DeFi Kingdoms AMA 8/1/24 Summary and Transcript
Summary
Hosts: Bolon Soron, Dreamer, Magnus Ironroot, Hubert Cumberdale, Winston Jazzhands
Updates:
Bolon Soron introduces the session, acknowledging Dreamer and his preparation for a tweet. Dreamer provides an update on a recent Bitcoin conference, discussing political speeches and DeFi Kingdoms’ recognition. He announces the JEWEL listing on the MEXC exchange and emphasizes the importance of integrating the DFK chain into a major exchange. Magnus Ironroot updates on the progress of expeditions. Hubert Cumberdale mentions efficiency improvements in gas costs for quest iterations and addresses concerns regarding the Klaytn chain and multi-questing limitations. Current updates involve testing and front-end side work.
Questions and Answers:
Bolon Soron: Can you provide an update on the treasury and runway?
Dreamer: Discusses financial strategies, mentioning grants, development milestones, and the impact of market prices on their financial planning. Emphasizes maintaining a one-year runway and adjusting based on the financial situation.
Bolon Soron: If the team feels DFK is undervalued, do we have plans to purchase JEWEL for the treasury?
Dreamer: Acknowledges the belief that DFK is undervalued but explains the risks of speculative buybacks and the importance of avoiding market manipulation perceptions. Discusses the possibility of using grants for player rewards in JEWEL.
Bolon Soron: What is the current number of full-time and part-time employees for Kingdom Studios, and how many are devs?
Dreamer: States that Kingdom Studios has 21 team members, with 16 involved in development and 5 in other roles.
Bolon Soron: Are there plans to bring in another dev or two once PvP arrives?
Dreamer: Not addressed directly; focus remains on current staffing and development priorities.
Bolon Soron: Can you discuss the thought process behind having players buy lower-level weapons from a shop rather than having those weapons drop from hunts, quests, etc.?
Hubert Cumberdale: Explains that gold used to buy weapons is burned. Bare minimum equipment is designed to be purchasable to maintain value and accessibility, while higher-tier equipment will still need to be obtained through more challenging gameplay.
Bolon Soron: What happens to the gold that is used to buy them?
Hubert Cumberdale: Reiterates that the gold is burned.
Bolon Soron: How is the team going to reconcile magical accuracy on melee units? For example, if my knight has stun, will his accuracy with stun be very low or will stun change between being a physical and magical attack based on the hero that has it?
Hubert Cumberdale: Explains that stun is considered physical, not magical, and that magical and physical accuracies are balanced based on the hero’s attributes and the type of attack.
Bolon Soron: Does each level of rarity count as a separate skill or are there 70 skill categories with various levels of rarity for a potential total of 200+ skill and rarity combinations?
Hubert Cumberdale: Clarifies that there are 70+ combat pet skill categories with various levels of rarity, resulting in over 200 skill and rarity combinations.
Bolon Soron: Has any thought been given to best of three rounds for tournaments considering the RNG aspect of the game?
Hubert Cumberdale: Acknowledges the idea but says it is not currently planned for the initial release as the focus is on optimizing the single-round experience.
Bolon Soron: Once auto leveling is released, will there be an option to lock heroes for a longer period in expeditions in return for added bonuses?
Hubert Cumberdale: Mentions that technical issues prevent this feature currently, and it would require significant changes to the existing infrastructure.
Closing Remarks:
Bolon Soron wraps up the session, thanking the team and participants for their dedication and contributions. He encourages the community to stay engaged, follow updates on Twitter, and look forward to future releases. Winston Jazzhands expresses appreciation for the community’s patience and excitement about the upcoming Expeditions launch, highlighting the convenience it will bring. Magnus Ironroot shares enthusiasm about the progress on PvP and the nearing release of Expeditions, emphasizing the team’s focus on delivering a quality experience.
Hubert Cumberdale thanks the community for their questions and participation, mentioning the importance of feedback in shaping the game’s development. He looks forward to the team’s full focus on PvP once Expeditions is completed. Dreamer reiterates gratitude to the community and the team, emphasizing the continuous efforts to deliver exceptional features and maintain DeFi Kingdoms’ reputation. He teases upcoming impactful features and encourages everyone to stay bullish on the project’s future. BULLISH!
Transcript
[Bolon Soron]
Week anyway, so he picked a good week. I don’t even know if we’re going to have anything for his list this week, but we’ll see. We’ll see if we can find something to put on his list.
And there is Dreamer as well. All right. So kicking things off on the update side, we are actually going to go first over to Dreamer, who is hopefully going to stall for me for just a second as I prepare this tweet.
[Dreamer]
Oh, man. What am I stalling with? I can stall with a Bitcoin conference update.
Is that is that the? Yes. Yeah, part of it.
Cool. Sorry, everybody. I’m getting over some conference crud that I got at the conference, but got much more than sick there.
Had a lot of good experiences. And it was a very notable conference, not only for DeFi kingdoms and our experience there on our extended network, but for crypto, there’s some interesting things. A couple of political speeches that if you haven’t caught, encourage you to go check them out.
I think at the very least, it was interesting to see so much focus by two presidential candidates. And, you know, a lot of promises in this space. We’ll see what happens, as I think it’s quite common in the US for there to be marketed promises that don’t actually get fulfilled.
But there’s a lot of focus that we even see in the the current administration potentially looking at that and rethinking their approach. It should all mean good things for the space. But again, it’s all talk, so we can’t get too sucked in.
But it was very exciting to be there. It could end up being like a historic moment. A lot of people are very fired up with the support in the space.
Essentially, it wasn’t for those that missed it. I think a couple of things from Trump’s speech is it wasn’t just like no regulation out with the old, like it was more acknowledging that this industry is an important industry. I think a couple of people retweeted.
