DeFi Kingdoms AMA 8/8/24 Summary and Transcript

Release of Trait Info:

Summary

Hosts: Bolon Soron, with key contributions from Magnus Ironroot, Hubert Cumberdale, Frisky Fox, Dreamer, and Winston Jazzhands.

Updates:

• Expeditions: Magnus reported that recent contract upgrades are complete, and the team is conducting final checks before deployment. The release is expected soon, pending successful final confirmations.
• Traits and Balancing: Hubert provided insights into updates to character traits, including significant changes like the overhaul of “Last Stand” and others. He also mentioned that updated graphics and information on these traits will be released shortly. (See graphics above)
• PvP and Colosseum: Dreamer and Fox emphasized that the team’s primary focus is on developing PvP features, particularly the Colosseum, which is expected to be a major addition and draw for competitive gameplay.

Questions:

• Question: “The Gore Axe has a trait of being heavy. Do all two-handed axes, including the loaner from the guild, have this trait, or is it specific to the Gore Axe?”
• Answer (Hubert Cumberdale): The “heavy” trait is standard for all two-handed axes, including the loaner from the guild. This means all such weapons will have reduced speed, making them slower in combat. Future two-handed axes available in the gold shop will also carry this trait, though there may be some variation in speed among different axes.
• Question: “Has the team considered doing ongoing airdrops for people that have staked their assets in the jeweler?”
• Answer (Bolon Soron): While the idea of ongoing airdrops for jeweler stakers has been discussed, it poses challenges since any airdrop, even of soulbound items, impacts the game’s economy. For example, giving away a soulbound greater crystal would reduce demand for purchasing greater crystals. While it’s not off the table, there are no current plans for ongoing airdrops, as the focus is on balancing the in-game economy.
• Question: “Can we get a simple toggle to disable selling this hero?”
• Answer (Bolon Soron): Although creating a simple toggle to disable hero selling seems straightforward, it requires a place to store that data. Currently, the game relies on on-chain storage, and off-chain storage solutions, which would make this feature possible, are not yet fully developed. Once off-chain storage for player-specific data is available, features like this could be implemented.
• Question: “Are there any thoughts on a teaser for yellow pet eggs and/or gold pet eggs?”
• Answer (Bolon Soron): Teasing yellow or gold pet eggs is not planned at the moment. The team wants to avoid creating false expectations, especially since these are not the current focus. The priority is on completing and polishing other aspects of the game, such as PvP and Expeditions. The team has learned from past experiences that teasing content too far in advance can lead to disappointment if the features are delayed or changed.
• Question: “Will Jewel play a role in swifter stamina recovery in the inn?”
• Answer (Hubert Cumberdale): While the concept of using Jewel for stamina recovery in an inn was considered early on, it is currently tied to land functionality, which is still under development. If the inn feature is implemented, there would likely be a fee for faster stamina recovery, but it could involve different tokens depending on the realm (e.g., Crystal, Jade). This idea remains a possibility, but it is not a current focus.
• Question: “Would it be possible or desirable in combat to add a percentage chance to kill when targeting, similarly to how accuracy works?”
• Answer (Hubert Cumberdale): Implementing a percentage chance to kill in combat is not a priority. The idea could clutter the combat interface, making it more complex and less user-friendly. However, the team is interested in adding a chance to apply status effects in combat, which could enhance strategy without overwhelming players with too much information. This feature is seen as a useful addition, especially with the introduction of traits and resistances.

Closing Remarks:

The session wrapped up with the team expressing excitement about the upcoming releases, particularly Expeditions and PvP. The hosts reassured the community that they are committed to delivering innovative and engaging features, with a focus on balancing development priorities to ensure a smooth gaming experience for all players.

Transcript

[Bolon Soron]
Hello everybody and welcome to this week’s AMA with DeFi Kingdoms. The answer to the question when is now, if you were asking when AMA, the answer is now. As always excited to be here for another great round of AMA fun.

We will have Dreamer here with us here in just a minute as well but we are going to go ahead and kick things off. Before we jump into updates and then questions after that, I just wanted to take a minute and say welcome back Fox, good to see you and hope your travels went well. If you have anything you want to share, feel free.

No, just, you know, it’s strange to say that I’m back because I’ve actually been here the whole time but obviously in another time zone but still been, you know, sort of doing all of the coding world stuff that I do but it is nice to be back here on AMAs and saying hi to everyone and answering questions again. So yeah, thanks, happy to be back. Yeah, welcome home would be a more accurate statement.

Yes, indeed, indeed. All right, so jumping into some updates. First things first, we are going to jump over to Magnus to talk about Expeditions.

[Magnus Ironroot]
Hey everybody, so if you guys noticed from yesterday we were doing some contract upgrades. It took us a little bit longer than we planned on but we got them all deployed. Currently doing some main net testings, making sure everything’s looking good, getting the right rewards, just checking all that.

So Winston’s been working hard at that but everything in terms of contracts are deployed and yeah, just apologies for all the issues with that yesterday but we got that squared away and yeah, it all goes well. If Winston gives us the green light, we’ll be deploying Expeditions today. So yeah, still waiting on kind of the final confirmations and stuff but yeah, just stay tuned for more on that.

[Bolon Soron]
Awesome, awesome. Thank you, Magnus. Super excited for that release tentatively a little later today.

Speaking of really cool things and releases and some other things that are coming up, I wanted to kick the mic over to Hubert to talk about what’s coming next.

[Hubert Cumberdale]
Oh my goodness, let me see. So I forgot what was on. Oh yes, that.

That. Sorry, I had to go double check our little notepad. Hey guys.

Yes, so we will also be… Man, I really feel unprepared for this but we have a lovely little graphic to share with you. We’re basically very close to being done with our balancing of traits and while it’s still possible that things might change a little bit more before they’re released, we feel like it’s in a good enough spot to where we can kind of release an updated list of how those traits work.

Some of them have changed, some have not really changed since we initially released those so I guess be on the lookout for a graphic. I’m not sure what exactly that was going to… where…

if it’s after this AMA or now but there should be a graphic soon.

