Welcome to the FirstBlood Alpha!
FirstBlood opens alpha to first group of pre-sale participants.
First up, we want to say a huge thank you to our pre-sale participants and all of the active members of our community that have supported us until now. Especially those of you who waited up until the wee hours last Thursday night hoping to get onto the alpha right away. Seriously, you guys rock!
After several months of pre-alpha testing, including the show stopping bug from last week, the team here at FirstBlood are anxious and more than a hyped to finally be able to share the alpha version of our platform with our awesome pre-sale participants!
If you participated in the pre-sale and would like to claim your place in the alpha, head over to firstblood.io/claim and fill in your details. Once you are done, we will review your claim to verify that you participated in the pre-sale and then put you in the queue to receive your exclusive alpha invitation.
We’re going to roll out slowly, around 100 users at a time between now and beta to ensure we can handle the load and to give us an opportunity to take in and act on feedback from each new group of alpha users. Invites will be first-come first served, so sign up early to ensure you get a place in the first few rounds.
#Buggernaut Arcanas
To celebrate the upcoming alpha bug hunt, and as a special thank you to our Dota 2 community for being…well…awesome, We’re giving away the new Exalted Bladeform Legacy Juggernaut Arcana to three lucky winners! For your chance to win, claim your alpha invite or head straight over to the giveaway page (you don’t need to be on the alpha to enter the giveaway).
What to Expect from the Alpha
Bugs!
This is alpha software, so there will definitely be bugs. That’s where you come in. Anytime you stumble upon something that doesn’t look, feel, or act quite right, how you would expect it, or is just plain broken, shoot us an email at alpha@firstblood.io.
Your bug hunting skills and feedback are crucial to this stage of testing. Plus, everyone who submits a bug during the alpha will get an awesome badge on their profile when we enable the badges feature in our beta.
Bare Bones
Right now the app has a very minimal feature set. The only game we currently support is Dota 2 and for now we have just one play mode up and running; solo queue. This is an important first step as it is by far the most popular play mode in Dota 2, along with every major esports title.
Our solo queue uses our matchmaking engine to match you against an opponent of similar skill (balancing will be tough while the user numbers are low, so expect pretty big skill variations for the time being) from the players currently waiting in the queue. Solo queue games are 1v1 all-pick games with a 100 PT buy-in.
PT? Play Tokens. Since this is still very early stage with lots of undiscovered bugs (again, that’s where you come in), we don’t want to risk anyone’s 1ST tokens. So for the time being, users will be risking PT, which have no value and are only meant to test our platform.
Centralisation
Unless you’ve been living under a rock (or maybe are just a new member of the community), you would know that over the past couple of months we have been running an ongoing pre-alpha; designed to test some of our underlying assumptions about how our platform should work and how users will interact with it.
For the pre-alpha, we designed a very decentralised version of our platform with the vast majority of the backend running on chain. While this was an awesome experiment, and a lot of fun for those of us who are heavily involved in the crypto community, it was an incredibly frustrating user experience for mainstream gamers who are used to interacting with aesthetically pleasing, streamlined, and intuitive UI/UX. This is something crypto has not gotten the hang of just yet but adoption is essential to FirstBlood’s success.
In short, during the pre-alpha we went 100% smart contracts, but based on feedback from users that we consider our core demographic (mainstream esports gamers) we are shifting focus to our user experience. Which means making a compromise to favor great UX over decentralisation in the short term.
The beta will continue focusing on usability, but as we prepare to start taking real money using the blockchain and as the ethereum/crypto ecosystem matures to suit the needs of our core demographic, decentralization will drive our development for the benefit of ecosystem and the individual.
Continuous Iterative Development
We have a whole host of new features that we are working on, from the obvious necessities like friends, parties, teams, and chat, to some more interesting and unique features that will really set us apart from our competition. So between now and beta we plan to operate on a continuous iterative development model and will aim to push features and fixes often. Be prepared for things to look different if you don’t log in for a week.
How to get an invite?
If you participated in the pre-alpha and would like to claim your place in the alpha, head over to firstblood.io/claim and fill in your details.
For everyone else, you’ll just have to wait. We will open up the alpha to more users between now and beta, and will definitely preference active community members on Discord and Slack who play Dota 2. So come get involved, play some games, and get to know the rest of the community.
*FirstBlood is not authorised by, affiliated with, or endorsed by Dota 2 or the Valve corporation.
