DeFi Kingdoms AMA 7/18/24 Summary and Transcript

Summary

Hosts: Bolon Soron, Pine Cone, Magnus Ironroot, Sunbear, Dreamer, Hubert Cumberdale, Workhorse

Introduction:

• Bolon Soron welcomed everyone to the AMA.

Updates:

• API update: Pet endpoint update with pool field and removal of id_normalized.
• Metis Chain: Dynamic fee system, block gas limit increased to 1.1 billion gas, block time reduced to 2 seconds, decentralized sequencer implemented.
• Expeditions: PR reviews completed, final testing in progress.
• Partnerships and Marketing: Metis, Avalanche, and Klaytn partnerships progressing well. Upcoming hunt sponsorships and co-marketing efforts.
• Codex Teaser: First advanced class codex ready for teaser.

Questions and Answers:

Is the randomness that we use actually random? Is it secure?

• Yes, we’re using commit-reveal paradigm and hashing function for secure pseudo-random number generation.

Thoughts on having the Rocboc Badmother Cluckers hunt give 1.2 raffle tickets, given that it starts at level 12 versus level 10 for the hunt’s raffles?

• No changes to raffle tickets for different hunt levels; higher-level hunts offer better rewards.

Do we anticipate an increased supply of materials brought on by Expeditions? Do we have a plan for burning those?

• Expeditions provide efficient questing, potentially increasing resource supply, future burn mechanics to balance it.

Thoughts on instead of the lower drop rates as far as we lowered it, different ways to burn pets, and do we have anything planned in that category?

• No plans to increase egg drop rates; upcoming pet burning mechanics to manage supply.

Thoughts on having something in summoning similar to the hatching system, where you could have different costs, different amounts of times, maybe different cooldowns, but in exchange you get increased rarity chances, or would rarity’s impact to stats kind of be a blocker to that?

• No immediate plans for tiered summoning cost model.

Any update on the centralized exchange listing that we mentioned a few weeks back?

• Progress on chain integration, awaiting listing confirmation.

Do Expeditions help balance resource acquisition costs across chains? With taking less gas due to the structure of Expeditions, do we foresee that having a bigger effect on Serendale, and do we have any analysis or numbers that we can share on what we think that variance might be?

• Expeditions cheaper on Klaytn, about half the cost of manual questing.

Any particular reasoning or thoughts on why ability and appearance genes are not included in Heroscore?

• Not included to avoid complexity; focus on core attributes like class, subclass, and rarity.

In PvP, will there be any pseudo or permadeath mechanic that requires some potion to revive the Hero?

• No permadeath in initial PvP release; possible future feature with divine essence.

Any thoughts on potential having, potentially having like a delegation system to where you could potentially, you know, delegate C jewel to give you a power-up in Serendale, for example?

• Not planned due to complexity and design considerations.

Will the luck stats play any role in crafting?

• Potential role, but not a primary focus currently.

Do we know the estimate of stone weight available for a typical, normal setting, no custom restrictions, PvP match?

• Default settings: battle inventory at 20, battle budget at 10 stones, customizable between 0–100.

Closing Comments:

• Excitement about upcoming features, partnerships, and community support. Encouraged community engagement and staying tuned for more updates.

Transcript

[Bolon Soron]
Hello everybody and welcome to this week’s AMA with DeFi Kingdoms. Excited to see you all here, thank you everybody who’s tuning in and everyone who will watch this video later as well. As is our tradition, we are going to kick off with a few updates and then hop into some of the questions submitted by you, our wonderful community.

First up on the updates list, we’ve got a couple of people up here that y’all probably haven’t seen in a little bit up here, so super excited to introduce the first one of them, which is Pinecone for a little API update.

[Pine Cone]
Hello everyone, yeah so I’m still here. So I’ve got a little update regarding the pet endpoint. By popular demand, we’re adding the pool field, which is normal, odd, or ultra-odd, with normal being zero, odd being one, and ultra-odd being the value two.

And at the same time we’re doing that, we’re doing a little bit of a cleanup, so we’re removing the id normalized field, but there’s still one other field, so it’s called normalized id. So we had two of them and we’re removing one, so just check your code that you’re not using the one with the underscore in it. Yeah, that’s my short update.

[Bolon Soron]
Any anticipation on timing?

[Pine Cone]
So it’s on testnet right now, and Zipper has approved, so I think it will be deployed in the next update from the next official patch, I should say, when beetle deploys that. I’m not sure when that will be though.

[Bolon Soron]
Awesome, thank you Sir Pinecone. Also thank you for reminding me, I actually got ready to be able to turn my camera on today. You’re only gonna see the bottom half of my face, which is also intentional, but now it made me sad.

So yeah, oh well, here you go, there’s the rest of my face. But moving right along, we are going to do some updates on our various chains. We got a few of them guys these days, and starting us off is another person that you have not seen in a few weeks, which is Magnus Ironroot, talking about, we mentioned last week that there were some changes that Metis was working on, and we have some updates on that front.

[Magnus Ironroot]
Hey everybody, so first off, really glad to be back. I know it’s been a while since I’ve been on AMA, I’ve been just heads down grinding on Expeditions, but as that is now wrapping up, I am happy to be back on AMAs. So yeah, first off, leave with some Metis updates.

So Metis put in some changes on their main net as of Monday earlier this week, so feel free to go check those out on the Block Explorer if you haven’t seen those already. I’m very excited about everything they released. So first off, they implemented a dynamic fee system for their gas, and the current gas price is at 1.1 gwei, which is awesome. There are also some protocols still submitting on the old gas price, which is around like 13 to 15 guay, so if you look at their gas fee estimator, it’ll say like 1.1 for the slow and standard transactions, and then it’ll say like 15 for the fast, but you can still submit at 1.1. Because they have so much block space with this update, they rarely have full blocks, I think they’re about like 10 percent, so it will kind of go through at whatever that slower or standard number is.

