CyBall Development Updates — April 5th 2022
General Overview
We have been overwhelmed with the positive reaction to CyBall thus far. Since launch a month ago, we are now up to 53,000+ sign-ups as well as 13,000+ DAU.
After the Genesis Mentoring period, our CyBloc population has nearly doubled in size, largely in part to our large number of participating guilds (50+). However, with growth comes the need to make adjustments to the game to keep our economy thriving.
In this update, we aim to highlight the changes that will take course for the rest of Season 1.
CyBall Reborn
It’s been a busy two months but we’ve listened to all the fantastic feedback from the community and are in the midst of developing a remastered version, CyBall Reborn!
Based on current progress, we are now estimating a mid May launch for CyBall Reborn. We understand that this is a few weeks delayed from our initial estimate, however, we are sure that users will not be disappointed by these new features.
Upcoming “Reborn” features
- Improved user experience with more intuitive controls during in-game matches
- More detailed results screen post-match to better enable technical analysis and review of strategies
- Updated artwork and animations (take a sneak peek below)
- Further improvements to matchmaking
- And finally, CyBall is coming to both iOS and macOS! (Most likely Testflight, TBD once we have confirmations from Apple)
Potions
As heavily requested by our community, we will be releasing several limited edition skin sets for our beautiful CyBlocs. To start off, the first release will be our mutant collection, which has been meticulously detailed by our arts team.
Users can buy potions and cast them onto their existing NFTs to create a whole new aesthetic. These skin sets do not carry any additional skill upgrades to start off, but may in future.
The skin sets will be sold for CBT which will then be burned, which will be one of our major upcoming CBT burn events.
Stadiums
After the release of CyBall, we will begin rolling out the first batch of stadiums, most likely towards the latter part of the quarter.
Stadiums will initially be auctioned off for CBT and/or CYB. We intend to strategically release these slowly so that owners of stadiums get full exposure to the benefits that come with them.
Initially, if resources allow, stadium owners may be able to provide inputs on the full design / aesthetic of their Stadium NFT. In the future, governance token holders can also elect for these stadium owners to get some form of rewards/yield.
CYB Launch and Dashboard
We anticipate to launch CYB in mid/late Q2. Full details will be announced in upcoming weeks.
As mentioned in previous weeks, all users who have been earning CBT since the beginning have also been accruing genesis CYB rewards. As a reminder, the initial genesis reward will be LIVE until the end of April 21st.
We will have a dashboard detailing the total amount of CYB earned to date included in the “Rewards” tab on our webapp by the end of this week. Please note that all CYB earned as part of the genesis CYB rewards program will follow a vesting scheme/distribution. This vesting scheme will depend on a ‘loyalty’ type algorithm. Users who have been actively mentoring and contributing back to the CyBall ecosystem will have a more aggressive unlock schedule whereas users who have not been as active, will have a much more conservative unlock schedule. More details will be released once we have finalized CYB launch plans.
Flash Mentoring/CyLoans V2
CyBall’s cornerstone feature and proprietary technology, CyLoans, has been revolutionary in assisting guilds and managers in streamlining the scholarship management process.
During the Genesis Mentoring Phase, CyLoans V1 was live, users were obligated to recall their CyBlocs to enter them into the mentoring process (level resets and cooldown periods were turned off during Genesis Mentoring).
Shortly from now, we would like to introduce what you have all been waiting for, CyLoans V2!
In approximately 2 weeks, users will be able to migrate CyBlocs from CyLoans V1 to V2, which will then allow users to mentor their CyBlocs without removing or recalling them from the CyLoans market anymore.
With CyLoans V2, mentoring new CyBlocs simply cannot become easier. Once users have migrated their CyBlocs from CyLoans V1 to V2, they will be able to enjoy all the benefits and features of this update.
Another important feature of CyLoans V2 is also the function of setting up “clubs” which represent guilds/clans/teams that can contain smaller subdivisions to better organise and coordinate scholars.
Once the abovementioned featuers are out, the onboarding and mentoring processes will both get a whole lot easier and we expect this to drastically influence population growth over the next 1–2 months.
New Mentoring Costs
These changes will come into effect from Tuesday, 12th April 2022 at approximately 6.00 AM UTC.
Note that with the changes above, users can choose to pay CBT OR BUSD, not CBT AND BUSD as was previously the case. These changes will apply for all CyBlocs, old and new.
Community Pool NFT Fund
As mentioned in previous updates, one of the big use cases for the BUSD collected in mentoring is to go towards game development. The first of these developments is to create a community pool of NFTs that will be purchased on market.
These NFTs will then be assigned to community members (via CyLoans) who are the most active and helpful within the CyBall community. The reward split will be given at 10% to borrower, and will be designed to introduce new players to CyBall, who can then hopefully get a more extensive scholarship with our partner guilds.
Any excess CBT earnings (for lender) will be used for mentoring, to create even more opportunities for our new and contributing users, or will be burned (if there is excess supply of CBT).
Initially, the team will decide and dictate how the NFT acquisition works. However, once the governance token (CYB) and DAO are released, users will be able to decide on the level of NFT purchases, as well as rewards share / distribution to borrowers.
The community pool will purchase all NFTs priced under X, a constant. X may change depending on the assets available within the community pool treasury, the NFT population and users numbers, as well as the cost of mentoring. We will initially set X at 205.
We hope that this plan will incentivise and strengthen our community to grow to even greater levels.
Guild Leagues
From April 11, we will begin hosting the first of our guild leagues. Guild leagues will see the top guilds in CyBall compete against each other.
Our Season 1 Guild League will be a simplified league which will see the Guilds being ranked based on the performance of their CyBlocs' Win %. In future we aim to have these guilds directly competing against each other in a knockout style tournament to determine the best. More details to be released in a separate article.
Leaderboard Reset
We are currently adding more filters to the leaderboard and will also be resetting our leaderboard at the start of each month.
This leaderboard will stay in place until the end of the month. The top 10 users on our win-loss-winrate leaderboard (monthly) will be eligible for CYB rewards. More details on this will be announced shortly once the leaderboard has been updated.
Matchmaking and other rebalances
In upcoming weeks, we will be making tweaks to the matchmaking algorithm.
Instead of matchmaking on total skills unweighted, we’ll be matchmaking on a new formula, which is Base Skills + y * Added Skills, where y > 1. The essence of this update is to emphasize Added Skills, that is skills assigned by the player, are more valuable than Base Skills.
As CyBall Reborn gets closer, we will also be adding in and removing several Tactic Cards. We do not aim to have any changes to Traits as it stands, however this might change in the future.
Future Updates
In the near future after the release of CyBall Reborn, we will be releasing the highly anticipated 5v5 gameplay modes. The 5v5 will be in the form of an exhibition match or in our League or Tournament modes of the game.
5v5 matches will be of a longer duration, which will include 10 key events that will occur instead of your usual 6 key events in 3v3 matches.
The League and Tournament modes will have users select a team of up to 7 players which includes 2 substitutes for the course of the Tournament or Season (League). The strategy to coordinate and optimise a team of 7 players who have a complementary traits and a good team dynamic to endure the length of the season or Tournament.
The introduction of the 5v5 gameplay will elevate the strategic prowess of players to the highest level of competitiveness; with more players key events and more tactic cards .
