DeFi Kingdoms AMA 7/11/24 Summary and Transcript
Summary
Introduction:
Bolon Soren - Welcomes everyone to the AMA, mentions the previous week’s absence, and introduces the hosts: Winston, Hubert, and Dreamer.
Updates:
Winston Jazzhands: Updates on Crystalvale, mentioning the stone carver’s arrival and encouraging participants to carve stones within 34 hours.
Dreamer - Reports on recent travels to Orlando for the Karate Combat event, LA for Killer Whales production, and a UFC event. Discusses partnerships with V-Chain and Metis and highlights upcoming attendance at the Bitcoin conference in Nashville. Emphasizes the importance of expanding DFK’s presence and creating synergies with partners.
Hubert Cumberdale - Updates on the progress of the expedition effort, mentioning the review and testing of a large amount of code. Highlights the completion of artwork and front-end work, with contract work nearing completion. Expresses excitement for the feature’s release.
Q&A Session:
Question: When searching for DeFi Kingdoms on CoinMarketCap, the Harmony jewel appears. What can be done about this?
Answer: The team is aware of the issue, but tracking sites like CoinMarketCap only reflect the original token contract. They are in contact with these sites to address the issue.
Question: Thoughts on making Decentraland wearables double as items in DFK?
Answer: It was considered, but required more infrastructure than available at the time.
Question: Updates on Discord feeds for armor listings and sales showing modifiers?
Answer: This has been updated.
Question: Any plans for global tweaks to the PvP combat engine?
Answer (Hubert): It’s possible but hasn’t been deemed necessary yet. The system seems robust for both PvE and PvP.
Question: Plans for double drop or double XP weekends ahead of PvP?
Answer (Hubert): It’s a possibility but not decided yet. The focus is on promoting PvP.
Question: Can we expect a hero marketplace at the Colosseum?
Answer (Hubert): Yes, there will be marketplaces for heroes, equipment, and potions dealing in jewel.
Question: Will there be a way to watch PvP matches without screen sharing?
Answer: Yes, there will be a viewing feature.
Final Thoughts:
Dreamer: Emphasizes the progress and upcoming features, encouraging the community to stay bullish.
Hubert: Excited about the progress and upcoming PvP features, highlighting the team’s hard work and problem-solving efforts.
Winston: Thanks the community for their patience and support, expressing excitement for the future.
Bolon Soren: Appreciates the team and community, looking forward to the release of new features.
Transcript
[Bolon Soren]
Hello everybody and welcome to this week’s AMA. As you noticed, I’m sure, we did not have an AMA last week in Observance of the U.S. Holiday and this week it’s just Winston and I. Just kidding, we have Hubert here and Dreamer is working on getting in.
He was having some technical difficulties. Oh, there he is right now. So, we are back and ready to get into some fun stuff.
I’m glad to be back and I want to give a shout out and a thank you to Winston for filling in as my superior host while I was gone. Much, much appreciated. I hope that you have all lowered your expectations for this week’s AMA now that I am back, but I am excited.
So, we are going to kick off with some updates and actually, first off, I am going to turn it over to Winston for a little update on what’s happening in Crystalvale right now.
[Winston Jazzhands]
Turn it over to Winston? Oh, right, right, right, right, right. I hope everybody has been collecting their materials for the last week because the stone carver has arrived.
He’s going to be in Crystalvale for the next 34 hours. Hopefully, you can get over there, carve some stones, do what you got to do. Just do it soon.
It’s easy to forget. Yeah, get over there, carve some stones. Thanks for the moment there, Bolon.
I totally forgot about that.
[Bolon Soren]
Thank you, thank you. And over to Dreamer to talk about how he is never at his own house.
[Dreamer]
Can you guys hear me? Yes, we can. Hopefully, you can hear us as well.
Just barely, actually. All my settings were wonky, but yeah, I don’t think we had an AMA last week, but the week before that, I missed it because I was traveling a bit, so I wanted to report back on that. I guess the initial travel plans, they had me going to Orlando for the Karate Combat event.
It was a great event, and Defight Kingdom just highlighted, I think, two or three times with our awesome new trailer that PyFace, Sam, Winston, and many others contributed to making. It was really cool. Hopefully, you caught it.
If you haven’t, go join the other 40,000 people that have viewed it and millions that have seen it on the Karate Combat stream. It was kind of funny. It happened right after the brawl that broke out.
The president of Karate Combat choked out the dude, and then they cut to Defi Kingdoms, so it was pretty cool. But before that, I had a chance to change my flight and stop in LA by invitation from those doing the Killer Whales production. They did something cool this year where they had a bunch of K-Wells, or I think on the show, they call them VIPs, just reacting to pitches and commenting.
So I was able to wear the DFK, and I don’t know what they’ll use throughout that, but commented on a couple of the day’s pitches, and see if we get some airtime in that. We did not pitch. It’s something that, who knows, you might consider doing in the future, but it was more participating in the production rather than as a contestant.
After that, I got invited by V-Chain to go to the UFC event, which was really fun. V-Chain has some new leadership there on the marketing side. They’re trying to expand their partnerships and everything, and we’re always looking for other chains that might have technology to support parts of the build, as we have done recently with Metis.
Nothing really significant progressing there other than intros, and got to see a cool UFC card, and make some connections. I was there with George as well and some other influencers. So really trying to find ways to grow our presence in this space.
Any of us in the community, any streamers, anybody on the team that expands their brand to other communities, it only helps us. It gives us a bigger platform, gives us a better network. So we’ve been doing that in various ways over the last three years, and are continuing to do that.
It just seems like we’re getting a little bit more recognition in some of these things. One, we’ve always been very careful with budgeting, travel, and things. And luckily, some of these opportunities and partnerships are helping cover a lot of that for me.