And then also alongside these other updates, they now support a block gas limit of 1.1 billion gas. You heard that right, 1.1 billion gas.

[Pine Cone]
1.1 billion gas!

[Magnus Ironroot]
Thanks, Pine Cone, I love that. Yeah, so for reference, DFK Chain has a block gas limit of 25 million gas, so you can fit a whole bunch of transactions in one block on Metis, so I am very excited about that number. And then another update along with this is they reduced their block time down from 8 to 10 seconds to 2 seconds per block, so not only does that give you more block space, since you’ve got a block coming like five times faster now, this also means that you don’t have to wait as long for it to be mined, so it’ll be a similar kind of a user experience with Metamask and submitting transactions as on a DFK Chain in terms of how long it takes to get your transaction process. And then lastly, they also implemented their decentralized sequencer, which if you’re familiar with L2s, that’s a huge update.

It basically means there’s no single point of failure for getting your transactions kind of bundled together and posted to the L1, which is Ethereum, so yeah, just a bunch of huge updates there. And so yeah, we’ll have some more updates, we’ll obviously be utilizing that technology, but very excited with everything there. And then I’ll quickly move on to Expeditions.

So Hubert has finished up the second round of PR reviews, he mentioned he was working through that last week. I’m currently checking off the items on that list and addressing those, and Winston is also doing some testing in parallel, so take from that what you will in terms of release timeline. And that’s all I have for now, I’ll pass it back to you, Bolin.

[Bolon Soron]
Take from it what you will. Real quick, before we move on, I’m going to throw it back to you for a moment, Magnus. In terms of the gas changes that they made, did you talk a little bit about what that kind of means for us?

[Magnus Ironroot]
Yeah, for sure. So we are basically, we have a really good environment to base all of our calculations off of for Mainnet, so in terms of moving forward with PVP, we are unblocked there and ready to start diving in and developing there.

[Sunbear]
Yeah, I’ll just add real quick, Magnus, working with this team, with the Metas team over the last several weeks has been really great, actually. They’ve listened to what we need to really build out the most that we can, the most native, and consulted closely with us as they have with other dApps on the chain. And these changes are significant and they’re going to make life for us as builders on this chain a lot easier and a lot more seamless and wonderful for all of our users as well.

So I’m as excited as Pinecone’s 1.1 billion at Bullish that we started a few minutes ago. So just really good connection with them. They’re continuing daily to interact with us to see what we need to move forward to support.

And in fact, you’re going to start seeing a lot more campaigns, marketing support as we approach PVP time. So in fact, next week, I’ll just put a little sneak preview in here. You may be seeing some hunt sponsorship happening from Metas pop up soon.

And the idea is that’s the combat engine that we’re using in PVP, right? So that’s where we really want to get people playing and engaging and learning the various skills, building out teams. And so they wanted to contribute and really support that process right now.

So get excited for some fun hunt sponsorship coming.

[Bolon Soron]
I’m going to spike it to Dreamer. You’re muted though. I’ve been spiked.

Wait, what does spike it to me mean? I believe that’s not a good name. I went volleyball style, right?

Yep, exactly.

[Dreamer]
Thank you. On the hunt sponsorship thing, I’m excited about that. So that essentially means we’re going to try to get Metas in the hands of future Coliseum players to use as gaps on Metas by playing the Vikings.

So hopefully that makes sense and that sounds fun. It also shows additional support from one of our new partners, which we appreciate. We’re working on some other co-marketing things there.

Keeping in mind when it comes to marketing in the space, especially for a project that’s in development, the best marketing that we found is through communities, through social media and through players and through partners. It’s not only cost-efficient, but it targets those in the space and can easily access the game. I think over time that will evolve when we have not only budget to do so, but also getting ready for those that may not even be in our target audience through our partners.

But very excited to have them working with us. We’re also having ongoing conversations with other major players in the space that we already work with to see how we can better co-market with them as well. I’m very excited to announce these updates on the chain that essentially unlock our ability to start testing, to start releasing things and connecting the on-chain aspects of PvP to the awesome gameplay that has been in development since and even before we announced the partnership back in February.

If we go back to February, I think at that time we were really estimating to be able to start this about two months from that date. The goal then was to implement Eichenlayer and we thought that would unlock pretty much everything that we would be able to build. Eichenlayer has still not been launched yet and it’s because they’re looking at some other changes and efficiencies.

And through this partnership, they wanted to say, hey, this means so much to our chain and we want it to be the best it can be for DFK players. Is there anything we could do to make it so? And gave them some feedback, worked back and forth.

Huge shout out to Magnus Fox, Hubert and many others. As of last week, since our last update, they’ve implemented some huge things. If you don’t fully understand or are able to digest what Magnus shared, essentially it means a lot more can be built on their chain that costs less for us to use it in simple terms.

DFK is not a simple protocol. We max out technology everywhere we go. So initially we scoped the build to max out the technology they had plus Eichenlayer.

And then we re-scoped the build to max out the technology they adjusted for us with Eichenlayer still to come. So we’re excited. We’re excited to get to work on this side.

It has been a little bit longer of a wait, but it seems like it’s really going to update on some of our other team partners. Avalanche continuing to be great partners there. We had our monthly meeting with them.

We meet with the Avalanche gaming guys every month. We have chats. We talk to them more than that.

But our last monthly meeting, a few things came up that I want to share. One is their summit. There’s some progress on their summit happening this year.

It’s in a new place. It’s not in Barcelona. I think it’s in Argentina.

And we’re trying to get some more details on what we’ll be able to do there. At the very least, we’re hoping to show up and be able to interact with everybody, get a speaking spot. But it would be really cool if we could do some PVP testing on the floor and other things.

So we’re working on that. We’ll see how that goes. I’ve also been working with them a little bit more.