It’s like the steel industry a hundred years ago that there’s focus to make the US a competitor, if not the place for crypto to live. And that for regulation, rather than regulation being written by people that hate the industry, it should be written by people that understand and are trying to build it. So definitely need regulation, but we need regulation that’s written for everybody, not just against those that are trying.
So I really thought that parts of that speech were positive and interesting. The event itself, we attended two years ago, and I’d say two years ago, felt like we should never attend the event again. Just felt like a lot of people on the mindset of like Bitcoin or die.
And I’m like, why are you here? Two years ago, I think when I was there, there were a lot of people that. I mean, this is after the market was shifting and everything.
So people were kind of sadder, I suppose. But I do think that there were a few people that really knew what DeFi Kingdoms was. And this time around, I don’t think I met anybody that didn’t know what it was.
And there were some people that are like, why are you at Bitcoin conference if you are building on ETH and all these other layers? I did have a little bit of an excuse for Karate Kombat, who had Nick Carter fighting in the main card, who is a Bitcoiner. And that I personally advise on that.
And DeFi Kingdoms was a co-marketing agreement with them. So that was kind of a foot in the door for the first day. But then I actually got to thinking a lot.
I’m like, man, all these people like hate any that’s not Bitcoin. Should we be doing something in the future around Bitcoin? So I ended up shifting my focus and kind of using it as a focus group on what things we could do.
Also, like the overall identity and awareness of DeFi Kingdoms being really surprised that I guess we shouldn’t be surprised, but really surprised that people know who we are. And so many of them don’t know we’re a game. So when I pulled out having like our PVP trailer handy, everybody was like blown away.
They’re like, whoa, I remember this like years ago and everything on the chain that should not be named. And it’s just like a lot of like commending, good connections, good support, acknowledgment of the brand awareness of DeFi Kingdoms. I know we get a lot of heat for allocating majority of our budget to ongoing building and not traditional marketing.
But guys, we do a lot of marketing through partners. If you if you go back in time through all the chain partners, through our sorry, partners with like Portal that got a lot of exposure, various attempts with Karate Kombat and other game launchers events. You know, we’ve we’ve made our brand go a long way with quite little.
And I think that’s something we should be proud of. Now, there’s always more we can do. And I’m of the opinion that as we refine the game loop, the onboarding process and the simplicity for the user profile of just purely a gamer, we will then be able to one day unlock a lot more ability to simply market DeFi Kingdoms in more of a traditional way.
But today, more people that come on without those things in place. The cost to conversion is too high. So we’re working on that.
But the focus group aspect was incredible. I think there were a lot of cool people met as well. A couple of people that are more like famous outside of crypto that also cross over, which was seeing them a lot of time with George.
We’re able to meet some of the core people like at the highest level for Metis there. And they have another product that that’s kind of rolling up to Bitcoin. So I was able to talk with them as well as additional like networking experiences.
So all in all, Bitcoin Nashville was a big success. And it also was something that didn’t cost us our as we try to spread our brands with others and work with others. In this case, Karate Combat and the IFC, you know, I was able to get on there and put up with all the work I was doing for and with them, which is awesome because I was also able to represent DeFi Kingdoms.
So that’s that’s kind of the name of the game. We’re trying to do as much with what we have. And I am proud of what we’ve done so far.
Outside of that, there were some really cool meetups. I got to spend some time with Ogre. Ogre was nice enough to actually come scoop up the group that I was with with George and a few others to go to the weigh ins.
And it was fun seeing Ogre like exposed to that world. I don’t know how much he’s been exposed previously, but it’s a good show. It’s fun.
I got to see people like Flu who are still OG supporters of DeFi Kingdoms, even though they are focused on many other things. For the first time, I got to meet Workhorse in person. We had a long chat.
You know, it’s been just under two years since we first had that initial discussion on trying to get game development progressed to a different degree and working with wisdom. And we’ve come a long way. So that was a really awesome moment.
I had never met him in person. And to just learn that he has not only a lot of exposure in game making and marketing, but he’s also an OG. Like you could consider him an OG Bitcoiner when he’s talking and working with everybody else.
They totally accept him as such. And it should be like, I don’t know, very respected in the space. And that’s probably why a lot of people want to work with him, including us.
I got some time with Zelys as well. We got to have some coffee together one on one. Never got to do that to that degree.
You know, he’s so passionate about what we’re doing. And I know that we all have different different views and efforts and attempts. But as time goes on, I do feel like a lot of us are trying to pull in the same direction to make this vision come true.
I probably miss people. I’m so sorry. But there are a lot of people that were there.
We got to get people into the fight. The fight was attended by a lot of interesting folks. Like, you know, the likes of Neo, the musical artist, the hot, cool girl, Bailey.
Even the Kennedy showed up with all of his bodyguards. So, yeah, it was a good time. And Bolon, that was probably an over delay.
But back to you, if that was you.
[Bolon Soron]
If you are ready to talk about the next update about the exchange that was mentioned a little while back, I am ready to post the tweet.
[Dreamer]
Oh, okay. Got it. I see you avoiding things.
Okay, so this is mostly good news. I think that it’s incredibly good news. But, you know, in normal BFK fashion, there’s some unfortunate timing things as well.
But we’re going to be dropping a tweet if you want to go check out Twitter. This is related to what we mentioned a few months ago about central exchange listings and trying to work with them. A bigger one than we had before this exchange.
And I’ll just wait for it to go. So, Bolon, give me like the… Good to go.
Good to go, okay. So, in the first year of DeFi Kingdom’s launch, MEXC had listed JEWEL really without collaboration at that point. And at that time, we’re kind of like, okay, I think maybe liquidity or pricing is off.
But for the most part, there’s really no harm done. You fast forward to a lot of events that took place and we moved off. That listing was never really remedied or corrected.
And I think a lot of folks were trading on MEXC and were confused because they were getting like Harmony JEWEL and didn’t know what to do. Now, essentially, I think you just use the Synapse bridge to remedy that. But it resulted in not a lot of people using it.