[Bolon Soron]
So I’m going to throw them up on the AMA right now with the disclaimer that you probably aren’t going to be able to read them very well. I am going to both Discord announce and tweet them immediately following the AMA. So here’s a preview but don’t stress it.

Here’s the passives. Keyword, I don’t know if you want to say anything about them as they’re shown but feel free if you do.

[Hubert Cumberdale]
Let’s see, we did change last stand quite a bit. So there’s a little bit more text there. Good luck reading it in this short period of time while it’s visible.

And let’s see, I think a few other things have been adjusted. Foresight I think got a little bit of a nerf and let’s see, I think that’s all. Everything else I’m not sure it changed too much.

And for the active traits, you can see all the icons we got for all of those. Great work from SecondBestDad on those I believe and on the animations for those that was our artist InkMouth who did the visual effects for those when you see those. Let’s see, is there anything else about this?

We also made some adjustments to some of these that like Exhaust, Daze, Explosion. Explosion was one that changed quite a bit and Stun as well like the damage that those deal were adjusted somewhat and I think let’s see the rest of them. I’m not sure how much those other ones changed.

[Bolon Soron]
Awesome, thank you. Hubert, I know those were probably hard to read. I know a lot of you probably just took screenshots which is fine but we will be posting those immediately after this AMA as well so don’t worry too much about it.

You will be able to see them, read them, download them, etc. Anything else you wanted to mention about traits?

[Hubert Cumberdale]
Just that I’m excited to have them. I’m not sure, I feel like there’s something I could say but I’m not sure if I should say it so I’m gonna not say anything.

[Bolon Soron]
That works for me. But yeah, as Hubert said, you know, still finalizing balance. Things can change of course but wanted to at least give you guys kind of an update on where they stand now.

And last but not least on the update front before we go into some questions, I’m going to throw it back to Frisky Fox. Yes, Duels. We’re like over halfway through season eight and it’s going to be over at I think on the 29th of this month.

I could be wrong, don’t quote me. But season nine is around the corner and we talked last time about how we were going to share the classes that are going to be boosted in advance so that players have time to prepare and start to create like their new teams or see if they want to make any purchases on the tavern for stuff that they want to like try to sort of like build. So I’m going to be releasing that in our Discord as an announcement after this AMA or maybe even during it if some of the questions aren’t for me then I’ll just be like, you can do it.

But yeah, stay tuned for that and the start date, let’s see. I also have a start date. It’s going to be two weeks after the other one closes and I should have this ready to go.

Let’s see. Okay, I don’t have it ready to go. Oh, it’s on the wrong editor window.

There it is. Okay, that is September 12th of this year. So season nine, September 12th and I will paste the list of the classes which I also have here.

So I’m excited. There’ll also hopefully be a couple minor tweaks and things but it’s not going to be anything major. As we’ve previously noted, most of our current resources and things are spent towards all the new and exciting things that are happening with PVP and expeditions and stuff like that.

So thank you and that’s all for me. Awesome. Thank you, Sir Fox.

Diving into some questions, we’re going to start out with one for Hubert. The Gore Axe has a trait of being heavy. Do all two-handed axes, including the loaner from the guild, have this trait or is it specific to the Gore Axe?

[Hubert Cumberdale]
Yeah, so for two-handed axes, it is kind of a standard that we’ve added for them. For them to be slow, so it should be applied for the loaner axe that you’re using right now. It will definitely be applied to the gold shop equipment that will be coming for all the axes that are available in there.

And yeah, just kind of a standard. I mean, it doesn’t mean that we might have some axes that are maybe a bit faster or even some that are even slower potentially. But in general, I think for most two-handed weapons now, we’re looking at kind of having that be kind of a standard thing if it’s kind of a heavy weapon.

[Bolon Soron]
And similarly, same question for the speed debuff on Boc Knight Mail. Is the speed decrease a unique trait or do all heavy armors have that quality?

[Hubert Cumberdale]
For heavy armor, that is actually specific to that heavy armor specifically and it was meant to kind of counterbalance the effect that it had to an extent where you could get extra initiative for blocking. So that is just for that. Other heavy armor won’t have it like by default as a general design approach, but that’s not to say that it won’t happen again.

[Bolon Soron]
Perfect. Thank you, Hubert. Let’s see, this one I’m going to ask myself a question.

Has the team considered doing airdrops ongoing for people that have staked their in the jeweler? Yes, we have. So one thing that was part of this question is, you know, it doesn’t have to be something economy impacting if, you know, it’s like a soulbound item or something like that.

The first part of that, I’ll just say like even soulbound stuff is economy impacting. You know, if we put out like a soulbound version of a greater crystal, well, anybody using that doesn’t need to buy a greater crystal to use it. So it does still impact the economy.

As far as like the ongoing airdrops for the jeweler goes, it is something that we’ve talked about. It’s not something that’s off the table, but realistically, anything that we do will be economy impacting. And so, you know, being staked in the jeweler already gives you multiple perks in terms of obviously governance voting, but also, you know, fee sharing and then power ups are a really big part of that.

Of course, we have expeditions tentatively coming up today, which need power up. So it’s not something that we’re opposed to, but it’s not something that we have plans currently to have ongoing airdrops. Fox, I saw your camera, so I assume you want to stop.

Yes, it’s kind of a nice way to raise your hand, just flip your camera on. But no, I agree with everything you said. And also just sort of wanted to point out that, you know, I think, what was it a few months ago when we did the layer zero airdrop, that also like looked at the jeweler.

And that’s sort of like an easy thing that we can do because we have all that actually pulled a ton of analytics and then like a ton of data about the jeweler. And we have an analytics database that basically tracks everybody’s balance every single day. And so that made it easy to do some of the other like airdrops that we just did that we’re like looking retroactively as well.

So having that data, it just makes it sort of like an easy and fast go to if we do things like airdrops and other kinds of like events and whatever contest that need that data is there. So it for sure is one of the perks of that along with all the others. And I’m really stoked with that system.