They have some really good personalities in this space, Coup being one of them, and looking to see if we can put together a little interview, intro to BFK, leading up combat overview type of thing. So that would be really cool if it came from their Avalanche gaming channel, where we start pulling them in to the gameplay aspect in terms of competitive gameplay, which I think a lot of the players in Avalanche are very focused on competitive gameplay. Shrapnel has done an amazing job drawing in a lot of that attention.

There’s a lot of big influencers that look at competitive gameplay on Avalanche, and we’re happy and excited to step into that arena and invite the partners of Avalanche to help boost that awareness and hopefully that excitement with their players. Last, the Klaytn update, we’ve been in a little bit of a holding pattern, but there are some updates there. There are more passive updates that we don’t have a lot of detail that folks don’t have publicly.

But in case you missed it, they did announce earlier this year that they are partnering with another team called Finjia that looks like it’s back by messaging service out of Japan called Line. And they announced a new branding a little while ago, and we’ve been added to some, I believe it’s pronounced Kaia, K-A-I-A. We’ve been added to some builder groups there.

So we’re looking to expand our network with those that are coming in from Finjia. I’m still kind of staying tuned on what happens next with the actual technology and the new token and everything. But Serendale is still functional on Klaytn, and we’re excited for this to kind of progress further so that we can return to seeing what we can do for that chain and what we can do with our new kind of partners by merge that has resulted.

My personal opinion is, man, it’s exciting to have that line messaging entity be supporting the chain to be, because it would be really cool to do some co-marketing with that audience, which would be an incredible audience for the game that we have and the product that we’re building. So those are my chain partner related updates.

[Bolon Soron]
Well, I’m back to you. Awesome. Awesome.

Thank you, sir. A bunch appreciated. A couple of other quick updates.

First one, we’re going to throw over to the other guy that you have not seen in a few weeks, which is Workhorse. Welcome, Workhorse. I believe you had a little teaser about some stuff you’ve been working on.

[Workhorse]
Well, hello, everybody. Yes. So what am I supposed to talk about today?

I think the teaser that you are referring to is the latest codecs for the first advanced class. It’s pretty much ready to go. We’re almost done.

Hubert and I have been deep in the tank on a million things. So this is just one of many things, but I think we got to the point where we’re ready to start sharing it. So if Bolin blesses me with his thumbs up here, I’m going to tweet out a redacted single teaser-y ability.

Okay. So I’m going to do it right now. All right.

Again, clicking the button. So if you don’t follow me on Twitter, it’s 0xWorkhorse. I just clicked the button.

So go check that out. Speculate what it is. There’s a million things in there that are suggested as to some evolutions of some design elements.

So that’s kind of fun. But beyond that, I’ve been seeing around the interwebs on Twitter and Discord, hey, where’s Workhorse? Just a heads up, all the work that I do, not all of it, but the vast majority of the work that I do with DFK, I’m designing things that are way in the future.

So I don’t get to talk about it a lot because it’s all very, you know, too alpha-ish. So as a result, I don’t get to spill too many beans. I’m here.

I’m still working on stuff. I’m designing crazy stuff. I’m not going anywhere.

So don’t worry. But beyond that, maybe do worry that I am going to Bitcoin Natural and I’m going to hang out with Dreamer and Bolon. I don’t think Dreamer and I actually have ever been in the same place at the same time.

I don’t think. Maybe?

[Dreamer]
Well, their cameras have now been on in the same place.

[Workhorse]
That’s true. That’s true.

[Dreamer]
So naturally, Bolon’s going too. Bolon’s not going.

[Workhorse]
Bolon, are you?

[Dreamer]
I will not be there.

[Workhorse]
You’re not going. I’m sorry. I know.

Oh.

[Dreamer]
Oh, man. I’m sorry. Okay.

[Workhorse]
But you know what? Dreamer and I are going to be there. We’re going to yuck it up with all the crazy folks.

We’re going to go to the karate combat thing. He’s going to throw me into the pit. It’s a pit workhorse.

I got to learn the nomenclature clearly.

[Dreamer]
So he confirms I was in the pit. It’s fine. Anyway, happy to be here, guys.

[Workhorse]
I’m sorry. I’ll shut it. Okay.

Okay. I think that’s it for me. Bolon, is there anything else you want me to answer?

[Bolon Soron]
So just a real quick clarification. This is the codex design, not a codex implementation. But we are going to do similar as what we have done in the past with the basic class codexes, where as they come to a acceptable point in design, we’ll start putting out some teasers.

So this is the first teaser for the first advanced class codex, which I’m super excited about. Really, I mean, chat just really wanted to know more about the plants behind you. So I feel like I got to talk to you.

[Workhorse]
Oh, sure. Check out this rosemary. It is like popping off.

I don’t know why it’s doing so well, but it’s doing really well. And it smells fantastic. So thank you, guys.

[Bolon Soron]
Thank you, workhorse. Appreciate you being here and updates and everything that you do, which as you said, is normally very far in the future. And we keep locked in the secret vault.

So very excited to have you stop by with us, though. And I am sad that I’m missing Nashville. I love Nashville.

So I just wanted to go in general, but I don’t think I’m going to be able to make it this year. All right. So moving into some other questions, we’ve actually kind of answered a couple anyway during our updates.

But so there are a few questions regarding how randomness works. So I’m going to throw this over to Magnus, which the, I guess, primary two questions is the randomness that we use actually random? Is it secure?

That kind of thing.

[Magnus Ironroot]
Yep. Sure thing. Happy to answer this one.

So in terms of our on-team randomness, we use a commit reveal paradigm, which is why everything that involves randomness on DFK chain uses two transactions. The first transaction you’re committing to a block number that is then used in the second transaction. And there’s nothing you can do to change that number after the first transaction.