We couldn’t really integrate it in the game. So, we had reached out to them to remedy that earlier this year, maybe even late last year, and see what it would take. What we heard was a very large number that we couldn’t allocate to that.
But through really good collaboration, SunBear and others working on negotiating, we got that down to a very, very reasonable amount. And essentially, this included not only remedying the listing, integrating into DFK chain directly, and essentially relaunching and marketing the listing with MEXC. Now, MEXC, people will have different views on them.
They’re on like their target audience and the history of operation. I am not an expert at everything MEXC, but I can say looking at volumes, especially when we’re doing our due diligence earlier when making this decision, they oscillated between like top 11 to top 15. That’s a huge improvement from the previous exchange to integrate into DFK chain that was like 54.
Now, the silver lining, I guess, not silver, what’s bad? The not silver lining? The gray lining, the gray core, is I think about a month ago.
And of course, we weren’t told about this and that’s okay. But about a month ago, there was a shift where they required KYC. So I think they previously supported US without KYC.
And now I think they’re going, my guess is they’re going through either license renewal, because there’s no way they didn’t have license before, or something else. Their goal needs to be and has been from our outside looking in to support the US market. We were told at time they did at the time we made these decisions.
We were not told that there would be a change and there was a change. So in the past, we did say we’re focusing on a big top 15 exchange that supports the US. That was all true.
That seems to have updated since then. So we’re still learning more. And we are we’re hopeful that this will support the US is that that was kind of our main focus.
But there are a lot of secondary focuses. Clear up the confusion with the Harmony listing. I answered probably over 100 of those inquiries in my DMs alone in the last year.
Have a precedent of a large top 15 centralized exchange integrating in the DFK chain. People don’t understand what that means. That essentially means that you can seamlessly go from the DFK chain using JEWEL and the exchange itself without having to do like, you know, it comes out on ETH.
And then you got to bridge it to the DFK chain. So essentially, people that are buying it on MEXC want to move in the DFK chain that’s integrated and supported. We’ll be able to support it right in game.
So for any future listings, the first question they always ask, they’re like, wow, you’re on a new chain, even though it’s a subnet. So it’s on chain on chain ID. Has anybody integrated yet?
And a couple of big names said until others do, like, we’re not going to. So there are multiple wins here. And we’re happy with the outcome, especially relative to the cost.
We brought down the cost significantly. I think it was dropped by 80 percent. And there wasn’t a requirement for like new liquidity to be provided because they just converted the old like debunked Harmony JEWEL.
So I think it’s a huge win. We should be happy. It isn’t a perfect win currently, given the what appears to be the adjustments they’re going to going through with their KYC and their U.S. engagement. But regardless, it’s win, it’s improvement. And we hope that people are happy with that and we’ll continue to do what we can to extend these centralized exchange listings where we can. Bolon or others, anything to add?
[Bolon Soron]
I just wanted to second and reinforce, like, it’s a really big deal to get the chain integration. Like, if you look at, you know, major exchanges like there, there’s a limited list of chains that you are able to withdraw and deposit from. And so, you know, being able to have the FK chain on that list is a big, big deal.
And, you know, to Dreamer’s point, it opens doors. And like that was, you know, a big part of the initial coin store listing as well. They were the first exchange to integrate DFK chain.
And so, like, I just don’t want to, I don’t want it to come across undersold how big of a deal that is for us to have that native integration.
[Dreamer]
And I will say it’s already been proven because MEXC also said, oh, you guys are on a subnet. Has anybody integrated yet? Because if not, I don’t know if we’re going to be able to.
And he said, yes, Coin Store. And they were like, oh, we’ll take a look. So pretty much got that ROI very quickly, as expected.
And it’ll likely help us in the future as well. Now that we have MEXC integrated.
[Bolon Soron]
Awesome. Awesome. Appreciate you, dreamer.
Hope that all of you are excited about that news, even with the gray lining and see the silver linings that are in it as well. Next up, let’s jump over to Magnus to talk Expeditions.
[Magnus Ironroot]
Hey, everybody. So quick update on Expeditions. It’s mostly winding down on the contract changes that I need to make.
The bug reports and PR reviews are definitely becoming less and less, which is always a good indicator that we’re getting close to release. And, yep, just currently putting a layer of polish on things, closing edge cases, rather than adding new features and stuff. A lot of the focus right now is around tuning the max number of iterations that are allowed on each realm.
Since there are some differences between the EVM implementations, as you guys know. It’s kind of like playing blackjack where you need to get as close to optimal as you can without going over. So it takes just a little bit of time to get right.
Yep, that’s mostly my update. Just getting close. I’ve mostly shifted over to PVP.
So, yeah, just not too many contract changes. Mostly on the testing and front-end side of things at the moment. Winston, Hubert, do you guys want to add anything?
[Hubert Cumberdale]
You said Winston first, so I was waiting. But, okay. Let’s see.
I will just add that, yeah, things are coming together really well. With the efficiency pass that we did, we were able to cut down the gas cost per iteration by between 10 to 25%, depending on which quest type you’re talking about. So that was a good exercise of just kind of improving things.
I think there’s a little bit more that can be done and will likely be done in the future. But it would just be a lot more refactoring. And I think at this point we’re pretty satisfied with where things are at.
So there’s been the expedition fee and gas costs versus just manual quest and gas costs. And so we’ll have more to update on that once we’ve kind of fine-tuned everything. Because it is also dependent on what we said is the max number of iterations per chain.
With Klaytn, we still also have the extra hurdle of computation cost limitations to deal with. So we’re kind of in the process right now of fine-tuning that and making sure we know what we can and can’t do. And unfortunately it is still going to be a difference there compared to right now in Klaytn when you’re doing manual questing.