So it was very, very useful for the recent airdrops. And also I think I pulled like, sorry, like 60 million rows worth of data or something for some of those. It took so long to like make all those things work.

But it’s really cool having that data there. Yeah. And I do think it’s fair to say like when we have opportunities like that, the jeweler is a good place for those.

So there’s always options. Let’s see. I am actually going to take this next question as well.

Kind of speaking for beetle dude who is not with us today. He’s doing some traveling himself. Can we get a simple disable selling this hero toggle?

So I’m actually going to ultimately reference this a few times for a couple other questions as well. But the button itself could be simple. However, there has to be somewhere to store that information.

And right now we really don’t have off-chain storage. It’s all on-chain storage. It is something that we’ve kind of been building out because of combat.

So, you know, when you do that second sign on stage for combat, essentially what you’re doing is like telling our database what 0x belongs to your profile. So as off-chain storage expands, things like this do become more options. But at the moment, we just don’t have a storage place to save that data.

For any of you devs, if I said any of that wrong, please feel free to correct me. But I think I got it right. I hear no corrections.

All right. And it’s just semantics. We store tons of off-chain data for our like operations and things, but not for gameplay.

Yeah, not player data or player. Yeah. Yeah.

Thank you, Fox. Go back to Hubert here for a second. How many class codices are anticipated to be released by end of year?

Which there’s two ways to read that question. So I’ll let you take it from there.

[Hubert Cumberdale]
Okay. Yeah. Let’s see.

So if we take that question to mean like implemented into the combat engine, I would say that I’m hopeful we have at least one more before the end of the year. We have our focus very like occupied with PVP, but I’m hopeful that we’re going to be able to squeeze in at least at least one more class. We’ll see.

That’s going to be dependent on us getting traits and combat bonuses done first, which we’re just put in front of another class just to have those done since they impact every class. And so, yeah, I’ll say at least one more. It’s hard to say, you know, we can get on a roll and maybe be able to have more than that.

But also we want to make sure we’re prioritizing all the things that we need to get done for PVP. So don’t want to make too big a promise on that front. And if we’re talking about this new codices in terms of ones that like classes that don’t have any released codices for you to look at and speculate about, we have one that we’ll be releasing very soon here.

So there’s that. And, you know, Workhorse is moving right along to the next advanced class to add a codex for as well. So I’m hopeful that we’ll at least have this really soon coming one and one more at least.

But I could see us doing even more than that. Just kind of depends on how things go.

[Bolon Soron]
Cool. Thank you, sir. Thoughts on a teaser for yellow pet eggs and or gold pet eggs?

I’m actually going to kick that one off as well. Realistically, they’re just not our priority right now. So while there is sometimes some work on the background or in the background going on on them, honestly, if we start teasing them, it’s just going to seem like we’re working on them, despite the fact that we can say a million times that we are not working on them.

So at this time, not really. So they are definitely not forgotten, but they are not our priority right now. We’ve got the priority list out.

I think everybody knows PVP is a big one. We’ll be able to cross expeditions off here shortly, which is great progress. But realistically, until we’re like focused on them and making significant progress on them.

We talked about it a couple of weeks ago where we don’t want to tease stuff six months in advance or eight months in advance or whatever the case may be like. We don’t want to do teasers that far out. And realistically, until yellow pets are back in focus, it just doesn’t make sense to do teasers for them.

[Dreamer]
I mean, we’d like to tease everything that you guys are mean when we do. There are things that like we’re in the idea generation phase. It’s like, yeah, this is really cool.

Let’s talk about what we’re thinking about. And then as we’re working through it, like, OK, so we make it best. We have to do A, B and C.

It’s like you didn’t say that a year and a half ago when you were thinking about it. And we understand it’s kind of hard. When we get really excited, we talk about things and they change.

That doesn’t feel good. So we’re trying to, over time, find the balance. And we’re probably always going to be a little too conservative, a little too loose when we get overexcited.

But what we’ve learned is if we do something that we know we are not prioritizing right now or in the very near future, it’s just not fair. You get too excited. You don’t see it progress.

And then it changes. So I think with pets, that is something that’s a lot of fun, a lot of fun, a lot of good art there. It doesn’t provide incremental utility, but there’s still so many eggs out there to hatch.

And we want those to come out. And they will be fun and unique. And when we get to that point, it’ll be awesome.

But we don’t want to mislead you that we’re near that point now. So bear with us a little bit on the communication. We’re trying to, especially in the last six months, make sure these AMAs are full of what we’re working on now, all the alpha and the teasing and the brainstorming.

And that seemed to work out pretty well. But yeah, I think in the past, when we come on, we’re like, a thousand things around us on our mind, but we can only do five. If we talk about anything other than the five, it seems to have adverse effects.

So we’re trying to be a little more cautious.

[Bolon Soron]
Yes, it’s a constant balancing act. Question for you, Hubert. This one’s a bit of a throwback for you.

There’s mentioned in the docs that at some point there will be an inn where you can pay jewels to drastically increase heroes’ stamina recovery rate. The question itself is, how does jewel play a role in swifter stamina recovery in the inn? But I’m going to broaden that question to, do we still plan on later having inns and that kind of thing?

[Hubert Cumberdale]
Yeah, so I guess as far as will we still have inns or not, I would say that was a very early concept. And I think it’s still possible that we would do that. But it’s going to kind of come down to land functionality, I think.

And when we get to focusing on there, then we’ll start really defining what are the types of buildings we want people, landowners to be able to build and what functionality do we want to give to do that. So I think the concept of an inn was one of the ideas that we had, and I still think it’s a good one, but we just have to see if it still makes sense once we get to that point. So, and yeah, if we did do it, then there would be a fee associated with it.

And whether it’s I think that was written when Jewel was our only power token. So it’s possible that maybe Crystal or Jade or whatever the power token is on the realm that it’s on or so on, but it’s kind of really far out and outside of our focus right now. So it’s kind of hard to say anything definitive.