So as you see me flying around a lot, it isn’t always on JFK’s dime. Actually, we’re trying to find synergy with a lot of these partnerships where I can add value in some way, and save us money, but also allow us to have different ways to co-market and get exposure, and extend our partnership. So working hard to be very strategic and efficient there.
Similarly, Nashville has the Bitcoin conference coming up in a couple of weeks. I was sponsored to go to that. And we’ll be attending the conference all three days.
Karate Combat has a fight there. There’s an Influencer Fight Club card there, I think with five fights, pretty stacked. And we should have more opportunities to be featured in the production.
Last time, I got to commentate for a little while. This time, we’ll see what happens. We’re trying to get us on the pit.
I don’t know if it’ll happen, but we’ll at least have some commercials airing, as well as doing some content for IFC and the influencers there. So that’s kind of the travel recap, and where we’re going to be in a couple of weeks. I’ll likely be the only one there, since it is a Bitcoin conference.
These tend to be really traditional Bitcoin miners and a lot of others that don’t cross over super well with the EVM or gaming space. But there will be a lot in attendance and side events that I think will be worth it. SunBear may make an appearance with me at the conference, but he has personal travel plans that will prevent that.
So right now, it’s likely just me. I do think Ian’s going to be there as well. So for any that are going to be in attendance, feel free to reach out.
If you want to get tickets to the fight, feel free to reach out. If you want to hang out or meet any of the others that I’ll be with, just let me know. We’ll run back over to you.
Awesome.
[Bolon Soren]
Appreciate it, sir, and appreciate how much time you spend on an airplane. One final update. We’re going to kick it over to Hubert for Expeditions.
[Hubert Cumberdale]
Hey, guys. Yeah, so we are still plodding right along with the expedition effort. Got through a full review of the giant amount of code that is required for this feature and nearly broke GitHub in the back and forth of comments that we had.
But now all of those comments have been addressed, and we’re now in like round two of review. And we’re also actively testing as well with that code. So it’s coming right along.
There’s still a little bit more, I think, that we’re going to need to do to get across the finish line. But our artwork is all there. The front-end work is mostly done, and the contract work is just getting finished up right now, just making sure that we dotted all the i’s and crossed all the t’s and made it as efficient as we can without spending too much time doing that.
So yeah, it’s getting close. It’s really exciting to finally get that across the finish line. And I don’t know if I have any additional details to share right now.
But yeah, we’ll see. Maybe next week we’ll have a little bit more to share. That’s it for me.
[Bolon Soren]
Awesome. Great. I appreciate it.
Yeah, very exciting to see it continuing on. I think all of you should know by now, but if you don’t, we don’t release things until we’re confident that they are in a good place. And so we are making sure that everything is working as it’s anticipated to have as smooth of a release as possible.
But super excited for it to be getting closer and closer. All right, we are going to dive into some questions. First up is when a person searches for DeFi kingdoms on a site such as CoinMarketCap, the jewel that comes up is the Harmony jewel.
Are we aware of this? And what can we do about it? As well as that same jewel shows like MEXC and CoinX, what jewel is being traded on those? We are aware of it. Unfortunately, our options are relatively limited. Tracking sites like CMC and CoinGecko and others only go off of the original token contract.
Yo, shout out to the Twitter people praying for my downfall while saying my champagne ain’t real. Unfortunately, our options there are limited. We are in constant contact with them.
If you search WJewel, you will see the jewel that is used on, you know, DFK chain, Clayton, everywhere else. But the core aggregation will unfortunately not reflect WJewel. As far as Mexie and CoinX currently, those are both trading on Harmony jewel.
At the moment, those are listings that we did not coordinate that they self listed, and they have not updated. That said, we are also in contact with them as well. So more to come on that.
But as far as like the changing the actual search result, unfortunately, it’s just not something that CoinMarketCap supports. Anybody want to add anything to that before I move on? All right.
We participated in the Decentraland Game Expo. It was a super cool event. I hope that you all got to check out our booth.
I thought it came out absolutely incredible. And we did have a wearable in Decentraland that was dispensed as well. The question was, was there any thought given to potentially making it something that would double as a busy in DFK?
It definitely is something we thought about. Unfortunately, it also requires infrastructure that we just did not have the time and resources to get into place. We would need an NFT bridge from Polygon and or ETH where Decentraland is.
We need the busy contract to recognize the contract used for the wearable. So definitely something really cool and something that we were very interested in doing. But it would have taken a lot more effort than we necessarily had time to put in at that moment.
And it looks like… Okay. Sorry, I was reading chat.
So the next question was about Dreamer on Killer Whales. We’ve already addressed that. So one last question that I’m going to answer, and then we’ll move on to some more exciting people answering questions.
But right now the Discord feeds for armor listings and sales show defense, which is constant, but don’t show the modifier. Can this be updated? As of about 30 minutes ago, it is updated.
Thank you, Dr. Zipper. He already knocked it out. So that is now reflecting in the listing and sales equipment channels in Discord.
All right. Going into some PvP questions. Do we anticipate some kind of global tweaks to the combat engine for PvP?
To give an example, you used to play an MMORPG where the damage you did in PvP was 50% of what you did in PvE. Do we anticipate anything similar to that?
[Hubert Cumberdale]
I’ll say it’s possible, but so far it hasn’t looked like we need it for sure yet. So we’re still testing, and if it seems like it’s the only way, then we could do that. But so far, it seems like we kind of built a system that’s pretty robust in both directions.
But yeah, we’ll see.
[Bolon Soren]
Awesome. Thank you, sir. Don’t go anywhere.
When we released the Badmother Cluckers, there was a period of double drops. Do we anticipate doing anything similar to that ahead of PvP, and does the idea of double drop or double XP weekends sound like something we would consider in the future?