We don’t have multi-questing set up because of that issue. So we’ll be kind of limited on the number of iterations that you can do over there still. But it will still be more efficient because there won’t be a start quest transaction you’ll have to do every time.
But compared to DFK chain there will still be more transactions to do as you’re processing your iterations just due to that limit. So I just wanted to mention that. But yeah, we’re getting really close.
Just trying to make sure we’re really going through it with a fine-tooth comb at this point. Just seeing if there’s any other little thing that we might have missed. But it’s getting very close.
So that’s all I’ll say.
[Winston Jazzhands]
Yeah, it’s pretty exciting. During initial testing I was kind of trying to find everything that’s broken. And now we’re at a phase where we’re using it quite a bit.
So we’re still on testnet. So my heroes aren’t using it but all of my little testnet dummies are working hard. And it’s exciting to see their skills increasing.
Whenever you wait three or four days and then go in and claim them, it’s like they’ve earned maybe two or three whole points. It’s pretty cool. Very exciting.
I think you guys are going to love it. Super easy to use. Thanks, Bolon.
[Bolon Soron]
Thank you, gentlemen. Yeah, looking forward to it. And I know it’s going to be beautiful once it’s ready.
Just real quick circling back on the MEXC topic because I saw a question pop up in Discord. It is not live yet. They are finishing the integration and everything but they wanted to announce it ahead of time.
So we’re announcing it. And we are super excited to be announcing it. But no, if you go today, it is not live just yet.
But getting very, very close now. Awesome. One last update and then we will move into some questions.
Hopefully you all saw the second poll on Twitter for what you would like to see teased next. This one was a much, much, much closer vote than the first one. However, I got to say the traits and pet combat bonuses people got to get together and coordinate.
But the Coliseum did pull it out by a slim margin of 3.7%. But it did pull out the victory. So stay tuned. I would anticipate most likely later today.
Worst case tomorrow. We will be dropping that new Coliseum teaser. So looking forward to that as well.
And hope that you all like what you see when it comes out. And stay tuned to our Twitter if you don’t. Which hopefully you already do.
But if you don’t, do. Because we’re always dropping fun stuff on there. And we might do another poll or two at some point.
So make sure you’re following along. All right. Moving into some questions.
This one actually kind of relates to some of what Dreamer was talking about earlier anyway. So we will jump straight into that one. Dreamer, can you provide an update on the treasury and runway?
And I’m going to separate out the second part of that. So we’ll start there.
[Dreamer]
I’m all concerned about what the second part is. Yeah, this is an answer. I mean, it’s not meant to be a non-answer.
It’s been the answer. And it will likely continue to be. I have a cough drop in my mouth.
So it looks like I’m plopping something around there. Yeah, so we usually look at expected inflows through like proceeds, through game fees, and our monetization rates. That we try our best to be non-disruptive.
Side note, I think there were multiple times this year where we actually were not selling anything, especially after we got some of the grants. But I think it’s healthy to always have predictable levels, really from a regulatory perspective as well, to have monetization and ups and downs. Be there to then inform us on what we can be paying our team.
Side note, nobody’s out like 40 hours a week. I wish we all could be, but our runway would be a lot shorter. So for the last two years now, I don’t think there’s ever been a time when we have.
That should tell you how much our team cares about this. This is a passion project, but it’s also, you know, people have to make a living as well. We try to find the right balance between those and do our best when we can and when we can’t.
There are additional sacrifices that have been made. But when we look at runway, we have just locked in this amazing grant to build a feature that we all need and are really excited for. And I am very proud of the progress we’ve had so far.
This grant is majority for development and it is milestone based. We don’t get it all up front and it is in Metis, so it’s not all monetized. So we have to factor that into our runway.
When we look at the prices of that Metis, it’s not necessarily a fixed number of Metis. So luckily, we’re not exposed to price risk throughout the life of the build period. Essentially, when we hit each milestone, there will be Metis paid relative to a dollar amount.
And so like, let’s say that there was a large drop in Metis and then we hit a milestone and then we get paid that amount. We then have a lot of tricky decisions on do we monetize it as quickly as we can to have a predictable amount to capital budget our team? Or do we hold it because it’s down and we are speculating and hoping it goes back up?
It’s a very risky game because if it drops further, we’re totally out. For the most part, we try to take about 80% and monetize it within a reasonable amount of time as we can. We’re also holding a little bit back, like maybe 10% or so, or at least a little bit of Metis upside.
That’ll probably adjust every time that comes up. And then the other input is the actual burn rate, how many hours we’re paying and where they’re being allocated. Also, the operation of the chain, RPCs and AWS and many other costs that are there that we may not all realize that this huge behemoth of a machine costs more than just development.
So with that, we try to aim to have about a year with all of these inputs. Keeping in mind that it’s really not accurate to say we have 100% a year runway because all the things I just went over, it could result in timing being in our favor and we end up having way more than a year. We don’t control prices and we try not to focus on them.
And we actually try to avoid any perception of manipulating prices, but we definitely are affected by them. In our monthly board meeting that is focused on financials and treasury, in the event we’re looking at this and we’re saying, wow, the way the prices are going and our forecasts and our current burn rate based on how many hours people are allowed to work for their approved rate, wow, we’re under a year. We’ll usually watch that through the month.
And if it doesn’t kind of come back up, we have to consider adjustments. And the main adjustment is paying less hours to the team. And that’s what we’ve done in the past.
There’s even been months, I think, initially after the chain that shall not be named hack. I think we went like two or three months without anybody getting paid while we’re working through all this. So this shouldn’t make people worried at this point because it’s been two years.
We built more than anybody else out there. Working through this, we’re constantly having wins. We’re constantly having new things that maybe we saw come and maybe we didn’t, that we saw before.
But the goal is to continue to keep the dream alive, keep DFK alive and not only alive, but have it be seen as one of the most respected and eventually fun and played games and ecosystems built on in the space. So the runaway question is an important one. I tried to give a more detailed question than in the past.