[Bolon Soron]
Yes, which I will just add as far as Jewel playing a role in swifter stamina recovery, not at the inn, but it does now with the rapid renewal powerup. So you can increase your stamina recovery rate now. All right, let’s see.

Any other, or are there plans from the team regarding any future mini games within DFA like Duels?

[Hubert Cumberdale]
Is that a me question?

[Bolon Soron]
It is now, sure.

[Hubert Cumberdale]
Oh, okay.

[Bolon Soron]
You volunteered.

[Hubert Cumberdale]
Let’s see. So, I mean, I think it’s certainly possible that we could have more mini games in the future. It’s not our focus right now.

Our focus is very much on PvP. And then, we have other combat content that we want to be building as well. So I think the majority of our team has a lot of, our focus is just going to be in that direction.

But down the road, it’s always possible that we could add another mini game here or there.

[Bolon Soron]
Go ahead, Fox. You know, one of the cool things about Web3, and I like to look at like XC Infinity as a pretty good example that’s out there. I think a lot of people are familiar with them.

They actually have a lot of like little spinoff or like small like mini games and things. Some of which have been built by the community, I think, could be wrong. But, you know, that’s one of the cool things about Web3 is that other people out there can build things.

We’ve had stuff for artists. We’ve had like Arena and there’s been other like crossover things. You know, I think it would be really, really cool to see more and more of those built, not just by us, but also by others out there.

And then, you know, like we could showcase those on our like sites and things. And the cool thing is that you have instant access to a player base that would pretty much all probably like want to go check it out. And also you can let them bring their assets with them because they own their assets and it’s on the blockchain and it’s an open ledger.

So, I mean, I’ve had like a million ideas for like mini games. I’ve even started some of them just on the weekends or things just like for fun. But there’s so many things out there you can do with this kind of IP that just basically owned like you guys own your heroes, you know, like you own your assets and that’s such a huge thing out there for this type of stuff.

So I think there’s a lot of opportunities in the future.

[Dreamer]
And when we look at when Duels first came out, we were at a point in time when the idea of combat being live, even in a testing environment was so far away. There’s so much we had to do. And it would be unfortunate if it required years for there to be something a little bit more playable than the criticism we were getting that like questing alone isn’t a game, right?

DFK is not a game. So we’re always listening to input and among that input, there’s some things where like there’s a way we can address this without sacrificing our primary priorities. And with Duels, you know, it was designed to be very on-chain heavy and solve some problems like on-chain rewards and other things that we’d have to get to eventually, but now so that we could gather as much information while also being fully playable.

Not to the extent of the game that we’ve seen now unfold that there’s a lot more in depth in terms of strategy and real-time actions, but it’s been wildly successful. We’ve learned a lot. I think you guys have enjoyed it.

It also paved the way for others to see that, you know, using the Raffle ticket program, essentially, launching a mini-game can be monetizable and you’re able to use the IP in whatever way you want, whether they’re heroes or pets, and create a fun game. DFK Duels is meant to be the example of that. Are we, Kingdom Studios, going to make 20 different mini-games of our own rather than one really strong flagship game?

Probably not, unless things change very materially in terms of our like ability to put things out and have like a whole mini-game sub-team, which who knows? The next bull market, who knows what could happen? But I think the better option is kind of what Fox was hinting to.

If you look at old-school games that are simple to make and there’s even a lot of platforms that you kind of plug in your IP and launch, you can make like a Frogger with the bun bun, you can make some pretty cool pet-based games, you can make like a Tamagotchi type thing where it’s pretty simple and fun and you just use the IP that we have out there for you. So maybe in this market it’s hard to see that vision, maybe in the last couple years it’s been hard, but we do focus, we do hope that in the future there will be teams out there, especially some smaller indie game builders that might look at DeFi Kingdoms as a platform to build and launch their own games or a subset of existing games on other chains. That’s just a possibility for a time different than the one we’re in where we’re trying to build and give legs to the flagship game as best as we can that could attract other builders to collaborate with.

So it could end up being a tomorrow thing where a small team gets together and they say, let’s start doing little mini-games and we would fully support those. Or it could be, you know, Colosseum comes out, we have a bunch of success, other big features like travel and others come out, and then down the road it happens. Whenever it happens, we’ll welcome it, we hope for that to be a part of DeFi Kingdoms, but from our perspective our excess resources have so many other priorities than additional mini-games.

Although that would be fun if we just took a year and said let’s build like 10 different mini-games, but unfortunately the flagship game wouldn’t progress and that’s our primary focus.

[Bolon Soron]
Awesome, thank you gentlemen, appreciate you guys. Jumping over to Magnus for a second, heroes that are on expeditions, are you able to list for rent for summonings and are you able to duel with them?

[Magnus Ironroot]
Yeah, so this is a pretty quick answer. The answer to both is yes, it’s going to be the same restrictions whether it’s an expedition or a quest. So if you can do it on questing or while you’re questing, you can also do it while you’re on an expedition as well.

Awesome, thank you sir.

[Bolon Soron]
Let’s see, I’m going to jump this one over to Dreamer to kick off. Are there any plans to change the UI with the upcoming PvP launch?

[Dreamer]
I’ll invite anybody else to add to this as well. I interpret this question a few different ways. One is the obvious way of will PvP have its own landing page UI realm and everything.

I think many of us have seen the teased portions in our trailer to show the Colosseum coming out of the ocean with islands around it and different backgrounds. So that user interface will be unique to Colosseum. There will be unique interiors, unique music and everything.

A lot of that’s out there. A lot of it hasn’t been shown as well. Very excited about that.

Another way to interpret this question is, is there going to be an alternative user interface for a gamer or for somebody coming in that just wants to play the game to make it simple? And whether or not that was the intention of the question, I interpret it that way because that’s been a big topic of discussion. The main discussion is, feedback that we have is as we increase the amount of features in the game, each feature made in a point in time that is different from the previous one to a new player can be quite daunting.

We can solve this by tutorials. We can solve this by micro-influencers in the community putting out awesome content like you all do. We can solve it in a number of different ways.