[Hubert Cumberdale]
Yeah, I’d say that’s in the maybe category. We probably will have a few different things that we do just in promoting PvP. I don’t know if it will include a double XP weekend or anything, but I think there’s definitely room for us to do something like that.
We really haven’t had much time spent thinking about that sort of thing because we’re really focused on PvP right now. So maybe.
[Bolon Soren]
Yeah, we have a lot of ideas, and as we get closer, we will be going deeper into those ideas as things continue on. All right, so for this next one, I am going to combine several questions and let us give a few responses, and then we can go back and hit some of these individually if they are not covered in our umbrella response. But if you are kind of paying attention right now, you should perk up, turn the volume up.
Things are about to get exciting. So, team has recently been releasing PvP trailers, which has caused much of the community to believe that PvP is nearer than we may have previously expected. Can we speak on the ramp up in post teasing PvP and our level of understanding how teasing for too long could be a bad thing?
Combined with that, do we anticipate a hero buying and selling marketplace as well as an equipment and potion marketplace at the Colosseum? Ways to trash talk, ways to watch PvP other than screen sharing, all of those kind of peripheral features. I’m going to kick over to Dreamer to start things.
[Dreamer]
All righty. Well, I’m going to trash talk on my camera, see if this is a bad idea. See if sticks in and makes fun of me.
Is this enough hat for you?
[Bolon Soren]
That’s a limited edition hat right there.
[Dreamer]
It looks very pink. All right. Somebody recently gave some feedback that we need to be turning on our cameras during AMAs.
It’s much more entertaining. So, I’m listening to you, and I’m excited to talk about this PvP topic because it’s much more than around timelines and features and everything. Back in East Denver, we announced a deal with Metis, and it was a really interesting deal because it was essentially paying Kingdom Studios to build a feature for DeFi Kingdoms that doesn’t exist to launch on their chain.
Now, part of that was the technology was different from the other chains. It didn’t focus on things that we really need for like a full realm. So, when we started to think what could be possible, this was one thing that could be possible, but it was still unclear.
We all knew we wanted to do it. We agreed on a number and a plan, but then how we’re going to deliver it was a little bit of a question mark. Our amazing devs looked at a ton of different ways that we could really make this a reality in terms of the build using the technology they had, but it would have been much better if they could meet us halfway.
What has happened over the last couple months, it did take them longer than we initially anticipated to allow us to get ready to build, but the result is something we didn’t anticipate at all. They have partnered with us to look at their tech stack and identify some things that would make it much easier to build over there. Now, nothing’s final.
They’re kind of in final discussions over there on what it’ll look like, but we’re eagerly awaiting updates to see in the next couple of weeks what the chain is going to be like to build on. We have a really good idea, and along with that good idea came incremental builds that would make the experience for you, the player, so much more enjoyable, more seamless for people to come back, easier for people to onboard, more fun to actually play, and not just focus on those that want to compete, but focus on everybody involved in the entire economy. So with this, we added an addendum to the deal that increased the amount by 50%, 5–0.
So if you’re familiar with the initial dollar amounts, that 50% is quite large. With this, it does shift back a little bit the overall release, but in reality, our game guys have been building as much as we can while we wait and anticipate the chain being ready. So the chain is still not ready.
So really what we’ve done is we’re using the extra time that we couldn’t control to make the initial PvP launch way better. We’re using the plans that we’ve had and pitched with our new partners a way that would, one, make it better for them, have more on-chain activity, and two, include all involved. Maybe there’s some players that don’t want to be competitive or don’t like losing, or look at the economy and say, you know, just having people go and have, you know, PvP matches in and of itself isn’t going to move the needle in the economy.
Well, we have a plan to address all those things. We want to be good partners for Metis, we want to make sure the players have a good experience, and we want to see in what way can this awesome, incredible feature impact as many involved in DeFi kingdoms as possible. So happy to announce that the extension of the deal, the funding, how close we are, if you zoom out, we’re really close.
If you focus day by day, we’re not like a month away. We’re working to find what that date is. It’s definitely a this year item.
It’s definitely contingent on certain things coming through on the Metis side and the technology supporting it, so there’s no 100% confidence dates, but we’re getting close, guys. And what we were planning to build and announce in February just became a hell of a lot more awesome. I’m going to go away now.
Back to you, Paul.
[Bolon Soren]
Well, don’t go too far away. But, Hubert, before I jump into some of the, hit some of those specific questions, anything you want to add just all around?
[Hubert Cumberdale]
Let’s see, I think, yeah, Dreamer caught it really well. We really, like, in the background, there’s been so many different things that we’ve been building towards, so many different ideas that we’ve been, you know, discussing and seeing if it’s possible and whatnot, and I think this deal that really is going to, you know, it pushes us across the finish line, a lot of these ideas that we’ve been talking about. There’s been some things that we’ve hinted about as being maybes in, like, previous AMAs that are now no longer a maybe.
They’re in our plan and plan for launch, so it’s, you know, it does add to the amount of work that we need to get done. I’m going to be doing a lot of my own smart contract work just to help get it across the finish line, so it’s going to be coding cave for me, which is not what I’m usually in, but excited to do that. It’s always fun to code, and, yeah, I’m just really excited to, like, be able to start giving more of these details, and, I mean, there are those individual questions.
I think that the first one in terms of, like, info being too early, I guess my only comment to that would be that this is a very large feature that we’re going to be releasing. It’s not just, like, a small add-on. It’s a whole new realm, essentially, a whole new ecosystem, a whole new chain with all new features and whatnot going along with it, so there’s enough there, I think, that, you know, I hope you’ll excuse us if we’ll give you a little bit of information in advance, because we’re also super focused on it, and it’s, you know, other than Expeditions coming out, there’s really not going to be too much else that’s going to be, like, a big release happening until that first phase is out, so, you know, we want to make sure that you guys are in the loop. You can see that we are doing things.