But the quick answer is there’s too many moving pieces to just give you a flat answer because our team is willing to adjust our burn as needed up and down. And we are always looking for new external ways to collaborate with people and improve our financial position. And we’ll continue to do that.
But the main point mentally, which is a moving target as well, is it feels good with all of these inputs to have a moving target of a year. As it starts to adjust below that, that’s when we look what can we adjust on either side, cutting costs or increasing inflows to get it back to a year. So it’s not we keep it at a year and sit.
We keep it at a rolling year. And when it adjusts greatly from that, if it goes way past it, then we’re like, oh, maybe we can move up hours a little bit. And if it goes greatly under it, we take a step back and say, OK, we need to adjust to make sure that we have enough to keep building, even if it’s at a lower rate.
Bolon, do you think that covered all of the points?
[Bolon Soron]
Yes, sir. I believe it did. And it actually is a perfect segue as well.
Well, actually, really into a couple of different questions. But first up is to your point about price and avoiding any perception about manipulation. If the team feels DFK is undervalued, do we have plans to purchase JEWEL for the treasury?
[Dreamer]
Look, I can speak personally. I think we’re all here because we all think that DFK is undervalued. So that’s all of us as individuals looking and playing and building and participating in the game.
But Kingdom Studios as an entity, it’s really, I don’t know, slippery slope, risky. I don’t know what the right word is to start having opinions on prices of tokens and then doing buybacks. If you look at the traditional financial market world or in like listed on the New York Stock Exchange, you can do stock buybacks.
But there’s actually a lot of regulation around it. And there’s also blackout periods and what people involved can do about it. And it’s something that people have been doing for a long time within this space.
If we were to say, all right, let’s establish an internal mental strike and say, we officially believe that at this strike, we’re overvalued in this strike. We’re undervalued and let’s buy and sell accordingly. We’re kind of turning into a little internal prop shop and also kind of pricing ourselves rather than letting the market price ourselves based on the overall features and input.
A sell rate that is consistent and the only input we look at is making sure that it’s very minimal impact price. That’s as much as we can really participate in that area without potentially having risk. Now, and some people might disagree with that.
They’re like, hey, you should buy it back, put it in your treasury and then sell it more. I just I don’t agree with that from a business perspective. I do see the logic.
But, you know, we do have a Delaware LLC and we do need to make sure that as a business, we are all of you guys do the right things and are careful so that, again, we can keep the dream alive and keep building what we all know we should be. Now, there is a portion of grants usually dedicated to marketing or rewarding players. And this is where I think the answer could go in the opposite direction rather than doing a speculative buyback of an entity saying it’s undervalued.
Let’s fill up our treasury so that when it goes up, we can sell it again and then be accused of market manipulation. Let’s avoid that altogether. I think we always will try to avoid that altogether.
However, oh, hey, we got a grant that is in the token that isn’t JEWEL, in this case, Metis, and a portion is allocated to incentivizing gameplay, in this case, Coliseum. When it comes time to make the decisions for a portion of that to maybe be like a reward for a tournament, for example, should that be in Metis or should we convert that to JEWEL to reward our players in JEWEL? With Hunts and with Visages, I feel like those should be in Metis because we’re trying to work with them to have Metis be delivered to our players over on the chain.
If that makes sense, have some for Gas. But when it comes to that grant, I think as it relates to this question, it is totally possible for us to consider a portion of that to be traded into JEWEL and rewarded to players. It would provide some upside.
It would be outside treasury, but it isn’t like our treasury, but outside treasury used to purchase JEWEL, but not for us to hold and speculate, simply for us to deliver the token that is native to the game that you’re playing. So that’s something we’re considering. I don’t think it would be all of it.
I do think it would likely be a portion of it, but it’s just a few of our opinions. We’re not there yet, but that’s, I think, the best way to answer the two ways I interpret that question.
[Bolon Soron]
Awesome. Greatly appreciate it, Dreamer. Don’t go anywhere.
We’re going to continue along this train of thought here. So speaking of our team, you already kind of answered a part of this anyway, to be perfectly honest, but the current number of full-time and part-time employees for Kingdom Studios, and of that number, how many are devs, with a secondary part of if we have plans to bring in another dev or two once PvP arrives?
[Dreamer]
Oh man. Okay. Sorry, I had to drink water.
Let’s see. If we count everybody up, I think the number of receiving some type of compensation at this time is 21, including myself. If you think about the board, there’s three people on the board.
They’re all included in the 21 number. But if you look at, I think, was the question split between devs and others? Is that what it said?
How many are devs? Yeah. Of the 21, 16 would be considered on the development side.
This is not only consisting of front-end, back-end, blockchain developers, but also counting art, animation, music, testing, project management, pretty much anything that’s required for us to click the button to go live for the players to get new content. That’s what I’m considering in the bucket of development. Outside of that, there are five additional positions that we all kind of do our best to do everything else.
So we have Professor Tango, who is our treasurer, and making sure that we, you know, hinting to a lot of what I mentioned earlier, he’s all over that stuff. He makes sure that we have many of our expenses that probably a lot more than people realize on different things that we have overhead to just operate across different chains. He does a great job at that, as well as working with making sure people get paid.
We have one digital marketing person. This is everything digital from website designs to the content that is tweeted out, the videos and so on, and used for pretty much social media marketing. One biz dev person, president slash biz dev, and community and player engagement.
So pretty much a skeleton crew outside a building. I do think the lion’s share of our pay goes to the development. And I said earlier, you know, we are focused on marketing in the best ways we can, and I think that we’re doing an incredible job within the space outside of traditional marketing.
But as we get to an efficient frontier of ease of onboarding, understanding game loops, stickiness in gameplay, there should and will be a shift when we are able to increase the build versus non-build budgets. But guys, we’re not only still early, we have so much to build. And we need to make sure that as we continue our reputation of having so much not only on chain, but built each year, that only happens if we continue to prioritize building the way we have.