One of those ways is to consider the different people coming for different reasons and trying to cater to them for their reasons. So if you’re coming in and just trying to access the gamified DeFi stuff, where you want to participate in deep endgame economy stuff with summoning and dark summoning and min-maxing, or if you’re coming in just because you want to get some heroes and hop on the Colosseum, eventually we’ll have to think through all these different target audiences and make sure there’s a safe and focused area for them to operate in.

Now it’s likely a problem long term for us to get to. We can break down these barriers in different ways, but I personally would love to see a little bit more of a streamlined flow for those that only want to play the game, that only want very simplicity in the onboarding process, cutting out everything they don’t need to know day one, but have it form as a hook to dive into the full realms, dive into the deep strategy. So that’s something we’re thinking of when we get to actually implementing something is a little less clear because we can’t stop all of our development to get to that, but I would say as PvP progresses, as phase one comes out, we’re in phase two, sometime in the next year, I would like to see some improvements on the onboarding process and experience for new and returning players.

It just might come in different forms and we’re discussing currently what some of those would be in terms of cost to build and how effective they would be on the other side. So important topic, two ways to answer that question. Hopefully those two answers suffice.

I don’t know if anybody has anything to add.

[Bolon Soron]
Okay, Fox looked like he was thinking, so I was waiting a second. I don’t know if I should say stuff. I always get in trouble for saying too much, but yeah, it is definitely on our minds.

If there’s a voice inside of you that says, maybe should I say this? It’s probably it. Exactly, exactly.

I’ll just say, yeah, it’s a thing that we talked about. Awesome. Thank you, thank you.

Jumping back to Magnus for a second, can we talk about the Synapse Hero Bridge and any thoughts on looking for alternatives, etc., etc.?

[Magnus Ironroot]
Yeah, sure thing. So first off, I’ll say we’re in constant communication with Synapse internally regarding any stuck Hero or Equipment Bridge transactions. Just for context, one of the there’s usually a delay in getting those resolved is on the Synapse side of things, they need to be manually unstuck due to some of the design constraints around gas and things like that as part of the messaging protocol.

They have mentioned that they’re working on a V2 version of the messaging protocol, and I’ve put in requests pretty much anytime I talk to them for a decentralized message replay feature that some other messaging protocols have. Last I’ve heard, they’re still working on that V2 version, and I think they’re going to have some upgrade for to get that converted over, but that will greatly improve things once that’s out. But I haven’t had any updates to share on that yet.

As most of you know, we use Layer 0 V1 currently for our item bridge, and that does have the decentralized replay feature. For the DFT to Metis and Klaytn to Metis bridges to enable PVP, we’re planning to use the recently released Layer 0 V2 for those bridges, which does have that decentralized replay feature, and they’ve also made kind of like under the hood improvements to make it easier to launch on different chains and whatnot. It’s just kind of at the infrastructure level as well as security things.

So we’re going to be launching with that for PVP, and then there may be some changes that come to some of our other bridges as a result of that, but all that’s kind of TBD.

[Bolon Soron]
Go ahead, Fox. I just had a comment here too, but yeah, it’s, you know, I like Synapse. They’re like really good at their main stuff that they do.

For PVP, we were faced with the prospect of having to write a lot of new things for the bridging just because of the way that heroes will actually be stored on-chain. There’s a lot of efficiencies that we’ve added specifically for like Metis, and it’s really like pushed us to say, okay, here’s what we’ve learned, and let’s see if we can make it even better for this one. So we were faced with the prospect of sort of like rewriting a lot of our bridge stuff for heroes anyways.

We’re like, hey, this could be a good opportunity for us to explore like using layer zero and some of their new stuff that they’ve built into the v2 protocol. So we spoke with some of their team and got them to bring that to our chain on like the main net and on test net, and always like really nice to work with them and their team, and we wrote a lot of that to do that. So it’s sort of an experiment, but it’s been really cool, really interesting so far.

We’re always trying to like really push that envelope with the cross-chain sort of world. As all of you know, we have like our app is on multiple chains, and we have to try to keep those in sync. So layer zero v2 for the hero bridge, and it’s going to be really interesting and really cool to see how that works out.

Awesome, awesome. Thank you, gentlemen. Going back to Hubert for a few minutes here, so don’t go anywhere.

Thoughts on having, and the example was pets, but it could apply to other equipment as well. So currently, if you go to equip, you have to go to the hero first and then select the equipment. Any thoughts on having the opposite of that also be possible?

So you could be looking at a pet and I want to equip this pet, and then pull up the hero screen from there.

[Hubert Cumberdale]
Yeah, I really like that idea. In general, I like having there being, I guess, context for anything you’re doing in the game. Like if you’re wanting to deal with equipment and equip it, being able to, you know, if you’re looking at the equipment first, being able to just select it and then select the hero, I think would be a great addition.

Just kind of in general, there’s a lot of things we’ve been adding lately to just give you access to other parts of the game more simply from the menu you’re on. Like you’re able to, if you’re missing a room or something, you can quick buy just by clicking on it right there on the screen in most places. And just kind of in general, we’re trying to close all the gaps where there are places that we could do things like that and have there be kind of cross-referencing happening more.

So I definitely like that idea and I definitely think it belongs on Beatle’s list and that, you know, when that gets addressed, it’ll be hard to say. But, you know, Zip’s also always listening. I think he tends to pull things off the list sometimes, so we’ll see.

We’ll see when that happens.

[Bolon Soron]
All the lists. Sticking with you, Hubert, with pet combat bonuses coming at some point and traits, as we discussed earlier, also coming, I imagine heroes will become stronger relative to the current PvE encounters. When such features go live, do we plan to adjust the difficulty of the Void Hunts?

[Hubert Cumberdale]
It’s possible. I think right now, I, you know, even I think just yesterday, I was, you know, double checking with Sashay on his feelings about if we need to increase the difficulty with the traits coming soon-ish. And, you know, we decided at least for this, we’re going to keep it as is.