You can, you know, we have great artwork being created by SVD and his team. We have great music happening, and we want to share that with you, and so hopefully, you know, I guess in my mind, I think it’s big enough that it should be okay to start teasing, you know, give you a little something every week, but, yeah, anyway.
[Dreamer]
Yeah, I’ll add to the timing. It’s kind of interesting, because when we have things that we know we’re going to build, and we have order of operations kind of set up for making that happen with kind of a moving date on when they go live, in the past, I feel like people are like, we want to know everything that’s happening, you know? We want to know anything that’s possible from now until infinity, and then we’ve gotten in trouble when we share things where it’s like, hey, partner with us in this.
This is what we’re thinking. This is what we want to do. We’re unsure when, you know, if we’re saying we’re trying to aim for this in two months, and it takes four, people are like, oh, it took four.
You guys are liars, so it’s like, well, okay, maybe we shouldn’t be telling people what we’re doing until we’re, like, super confident, and then when we wait, and then two weeks before, we talk about it, and then it comes out, or like, we even do, like, a surprise launch. I think we did that with one of the classes. People are like, what the heck?
Why didn’t you market this or tell us anything? So it’s like, damned if you do, damned if you don’t kind of a thing. With our AMA, where all of our hardcore players are here paying attention, I feel like we can be a little bit more transparent and do things earlier.
For our official trailers that go out and that are posted and reposted, official effort to market, we do have to be cautious, because if we kind of spend all of the excitement, like, a year before it’s live, yeah, huge miss, and we see a lot of games do that in this space. So work with us on kind of the balance there. We want to make sure that our community is informed and excited about what’s happening.
Just understand that if we’re sharing high level, we may not cover or control all of the inputs or externalities that allow us to actually deliver it on time, but when we’re pushing it out more officially, I think we are looking for that, like, four to six weeks time period to make it so that it’s effective marketing. Anything past that sometimes tends to fizzle out the excitement. So we are constantly learning and working and trying to improve.
Outside marketing is a little bit different than, like, alpha sharing here. So if we could try to draw a line between, that would help us be a little more transparent here, while also not worrying that we’re oversharing too quickly.
[Bolon Soren]
Yeah, and I will just caveat the four to six weeks I think is a really good benchmark for most of our releases. PVP is a little different. It’s big.
It’s very big. So, you know, y’all started seeing a little bit of stuff showing up. Y’all see the ramp up also.
So to kind of chime in on that first actual question of, you know, can we speak to the ramp up in post-teasing PVP? Yes, this is just the beginning. As Dreamer was saying, you know, we don’t want to drag it forever by any means, but PVP is a really, really big one.
And, you know, there’s also external opportunities. Like, I’ll just say it. And if somebody gets mad at me for saying it, I apologize in advance, but I’m gonna say it anyway.
Y’all wouldn’t have gotten that trailer yet if it weren’t for Karate Kombat. But we had an opportunity to run that ad in the Karate Kombat event, and we wanted to take advantage of that opportunity. So we put a trailer out a little earlier than we had planned.
But to start the posts and everything, that definitely was planned. And you will see that continue to ramp up as things progress and as we get closer. I know you’re all really just now wanting more information on everything that we just ended at.
You’ll also get that as we get closer, but not today. But as far as, like, peripheral systems and everything go, you know, we’ve got a lot of stuff in mind. Now we have stuff that, you know, we have agreed to build, and we will share more information on that as well as it gets closer.
But I’m super excited for it. I just wanted to caveat that PVP is not four to six weeks away. Just calm down.
But it is progressing. And as Dreamer said, if you zoom out, we are close. All right.
Real quick, anything anybody wants to add to that? And then I am going to hit a couple specific pieces of that group of questions that I kind of bundled to kick this off. So any last general comments?
All right. Going into some of the specifics real quick, are we expecting to have a hero marketplace at the Colosseum?
[Hubert Cumberdale]
Yes.
[Bolon Soren]
What about equipment?
[Hubert Cumberdale]
Yes.
[Bolon Soren]
Potions?
[Winston Jazzhands]
Yes.
[Bolon Soren]
Will it deal in jewel or a different token?
[Hubert Cumberdale]
Jewel.
[Bolon Soren]
Sorry, I lost my place.
Dang, we had such good rhythm going. PVP needs a way to mock and trash your opponents, such as taunts and dances. Any plans?
[Hubert Cumberdale]
Kind of. That’s one we’re not at launch, but we are talking about different things that we can do in communication regards.
[Bolon Soren]
Will there be a way to watch a PVP match without one of the players sharing their screen? Yes. How do you spell Colosseum?
C-O-L-O-S-S-E-U-M. All right. Well, I hope you all were paying attention because there was a lot of stuff that just got said very rapidly.
So hopefully you all caught it. And good news, this is recorded, so you can go back and listen to it too. All right.
Anything anybody wants to add on the Colosseum PVP front before we move into some general combat related questions? Dreamer’s camera’s back on. Dreamer?
[Dreamer]
Yeah, I’m just doing it. I’m just doing it. I think it was action.
Was it action? I don’t know. Maybe it was something.
Somebody said that we should have the cameras on because it’s more entertaining.
[Bolon Soren]
Yeah, you’re having to put a shirt on, aren’t you?
[Dreamer]
Do I have a shirt on?
[Bolon Soren]
You do. I don’t.
[Dreamer]
Oh, I had to put a shirt on. Yeah. No, but I would say even the rapid fire questions, it’s related to the deal.
So SunBear had worked very, very hard with our friends over there at Metis along with many others. And some of those questions we weren’t sure about before. We really need to make sure it’s not just about saying, it’s all available there.
