TL;DR: Please head to section 3, Our action plan
It has been 4 days since Etheremon.com first launched, a lot of things have happened, and we’ve barely had any sleep. As much as we enjoy its popularity, we feel that the game’s collection feature is being misused, drifting far away from our original vision. It is about time we take some actions.
In this blog, we will talk about how Etheremon.com was born, how we look at its current state and our action plan for its near future.
- Our story
We came together as a small group of enthusiastic developers who shared the same dream of creating an enjoyable game running on the blockchain. We had been working for months, throwing away various ideas until we came up with Etheremon. In our vision, the game should consist of three main features: Collecting, Trading and Battling. Those will always be our main focus. Furthermore, the game should be decentralized so that players should have the exclusive right on their own properties.
We all knew crypto world rolled fast, so we had to roll fast as well. But our experience was all around writing Python and designing centralized servers, how were we going to do this? In two months, we gave up most of our daily routines to sit together to study Solidity and write Etheremon smart contracts. Etheremon as you see today is our open Beta version with the first main feature: Collecting. Although we tried to avoid centralization as much as possible, there are still pieces in our smart contracts that reflect our old centralized design patterns. This week we have been working hard to change this design in an upcoming update.
2. The current state of Etheremon
As mentioned above, this Etheremon release was our very first open beta version. We only expected very little traffic. Our only announcement was a post on reddit and we did not run any advertisements at all. That was because we knew the game model as well as the contracts were not refined, there were many things we need to change. The explosion in user base made us super excited, but at the same time scrambled all our original plans.
At the moment, Etheremon owners are rewarded an ETH amount each time somebody purchase an Etheremon of the same kind. Our original intention for this feature is just a marketing campaign in which early birds user will enjoy some discount if more people knows about Etheremon. That holds true if our user base remains small (<100 monsters bought per species), as no one would be able to gain any profit. We also have a catching limit in our release timeline (which we did not roll out at first). That is the reason we never do any advertisements. Unexpectedly, overnight, our user base has become so big that many can abuse this reward feature for speculation. That was never our intention and never will be.
3. Our action plan
- Limiting number of Etheremons per species: As the number of Etheremons has exploded well above our expected limit of 100 Etheremons/species and to avoid Etheremons being used as speculative assets, we will now disable catching of all 22 existing (Generation-0) Etheremons. As such, your Etheremons will be unable to give out additional rewards. Instead, your Etheremons have become legendarily rare and in one week you will be able to trade them in our Trading platform. The only way other players can get those legendary Etheremons is to trade with you!
- Etheremons can now lay Eggs: In addition to making your Etheremons legendary, we will give out Etheremon eggs . You will receive from 0 to 4 eggs depending on what price you caught your Etheremons. You can now check the number of eggs you have in “My Etheremons” page. In the update to be released tentatively on 01/01/2018, you will be able to hatch your eggs into Etheremons of its mother’s species.
- Trading platform: The most expected feature Trading is now under way! You will be able to sell your Etheremons to other players on our Trading platform by listing them in a global market place. Trading will be released together with other features tentatively on 01/01/2018.
- Battle arena: Battle area is also a very important feature that we will be rolling out in the upcoming weeks. Do keep an eye on your Etheremons’ battle power, types and classes (such as Gason).
- Generation-1 etheremons: First generation 1 Etheremons will be coming out soon. Their entry price will be low and they will have NO reward.This will allow new players to join our Etheremon world.
- Upcoming update on 01/01/2018: Our contracts will be completed soon and released on Rinkeby test net. This update will address some centralization issues as well as rolling out Egg Hatching and Trading Platform. We are inviting all Solidity experts to help us review these contracts, technical details are to be updated in a separate blog.