But it’s very clear that we’re getting closer and closer, especially with competitive gameplay, for the need to adjust a bit and allocate more resources than we have historically, to efforts to market, continue to build community and reward. But yeah, 21 total, 16 on the build side. And member build includes everything related to building and releasing.
And then five outside of that.
[Bolon Soron]
And just to highlight too, on that shift of sorts, that’s why part of the Metis grant is dedicated to marketing and player rewards, for exactly that reason. Because that’s been our mindset and Metis’ as well. And they see that vision as well, which is why that is part of the actual structure of that grant.
All right. Yes, we are going to give Dreamer a break. Thank you, Dreamer, for so much information that you have shared with us.
We greatly appreciate it. And now we are going to jump into Hubert’s turn to just get an onslaught of questions. So it is time for Hubert hour.
All right, let’s do this.
[Hubert Cumberdale]
So I would say, I guess that second part of the question, asking like closer to the implementation, I assume that means implementation of crafting.
[Bolon Soron]
I’m assuming that also.
[Hubert Cumberdale]
Yeah, so I would say that, yes, there is plans for like crafting and the Scrub Fight system are meant to be very strongly linked. You know, depending on our release order and timing, there may be a period of time where we don’t necessarily release too many crafting ingredients if we don’t have the crafting system ready yet, just so we don’t have kind of too much inflation of tokens that don’t have a use yet. So I guess that it’s going to kind of be dependent on that.
But in general, I would say, yes, I mean, the Scrub Fight system, and in terms of like the overall gameplay loop of like where we want the game to end up at, is, you know, you’ll be spending the majority of your time when you’re like trying to do combat content, doing Scrub Fight type things, everything that’s kind of related to that. And then you’d be in the process like gathering loot that would be useful for crafting or maybe potentially also just be farming for some rare equipment that may be droppable from specific enemies in those fights or like events in those fights. But, yeah, so you’d be doing that, then you’d be going, you know, either if you’re a crafter, you’d maybe use those ingredients for crafting or you would potentially sell those to others who are crafting and, you know, that would be equipment being crafted and whatnot as well.
So and then beyond that, there’s always going to be, you know, the harder fights that have kind of more elite gear and those would be the Void Hunts. Those will also be around still and, you know, a source for getting like high-end equipment and, you know, other, you know, more of a challenge as well. So hopefully that kind of explains like the general approach.
But, yeah, we just also don’t want to be a little bit careful about doing too much with the minting tokens too early.
[Bolon Soron]
Perfect. Thank you, sir. Can you discuss the thought process behind having players buy lower level weapons from a shop rather than having those weapons drop from hunts, quests, etc.
And what happens to the gold that is used to buy them?
[Hubert Cumberdale]
Sure. So, yeah, the gold that gets used would be burned. So just 100% burned is our plan for that right now.
The, I guess, the thought process behind doing it that way. I mean, you get gold from doing questing, from selling some ingredients, things like that. Like those are all kind of gold itself is kind of like a proof of gameplay to an extent.
And so I think that it is gameplay related. It’s just by doing it with a gold shop, it also allows us to have the value of the equipment kind of follow the similar approaches like what we use for the gold vendor right now, where prices can vary based on popularity and whatnot. So we do plan to do that, which should kind of give the equipment a little bit more of a variable value.
And the intent with the equipment is to kind of be like the bare minimum equipment as far as what you might need to be able to be successful. So if you want better equipment, it would need to come from other gameplay like Void Hunts. So that’s kind of the design approach.
I think it’s kind of pretty standard for most games to have kind of the bare minimum equipment as something that you can just buy with the resource that you gather through gameplay. But if you want the best gear, you have to get it from more challenging means. So that’s kind of the same approach we’re taking here.
[Bolon Soron]
Cool. Thank you, sir. How is the team going to reconcile magical accuracy on melee units?
For example, if my knight has stun, which seems like it would be a magical attack, will his accuracy with stun be very low or will stun change between being a physical and magical attack based on the hero that has it?
[Hubert Cumberdale]
So I guess first off, I would say that stun by itself is not necessarily considered magical. So I don’t think… There is one attack that is considered magical on the knight, I believe.
And that would be the challenge, the taunt ability. But besides that one, the rest are all physical. So I guess in general, with magic accuracy and how that works, we’re pretty aware of how weapons are set up.
Everything is kind of thought through in terms of, alright, this is a weapon used for a physical class, we’re going to use the physical accuracy. There aren’t going to be too many cases where you are jumping between using both physical and magical accuracy. But I think there are a few classes where we’re going to have to tackle that kind of head on and we may have weapons that are more specifically designed to be used by those classes.
I think the one example that comes to mind that’s very clear is spellbow. We likely will have bows that are kind of tuned differently than bows that an archer might use. That would be more for spellbows.
[Bolon Soron]
Just to hone in a little more, I’m guessing they were referring to the trait stun and how that might interact. Or all traits for that matter. Traits.
[Hubert Cumberdale]
Traits, the way those work is they will use whichever of the two between attack and spell. If it’s using attack, it’s also going to be using physical accuracy. It uses whichever of the two is higher for that hero.
So if it’s a mage, then it’s going to be using spell, it’ll be using magic accuracy. If it’s a knight, it’s going to be using attack and physical accuracy. So that’s kind of how that’s set up.
Hopefully that makes sense. It should be picking whatever’s better.
[Bolon Soron]
I think that makes a lot of sense. I would like to petition for it to pick whichever one’s worse. I think it would be funnier, but that’s fair.
Awesome. Let’s see, talking about pet combat skills. The team has stated that there will be 70 plus combat pet skills.
Does each level of rarity count as a separate skill or are there 70 skill categories with various levels of rarity for a potential total of 200 plus skill and rarity combinations?
