard. One of our questions is how do we make this readily available to the community? If you have ideas that would need data and don’t know how to get it, feel free to reach out to Sunbear and MrZipper with your ideas and they will communicate that to us and we can see what we can do.
The screencast that was shared for the Scarlet Hearth, and those that commented on it, thank you for the kind words. I’m happy everyone seemed to enjoy and I hope we can do more of those in the future. I was surprised there was so many people that could sit through an hour of me coding solidity. That was a lot of fun to do!
My last piece — I’ve now become an understudy to Sam for music, because he implemented one of my randomly composed songs.
Real quick I want to emphasize something. Magnus made a good example of why we went to Klaytn. Their level of partnership and willingness to work with us, and possibly making a change to their computation method for transactions is a perfect example of what took us in that direction. This is why being with Klaytn is such a good partnership. Now to Dreamer.
I will give an update on three things, then I have to drop the AMA.
Market Making < click for link
1a. CEX listing (which is the call I have to drop the AMA for). We’re learning about price models, each market maker has a different way of how they do this. One of those ways is to charge us a fee and a retainer. Another is to share P&L on the trading. And the third one (the most used one) a loan optionality (Kujo: incoherent, might have this word wrong) model. The first two are probably straight forward, but we’re trying to gauge the importance of the primary goal of offering healthy liquidity — like a fee, retainer, or profit sharing model. The loan optionality model may align interest in a different way, which some may seem positive, but it is at a cost of offering up a significant amount of liquidity. You identify a series of strikes, or a single strike price, and the market maker has an agreement to buy those strikes. If it’s $1 and the token goes to $2, they can continue to buy it at $1 if it’s going up. If the price is going down, they don’t buy anything additional, because the price is higher than the strike, and they buy it back from the CEX itself. There is some smoothing benefits from that approach and some downsides to earmark some floats (which a majority is owned by the community). Different price models with different benefits, short term and long term. The loan optionality is used heavily for tier 1 market makers, though.
1b. Second point, we’re considering this tier because of partner credibility. A market maker is a step to a healthy exchange. The higher tier the exchange, the more volume is expected on that exchange, therefore the better your market making needs to be. When we talk to listing teams and they ask who your official market maker is, and they don’t like them / know them for whatever reason, it can affect that partnership. Credibility is very important to the listing process.
1c. Third piece, referencing a question in a previous AMA, is chain integration with a CEX. That means that often times when folks are on a different chain, other than Ethereum mainnet for example, when they do a CEX listing they do a wrapped version of their token that offramps to Ethereum, then you have to bridge from there. It adds added steps, and obviously our preference is to integrate DFKChain with any market maker. What we’re learning is this can also impact where we are in line and how long it takes to get approval and get to market. If this was a month or two, that would be attractive to integrate DFKChain. If it’s a longer period, we may have to consider the alternate option. Just to be fully transparent. We’re no where near getting an official listing. We’re trying to gather as much information as possible to make an informed choice. However, we are pretty close to identifying who our market maker is and then seeing where we go from there.
Lending < click for link
Lending has come up a few times, initially when we launched Crystalvale and at Avalanche Summit. We’re looking to collaborate with as many in the eco system as possible. We have been revisiting those talks now, we’re in the info gathering stages. We’re also talking with lenders on the Klaytn side as well. There are two takeaways from this so far.
1a. One is that we have to be very careful with the model relative to the collateral being posted in the model. I come from a traditional finance background and my expertise is in risk. I was very involved on the prime brokerage side. Which is all model based; due diligence. All the top hedge funds in the world run models in their trading processes. Risk management guidelines, when to de-risk, what th emodel does prior to liquidation is all really important. Some models have been built and were optimized in the bull market. In the bear market they need to be re-optimized — a lot of lessons learned with the new events seen. We’re being very intentional on how the models work. If Jewel was used as collateral, what does that mean? What kind of LTDs would be offered? What would a liquidation or close our scenario look like? How much would it need to move for that to happen? Because we really don’t want to lose incremental functionality that people may not fully understand that is at least from our biased view. Such as a disproportionate amount of risk to our users. So, we’re looking to innovate a little bit here and there. There is an attack vector that is known that if you have an asset that you are lending on that has a low market, there are some ways to manipulate those lending models.
