FirstBlood pre-Alpha Release
TL;DR — A select group of users are being invited to be the first round of testers in the pre-alpha release of our platform. Fair warning, it is buggy, runs on the testnet, and only supports 1v1 Dota 2 for now. So if you’re after stability and a full feature set, we’re not quite ready for you. If you signed up for the alpha, but have not yet received an invite, sit tight. We are rolling out invites slowly to ensure we can handle the volume. Rest assured, everyone who participated in the pre-sale or who signed up before December 1st will get an invite code during the alpha.
Thank You
First and foremost I want to say a huge thank you to our community for all your support and patience, we’ve worked tirelessly over the past couple of months putting together all of the necessary pieces to bring this dream together. It is hugely gratifying, exciting and more than a little bit nerve wracking to be building this collective dream into a working product.
This would not have been possible without the inspiring dedication and hard work of our team, and their supportive families. Over the past few months I have witnessed these guys push themselves well beyond all reasonable expectation. Commits at 3am, 15+ hour days, team meetings during holidays, and group calls spanning 3 continents have become a staple of our work environment. Without this monumental effort, we would be nowhere close to where we are today.
With this limited pre-alpha test we hope to gain some valuable insight into the way users will interact with the platform, along with hunting for the inevitable bugs hiding in plain sight. As of right now, the platform is up and running. However, it is pre-alpha software, so expect things to be unstable.
Why We’re Building FirstBlood
FirstBlood was born of a desire to reward the journey and in the process make the dream of playing video games professionally more attainable.
But more than that, we want to create a more enjoyable gaming environment for every gamer, by properly aligning the incentives of gamers so as to weed out all manner of toxic behavior that is common in gaming communities.
And most important of all, we want to create an environment free of the need for gamers to trust third parties with their earnings. Our innovative technology, built on top of the Ethereum protocol, makes all of this possible.
What to Expect
The pre-alpha is a bare bones version of what our end product will look like, it runs on the Ropsten testnet using testnet tokens, which have no value; so there is no chance for early bugs to put anyone’s 1ST in jeopardy.
To simplify the smart contracts involved, we’ve elected to begin with 1v1 games only. We’re well aware this is not a standard game type, but it is an important first step as we build out the underlying infrastructure. We will introduce more play modes as we progress through the alpha and beta.
In this version of the platform, users will be required to make use of MetaMask, an awesome chrome plugin that brings Ethereum to your browser. In theory, the app should work with MIST, Parity, and our new favorite IM client and Ethereum wallet Status.im, but we’re still testing integration with these additional services.
When you first visit app.firstblood.io, you’ll be prompted to enter your registration code and create an account. After that, it’s all up to you! Poke around and try to break things. We won’t get mad, I promise.
A good first step after registration will be to connect your Steam account and grab some Play Tokens. You’ll find both of these from the account view, which is accessible from the dropdown menu in the top right corner under your username.
From there, go hit up the lobby, try jumping into a game or creating one of your own, and if you’re feeling really adventurous, try signing up for jury duty and giving a ruling on the outcome of some disputed matches.
Limitations
As I mentioned earlier, we’ve deliberately restricted the game type to 1v1 for the sake of simplicity in our underlying Ethereum smart contracts. We will expand this to 5v5 with all of the common game modes once we are comfortable with how the system is behaving with 1v1 matches.
One of the awesome features we advertised for FirstBlood is decentralized match verification. In future iterations of the platform, users will be incentivized to run witness node software that will perform the match verification function for the platform by informing our smart contracts of the results for games. Thus removing any opportunity for us, or anyone else, to maliciously manipulate game result data. For the time being however, we are handling match verification in a centralized manner.
Bug Reporting
Whenever you stumble across something that is not working as you would expect it, please drop us an email at prealpha@firstblood.io. Screenshots and as much detail as you can provide (bug, browser version, etc) will be invaluable in helping us improve the platform.
Want to Help? We’re hiring!
If you want to help make the magic happen, we would love to hear from you. We are looking to fill the following two positions immediately, and have several other positions coming up in the near future.
Director of Marketing: We are looking for someone US-Based (preferably Boston or New York), with experience in digital marketing (bonus points if it’s in video games/esports), a creative growth hacking mentality, and a 5k+ Solo MMR in Dota 2. Ok that last one isn’t a requirement, but it definitely wouldn’t hurt.
Senior Full-Stack Engineer: We’re looking for a JavaScript wizard who can navigate popular frameworks (Angular2, React) with ease, integrate them with a Node.js backend, build outstanding APIs, build the whole stack to scale smoothly (we’re planning on growing quickly), and confidently manage a dev team. Bonus points for every hour you’ve logged in-game on steam.
If neither of these roles fits your skill set, fear not! We’re expanding quickly, so keep an eye on firstblood.io/careers as we post more positions.