But we’ll keep watching and seeing how things go and it’s always possible we could kind of tweak things a bit once kind of people have gotten their hands on it and we’ve seen kind of more widespread usage. And then when it comes to like pet combat bonuses as well, we’ll have to see. You know, they are kind of designed to not be like an end-all be-all if you have this pet combat bonus you’re, you know, going to be able to always win.

Like we try to just make them, you know, balanced and additive and, you know, help improve your experience and your strategy, but not, you know, make it just a win button. So I think as long as we keep that balance pretty solid and tight, I mean, he still has to take an action to do it. I think it is possible we won’t need to make adjustments, but we’ll see.

We’ll see. You know, if we need to, we will.

[Bolon Soron]
Cool. When looking at the Squire’s Sword, for example, it has a DEX requirement of 15. What happens if you don’t meet that requirement and how much of a lift would it be to show the temporary Squire’s equipment on the hero paper doll view in Hunts?

[Hubert Cumberdale]
Let’s see. So for the second part of that question, I will just say that it probably isn’t that big of a lift, but we’re also not that far away from just being done with the temporary equipment. So I don’t think we’re going to spend the time to do that because soon the Squire’s equipment will be, I mean, I say soon, that’s a relative soon.

But around the time that PvP first releases, we should also have that equipment available. So then that part won’t really matter as much about just showing the temporary. So anyway, probably won’t be doing that.

On the first part of that question, if you don’t meet your DEX requirement on the sword, you can still equip it. It just means that your accuracy is going to be below the base accuracy of the weapon, depending on how far away your DEX is from it. So I think that weapon’s base accuracy is 90% if you’re at 15.

So if you’re like 14, I think it’s like 88% or 87. And then it drops down pretty quick if your DEX is lower than the requirement. So not really recommended, but you could do it.

[Bolon Soron]
Another one for you, Hewitt. Can we use Divine Essence to reset hero summons pretty please?

[Hubert Cumberdale]
Currently not on the plan, but you know, some things are always possible, I guess.

[Bolon Soron]
Would it be interesting to have unique special pets that drop only from Void Hunts or maybe Void Eggs that can be hatched the same way other eggs can?

[Hubert Cumberdale]
I mean, with us still having like yellow and gold eggs pending, I don’t know that it would really be a good idea for us to be adding even more eggs on top of that. I mean, it’s possible, and it could be interesting to do that, but I don’t see us doing that with everything else we have going on.

[Bolon Soron]
Thank you, thank you. Give you a break for just a minute. Actually, a couple of minutes.

I am going to speak for Beetle again, which is my favorite thing to do. A function to save wallets as contacts to not always have to manually paste in wallet addresses, such as at the barkeep, referring to my previous answer about storage. So again, as we build off like player-specific off-chain storage, that could become more of a viable option.

But right now, there just isn’t really a place for that to live, which also applies to the first half of the next question. Preset filtering for heroes is basically that same thing, where we need the off-chain per player storage to link to your profile, because right now it would basically store like in your browser, and then you clear your cache and it’s gone. So that’s not super helpful as a solution.

The second part of that question was having predefined ones for certain filtering and like separate buttons for basic classes, advanced classes, basic abilities, advanced abilities, that kind of thing. That one actually I happen to know is on Dr. Zipper’s list. So again, a lot of stuff going on, not saying that we’re going to get to it right away, but I know that is something that we talked about.

Actually, it came up in Discord a couple weeks ago, and Zip was talking about it a little bit. So that is one that could be interesting. Oh god, he heard me.

He heard me. We’re going to keep moving along now that Zip is here. Jumping over back to Dreamer for a second, with Klaytn Merger coming up and the launch of Kaia.

Kind of a few part question here. Any updates? Are we expecting to need to like relaunch Serendale?

Should players bridge their heroes to Crystal Veil to keep them safe? That kind of thing.

[Dreamer]
Yeah, so I will put a disclaimer out there before responding. We don’t control what they will ultimately do, but we can relay what they told us so far. We’ve definitely been in a holding pattern for a while now with Klaytn for the to-be-launched Kaia.

And what we know is that their current plans are pretty much, of all the options, the least disruptive for anybody currently on Clayton. It appears like they’re going to be using Klaytn as the core chain technology, and the partnering chain migrating to that chain with a rebrand of the token and maybe some adjustments to the underlying code that has been communicated would not require a relaunch of all contracts. Now, their view is going to be different from ours, because whatever they decide to do, once it’s in testing and we review it, we might find that for our very complex offering, it will require something.

But at least with what we know now, we don’t anticipate that. Hopefully, it’ll be quite seamless or at least minimize the pain, but it does not appear to be a full redeployment of everything on a complete new chain, a chain ID, and figuring out bridges from old chain to new and all that madness. It seems like what we’ve been told so far is that it should be quite easy for us to operate in the to-be-rebranded and launched Kaia product.

But again, the disclaimer is this is only what we know. If tomorrow came out and we’re like, man, they’re doing A, B, and C actually. Now we have to change.

We will update you. But that’s as best as we can answer the question, which is really for another team. We’re takers of what they decide to do, and they do consider our input and our request, which we’ve been very vocal about, as it would be quite disruptive to have to redo and relaunch everything.

If we were going that direction, there would likely be focus around safety. I think the question then, should we move everything off to keep it safe? I don’t think the lack of safety is a concern right now.

I think it’s more like they wouldn’t just abruptly be like, off. But I think it’s more the complexity and the time required for us to migrate is what we’re concerned with. And as of right now, it doesn’t look like that’s a thing.

But Fox, anything to add there? I know that we asked a lot of questions a few months ago. Did you want to correct or add anything to my comments?

[Bolon Soron]
No, that’s exactly right. We asked all these exact same questions as what you guys are asking six months ago or something when they were first talking about it. And we’re telling you guys what they told us.

We always are trying to look ahead for these types of things. And so as things change, if they change, we’ll for sure let you guys know as soon as we can. But for now, I’m not really…

I would say there’s no current need for you to do anything with the existing plans as they are. So they’ve tried to make it be as seamless as possible for the users and for the apps that are on there.