We’re thinking about you guys, how hard it will be to move and bridge, how much it’ll cost, how much it’ll cost to play. Thinking in the future, we’ve learned a lot from moving from initial chain to Avalanche to Clayton and doing all this. I feel like we’re probably one of the biggest veterans in this space.
We know the right questions to ask. We know what to think about. And we’re probably always going to be surprised by certain things because that’s what happens in this space.
But having so much native on Metis is going to make it not only easier for the transition, but we’re trying to also think about people seeing DeFi Kingdoms for the first time or the game for the first time and returning. We want it to be as seamless as possible. So for any of those that really like playing the game to allocate a portion of their time to support and sell to others, imagine all the new players coming in that just want to do PvP that don’t necessarily know how to or want to summon or on equipment or potions or anything.
There’s going to be a lot of opportunity for those that want to provide and support that market. We needed a native place there so that new players coming in could connect with our existing players and the economy as well. So the incremental deal that we landed allowed us to build all of this as well.
It’s also proof that Metis sees the whole start to finish equation, not only the gameplay, but the economy and everything that we’re building around it. They see that vision and they’re adding more money behind it. So just want to make sure that we hit at the beginning and after those questions, make sure people are excited of the realization of how cool the Colosseum is really going to be.
[Bolon Soren]
Most definitely appreciate you, Dreamer. All right, rolling into some general combat questions. As we get closer to traits being implemented, a few questions.
Do traits have a magical or physical classification?
[Hubert Cumberdale]
Yes, they do. And it’s actually, it’s a new mechanic that we haven’t done before that will apply here and also in pet combat bonuses, which is called power, which to put it simply is just to use the greater of the two that your hero has between attack and spell in their calculations. So if it’s using your spell, then it’s a magical attack.
If it’s using your attack, then it’s a physical attack is how we have that working.
[Bolon Soren]
Damn, here I thought we were done dropping alpha. Will silence and fear affect them like they do normal skills?
[Hubert Cumberdale]
That’s a good question. I think they should. And I think that’s something I should follow up on to make sure we are doing that correctly.
[Bolon Soren]
Can offensive active traits miss, be blocked or be negated by status effect resistance, such as critical aim or stun? They sure can. Can support active traits miss, such as hardened shield or resurrection?
[Hubert Cumberdale]
Those would not, but I mean, they could, I guess, be canceled by confused or like, I guess, delayed from being used with confused. But yeah, no, they work like other, usually the positive benefit skills don’t have any sort of miss chance on them.
[Bolon Soren]
Cool. Can you talk about the formula for retaliate one and is there a retaliate two, three, retaliate 69, retaliate 420? I was under the impression that it was just a basic attack, but a certain frog in discord told me that it wasn’t.
[Hubert Cumberdale]
That certain frog was correct. It is not just basic attack. And a retaliate 69 or 420 would be a pretty powerful retaliate.
The formula is half of your attack. So it’s half of a basic attack for retaliate one. And then the one is a multiplier on that.
So retaliate two would mean basically a basic attack. Retaliate three would be 1.5 times attack and so on. And there is room for us to have more than retaliate one, though it doesn’t exist right now.
[Bolon Soren]
All the way up to 420?
[Hubert Cumberdale]
It’s possible, but probably won’t see it. At some point, it’s all the same. You die.
[Bolon Soren]
To be fair, if you did that against a demonbok, it would be really, really fast if it survived. Any teasers for the pet to combat bonuses?
[Hubert Cumberdale]
Well, we don’t have artwork to tease. And let’s see, I think I mentioned how many we have before. I’ll say, I think we took one off the list since I last said it, so I guess I’ll re-update that number to…
there are 77 currently on the list. Different types of combat bonuses. And of those, there are eight that are activated combat bonuses that will work like traits.
So I like the active traits. And some of those use power as part of their equation. So maybe that’s good enough of a tease for now.
[Bolon Soren]
I like it. Real quick question from chat, circling back for just a moment on retaliate. Does the bok helm increase the bonus of medium armor from retaliate one to retaliate two, or is it just the percentages?
[Hubert Cumberdale]
It’s just the percentages.
[Bolon Soren]
Awesome. Thank you for that. All right.
Talking about equipment for a moment. Since equipment are NFTs and aren’t changed once they are put into the game, the idea of durability was always a good safety net, that if something was really broken, it would eventually cycle out. With the introduction of divine essence and being able to reload durability, are you worried that a now potentially broken item will stay in the game longer, however costly it may be to do so?
[Hubert Cumberdale]
Yeah, so good question. I guess I’ll just note that while we generally don’t change NFTs once they’re released, there have been occasions in the past where we’ve needed to address things like tainted genes. Or even with one of the pets, there was one that wasn’t configured properly.
One of the bonuses that went minted, it had a number that wasn’t intended. And that was, the moment that pet got equipped, it moved it down to what the actual maximum was supposed to be. So I think if something is truly broken, it gets past all our testing and whatnot, and we somehow still release it, there’s still room for us to say, this weapon, to use it, it will need to be re-rolled in a way.
I don’t think we’re saying that that’s never possible, but it’s something we don’t like doing. It’s a lot of extra work to fix something rather than just have it be how we want it right at the beginning. So we try really hard.
I’m super hyper aware of after all the work that we’ve put into doing the tainted gene thing, it was a ton of work. It’s such a distraction from just our roadmap that we really try to avoid letting anything like that happen. But if it does, I’m not saying it’s like that.
I think we want to make sure that it’s known that that option is something that we are willing to proceed down if necessary. But with that said, if there is this equipment that is on the more powerful side, but not truly broken, and having greater divine essence being able to restore that equipment, am I worried about it? I think it will create an interesting situation.