[Hubert Cumberdale]
So the second one, there are 70… Where did my list go? I was on it and then I went away from it because of these other questions.
Where did it go? Yeah, so there’s about 70 combat bonus categories. Among those, there are…
There it is. Let’s see, there are 27 that fit within all three categories of star level. Then from there…
Let’s see. It’s like about 31 or so. I’m bad at doing very quick math.
31 about that are within the category of 2 and 3 stars. And then beyond that, there are about… Let’s say 16 that are only reserved for the 3 star bonuses.
So yeah. And actually the number is more than 70. It looks like total right now we have is 78 different bonuses.
And it’s possible that one or two of these might… We might add something, we might remove something before it’s all released. But that’s where it’s at.
So I guess you can do the math to say how many… If you’re doing it by star level, I mean it’s… For example, I think there was a question that wanted the name of one of these too.
[Bolon Soron]
That was my question, yeah.
[Hubert Cumberdale]
So let’s see. Say… I’m just going to pick a random one.
[Bolon Soron]
Even though y’all didn’t win the vote for Pet Combat Alpha, we’ll still give you a little.
[Hubert Cumberdale]
So there’s one called Arcane Shell. That one has three different… Like that one exists within all three categories.
So you could get that with a level 1 star combat bonus, or a level 3 or level 2. And those will give different ranges of the effect that that does. There’s another one called Lick Wounds.
That only is a 2 star or a 3 star. So you’ll never see that on a 1 star combat bonus, but you could get it from 2 or 3. And then there’s a bunch of other ones that I’ll refrain from saying more on.
That are just going to be… You can only see those if it’s a 3 star bonus.
[Bolon Soron]
Awesome. Very nice. Thank you, Hubert.
That has been, well I guess another alpha drop for today’s AMA. You’re all welcome. Even though you lost the poll vote.
You know, you gotta vote. You gotta go vote. Alright, let’s see.
I know tournaments are farther away, but with the RNG aspect of the game, has any thought been given to best of three rounds?
[Hubert Cumberdale]
Yeah, we have thought about it. I don’t think we are implementing that from the start. But I think it’s something that we could add if there’s high demand for it.
I think right now we’re just focused on optimizing the single round experience first. And seeing what we can do with that. But it’s going to kind of depend on…
With PvP it’s going to be a little bit different. Because it’s heroes versus heroes. Their HP levels and their stats are a little bit more normal.
Compared to the Void Hunt enemies that have kind of jacked up HP. And some of their stats are fairly high. So the time per fight should be reduced.
But there’s going to need to be a balance there of how long does a normal fight take. If we do best of three, how long would that actually take to get through best of five and so on. So we’ll need to be aware of that.
And that will probably drive some of our decision making there. But again, if there’s demand for it, speak up. And I don’t think that would be too hard for us to add down the road.
[Bolon Soron]
Thanks. Thank you sir. I’m just hitting you with every possible topic today.
We’ve hit all of the various options. And now we’re going to hit another one. Expeditions.
Since expeditions are basically staking heroes. Any thoughts on once auto leveling is released. Having an option to lock the heroes for a longer period of time.
And actually lock them and say that you cannot withdraw them for X amount of time. And in return for that you would get either added bonus to your rewards, more XP, whatever the case may be.
[Hubert Cumberdale]
Yeah, that’s an interesting question and idea. I think there’s kind of a technical issue that’s associated with that. If we were to do that we would also need to add some restrictions that I don’t think people would like.
Or it would just be exploitable. Which would be to not allow you to cancel your power ups once you’ve done this. Because everything is tied to your power ups.
If you don’t have it with expeditions you can’t use expeditions. So if you were to just go and cancel the power ups then that would be a way to bypass the one year lock. If we were to allow you to do that.
Or if you did an early withdrawal of your Jeweler funds that would do the same thing. So that would also be kind of another angle. So that would be a question of do we allow that exploit angle to exist.
Or do we close that and just be more restrictive. And since you chose to do this you also can’t early withdraw. You can’t cancel power ups.
I don’t know that I’d want us to go down that route. But I think that would kind of be necessary if we were to do something like that. So I’m not sure.
I don’t think we would. And also just doing something where it doubles the rewards and what not. That also has some impacts to the economy that we’d want to really consider in advance.
So I don’t see it happening right away. I think it’s something we can consider down the road. But at least you have a little bit more context as to why we might not want to do that.
[Bolon Soron]
Awesome. Thank you, thank you. Got another new topic for you.
We’ve talked about how matchmaking in PvP requires a critical mass player base. As well as a lot of other factors as well. Thoughts on having matchmaking with either both players and bots or even just bots to potentially make it more accessible to players with low level heroes in particular?
[Hubert Cumberdale]
Yeah, I think we would need to make sure our AI is in a good spot for that. And I don’t know that it necessarily is. Especially if we’re talking like you’d be fighting against random teams that other people have used.
Or if we’re designing it ourselves. We haven’t really been building an auto matchmaking AI based system so far. I think with just private matches, at least in the beginning, there is definitely going to be an option for people to fight at low levels.
And I think it may be more interesting than you think to do so. We are going to be providing equipment that will allow you to, for those low level heroes, you can buy that and equip that. Which that equipment is also intended for when we get to scrub fights for use on the low level, doing low level scrub fights there.
Yeah, I mean, to the question of do we have a critical mass of players for PvP, I think we’re going to do what we can with our marketing efforts, utilizing the funding that we are receiving from Metis to kind of incentivize some of that. And we have a lot of different ideas to kind of help make it interesting that we haven’t really been talking about too much yet. So I think we’re going to see how things go.
And I think it’s going to be something that just continues to evolve as we proceed forward. I think using kind of duels as an example, like the first duel season versus now, there’s a huge number of differences there as well. So even if we don’t have something like that initially, I think we could see different modes kind of come into being as we kind of progress and lay the foundation down.