So you can’t, this like mitigates the vulnerability where you could just process all this stuff to try to get some block number you like and then submit the transaction. Like you don’t know what you’re committing to, but it’s just important to know that whenever you submit that first one, you’re kind of locked in. And then just a note on like pseudo-randomness versus true-randomness.

In Web2, oftentimes the seed for randomness is the just like current timestamp that the computer has for the clock. And then they use that to generate a random number. In Web3, we use the block number that you could use a handful of different things.

And then we combine that with a few other inputs, such as the NFT ID, which of course you can’t change. And then also a nonce, which each time you like successfully request a random number, that nonce gets incremented. So that mitigates another vulnerability where you could be reusing that same, those same inputs over and over again.

And then we also include a future block. And so it’s kind of like locked in and unpredictable. And then we use all of those inputs to produce a hash, which then serves as that base pseudo-random number.

And then as we kind of go through and use a random number each time, we’ll rehash that value. And we’ve got some transactions that can use like hundreds of random numbers and we’ll use that base seed and then combine it with something with like another input and then rehash it. And then hashes are like very difficult to predict ahead of time.

You can like pre-compute them if you know everything, but they’re the kind of, the way the algorithm works, it just kind of spits out a jumble of numbers, which we then use in all of our math to determine different things like hero rarity and stuff like that. And then, yeah, I guess I already mentioned about the commit reveal scheme, we kind of locked into the future result. And then in terms of like verifying, you can actually see what that block number is that you kind of committed to in the hero data on chain, or the, sorry not the hero data, but the struct data on chain, if you wanted to check out that value.

And then we do clean that up to zero out the storage space after your transaction goes through on the second transaction, just because we want to be good stewards of our chain and don’t want to leave that out there to kind of consume resources on our validator. But yeah, if you’d like to see what that kind of initial seed is, it’s available with the first transaction. And then I’ll kind of spare you walking through code and stuff at this point, but Fox and I gave, I believe like a half an hour talk about this at SmartCon a few years ago, I think Bolon posted the link in Discord, and we walked through the code snippets, we talked about the different inputs, and it has been a few years since then.

The primary change we made is we worked on a bunch of bit shifting approaches, to where we calculate a bunch of random numbers at one time, just to save you guys gas, but other than that, it’s a very much still the same core approach as Fox and I walked through in detail during that talk. Hubert, do you have anything to add there? That was very detailed.

[Hubert Cumberdale]
Yeah, so I guess not really too much to add. Our randomness is secured by using information that no one has access to, since it’s future information, as Magnus said. So I mean, with random number generation in general, if you can know what, like generally you’re using a hashing function of some sort, an algorithm to take some input data and convert it into something that is, you know, a randomized set of bits.

And so that’s what we’re doing here, by using future information, like what you see with other randomness solutions, like Chainlink with its BRF function, that’s calling a function that’s off-chain to provide a random number that it generates. So it’s also a two-step process, but it just calls an off-chain function, so it’s kind of like bridging in a random number in a way. So we don’t use that, we’ve talked about using that, but because of how many random numbers we use, it hasn’t really been that feasible to do something like BRF for things like questing, but we have considered potentially using those in the future.

But we also have done a lot of testing with our randomness solution, the results that we see on chain are matching what we expect. So, you know, we’ve spent a lot of time making sure that our randomness solution was robust, was not exploitable. There’s been, there was one thing we discovered down the road, which was like, if you waited a long period of time, the hash can get lost, like only like 255 hashes are stored at a time, then they get deleted.

So we did actually have to come up with a way to make sure that, like, you can’t get a different hash by waiting time. So we solved that, so that was one little small issue, that’s just kind of due to the chain infrastructure that we solved for, but that’s been long solved for, for a long time. And yeah, anyway, there’s a lot of technical details for you guys, but anyway, I think it’s definitely random.

There’s no way you can know what the result’s going to be, like, and we do use a hashing function to like scramble the results even further than just what’s provided from those seed, the seeds that we use, so.

[Bolon Soron]
For my fellow smooth brains out there, oh sorry, real quick and I’ll pass to you, for my fellow smooth brains out there, essentially the key takeaway here is that one of the inputs does not exist yet when you commit to the random result, it is not something that can be predicted, which is what then secures the randomness, because you’re agreeing to accept a random result that doesn’t exist yet. So true randomness doesn’t exist in computing, just period, what three, what two, doesn’t matter, and really doesn’t exist in the human brain either, you have to involve like physical attributes, but anyway, all that aside, so the biggest thing with randomness is that it cannot be predicted, and so that’s where that future result comes in. If that prompted anything from any of you, feel free, but I know I needed the dumbed down explanation myself.

[Dreamer]
I’m here to dumb it down more, so I’m not a technical guy, but I just wanted to lean in on a couple of what was dropped in here. So SmartCon is put on by Chainlink. Chainlink is probably one of the most respected builders in the space as it relates to a certain number of products, one of which is VRF, that relates to randomness.

Chainlink invited Fox and Magnus to this event because they were so impressed by our on-chain randomness that we built. I believe the quote was, finally, builders in the space that understand randomness. We put a lot of work and effort in this, and I’m sure that in the future, as technology changes and our needs change, there will be new opportunities to improve it, and we’ll look forward to those, but as it relates to certain parts of the game, randomness is really important, and we’ve been around a long time, and nothing was perfect from the first day, but we have continued to be committed to quality and improvements and partnering with people out there like Chainlink in ways to just learn. You know, we actually never were able to use their services and pay for them, but we do continue to collaborate with them and contribute on the research part of the space.

I think people don’t fully understand how hard it is to build in a space where everything keeps changing, but we’re doing our best to learn everything out there, and to many people, on some of the topics, including this topic, we are seen as more experts than noobs. So, excited for these responses, but at the end of the day, those that know this topic better than us have made comments on the quality of what we built, and we’re continuing to focus on making it better as we can.

