Recap and learnings from Levana’s first mini game
It’s been a month since we released our first mini-game: Salim’s Side Scroller adventure
The launch of Salim’s game represented the opening of the Levana Faction Wars. The Faction Wars are a team-based set of mini games and live action role-playing, set to officially begin on 22.2 and run over the next month, with thousands of members of the Terra community signed up to play. The end of the Faction Wars leads directly to the Levana token (LVN) airdrop and the launch of the first DeFi protocol from Levana, LUNA2x.
Like most launches, we’ve learned a lot. And this information is being used to help us create and better design other entertainment experiences. Our products are designed to attract a casual audience to learn more about Terra, and the power of DeFi. You can read more about this unique approach in our article on DeFi-Tainment.
Game Difficulty
One thing we learned is that not everyone in our community grew up mashing buttons on an original Nintendo. Some players spent 8 hours beating the game. Others gave up on Level 2. In future games we will perform more broad testing to release games that are accessible to a general audience.
This lead to the community creating tutorial videos, Walkthroughs and Speed Runs
Game Stats
The game has already been completed by over 3000 wallets, with more playing every day.
About 800 of the wallets were suspected to have bypassed legitimate play via some type of manipulation of the front end code or attempting to spoof the network calls of a completed game. No need to get into details on what we look for regarding cheating, but after each round, our data scientists attempt to improve our ability to identify fraudulent game play.
118 wallets no longer had a Levana NFT in them at the time the reward snapshots were taken. This defaulted to skipping them during reward distribution, as an in-wallet NFT is required to be eligible for the reward Mint.
In the game, Salim has died over 500,000 times, but with valor, he continues to battle the spiders and save Mars!
This translates to the average wallet having died over 100 times.
Rewards
In order to keep separate the original bottles of dust from the newly minted bottles, all new minted bottles of dust were given 0 SL. These bottles are designed to ensure that the current and upcoming game mechanics requiring dust are accessible and affordable while not diluting the original mint of dust cracked from the meteors during the meteor shower.
After filtering out the suspected cheating, there were more than 2500 bottles of 0 SL distributed to players and roughly 250 bottles of dust used for distribution manually via customer support if a player was filtered incorrectly and contacted the team. The rest of the 0 SL bottles (roughly 5% so far) are used for market making (via levanadustmarketmaker.ust)
NFT Prices and Sweeping
Building a P2E game via NFTs is difficult. As the user base grows, the demand for in-game items increases. This can drive up the price of the assets, which in turn, price out new players.
We designed the Levana NFT experience to have both limited scarce items (eggs, dragons etc) and unlimited resources (meteors, dust etc). It’s important to distinguish between these items’ roles in a gaming experience.
The price of dust is one of the biggest challenges to manage correctly. If it goes up too quickly, no new players, if it crashes, then the rewards in the games are less sought after.
Running a Market Maker
To date, over 60 Luna (~$3000 at the time of this writing) have been collected by the levanadustmarketmaker.ust wallet by selling roughly 5% of the 0 SL dust generated. This market maker is designed to prevent the liquidity drying up in the public market for the 0 SL dust at each rarity tier, thus preventing price spiking, and egg holders / new community members from being priced out of participation. The funds collected by the market maker are used to buy eggs or other prizes (currently 4 common eggs purchased from the open market) for distribution as rewards to the community.
Floor Sweeping
At regular intervals, there are wallets, which remain unknown to the team, that appear to sweep the floor of all Levana assets.
We partnered with Flipside crypto, to create a report on how this sweeping, (and potential wash trading) compares between Levana NFTs and other popular NFT sets on Terra. We invite all data scientists in the community to review this report and share their own findings.
Floor sweeping is a complicated subject. It means that volume increases, distribution decreases, liquidity decreases and prices go up.
While this may be desirable for many NFT collections, it presents a challenge for dust. We hoped that the rewards we distributed to the community would combat the floor sweepers, but the results have been unsuccessful in the short term and inconclusive for the long term.
Get Involved
If there are any community members that would like to help on the topics of
- Fraud prevention
- Customer Support
- Market Making
- Game Mechanics
- Game Economics
Please reach out to us via DMs on Twitter. We would love to hear your thoughts on ways we can improve Levana and innovate in Defi, GamiFi, P2E, and NFTs.
If you are just getting started on Levana we recommend the following starter content:
Real Vision 5 Min Summary (Video)
Climb Crypto DeFi-tainment Overview (Video)
DeFi-tainment (blog post) (Video)
Follow us for updates:
Read the story: https://blog.levana.finance/levana-lore-part-1-of-4-8dde4b3f40bf
Join our Discord: https://bit.ly/discordlevana
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Levana_protocol
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