I hope we won’t have to do anything other than just wait for it to eventually get too expensive to keep repairing, and maybe someone will just keep doing it and it’ll continue to be really good equipment for a long time. But also something that’s really good at level 10 is not going to stay good at level 20 or level 30 once we start increasing the level cap, releasing higher level gear. So I think there’s a lot of different ways that it’ll have its moment to shine perhaps, a supposed very good piece of equipment.
But it will shine within its own category. And I guess if I can go on a little tangent to where I feel like this is okay for anyone that’s played Final Fantasy XI, which I love to talk about since I spent 500 days of my life in that game. That game has equipment that I like how it’s built a lot more than other MMOs I’ve played, where equipment just very soon becomes obsolete.
In that game there were at least level caps for content, and so there was gear that was like the best for a given level cap. And I think it’s okay for that to exist in our realm. I mean, we just need to make sure that we don’t let anything get too crazy.
So not too worried about it. It creates an interesting situation. It makes that equipment, if it is really good, more valuable, more desirable for players, which I think is good for the economy.
So kind of a long answer, but that’s kind of how I feel about it.
[Bolon Soren]
Yeah, I think it’s also worth just always mentioning it’s going to get expensive. That durability reset is going to get very expensive.
[Hubert Cumberdale]
Yeah, and it grows. It doubles, or it’s like plus four every time you do it. So it’s like four Greater Divine Essence, and eight, then 12.
And it’s not easy to get that much Greater Divine Essence. Many heroes will die for that weapon to still exist.
[Bolon Soren]
It’s going to be a really good weapon. Cool, so a follow-up actually on Greater Divine Essence and the journey that we foresee for it. Do we expect other use cases, such as rerolling abilities or rerolling rarity, and just kind of in general, how do we determine where reroll could be an option versus kind of a fixed randomization?
[Hubert Cumberdale]
Yeah, good question. I’ve always been very hesitant about introducing anything that allows for genes to be changed, and I still take that stance. So I don’t really see us going in that direction with Greater Divine Essence in terms of changing that, or even changing the rarity of a hero as well.
That’s a pretty fundamental change. Resetting your levels, that is also a pretty fundamental thing. It does let you go back and retry, but there’s no guarantee that your levels are going to be better the next time around.
Use the same randomness every time. You could reroll a five stat level up and get a four stat level up the next time. There’s no guaranteed improvement that’s involved.
So it is all random. So something that’s like, you spend enough to just upgrade from common to uncommon on this hero or something like that, I don’t see us doing. Nor do I really want to even allow the realm of possibility of upgrading a specific hero’s rarity.
But with that said, you do have the option to dark summon with the hero or summon with the hero and potentially get something more rare from it, so that’s an option. So as far as additional features that might use Greater Divine Essence, I think it doesn’t necessarily have to all be around changing heroes. I think we’ll just, as we see it, it’s appropriate.
In crafting recipes, we could potentially use that for some very good gear. It might require Greater Divine Essence just to create it in the first place. We’ve talked about avoiding death penalty as well being a thing.
That could be something where some content would require Greater Divine Essence to avoid the death penalty from failure and things like that. So I think there’s a lot of room for us to explore with the Divine Essence system. But yeah, I do think that we’re going to keep limits in terms of how far we’ll allow heroes to be changed.
[Bolon Soren]
Especially from genetics.
[Hubert Cumberdale]
Cool.
[Bolon Soren]
Will we be able to transfer C slash S jewel between realms in the future? Currently, the majority of the power-ups are used in Crystalvale, so it makes sense to stake your jewel there, but as more activities open up, it could make sense to have them in different places. We do not currently plan on having it be transferable between realms, so it’s really just a matter of planning your staking, I guess would be the best way to put it.
But Hubert, anything you want to add on that as well?
[Hubert Cumberdale]
I thought this question was one I wasn’t going to answer, so I kind of tuned out and started reading the chat.
[Bolon Soren]
Oh, you’re fine. Probably not. You don’t have to.
[Hubert Cumberdale]
Okay, yeah, if you want to ask again, I can try to weigh in, I guess, but sorry. No, you’re good.
[Bolon Soren]
Just any thoughts on transferring C and S jewel between realms?
[Hubert Cumberdale]
Oh yeah, no.
[Bolon Soren]
Perfect, thank you. Thoughts on adding the list of supported classes to Equipment Viewer? We have some plans for the Equipment Viewer in general, but I think that that is a good callout, and so I am going to make the call to add it to Beetle’s list.
Woo! He’s not here, so I get to do that. Will we ever have total stats added to the hero cards or get to sort by total stats in the hero tavern filters?
We actually have adding the total stats to the hero cards on the, like, let’s take a look at it list. The sort option can be looked at as well, but obviously we would need it on the card first, and it just depends on how that data is stored. So we can add that to the to-be-looked-at list as well.
[Hubert Cumberdale]
Well, actually, maybe I’ll counteract that statement and say that just give a little bit more PvP alpha. You know, we do have a bunch of different things that we’re doing in terms of allowing customization on what type of matches what heroes would be allowed in a match, and one of those things that we are including is stat score, which would be the sum of all stats. So it’s gone from the list of to-be-looked-at to the planned list, and I think an extension of that would mean that we would want to have the ability to sort by stat score as well.
So I’d say it’s now on the list at this point, on the Beatles official list.
[Bolon Soren]
Well, there we go. Damn. All right, I’m gonna have to fire myself from the alpha police squad here.
That’s awesome. Yeah, very nice. All right, so this one’s a bit more open-ended, so anybody that wants to chime in, please do feel free.
If you were explaining to someone in the crypto space to come into the DFK ecosystem and had their full attention, can you talk a little bit about how you would sell DFK to that individual? Dreamer, you want to kick that one off?
[Dreamer]
Can you repeat the question? Sell to whom? Who’s this person?
Where are they from? How old are they? What do they know about blockchain?