(Kujo: there was nothing that clearly said what the second takeaway was, but I assume it’s involved in 1a of Lending somewhere)
Burn Plan < click for link
Mid last year we discussed our burn options. One of those was related to hero summoning, specifically Dark Summoning (check it out here!) That wasn’t all, we’re also looking at locked tokens. Especially leading up to unlocking events. With the events that happened with Harmony, this shifted some of solutions. But, we haven’t forgotten about locked token “spending”. Essentially using your locked tokens for features in game. Where a portion of them are burned and a portion is going to the Quest Fund or the fees in game otherwise. We are kicking around other ideas on further token burning, and ways we can make it fun. Maybe tying it into the remaining Gen0’s that we have from Crystalvale and Serendale, maybe having it be an ongoing thing. More details to come. In addition to what we mentioned in the past being brought back into scope, we have added upon that in our build priority.
I think we have spent around 100+ hours on what’s the best way we can incentivize our users and players, and what’s the best way to make use of the Gen0 assets that are out there, and other sought after in-game things. Incentivizing the right behavior we want to see. We have been very, very, very thoughtful in the best way to do this. It is a big thing and I think it’s going to be a very, very positive thing to come out. We have some solid plans we want to build out first before we push the button on it and go into detail on it. But, feel free to ask questions at https://talk.defikingdoms.com/. I just wanted everyone to know that it is high on our list and we have a good solution, I think, in place for that.
Appreciate it gentlemen. Lets go to Pieface for an update.
Awesome! It’s been a little bit since I’ve been up here. But, it’s so great to talk to you all to give an update on the digital front. This includes marketing, merch, branding, and etcetera. I’d like to start on our New Moon event, coinciding with the Chinese New Year. I hope you all are enjoying the fun buns taking over the realms! If you don’t already know, they are there for a reason — because it’s a fun opportunity for you all to find them all! Count them all and submit them to a form. Check out the medium article about it here! Counting all the bun buns in each realm, they are both in Serendale and Crystalvale with some fun prizes from it.
Today we have our Gen0 raffles, both the consolation ones and the merch ones. Bolon posted the spreadsheet and you can use that to verify and follow the merch raffle (later today).
I do want to share some fun things going on in social media for DeFi Kingdoms. We had shared how we had our 150,000 hero summon in Crystalvale. We are approaching half a million heroes summoned ever across Serendale 1.0, Crystalvale, and Serendale 2.0.
DappRadar had shared a few days ago that DeFi Kingdoms is third place in volume, right behind Axie Infinity and Sandbox.
Something fun we noticed about duels is that we crossed 1 million duels across all realms and seasons. We’re thinking about doing something to celebrate. Frisky Fox pledged a hero summon for the millionth duel entry. We’ll find that out at some point and see who it was, but Frisky Fox said he would keep summoning until he gets a rare or higher hero to give away.
And a final update on my side is that we’re hard at work at designing event merch for the events that we will be at this year. Look for collectible items that will build off of merch we had last year.
Thanks! Let’s go to Beetle Dude.
We are tentatively looking at tomorrow (January 27, 2023) to launch power-ups. We already posted that we will be putting quests on hold for a little, so bear that in mind. That release will also include all the Hero Hub updates. Part of that will include appearance gene search as well. Other than that, we’re focused on PvP, a huge feature we’re pushing forward with in conjunction with Wisdom. We’ve mentioned that we’re looking at in-game chat, we should be focusing on that in earnest now that power-ups are getting wrapped up. Excited to be getting this stuff out, kudos to Typicool for optimization as well.
Hubert!
First thing I have been working on has been with PvP. We spent a lot of time doing that with Wisdom. There’s a lot of back and forth, with a lot of well spent time and progress. More pressing things are locked token efforts that Dreamer mentioned as well as getting things ready for our release of the Green Pet Egg hatching, Level 10 profession quests, and pet utility. Another thing is dusting off something that’s been on the back burner for a while: the tournament system. I think I have a question on that, so I’ll wait to mention that. We’re trying to take it into smaller pieces. We initially had it for land tournaments and the eternal stories, but we’re trying to make it more malleable and open up.