[Bolon Soron]
Awesome, awesome. Greatly appreciate all three of you. Anybody have anything that they want to add to that topic before we move on?

All right. Moving right along, it is time for a little Hubert Hour mini-section to start with, but I’m sure we’ll circle back. Thoughts on having the Rokbok Badmother Cluckers hunt give 1.2 raffle tickets, given that it starts at level 12 versus level 10 for the hunt’s raffles?

[Hubert Cumberdale]
Yeah, that’s a good question. I think probably not. You know, the Void Hunt raffles, sure, one is a little bit more difficult to do, but the raffle tickets aren’t divisible, so giving 1.2 would have to mean that, okay, we actually give you 10 tickets on one and 12 tickets on the other, which, with how that is all implemented, it would be a pretty big amount of data that would need to be stored. Right now, we store per winner, it’s like one storage slot that’s being written to. If we had to do 10 times that many per win, I think the gas cost of just even doing this thing would get out of hand. I don’t see us doing something like that for these hunts anyway.

Down the road, we may consider having a potential chance for a second entry or something like that to maybe account for a difference in difficulty, but even then, I’m not sure that’s really necessary for what we were going for with these hunts. So yeah, I guess that maybe answers it. I don’t think we’re gonna be making any changes, at least for the short term.

[Dreamer]
Hubert, is it fair to point to the difference in rewards or XP outside of raffle entries for level of hero?

[Hubert Cumberdale]
I mean, yeah, I think that is fair. You do get a little bit more with the level of 12 hunt, the chances of getting the moksh runes are increased, the amount of experience you get is increased, and then the loot that you can get is also a little bit more focused towards higher levels. I mean, there are definitely other sources of rewards where you are getting different benefits there.

[Dreamer]
Yeah, and I think just explaining the partners as well, when we say every win in a day is a raffle entry by players, and they’re limited to one per hero, so it encourages them to use more heroes and so on, but also they can just like one person can sit there. So from somebody paying for a sponsorship slot, it’s a little bit easier to explain. I think if we had to say, you know, this is scaled up by level of hero, and then we have to say, you know, they may ask how many heroes, and we’ll be like, okay, the amount of heroes makes up this amount of active, you know, there’d just be a lot more questions, it’s less simple.

So I think on the things we control in the game, we’ve tried this all for rewards being better for higher levels, but for raffle entries, as it relates to external sponsors delivering their tokens to our players, I really like the simplicity, just from like a selling side. But there’s probably other ways you can keep it simple, but also benefit in the future, as mentioned, but I think for now we’re not looking to mess with it and just try to keep bringing in some sponsors for our players.

[Bolon Soron]
Awesome, awesome, thank you. Expeditions related. I mean, I guess the first part is, do we anticipate an increased supply of materials brought on expeditions?

Do we have a plan for burning those? I guess just overall, kind of what we foresee as potential impact?

[Hubert Cumberdale]
Yeah, so I think it’s going to depend on how many people are using it. But I mean, in general, it is going to be like the most efficient way to do the profession quest. So you’ll, you know, you can set up many, many, many iterations of quests to just happen automatically.

So like, you’ll be getting rewards as efficiently as possible that way. There is a fee associated with it. So I think there’s a little bit of an offset that occurs because of that.

Though it also does mean that you’ll be paying less gas in general, as well. So it’s kind of offsets there. So yes, I think there may be some increase in like the amount of tokens going out, depending on, you know, again, how many people are using it.

I think for those that are currently using like botting services, it will, you know, it’s, you know, we already have those are running very efficiently as well. So like, we do already have a good influx of resources just coming from like the most efficient, I guess, questers at the moment. So this is really kind of just opening up to more people to do that.

And I think with what we are doing with PvP coming out, which is going to allow more people to have more combat opportunities as we move further in the future, we also have like more simple PvE content that also provides more, like more ways for people to use their stamina, and to use potions, things like that, as well. So I mean, as we just keep building on the game and provide more uses for the materials that you get from profession quests, I think that just will help, you know, push against the inflation that is coming from questing as well. And I know there’s a question about this later, but we do have more uses for gold as well, which which all the resources that you can get from all these quests can also be converted into gold.

So as there’s more use for gold, there may be like a certain resource that’s not being used very much, or you’re not using very much, where you could convert it to gold potentially if you need more gold. So yeah.

[Bolon Soron]
Awesome, thank you. I did want to add to that as well, just a note that, you know, theoretically, like, yes, expeditions is more efficient, so like there is a small gap there, but the vast majority of that potential for materials is already there, like the heroes already exist. So, you know, yes, there could be an uptick in the number of heroes questing to use expeditions, but those heroes could also be questing today.

[Sunbear]
Would you say that is fair?

[Hubert Cumberdale]
Yeah, yeah, I think that’s pretty fair. Yeah, I mean, it’s really gonna depend on how this changes people’s behavior, but I expect it probably will lead to a little bit of, like, more heroes being used more efficiently than previously. That’s what I’d expect.

[Bolon Soron]
Awesome, awesome. Thank you, sir. All right, on egg drop rates, thoughts on, obviously, this would kind of be undoing a little bit of the change, but instead of lowering the drop rate as far as we lowered it, thoughts of basically different ways to burn pets, and do we have anything planned in that category?

[Hubert Cumberdale]
Well, I don’t know. I’d say instead of the lower drop rates, I think in addition to, we are planning on additional burn mechanics for pets. So I think in general, just with the lower drop rate with what we’re doing coming up, I’m not going to say exactly what we’re planning there, but we do have something that’s mostly finalized at this point to do with pet burning that I think will also help.

But yeah, I don’t think that by doing this we should be now increasing the egg drop rates again. I think it’s probably better to have it as is, and hopefully we’ll just see a net deflation of eggs in general, which should just help make pets be a little bit more rare, especially as they start getting burned for other things.