[Dreamer]
And obviously, as things change, we’ll let you know. So even though we’re all waiting, I’m really excited for when they are ready, because the partnership is particularly interesting because of the parent company of Ventia, if that’s the right way. I don’t know their exact structure, but they’re very well connected to a messaging app that is popular in Japan called Line, who has some interesting IP, could become some collaboration options in the future, maybe with some messages, maybe with messaging, who knows?

Sky’s the limit. But they’re trying to figure out their base product and merger, after which there’s an access to the world that consumes RPG games, that is moving closer to being comfortable with crypto, and it could be a long term play. Initially, a big part of the decision was we expand our exposure to a user base and a team completely outside of what’s in the direct scope of Avalanche and not an immediate competitor.

Then Klaytn had a number of things happen, and we’ve been waiting, but I am confident that with this merger, if it goes well, and the partnerships that they have, maybe that long term marketing play could come to fruition with this through the Line connection, through the geographical focus of Japan and Vietnam, who have traditionally been big in the gaming space, as well as the player in space. So fingers crossed, hoping for that. We have reduced costs a ton on Serendale with working with the Klaytn teams, primarily on RPCs and a few others.

So it would be great to start building a little bit more there when some of this gets a little bit more clear.

[Bolon Soron]
Thank you. And speaking of, we did an announcement in the tweet, but if you’ve not updated your Serendale RPC URL, please do so. Jumping back to Hubert, thoughts on being able to delegate power-ups between wallets, and if so, any thoughts on when?

[Hubert Cumberdale]
Yeah, so this is something that we were talking about doing. We’ve talked about this in the past, especially when we were first integrating Halliday. We were looking at if people wanted to switch wallets, but they have their dual locked up, it makes it a little bit difficult to do that.

So yeah, I think in general, we have kind of a concept of delegation that we’re comfortable with. As far as when we would actually focus on doing that, though, that’s harder to say. I keep saying our focus is on PvP, and it really very much is.

We have a lot of things that we want to make sure we accomplish. So doing a delegation, the effort to make the delegation work, I think would not be trivial. So it’s kind of hard to say that that would be something that we would do soon.

[Bolon Soron]
Awesome, thank you. Let’s see, would it be possible and or desirable in combat to add a x percent chance to kill when targeting, similarly to how accuracy works, considering like crit chances, block chances, all of that stuff, as well as potentially a chance to apply status effect?

[Hubert Cumberdale]
So that second one, the chance to apply status effects, is one that I have asked for and would like us to eventually have, for sure. The first one of kill chance, I guess I’m less interested in prioritizing something like that. I mean, we could, and yeah, I mean, we could figure out what the max possible damage would be and be able to figure out the math for that.

But it may make the confirmation window, like if we have that plus the accuracy plus potential status effects on there, it could get a little bit busy. So to reduce busyness, I would say probably the chance to kill one would be what I would remove from the list, like from what’s there if we were to do that. But yeah, the second one for sure, a chance to do status effects, I think that would be really useful, especially now that we’re getting close to traits being out, which have more resistances in them for resistance-specific status effects.

And just armor and with PvP coming and everything, there’s armor accessories, various things that also increase resistances. So without showing it in that preview screen, it will become a little bit harder to keep track of, should I be trying to hit this specific hero with this thing? So I’d like to make that as easy as we can.

So that’s definitely something I’d want to keep pushing and prioritizing. But yeah, the other one, not so much.

[Bolon Soron]
Awesome. Thank you. Thank you.

I’m going to try to snag a couple more questions before we wrap up. Real quick one from chat actually related to Expeditions. Do quick study and rapid renewal work in Expeditions?

[Hubert Cumberdale]
They sure do. There’s a whole bunch of code associated with that.

[Bolon Soron]
Awesome. Thank you. Thank you.

This next one might be our last one, depending on how long we talk about it. But essentially, thoughts from the tokenomics side of the impact of Expeditions to material supply. I will say we talked about this a pretty good amount in the Expeditions stream.

So I don’t think we necessarily have to take a very long time to talk about it again here. That stream is on our YouTube. So anybody who’s interested can reference it there as well.

But I’ll kick it off and then hand over to Hubert. And if anybody else wants to add, the biggest thing is, there is a gain in efficiency, yes. But aside from that, there’s no difference in what can be produced through Expeditions versus what could have been produced without them.

Is there the possibility that heroes that aren’t currently questing start questing through Expeditions? Of course. Hopefully some do.

But it doesn’t change the fact that if they just were questing today, they would still be getting those same materials. But in fact, they’re actually going to be paying, in a sense, for getting those materials because Expeditions requires a power up and has the per stamina fee. So it’s not really introducing the potential for material gain that wasn’t already there.

It’s offering an efficient way to do it, but at a premium. So I’ll stop there. Hubert, if you want to add anything, and then if anybody else does, feel free.

[Hubert Cumberdale]
Yeah, I think that was really well said. We could potentially see a lot more heroes just questing in general because of Expeditions coming out. And if we do, then that would also mean that there would be a potential increase in resources being released as well.

But I’m not too concerned about it right at the moment, especially with some of the things we’re working on with PvP. On Menace, there won’t be any questing over there. So if you have heroes over there, they won’t be questing anyway.

And we’re trying to make sure that we have a pretty engaging experience over there. So I think some heroes will be preoccupied with PvP. And as we just get further into the game and developing some of our core features, I think there will also be other changes that will just make that questing experience a little bit more, just like a smaller part of the whole of the game.

And it’s always possible we could adjust things if we need to. We’ll definitely watch and see how the market changes and what Expeditions, what that impact is. But yeah, I think because there is a fee though, I think that does kind of help with any concerns with value because it just adds another variable into the calculus of, is it worth me doing it?

Should I do this? And what are my motivations for doing it? So yeah, I don’t have anything else to say on that one.

[Bolon Soron]
I had something. We’re kind of short on time, but I was going to say the same thing. There’s more and more things for heroes to do, especially once we have some of these new releases out.

Over the cult scene, there’s going to be a lot. There’s other systems that we’re working on that will use heroes. So it’s kind of like in MMORPGs where you’ve got so many different things you could be doing, and you only have a certain amount of time to do those things.