Lets take some questions.
Question #1 — Hubert Cumberdale < click for link
Q Any plans on changing the calculations for mining in Crystalvale and Serendale 2.0, given the higher cap of total tokens?
A Not at this time. Planning to keep it as is.
Note from Bolon: This would actually be more punishing if we did this. The cap doesn’t change the yield, so if you have to have more locked tokens, you wouldn’t actually get more. You would have to have more.
Question #2 — Hubert Cumberdale < Bolon didn’t say this was Q2, but it was
Q Will you be able to use potions during PvP and, if so, will there be a limit on how many can be used for battle?
A The plan is yes, maybe not for all instances of PvP, for the first question. As far as the second question goes, as far as limitations go, we do plan on some limitations. We are not prepared to say what those will be at this time.
Question #3 — Hubert Cumberdale < Bolon said this was Q2, but it was Q3
Q Will PvP also have the same raffle system that duels uses?
A I think that’s a possibility, though I wasn’t thinking it would be. Duels is kind of considered a “minigame” feature, where as PvP is a “main” feature. It’s likely we’ll do something a little more robust. In the initial iteration, where we just have PvP and we don’t have PvE or crafting out yet, that may be somewhat limited. But once we get to a more complete system with PvE and crafting we will probably see rewards specific to crafting ingredients. PvP is considered a “main” feature of the game and the raffles are meant for “minigame” features.
Question #4 — Hubert Cumberdale
Q Anything you want to add on Page 10 (Kujo: of eternal stories).
A Reminding everyone it hasn’t been forgotten. We’ve just had limited bandwidth and priorities that came before that. With our tournament system becoming one of my focuses in the near term, that does bring us closer to having that. I still think it’s going to end up being closer to around the time we get travel out that we would be seeing those Page 10s show up. Still a little further bit down the timeline, but more in sight now with the tournament system being brought back into focus.
Question #5 — Hubert Cumberdale
Q Will a hero’s level, in some shape or form, be required for future profession quests rather than just tied to profession stat level?
A This was eluded to in the past as well. There will likely be some sort of limitation, but I’m not sure exactly if it’s going to be a straight level limit. More like limited by PvE, such as making an area safe before you can do a profession quest there. Which doesn’t mean you need to do it with the hero who is question (to clear the area). You can use a group of combat heroes that specialize for that, clear it out, and make it safe for your other heroes. Since your stats do matter with profession quests, if you are using low level heroes, it won’t be quite as effective.
Question #6 — Hubert Cumberdale
Q How do we envision travel, for instance, is the end goal to have a character move around the map?
A Yes. The plan is for your heroes to be moving around to different regions on the map. The regions that exist right now you can see on the Serendale 2.0 map. You can click on the lands and see what region they belong to. You can see, I can’t remember, maybe 15 regions. Each of those regions will be places your heroes can travel to. The goal is that each of those places will have different things you can do. Of course visiting those lands will also be an important part of the game. Also having PvE type things available there and special events, or other things to participate in, that you can’t unless you have specific leveled heroes there. The goal is to have a much more living world. You can log in and see there are activities and quests in regions around your groups. Make it a much more living place for you to experience and interact with.
Question #7 — Hubert Cumberdale
Q Any sharing of the vision for PvE?
A Beyond of what I said, PvE, I think, as you’ve seen in general, we have to go in steps. Early PvE will fairly simple with certain fights in certain regions. Ultimately, I would like us to get to a point where we can have dungeons in the game and special events that occur that are more global. Where it’s not just you participating as a single player, but including others to work together to solve some problem. I have a pretty big vision for that, but it’s going to take a long time to get to. Expect baby steps.
Question #8 — Hubert Cumberdale
Q Quest formulas? We have published the formulas for Mining and Gardening because they directly correlate to other balances that that wallet holds. We have not released the formulas for Fishing and Foraging, which are unrelated to other wallet holdings at this time. Are we planning on releasing those?