[Bolon Soron]
Thank you, sir. Thoughts on, one more for you, and then I’ll give you a little break. Thoughts on having something in summoning similar to the hatching system, where you could have different costs, different amounts of times, maybe different cooldowns, but in exchange you get increased rarity chances, or would rarity’s impact to stats kind of be a blocker to that?

[Hubert Cumberdale]
I feel like I answered this question already, but yeah, I mean, that’s an interesting idea. I think, you know, we have set up summoning as it is right now, so people kind of have a good expectation of how rare things are. If we were to change kind of to a multi-tier cost model, that would kind of impact that.

So it’s at least an amount of work to make a change like that. We’d want to do a lot of analysis, make sure we’re not being too generous or not generous enough, and I guess I will say I don’t really see us doing anything of that nature anytime in the near future. I guess it could happen down the road, but right now it’s definitely not a priority for us to be changing the summoning cost model at the moment.

[Bolon Soron]
Awesome. All right, a little bit of a break time for Hubert. Thrown over to Dreamer, any update on the centralized exchange listing that we mentioned a few weeks back?

[Dreamer]
Let’s see, centralized exchange listing. So I think we’ve gotten updates on the chain integration portion. So we were told that chain integration could take two to four weeks from the start, and the overall questions that we’ve been getting that Magnus, Pinecone, and others have been so helpful answering for them, they’ve kind of slowed down.

They asked for some test jewel as well and didn’t see any issues with that. I believe they’re working on now the actual listing portion. So chain integration is something that we have no control over.

We haven’t gotten complete confirmation that it’s finished. It just like there’s not a lot of remaining questions. Now they’re asking for things that we would assume.

So a lot of times these teams aren’t the most transparent. They probably have a lot on their plate and we just kind of are here waiting for them to give us updates and ask us questions, but can report that there seems to be progress. We don’t know though what that means in terms of when it’s ready.

We’ve kind of asked a few times, but it does feel like it’s progressed a lot, at least on the chain integration side.

[Bolon Soron]
Thank you. Thank you. Let’s see, next question is when BeetleDude?

So BeetleDude has also been doing some traveling. He’s still working, but he’s not been in his normal time zone and trying to enjoy some family time during his travels as well. But I believe he will be back next week.

If not, I would say probably a week after. So we are close to having our Dude of Beetle back up here on stage with us, but also hope that he’s enjoyed his travel and some family time and all of that fun stuff as well while still working. Going back to Hubert here for a second, actually another Expeditions related question.

Do Expeditions help balance resource acquisition costs across chains? With taking less gas due to the structure of Expeditions, do we foresee that having a bigger effect on Serendale, and do we have any analysis or numbers that we can share on what we think that variance might be?

[Hubert Cumberdale]
Yeah, so it will definitely be cheaper to do Expeditions on Klaytn than it is to do manually questing just due to the gas costs there. I think when I was looking at it before, it was somewhere in the realm of about half as expensive, but that is using numbers like we are still, you know, optimizing the Expedition code, so it’s possible that we could get even better gas numbers in there. But I want to say around half, and I think down the road when we get a little bit closer to finalizing things, I can probably share that analysis, but right now I don’t think it’s quite in a spot for sharing.

But let me just check one thing here. Yeah, it was about half. So by doing Expeditions with including the fee that you would pay for the Expeditions, like compared to the amount of gas being spent for the amount of stamina spent, it’s about half as expensive.

So yeah.

[Bolon Soron]
Thank you. On Heroscore, and I think we talked a little bit about this during the roundtable if I remember correctly, but any particular reasoning or thoughts on why ability and appearance genes are not included?

[Hubert Cumberdale]
I feel like I did answer this before too. Yeah, I mean, it’s just, there’s a question of how complicated do we want it to be, for one. I mean, looking at all the things that we are doing, we’re looking at the class rank, we’re looking at subclass, its rank, the rarity of the Hero, and I guess some other features of it, like how many of them have been burned, I guess, when we’re talking about divine essence anyway.

But if we were to add, in addition to that, also add a score for visual genes or for ability genes, it just keeps adding to an equation that’s already fairly complex, and then we have to find a way to balance all of that in a way where, you know, is it, would it be worth it? Like, how much should a visual gene that’s a higher rank give in terms of divine essence or Hero score compared to one that doesn’t have that, you know, visual gene and stuff. So, you know, it was a lot of work just to get to where we were with the parameters we were using.

There was a lot of tweaking involved with just, you know, getting it to a place where it felt good. If we were to add more to that, it just would have taken more time and been harder to understand, I think, for anyone using it. So, you know, I’d say ultimately it was a decision of complexity and feeling like, while the ability genes do make your Hero better, I think when it comes down to just assessing a quality of a Hero, it’s not absolutely necessary to be included.

And then for the visual genes as well, I think that you can make that argument even more strongly that it’s, you know, that’s more of a visual thing. People do like, you know, different looking Heroes and having something that’s just more rare looking is cool, but are you going to get more divine essence because your guy has a beard versus not? I think Magnus would argue yes, but in general, I think that’s generally the thought process behind why we did that.

[Bolon Soron]
Beard strength. Thank you, Hubert. Win preset filters for the Hero filters, that is something that is on our wish list.

We need some additional off-chain storage and that kind of stuff, but it is definitely something that we’ve got in our brains as well. In PvP, will there be any pseudo or permadeath mechanic that requires some potion to revive the Hero?

[Hubert Cumberdale]
In PvP, I think we could potentially do that in the future. It is not something that we’re going to start with, but it is something that could be done, and I think it would be something, if we did do it, it’d be after we have divine essence out so that we can have, you know, that we’ve already kind of talked about divine essence being a tool for preventing permanent death, so I think it would be involved in that if we did that.

[Bolon Soron]
Perfect. There’s a follow-up to a question last week. So last week it was asked about if we foresaw ever having the ability to transfer C and or S jewel like between the realms.