[Bolon Soren]
They are somebody in the crypto space, and you have their full attention.
[Dreamer]
That’s it? That’s all we know?
[Bolon Soren]
That’s it. That’s it. Everything else is up to your imagination.
You know what? They’re a 28-year-old male named George. Oh, no, that’s no fun.
We have a George named Bob. Bob is an Ethereum maxi who’s looking to get into gaming.
[Dreamer]
Nice. Well, I mean, jokes aside, I think there are different ways that really we need to sell DeFi kingdoms, and it is important to understand who they are. If they are somebody that has been in the space for 10 years and is an ETH maxi and is trying to branch out because there’s no big games on ETH, I think we definitely tap into the fact that we’ve been around for a long time as well.
There’s a lot of hype. There’s a lot of people that white label and pre-release and pre-sale and a lot of people that get funding for games and fizzle out. There’s people that launch that have died in cycles, but you’re an ETH maxi.
You’ve seen cycles. We’ve seen some cycles as well. Been around three years and survived a lot of three sigma huge events, even a giant hack that greatly impacted us.
We recently locked in 3 million from Metis on our new release that is going to be competitive. It’s going to include not only our players, but hopefully KOLs and others and impact the economy that has been growing for the last three years. We’re the most on-chain game out there.
We have more transactions than entire blockchains combined, and we have a community that is stuck by us through thick and thin. So if you like combat, you like RPG-style games, you like fantasy, you like some nostalgia for maybe some older games like Zelda, RuneScape, and so on, come check out DeFi Kingdoms. Hop in the markets, the DeFi integration, and the upcoming competitive exciting gameplay.
[Bolon Soren]
Very nice. That was an elevator pitch too. I like it.
Hubert, anything you want to add to that?
[Hubert Cumberdale]
I really don’t think I can one-up what Dreamer just said. I know he’s got a lot of experience going out there to all these events and talking about DFK. I guess from my perspective, if I were asked, and I’m not the salesman, I would be most focused on just selling the game.
The Web3 experience provides people the ability to own all of their assets in the crypto world. Ownership is a really big important thing for people, and what we’re doing is we’re taking that and applying that to creating an MMORPG on the blockchain, where our game runs mostly on-chain. Every asset that you get is something that you own, and we’re building something very unique.
Come give it a try, come buy some heroes, come fight other players here with our Colosseum, and see what there is to offer. You shouldn’t have asked me this, honestly, especially not as a Dreamer.
[Bolon Soren]
Oh no, I love it. Winston?
[Winston Jazzhands]
Yes, yes, thank you. When I talk to people about it, I lead with game and try to weave the crypto side of it in.
I’ll talk about games like Diablo 2 or Destiny, any of these games that have tons of drops, tons of items, some of them tradable, sellable, some of them you just keep for yourself, some of them soul bound. Just talk about how the big problem with those games is that the economies are all overly managed by the creators of those games. Those games are fun, but you can’t really do whatever you want.
They don’t want you to go on eBay and sell stuff, and they don’t want you to try to trade your gold for cash or whatever. We would love it if you did that, so please do that if you can figure out ways to generate returns and ways to make income playing the game. We love that.
That would be my pitch. I feel like the main difference is that we let you do all those things that those games really try to prohibit you from doing. I mean, I sold a couple of Warcraft characters, and it was always a little sketchy because you have to give them your password for a minute, and at the same time, man, give me the money, and I’ll give you the password.
I don’t know. It just seems like people are going to do it, and why make it a black market? Why not support it and contribute to it and try to help people build that economy?
Yes, thanks, Golan.
[Dreamer]
I think Winston is hitting on how to sell to somebody that has never played a blockchain game, and I think Wagner games do this really well. They come out, and they’re like, you own your heroes. They’re tradable.
Whatever’s in the game, you actually own. The time you spend appreciates what’s in the game. I think that’s a really exciting narrative to hardcore gamers that have been around for a couple decades that have gone through the experience of trying to sell things or buy things or wish they could, so to that type of person, that’s like opening your eyes to blockchain and how it can overlap with gaming.
Now, if they then bite, and they’re like, oh, that does sound cool, well, the most advanced and progressed version of that with the deepest capability, where we as the development company don’t even sell things directly. It all comes from the actual players. That’s a huge draw to that person, so very different from the first 28-year-old Eve maxi that’s just kind of curious about what’s happening outside of Ethereum.
There are other personalities that you have to sell to as well. There are people that really like crypto, really like crypto gaming, and that may have been in DeFi kingdoms and haven’t been here for a while. That’s a big one to sell to because we covered so much of the space, and I think mentally snapshotting DeFi kingdoms in its first phase and then allowing that person to be open-minded to where we are in our current phase, which is very different.
We’re building an entire game on top of infrastructure that was DeFi kingdoms. Now, we have gameplay. That gameplay is starting to be linked to lore.
We have cosmetics coming in. We have crossovers with others as well where IP is coming in the game, and pretty soon, we’re going to have competitive gameplay that will be streamable and consumable by people that aren’t in the game currently. So, knowing your audience is kind of the takeaway.
We could sit here all day and talk about how to sell DeFi kingdoms to different people. What we see in our trailers is trying to reach as many as possible, but when we have an opportunity to talk to somebody, my recommendation is before you start spinning DeFi kingdoms gospel, ask questions. Who are they?
Do they like gaming? Are they in crypto? Did they ever hold you?
Did they hear about any of the bad things? Here’s all the good things that have happened since a lot of those things that nobody could control. Here’s what I’ve done.
Here are the numbers. Here are the blockchains. Here’s those that are backing it.
Here’s what’s coming out. If we kind of fire a lot of that at somebody that isn’t ready to hear 90% of it because they don’t have the background or it’s not their personality or it’s not their interest, it’s kind of a waste of time. So, go on.