[Bolon Soron]
Awesome. Thank you, sir. Going to Divine Essence for the next topic to touch on.
When the Reset to Level 1 feature gets implemented, thoughts on having it possible only for Gen 0s to also add a summoning stone while doing so?
[Hubert Cumberdale]
Yeah, that would be kind of tricky to do. It’s possible, but we’d have to add new tracking for every hero just so that we could do that specifically for Gen 0s. Because right now we’re not tracking the specific stone that was used.
And also if it was a Chaos Stone, for example, we’re not tracking which stats were augmented by that. So it’s possible to kind of add that tracking if we needed to. But it does kind of have a lot of knock-on effects to a lot of the infrastructure that we’ve already built and have been building for PvP as well.
So the implications of doing that are pretty high. And as far as like, should we do that? I mean, Gen 0s have a lot of merit on their own in terms of their summoning capacity.
And there’s nothing below rare in rarity on them. So I think they do already have some unique benefits to them already. And there’s more that we have coming as well for them too.
So I don’t know that it’s really necessary for us to kind of put in the effort and change our whole infrastructure to do that with what they already can do. They may not be the best combatants that can be created since they have all basic genes and whatnot. They’re not going to have the more advanced combat genes or anything like that.
But I think they’re still pretty viable as is. So probably not going to do that just for the amount of effort it would take.
[Bolon Soron]
Thank you, Hubert. We’re going to grab one more because it has to do with Divine Essence anyway. And then we will wrap up for today and save these last few questions for next week.
When rerolling a single level up in the Divine Essence system, if you already used a crystal on that level up, will you need to use a new one?
[Hubert Cumberdale]
No. So level rerolls of the same level up will use exactly the same parameters that you had done before. So you won’t be able to change what received the guaranteed bonus, what received the two boons, what crystal you used.
It’ll use all the same parameters. It’s just going to remove whatever stats you gained from the previous attempt and replace them with whatever the new attempt would be using the crystal that you had.
[Bolon Soron]
Awesome. I appreciate it. And actually, I’m going to slip one last one in.
Sorry, I saw this one. It’s Expeditions related, and it should be pretty quick. Will Expeditions stop questing if one hero in that Expedition is ready to level up?
And more specifically, will there be an option to have it do that?
[Hubert Cumberdale]
So no, not right now. It’ll just keep going, and you’ll have to process all of them up to all the iterations that you have available. So if they got the experience they needed at iteration one and you had like 20 worth of time, it’d been like a month or something.
Yeah, all that time will be experience not gained. When the auto-leveling system is set up, then that should take care of that. But until then, you may want to be a little bit more aware of how soon your heroes are going to level up if you want to level them up as quickly as you can.
But yeah, there won’t be any option to stop it right now.
[Bolon Soron]
Thank you, sir. Appreciate you snagging that last one for me. And the last couple of questions that we did not get to, we will save for next week when we are back.
Same bat time, same bat place next week. So we will jump into our wrap-up here. I’m going to nominate Dreamer to bullish us because he missed last week’s AMA, and so now we get to make him bullish us.
So we’ll go to him last. I’ll just say, as always, thank you, everybody, for tuning in. Thank you to everybody who will be listening to this later.
Appreciate you guys taking the time out of your day to hop up here and answer all of these questions. Thank you to everybody who submits questions. Please make sure to keep them coming, talk.defikingdoms.com or the AMA Questions channel in our Discord. Make sure to keep an eye out on YouTube for our… or not YouTube, sorry, we’re on YouTube now. Make sure to keep an eye out on Twitter for our next teaser for the results of that poll.
And looking forward, as always, to seeing you all again next week. Let’s go over to Winston. Any final thoughts, Winston?
[Winston Jazzhands]
Yeah, thanks, everybody, for joining us. Really appreciate all the excitement and the players. Couldn’t do it without you guys, so thanks for your patience and waiting for all this stuff.
It’s wild that Expeditions is so close. It’s wild. Really exciting.
Thank you. Thanks for hanging out with us.
[Bolon Soron]
Over to you, Magnus.
[Magnus Ironroot]
Hey, everybody. Yeah, just excited to be over on the PvP. Getting super close to Expeditions launch.
So yeah, I hope that ushers in a new layer of convenience for you guys in managing Allegiance. That’s it for me. Thanks, sir.
[Bolon Soron]
Hubert, since you haven’t talked in so long.
[Hubert Cumberdale]
So long. Yeah, thanks for all the questions, guys. Gave me a long Hubert hour today.
Also very excited to be getting across the finish line here on Expeditions and just to have the whole team fully focused on PvP. We still have a lot of work to do, but it’s all coming together really well. I hope you all are excited.
And I’ll pass it over to Dreamer.
[Dreamer]
Yeah, I won’t repeat a lot of what was just said, but guys, we got so much in the works. We always do. And sometimes there’s some longer delays in between releases, but we try to make sure they are the best they can be.
So thank you to everybody that has been supporting us. Thank you to the team that is continuing to build and not just to deliver the bare minimum, but try to go above and beyond. We constantly get feedback from our partners that we are very refined and not only responsive verbally, but responsive in what we deliver and build.
And I think that’s why we do continue to get support that’s measured in dollars from people out there that want to work with us. And thank you to everybody that showed support, not only for DeFi Kingdoms, but everything that we’re exposed to, like Karate Combat and IFC. There are many that came to the fight and enjoyed it and did see the co-marketing benefit, but also seeing the value of all of us extending and growing our presence and our support and our names.
It allows us to make sure we carry DeFi Kingdoms to the next level. I’m very excited for Coliseum, and we’ll continue on those teasers with that and everything linked to it. There are still some things you guys don’t know yet that we have not shared that are going to be very impactful.
So stay tuned. And with all of us, stay bullish. Thanks, everybody.
[Bolon Soron]
See you all next week.