We talked about most likely not. Any thoughts on potential having, potentially having like a delegation system to where you could potentially, you know, delegate C jewel to give you a power-up in Serendale, for example?

[Hubert Cumberdale]
Yeah, I mean, when we designed it, we intentionally designed it to be kind of chain-specific, and if you want to have the benefit there, you would need to have, you know, that amount of C jewel or S jewel available on that chain. So to change that, it would be pretty involved. Like, it’s going cross-chain, so we have to have cross-chain messaging.

There could be a risk of things getting out of sync, which is always something that you want to be careful with, especially with something where we kind of have like a base amount that you’re supposed to have to be allowed to do things. So it would be fairly complicated, and it wasn’t really in our design plan to do that, so I think we’re still going to stick with how we’ve done it for now, but, you know, in the future, I suppose, anything’s possible.

[Bolon Soron]
As Magnet said in chat, edge case city.

[Hubert Cumberdale]
Yeah, so much of our code is just dealing with edge cases, and the power-up code in particular has a lot of that, so, you know, and what we’re adding with expeditions also, we had to add a lot more, so that would just even make it even more, like, are we covering every single base? And, you know, we want to try to avoid opening up to something that, like, makes something so hard to, like, find everything. Like, that’s what works, anyway.

[Bolon Soron]
For sure. We had mentioned at one point that we thought that we may have pet combat bonuses a little bit after initial PvP release. Any updates on that front of our anticipation in terms of timeline?

[Hubert Cumberdale]
Yeah, I think, so, probably same as what we said before, I think we probably won’t be able to get it out with or before the PvP release. It’s possible it could make it for the release, and if not, I, you know, I guess, then there’s only that last option, so I I would say just don’t expect it before PvP, and also that we’re moving right along with it as well, so hopefully it won’t be too far out fast when we launch, but I like your process of elimination.

[Bolon Soron]
Oh, assuming a vendor on Crystal Vale will eventually sell basic equipment, what currency do we anticipate that vendor using? Gold. Awesome, which is the earlier referred to new use case, which, so, last week in the AMA, we mentioned that we were planning for an equipment shop on Metis.

Are we anticipating just a P2P shop, or an actual vendor there also?

[Hubert Cumberdale]
So, initially it’ll be the, just the P2P shop. We do have plans for the equipment vendor, for how it’s going to function, that I think will be pretty interesting, but for the initial period it’s going to be just in, I believe, Crystal Vale is what we’re planning to do with that.

[Bolon Soron]
Perfect, thank you, sir. Actually, I’m going to go slightly out of order, because there’s another question about the equipment shop. Did we answer that last week, or did I lose it?

Oh, nope, I just completely missed it. Sorry, well, I’m actually going backwards to this question that I meant to ask earlier, but it worked out really well. Since our current equipment provided by the Hunters Guild is level 10, will the equipment, or will the equipment from the future shop also only be level 10, or will there be various levels of equipment for sale?

[Hubert Cumberdale]
There will be various levels, so we want to have equipment that, like right now, the level 10 equipment that’s being used for the hunts that’s coming from the Hunters Guild, that equipment would not really be very useful in the hands of a level 3 hero, because the dexterity requirements, the accuracy would be really low, things like that, so we do have lower level equipment available in that shop, which I think, really, I’d just say if you’re doing Void Hunts, you should try to use the highest level equipment you can, but it will at least allow people to do low level PvP matches by using that equipment that’s available.

[Bolon Soron]
Awesome, awesome. Much appreciated. Let’s see, so a couple of specific combat questions.

Thoughts on the minus 5% accuracy to the Seer’s Warstone. Is it too punishing?

[Workhorse]
It’s a good question.

[Hubert Cumberdale]
Yeah, that’s a good question. It seems to me like it’s been okay, though I can definitely follow like Pokeshache and Winston and see if they have an opinion on that, but so far I haven’t heard too much about that being out of balance.

[Workhorse]
My two cents is that Warstone is super dope, and that that minus 5 DOD, it might be required to keep it in check.

[Bolon Soron]
I like it, I like it. Does Shatterbox have any utility for a physical damage hero?

[Hubert Cumberdale]
There are some hero class skills that do require that you’re not silenced, that are basically treated like they’re magical abilities, so I think Warcry would be an example with Warrior. You can’t use that if you’re silenced, and I think the Knight has one of those as well. I think Berserker has one too.

I guess it’s limited in scope, I would say, but there are some benefits to not being silenced, at least for some physical classes, so I would say it’s not completely worthless, but it’s also probably going to be your least desirable option.

[Bolon Soron]
I think that might be bad news for me if I remember it. Thoughts on, or can you share any insights into how subclasses will work when they are implemented? For example, if you have a subclass Berserker, will every hero with that subclass also risk going Berserk, or are there traits that are not applicable for subclasses?

Or not traits, but keywords.

[Hubert Cumberdale]
Yeah, so our plan with subclasses, and you know, we don’t have it implemented, it’s always possible that this could be adjusted somewhat, but as it stands right now, our plan is that you can spend skill points to get an A skill from within one of the trees for any tree that you have already received a skill for in your main class. So for example, if you have a tier 1, tier 2, and tier 3 skill on your main class, that means that you could pick a tier 3 skill from your subclass if you wanted to, if you have the skill points for it. You don’t have to follow the same rules of having 1, 2, and 3, so it’s just as long as you have a main class skill in that tier, you’re allowed to take from the subclass tier, spending the same amount of points, and there are no other additional rules required.

So with that Berserker example, it’s like the tier 1 skills that have the automatic Berserk effects on them, so you could potentially take a tier 3 Berserker skill without taking the tier 1 from your subclass, and avoid a lot of that potential Berserking thing, if that’s what you want to do. So that’s kind of how it’s planned to be set up, but again, we haven’t gotten there yet.