A I believe in the past I’ve said that if people can guess close enough that I can confirm that they’re correct, then yes. But in general we’re following what most game companies do with their game’s, especially in RPGs, they normally don’t release them. People generally figure them out. This is a part of the game, the mystery. We have released a lot of information about how they work, and we’ll continue to answer questions of that nature; we’re not currently looking to just release the formulas, for now.
Question #9 — Hubert Cumberdale
Q Any insight on when we can start working on PJ land tournaments?
A That ties back into tournaments, what I was saying before. It’s still in the works and right now we’re taking steps toward getting a version of the tournament out that we can then use for that and other things. I can’t really give a date, but it’s still around the time that travel comes out. Feeling close, I will say.
Question #10 — Bolon Soron
Q Is the team planning on publishing a new roadmap?
A Yes, we are. It’s in discussion on getting things together. We’re probably going to tie it in with other things we have in the works as well.
Question #11 — Magnus Ironroot
Q It would be great to be able to submit offers on the tavern for heroes that have been listed.
A We don’t have any specific plans for that on the roadmap. It’s something we can definitely do, but it would be a ground up rewrite of the auction contracts. Might be something we address in the future, but currently there’s a lot of stuff going on right now. So, it’s not on the priority list now, but something we can look at in the future.
Question #12 — Hubert Cumberdale
Q How long will power-ups last? For example, if I have a million Jewel staked for a month and I get enough cJewel for all the power-ups, do they expire with my staking period?
A Power-ups do last until your staking period expires. If you do allow that to lapse, and you still want your power-ups, you will still have to renew your locking period to do that. As long as you extend your locking period and you’re getting close, you could just extend before it expires and you wouldn’t see any impact in that case.
(Kujo: There will be a write-up on this when it releases, for power-ups)
Question #13 — DrZipper
Q Don’t know if anyone on the team can answer this, it calls for someone with an academic background in medieval history. But, in terms of history, did the common folk of villages have local heroes that they would create legends and stories about. Say something walked through a village with a sword, would everyone know who that hero was, and do examples like this shape you all create the lore of the world?
AWell, I guess it’s a good thing that somebody on the team does have such a background! Hi everybody! That’s a great question. That has a lot of potential answers to it and can go in a number of directions. I will say a couple of things on the history aspect of that. One, despite what we would like to believe are our own perceptions of Western European middle ages looked like, maybe don’t totally align with what we like to see in our fantasy RPGs. Which is to say that we like to make up a whole bunch of stuff about what the middle ages looked like, but that really was not the case at all. See Game Of Thrones or Tolkien or anything else of that ilk. There is probably not going to be some random guy walking through a village with a sword, who does not live in that village. And if some fancy guy with fancy clothes and a sword and a (kujo: no idea what that other word was, sorry Zip) does show up to that village, they’re probably from aristocracy of somewhere off in the distance and that’s probably not going to be good news for your village. You do not want those people coming by, because they are going to bring unhappy things. That said, there are definitely folk legends, folk heroes. Probably some best examples would be Joan D’Arc, who did come from peasantry and lead the French Army to victory in the 100 Years War, eventually, eventually. There are people who are treated as folk heroes, but in general they will be coming less from military backgrounds. You would see more of that in terms of religious stuff. Maybe somebody in a village dies under mysterious circumstances and over the next half a century a bunch of miracles happen at their tomb. Then eventually, allegedly, legends will grow around them and they get sainted or something like that.
So yes and no, and maybe in different kinds of ways. Which, I think is a complete and total digression from the point of the question. Which is: Are we thinking about building lore out of cool stuff like that? The answer is Yes, of course! I think we see some of that in the game already. For example, Sir Derek I think in Serendale. Rolando in Crystalvale, Sir Parn, and others who seem to be prominent figures where legends are springing up around them. In terms of classic here’s somebody important, like an adventurer, it seems like we are adding a lot of them into the game. As is typical for this kind of genre. As for the rest of the details if we’re building quests out to those figures, I would need to leave that to SecondBestDad, Hubert, Beetle Dude, etc. I have no doubt that that will be apart of the lore in the future though.
To summarize: Yes, real life is way more boring than fantasy. But that’s ok, because it’s still cool too!
FIN
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