Back to you. But we went through a bunch of different options on how to sell DeFi kingdoms when it comes down to it. We have to know our audience.
It makes it hard to do it on a massive scale, but whenever we have somebody one-on-one, it should be a lot easier as long as we ask questions and get to know them.
[Bolon Soren]
No, I love it. They were all phenomenal answers. The only thing that I will add that was not touched on is in the short term, once we have Expeditions out, there’s also a passive way to play, which is something that we have not natively offered before Expeditions.
So, not only do you have hunts, PvP coming, you have the hopefully highly engaging gameplay, but also your heroes can be gathering resources in the background for you while you participate in the more fun, highly engaging gameplay as well. So, I’m super excited for that as a new angle for us to be able to take as well is, yeah, you can buy some heroes, lock up some jewel in the jeweler, and your heroes will just quest for you until you tell them to stop. So, very excited for that opportunity as well.
Real quick, and then we will wrap up, but I saw a question in chat and Hubert answered it in chat, but I’m going to throw it out live because we’re just dropping all kinds of freaking alpha today. Will heroes be able to be leveled on Metis?
[Hubert Cumberdale]
Yes, though it might not be right at launch, but yes. Very nice.
[Bolon Soren]
Yeah, I enjoyed the A or B yes answer there, but yeah, no, that is super exciting as well.
[Hubert Cumberdale]
I mean, you could also midget back and level them over there too, so.
[Bolon Soren]
True, it’s fair, it’s fair. Both are options. Man, this has been an alpha-filled AMA, so is the last one.
We’re gonna have to, you know, tighten the, tighten the, batten down the hatches. That’s the phrase I was going for, but super excited for everything that’s coming and appreciate y’all, as always, taking time out to answer all of these questions, share all of this information. As always, thank you to everybody who tunes in and listens.
Thank you to everybody who submits questions as well. If we did not get to your question this week, we will get to it next week. Thank you again to Winston for filling in for me so I could take a little time off.
Super happy to be back as well, and with that, we’ll go to final thoughts from everybody, and then I’m going to make Winston bullish us. So, Dreamer, any final thoughts?
[Dreamer]
Let’s see. I think I saw Ogre was in here. I remember at one point, I think it was through a lot of volatility a couple years ago, you know, person Ogre kind of gave reassurance of his vision of the Viking, and just like, I believe in you guys.
I see the game coming together where it’s going to be more than kind of passive gameplay. I think, you know, I really, we all really want this to make it so we can come and compete, and I just, you know, I just believe in you guys. Give me a big hug, and I think, you know, it’s similar discussion with Fox and others, always very uplifting.
Well, guess what, guys? Like, we’re really close. We’re really close to having a place, the Colosseum, to go run tournaments, have rewards, and have all of you and many others hop in there with heroes that have been getting stronger for years and go at it, and we’re all going to be able to watch.
We’re all going to be able to share it and make it really interesting. I’m being very careful with my excitement on some of the features that will be released later, but if you have been bullish all along, good on you. If you haven’t been bullish enough, like, now is the time to get freaking bullish.
We are doing what many others said they’d do and then just kind of ran away or failed at. We are doing what many people said we couldn’t do, and we are doing what a lot of you want us to do. So we’re going to continue to work hard.
I’m really excited for what is going to be released, but I also hope that you partner with us on the phases, because when phase one comes out, when phase two comes out, and phase three, it’s going to add on each other, and that’s only the foundation. We need players. We need people to share.
We need people to cheer each other on, and, you know, we’ve had some of our guilds, talk a little bit of smack back and forth, and that’s awesome. As we keep it respectful, we need some competition. We need those alliances and those rivals forming, because this is getting real.
You’ve been here for three years, and you’re on the verge to be able to hop in a Colosseum, get your heroes, talk with your buddies, and hop in there and go to battle for some rewards. If you haven’t been bullish, if you haven’t been hearing, please take some time to digest this. Give us time to build it correctly, but please stay bullish, because we sure are over here.
Hubert, I keep setting you up for failure by putting you down.
[Hubert Cumberdale]
I really do. Dreamer is really amped up today. It’s great.
Yeah, what Dreamer said. I really can’t add more to that. We’re working really hard over here.
Our team is such a great team. We’re solving so many problems, and it’s a lot of building this game on a blockchain in the way that we have, like having everything work on chain and making sure that nothing is exploitable or broken. It’s a huge effort.
It’s so much harder than just a traditional Web 2 game or just a game that’s a traditional game that’s not trying to utilize crypto assets. There’s so many extra angles that we have to think about, so many things that we have to do to make it work. It’s really, really fun to be on this team and to solve all these problems and to build this thing together.
I’m always bullish. As we get closer and closer to having PvP out, I’m super-duper bullish to see all of it come to fruition, see everyone fighting each other. I expect and hope to see great guild rivalries happening until we have the tournament system out.
I hope to see some impromptu tournaments being put together by various guilds. It’s really exciting stuff. That’s all I’ll say.
What Dreamer said was way better.
[Bolon Soren]
Awesome, awesome. Yeah, I said most of my comments before. Love this team.
Love you guys. Love this community. Super excited for what’s coming.
Over to Winston for the final words and our bullish.
[Winston Jazzhands]
Thank you, Bolon. Yeah, thanks, everybody. Great words from everybody today.
I don’t know that there’s anything else I can say to really bolt anything on, but thanks to the community. Thanks for sticking with us while we’re building this and letting us cook. I think we’re finally going to start bringing stuff out to the table for you guys to munch on.
Thank you so much for your patience, and I am super-duper bullish. Bullish. Bullish.
Do a whisper bullish. Bullish.
[Dreamer]
Bullish. Bullish.
[Bolon Soren]
You gotta stay on your toes around here.