[Bolon Soron]
Awesome, thank you Hubert. We only have two questions left, and they should be pretty quick, so we’re going to knock them out real quick. We might go a minute over, but we’ll try to wrap up.

Will the luck stats play any role in crafting?

[Hubert Cumberdale]
I feel like this has been asked in the past. I would say that there’s a good chance it’ll be used in some fashion, but I don’t want to say too much. It probably will be not as impactful as the stats that are important to the profession itself, but again, we haven’t really gotten to the point of doing any deep design for the crafting system at this point, so there’s a lot up in the air until we get there.

[Bolon Soron]
Awesome, thanks Hubert. And one last question. Do we know the estimate of stone weight available for a typical, normal setting, no custom restrictions, PvP match?

[Hubert Cumberdale]
No custom settings. It is… So it’s very customizable, I’ll say that.

You can easily just change this, but at least where we have it set right now for defaults… Where is that? So we have the battle inventory default set to 20, and the battle budget default set to 10 stone.

But you can go anywhere between 0 and 100 on either of those numbers.

[Bolon Soron]
Very nice. Yeah, a lot of customization that’ll be there, which is really exciting. Awesome.

All right, well we are going to go into our wrap-up. We will see if we can do it in approximately two minutes to end at an hour, but if not, that’s okay too. So we’ll go around the horn real quick.

I’m gonna see if Workhorse will be so kind as to bullish us on this special occasion of having him here with us. Sweet. So we’ll go to him last then for final comments and a bullish.

I’ll just say, as always, thank you everybody for being here. If you’re here listening, if you’re here up on stage taking time out of your day to answer these questions, thank you to everybody who also submits questions. As I mentioned, we are fully caught up, so make sure that you keep submitting questions so we have stuff to answer for you next week as well.

As always, we will be here next week, Thursday at 2 p.m. Eastern to host our AMA, Don’t Open to Broken Mechanics, and I had a thought and I lost it, but always excited to be here, always excited to catch up with everybody. Please do like this video, subscribe to our YouTube channel if you haven’t, like the tweet, retweet, all of that fun stuff, and stay tuned for some exciting teasers coming up here in the shorter term on PvP and some other things as well. So make sure you’re following us on socials and all that good stuff so you don’t miss anything.

Let’s see, I’m just gonna go in order of the cameras as I see them. Magnus, any last comments?

[Magnus Ironroot]
Yeah, sure thing. So I’m stoked to see the meta changes live. It was kind of a surprise to me to see the block gas limit be that high, so excited to see what we can do with that.

Definitely a lot to build with there, and then also excited about expeditions wrapping up, and yeah, it’s been a lot of work. It’s very complex. I think it’s probably like 120 contracts we’ve changed at this point.

I hope I don’t kill Hubert with making him go through my code, but yeah, just excited to get that one live soon. That’s it for me.

[Bolon Soron]
Thank you, Magnus. Sunbear?

[Sunbear]
Yeah, thanks, Bolon. Just feeling really grateful and stoked for solid partnerships like Metis, like Avalanche, and the new Klaytn that’s to come, and a solid team that I get to work with. The quality of work that comes out of this team and the passion that comes with it is just phenomenal and grateful for a community to support us in this project, and I think the next little while is going to be showing a lot of the benefits of all the hard work we put in, so really looking forward to it.

[Bolon Soron]
Thank you, good sir. Dreamer?

[Dreamer]
My mouse is all double-clicky. I don’t know if you noticed. It keeps double-clicking everything, but I won’t say the word, but it’s on my hat.

I’m very, very excited that there’s been progress made on the chain that allows us to start testing and building certain things there to give us a better idea of when we can launch Coliseum. Coliseum is going to be fun. I’m so excited to not only get in there myself and challenge some of you out there who maybe will probably smash me.

That’s okay, but also watch all of you and your efforts. It’s going to be hopefully to make this fun. While making it fun, let’s keep in mind we’re all here because we believe in this dream.

We’re three years in, and we want DeFi Kingdoms to continue to develop into its full potential. That really takes all of us coming together and doing our best to contribute what we can, identify things we can work on with good solutions, and lifting each other up. Grateful for everybody.

My thing here says BFK fam. I do see this team here, our community, folks that have come and gone and hopefully will return, always a part of contributing to that overall vision and dream. We need our people to stay together, band together, and see how we can improve.

For those that are here with that mindset, thank you so much. Please continue to encourage those in the space. Let’s help people coming in.

It’s a lot to learn, being really helpful on Discord and on Twitter. I think it means a lot to players as they try to figure out DeFi Kingdoms, especially as they will see some rewards and competitive gameplay on Metis. We need to keep that culture and that overall mindset alive and have fun.

Got to be having fun with this. I’m the B word, but I’m not going to say the B word. That’s going to be a soundbite.

[Hubert Cumberdale]
Over to you, Hubert. I don’t really have too much more to add at this point. I’m also looking forward to getting the expedition code all reviewed and I have survived the 120 file review twice now.

Hopefully, we’re wrapping most things up at this point. I think we’ll maybe take one little pass at some efficiency stuff. Now that we’ve gotten this movement on Metis, we’re also starting to really get our focus turned in that direction as well.

It’s going to be really busy for the next while. Really exciting stuff that we’re working on right now. Really excited for releasing all this new combat content and just really starting to get DFK closer and closer into a more finalized state with all of the main mechanics in place.

One step at a time on it, but we’re making really big steps late these days.

[Bolon Soron]
Thank you. Last but certainly not least, the workhorse among us all. Any final thoughts and a bonus?

[Workhorse]
Thanks, everybody, for tuning in. Happy to be here today. I hope to see some of you at Bitcoin National.

Come by and say hello if you see me. Overall, I’ll just say, bullish!

[Bolon Soron]
Bullish! See you all next week.