So some people will be doing this thing. Some people will be doing this thing. And it all forms just this giant economy that has the suppliers and consumers.

And so I’m excited as more and more of those things get built out, it just really makes it such a much more robust economy system there. So that’s all I’ll say about that for now. Awesome.

Yeah. Also important to note, we’ve referenced a couple of times other use cases for heroes. So that all plays into Fox’s point as well.

So we are going to stop questions there as we are reaching the top of the hour. Anything that we did not get to this week, we will get to next week. I know there’s a couple that we have not hit, which is fine.

So make sure you tune in next week because they’ll be up at the top of the list. So to wrap us up, I will just say, as always, thank you to everybody who has taken the time up here to answer questions. Everybody who is listening to this video now, and will listen to it later.

And thank you to everybody who submits questions for us to answer. You can submit your questions at talk.Defikingdoms.com or in the AMA questions channel in our Discord. So keep the questions coming so that we can keep answering them, because otherwise it would be a really quiet AMA.

But really appreciate everybody hopping up here to take the time to answer some questions as well. We’ll do a quick around the horn and then we’ll let Fox bullish us because he hasn’t been in an AMA for a few weeks. So it’ll be good to hear that.

So just going to go in the order that I see on screen. Winston, any final comments?

[Winston Jazzhands]
Yeah. Super happy for everybody to come check us out and listen to it today. And I think we’re really excited about Expeditions coming up.

It’s going to be great. Looking forward to hearing what you guys think about that. So thanks again for hanging out with us and look forward to Expeditions.

[Bolon Soron]
Thank you, Winston. Hubert?

[Hubert Cumberdale]
Yeah, not too much more to add. I’m very excited to get Expeditions across the finish line here. Just a reminder that we do have one feature that we are leaving out, which is auto level ups.

So that will be something that we are going to do eventually after this point. So there’s one more power up, one more feature that will come with that. And yeah, it just might be a while because we’re going to be all hands on deck on PPP.

Very excited also to just be able to have pretty much our whole team focused on getting PPP across the finish line. There’s a lot of work going on to that as we kind of keep repeating every week, but it really is. And I’m very excited to get that into you guys’ hands.

And yeah, that’s all I’ll say.

[Bolon Soron]
Thank you, Hubert. Dreamer?

[Dreamer]
Man, my mouse is showing up. Yeah, there’s a lot going on there. Just double clicks.

I’ve tried everything. I think I just need a new mouse. Anyway, I will echo everybody’s comments already, but I won’t repeat that I’m excited for Expeditions because we all are.

We know we are. It’s going to be awesome because Expeditions frees up time to get in there and hunt, and more specifically, fight each other in the Colosseum. There are still some major features we haven’t shared with you guys simply because we wanted to be closer to it actually coming out.

But man, Colosseum is going to be sick, not only for us that like the game, but it’ll probably be our potential catalyst that has been most powerful to establish ourselves as an innovative game in the space that’s pushed the technology not only from tokenization perspective, economy perspective, gameplay perspective, fun perspective, but beyond that. We really want to attract those that are reviewing games and streaming games and creating a business for themselves to talk about what’s out there. But there’s not a lot of products, really, that cause people to stream consistently and view it and play it.

This competitive environment that will be fueled with rewards from us, our partners, and from others externally, it has a ton of potential to draw a lot of people in, to bring people back and have eyes on it. So we’re taking our time in the design not only of the play experience for you all, the onboard experience for new players, but beyond that as well. So there is more to come, and we’re thinking bigger than just you can fight each other.

So I am very excited about that, and the Expeditions release paves the way for that so that all of you can continue to benefit from your large legions that you’ve amassed and will continue to, while also having time to make your smaller legions to compete and fight for glory. So very bullish, very excited, and thank you for all the questions in this AMA. Thank you, Dreamer.

Magnus, any final thoughts?

[Magnus Ironroot]
Yeah, sure thing. So thanks for being here, everybody. So now that the contract side of Expeditions is all deployed, I’m full steam ahead on PvP, so excited to just put the blinders on and get the coding on that.

We’re doing some pretty crazy stuff on-chain to be good stewards of the gas on Metis. So yeah, we’re really compressing things and taking a lot of the lessons we’ve learned in the last few years and applying that all into a really cool product on Metis. So yeah, looking forward to diving there, and yeah, just excited to get Expeditions out.

Thank you, thank you.

[Bolon Soron]
And last but not least, Fox. Thanks. Yeah, it’s really, really cool, and I am excited about Expeditions, I’ll say it, but mostly because it’s been just this huge undertaking that I have done a little bit for, but most of which has been other people.

Magnus has just been this amazing MVP. There’s 55,000 lines of new code introduced into our code base with this, and 135 commits, and it’s just a huge undertaking, and that’s just on the smart contract side. There’s a ton on the interface and API.

There’s just a lot of work that’s been put into this all across the board. Winston is amazing with his QA things. He actually just, this morning, he found one little last thing.

There’s just all kinds of things, and it’s just a huge effort. And Hubert, of course, the mastermind and back of all the math, and it’s really exciting to be, I think today is, fingers crossed, the day. So I’m stoked about that.

I have a lot of heroes. I don’t always have a lot of time to actually quest them, because I’m actually writing code and stuff, but I’m going to definitely use it. And I’m super excited about the upcoming stuff, too, with PPP, which I’m going to be involved with as well.

So I’m super just excited about that stuff in general. Just this space, this team, we’re in the right place at the right time, and the stuff we’re building, like the actual tech, is always leading edge. We’re always trying to push the envelope there and try things that haven’t been done before.

And that’s what it’s all about, trying to find those really good partners out there that have the same vision, the same mentality, and we’re here for it. So yeah, excited to be a part of it, and just want to say bullish for all of it. So thanks for coming.

Thanks for listening.

[Winston Jazzhands]
Bullish!

[Dreamer]
Thanks, everybody.

[Bolon Soron]
See you all next week.