Battle Racers update (April — July 2020)

Welcome to our Battle Racers Update! In these updates, we’ll share with you the status of the game and how development is going. For this joint update covering April to July, you’ll get the latest details on parts trading and the Duel Cup Open tournament.

The update is divided into the following sections:

• Parts Trading Update
• Tournament Update
• Press and Events Roundup

Parts Trading Update:

Parts transfer was put on hold at the start of our Season 1 sale last December in order to give way to our migration to the Matic Network sidechain. Since then, our parts trading feature became limited to car part NFTs that were already on the Ethereum main network and was not available to parts that remain on the sidechain after obtaining them from crates.

After solving the last blocker on ETH transfers and finishing internal testing in the local environment in testnet earlier this July, we are now setting up the staging environment with Matic’s new testnet. We will be able to assess and announce the new launch date soon.

Once we relaunch parts trading, we will re-enable transferring car parts from the sidechain to the Ethereum main net, and vice versa. This means you will also be able to trade your Season 1 and CryptoKitties parts on OpenSea! Visit the inventory page on the Battle Racers website to start trading when it’s live.

Check out our previous Medium articles for more information on parts trading:

• Parts trading launch next week, tournaments, and a giveaway!
• Parts trading update: Road bumps, fixes, and upcoming CryptoKitties event

Remember that each sale or purchase would require a 3.99% transaction fee: 2.99% goes to OpenSea and Battle Racers, while 1% is added to the prize pool for official tournaments.

We would also like to address the community’s valid concerns about the delay and share with you the reasons for the prolonged development time:

January to February: Custom Solution for Parts Trading and ETH Transfer

• When we began working on fully restoring parts trading, our sidechain partner Matic Network suggested that we go with a custom, tailormade solution for withdrawal transactions, which meant certain improvements had to be added to make sure it worked for Battle Racers.

March to April: COVID-19 Adjustments

• We announced the tournament in April as we believed that we were close to being ready, but did not anticipate how much the coronavirus pandemic would affect the teams working on this project. Prior to the lockdown, our company has already been able to function remotely, however, we have been limited by the occasional power interruptions and internet disconnections. Government-imposed curfew hours meant we had to take care of essential errands during the daytime, taking up some of our regular working hours. Some of us also had family at home which prompted changes in terms of schedules and access to shared resources. This is by no means meant as an excuse, but it certainly did add time to the delay.

May to June: Metadata Conflicts, Error Logging, and Actual ETH Transfers

• Metadata had to be tracked via asynchronous calls and we had to make sure that the transactions were occuring in the correct sequence.

• Debugging the errors forced a longer march to make sure we knew for sure where the parts were at any given point in the process.

• ETH transfers were escaping the event listeners.

Tournament Update:

In mid-April we announced the Duel Cup Open, a 1v1 best-of-3 tournament open to all Battle Racers NFT holders. Registration is currently ongoing!

To join, just submit the following in the #tournament channel on our official Discord server:

• In-game or Decentraland username
• ETH address containing at least one (1) Battle Racers part NFT

We extended our registration period in order to give enough racers enough time to obtain parts through trading on OpenSea. Due to the recent increase in ETH value, our previously announced prize pool of US$4,000 has increased to over US$6,500 worth of cryptocurrency and NFTs to be given away, including prizes from our sponsors:

• US$1,000 worth of DAI and Guerilla DaiHard Car Part NFTs from Maker
• US$300 worth of MATIC tokens from Matic Network
• Six (6) vouchers worth 6 ETH in total for Polyient Games Founder’s Keys (PGFKs), a new collection of NFTs that will provide holders with varying levels of lifetime benefits across the entire Polyient Games Ecosystem. PGFKs will be available to the public for purchase in Q3 2020.
• 6,000+ MANA worth of wearables from Decentraland
• Origin Axies from Axie Infinity
• LAND from The Sandbox
• DEGEN Trophy NFTs from Neon District
• City Decentraland Sneakers from DCL Core

Note: Prize valuation is based on current exchange values at the time of writing.

The complete tournament mechanics and detailed prize distribution list will be shared in a separate article.

Press and Events Roundup:

• March 28: Battle Racers was added to Fungibler’s list of blockchain games.
• April 6: The first ever Pocket Gamer Connects Digital featured both our CEO Gabby and Creative Director Luna as speakers.

• April 13: We participated in The Future of Blockchain Gaming webinar hosted by Matic Network.

• April 13: We also announced registration for the Duel Cup Open tournament, and it was featured on eGamers, TheDAppList, Token News Asia, and Zima Red’s NFT Proof of Work.

• May 19: Public trial started for Codename: Metaboss, a team-based idle MMO which allows you to use different NFTs from different projects. Using Battle Racers parts will give you more points if you join the ROGUE division. As one of the collaborators, our company Altitude Games was mentioned in the starter guide here.

• May 27: Codename: Metaboss then launched the CHERRY Marketplace on OpenSea, with an auction featuring various NFTs including Chubby Carrot car parts from Battle Racers.

• June 11: Our Creative Director Luna joined Blockchain Game Alliance’s all-female panel on Creativity in Blockchain Games: Art and Narratives.

• June 20: We participated in TheDAppList’s Twitter AMA series. A recap of all the questions and answers is published here.
• July 4: Battle Racers soccer shirts were made available during the Moonshot World Cup in Decentraland, where we played against SuperRare and DCL Plazas.

• July 7:We were selected to join the Genesis Block of Gitcoin’s KERNEL Fellowship, an 8-week program about blockchain and Web 3.
• July 15: XAYA announced the Taurion Treasure Hunt #3 where we are once again sponsoring five Silver crates as prizes!

• July 25: Battle Racers joins the Polyient Games Ecosystem!

Thank you for reading all this way! Stay tuned for the new launch dates for parts trading and the Duel Cup Open. Follow us here on Medium or join our Discord for the latest news, and please clap or share if you like this article.

Battle Racers: https://battleracers.io
Discord: https://discord.gg/gfEPSra
Telegram: https://t.me/battleracers
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/battleracersgame/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/BattleRacers