Our Answers Session with The Next Web and Giveaway Winners
On February 7th, the CryptoKitties team hosted a TNW Answers session.
The team gave TNW some Kitties to give away to community members who asked the most interesting questions. Congratulations to @toxoplasming, @Alanfalcon, and @Twisted_Majic on their new Kitties!
Check out the full transcript to see all of the questions and answers — learn more about the real-life size of a CryptoKitty, whether eggs will ever be part of the game, and dealing with randomness in the Ethereum Virtual Machine.
Highlights below!
Alan / Falcon
Why can’t developers play the game? Some of us in the community feel, rightly or not, that it contributes to a sense that the development team is disconnected from the experience of playing the game. We don’t want you to trade on your inside information to rob us blind or even really benefit financially, but it seems there’s a middle ground where you could be allowed to play “for fun” and not be allowed to trade on inside information. Imagine if Apple employees couldn’t use iPhones? Is your team exploring solutions to this, since it is something that many of the most invested community members feel is a very real problem?
This is a really great question.
We excluded developers from playing because they have deep insights into our breeding algorithms. This would give them an insurmountable edge when it comes to breeding certain kinds of cats, and that has financial implications. Trust, transparency and a decentralized economy are important to us and this product.
That said, the concerns you’ve brought up are valid. It was my concern as well. But I think the sentiment would be far worse if devs were making immense amounts of ether breeding or selling cats.
We have non-core team members who provide direction and feedback. Everyone at Axiom Zen has an account. I kept myself ignorant of the gene details up until the past month, so now I can’t buy or breed cats anymore, nor can I provide feedback to the team. However, we have 60+ active play testers down the hall who can. I think that’s a reasonable compromise.
- Bryce Bladon
NOTE: We constantly iterate on our ideas and policies, and we’re re-examining this one right now.
do you cat?
what books about cryptocurrencies do you recommend?
Tech wise I didn’t read a book on blockchain, but learned mostly from Ethereum docs and smart contracts found on github, special mention to OpenZeppelin code is very nice.
I’ve heard really well of The Business Blockchain: Promise, Practice, and Application of the Next Internet Technology by William Mougayar, but I haven’t read myself yet.
- Fabiano Soriani
Skot S.C.
Do you think Kitties is doing well introducing concepts in crypto and blockchain to people who would otherwise be too intimidated to get involved?
What else are you guys doing to make Kitties feel more like a ‘game’ instead of just trading and collecting? Can I get a digital room where I can play with my Kitties?
Why has Kitties been so successful compared to other similar games like Etheremon? Is it just that the internet loves cats more than anything?
That was our main goal, we wanted to give people something fun and simple for them to interact with the blockchain for the first time. CK brought tens of thousands of users to Metamask and Ethereum, a big part of our audience are first time blockchain users who found a way to play with it for the first time. We still focus on making the blockchain accessible for the mainstream.
We are thinking of ways of deepening the game experience in CK, and there are some community initiatives that add to it. We have a team member dedicated to exploring the possibilities of implementing something like this, but we are also facing technical challenges since we are thinking really hard about off-chain dynamics or on-chain dynamics that we can implement considering the current bandwidth of the Ethereal blockchain.
We’d love to make something like what you describe happen and are seeing how we can make some of those dynamics possible.
We think part of the success is definitely because of the kitties. They are internet gods of some sort. But we think it might also have to do with timing, many of these games came out after CK launched. But then, some are adding more game dynamics and finding new success there, like what’s happening with World of Ether, they decided to add the ability to battle of your monsters which seems really fun too.
- Daniela Diaz Reyna
