Three weeks and more than 50 members later, MetaClan has completed its first inaugural quest!
For those who missed it, we partnered with Axie Infinity to host a Breeding Tournament, pitting Guardians against one another to spawn the best Axies in all of Lunacia.
Key Takeaways:
- More than 30 DAO members participated in the tournament
- 54 Virgin Axies were sold in our auction
- Over 100 Axies were bred from the tournament
- Two of our contest winners were not DAO members (but they are now!)
- We gave away over $300 in prizes- including exclusive Axie tokens which can not be earned or purchased anywhere else!
- Members claimed over 30,000 SLP
When asked to reflect on the first quest, a co-founder of Axie Infinity and one of our judges, — Jiho — stated:
“It was fascinating to see a new generation of Axie trainers jump into the universe. MetaClan provided a structured and social playground for the quests and it’s been awesome to see these players integrate into the broader Axie community.”
Adding to this sentiment, our Axie Commander — ExHuman — noted:
“It turns out that entrusting novice players with the right tips allows them to create great internet monsters. I am impressed by the level that was achieved in the tournament. This event shows that when it comes to blockchain gaming, there is a place for specialized DAO insights where players can share their experiences to achieve the best results.”
Here’s a recap on how it all played out!
Bumpy Start
Upon announcing our quest, there was a lot of contention among the Axie community about how MetaClan received the SLP for DAO members.
Long story short, rather than purchasing substantial amounts of SLP off the open market at incredibly high slippage, MetaClan brokered a deal directly with the Axie Infinity team.
This notion of minting SLP sparked a huge discussion around admin privileges — all of which MetaClan acknowledged and remedied through a Buyback described in detail here.
The biggest learning here was that MetaClan needs to be more conscious of how we approach these games and that working directly with the core team does not always merit the same sentiment as getting it from the community.
Seeing as this is a community-owned project, we’ll be sure to actively source feedback about all aspects of quest curation from game communities prior to going live!
Virgin Axie Auction
Following the SLP situation, we partnered with AxieGG to auction off 54 Virign Axies which had never hit the market before.
We conducted the auction via Discord with DAO members bidding against one another over the course of 2-minute intervals at a floor price of 0.02ETH with minimum increments of 0.001ETH bids.
The contest was receive extremely well, resulting in over 2ETH being raised from 16 unique bidders.
This auction gave our Guardians a great way to get started with Axie without having to spend extensive amounts of time on the Marketplace or having to buy mediocre Axies that were not very strong breeders.
This experiment was one we fully plan to run again with rarer Axies, higher stakes, and more automation (anyone who participated knows what I’m talking about!)
Breeding Begins!
After sending the Virgin Axies to the winning bidders, the actual breeding kicked off 24 hours later with DAO members claiming their 700 SLP for the first weekend.
While gas remained unbearably high (where it still sits today) we still had 25 DAO members (roughly half of all existing members) request SLP — a great signal that our first quest was well received and worth participating in by more than over half of those who pledged.
Beauty & Ugly Contest
The following weekend marked the first break where members voted on Beauty & Ugly Contests — ones which required no tangible breeding expertise rather just the ability to breed something that looked optically pleasing (or disgusting).
The winners of these contests — Baronar (beauty) and CloudWhite (ugly) — each received one DAO share, with an excellent recap video being put together here.
When asked for comment on winning the contest, CloudWhite stated:
“It was an honor to keep my looks contest streak alive with the Ugliest Axie win!”
Interestingly enough, the other winner — Baronar — made some big waves in the Axie community following his winning when he scooped up the rest of the remaining Land Chests, marking a complete sell-out on all Land offered by Axie in their pre-sale.
When asked whether or not the MetaClan quest influenced these decision, Baronar commented:
“The MetaClan tournament came at just the right time for me. It is exactly the type of event that shows the multi-faceted appeal of Axie — PvP play, collectability and creativity. Winning this beauty contest stoked my excitement for Axie and not long after I decided to acquire the remaining Phase 1 chests. The community content connected with Axie is incredible and Metaclan is a perfect example of the player base adding major value to our cute, fun and potentially lucrative digital assets.”
But, things didn’t stop there. Following the Beauty & Ugly Contest, DAO members topped up with another 800 SLP for the real showdown that was the Meta Contest.
Meta Contest
With 3 DAO shares and 375 LUNA up for grabs to first place, the $100 prize pot was one of the biggest ever offered for an Axie community event.
Just as with the first contests, we made a custom portal for participants to check out the top submissions and quickly scope the stats on each Axie.
During the contest, we dropped a video call link for members to come and chat about their top picks. With special appearances by Jiho, 3xHuman and RCTech among others, the call was a great first example of the social opportunities that arise from MetaClan quests.
The voting ended up being extremely tight, with first, second and third place all being separated by just one vote each!
Here’s a look at our winners:
- Porkiepie — The Hulk
- Happyspoon — Gary Bugsy
- AK — Nando Parrado
While both Happyspoon and AK were not MetaClan members prior to the tournament, their newly awarded DAO shares were a great way to get them onboarded. Happyspoon even added, “ I intend to stay a member for a long long time :)”
As for the contest winner himself, Porkiepie was just about as great a story as we could have asked for. Coming in as someone completely new to MetaClan with no Axies prior to the tourney, he was able to snag some great breeders from the Virgin Auction which allowed him to breed the winning Meta Axie.
Porkipie described his experience saying:
“After some incredible competition and luck with breeding, I felt like I had won the lottery despite many competitors having more experience than me. It was hard to believe that I was the one who ended up winning, I thought at most I might place. It was one of the most thoughtful yet fun competitions I’ve ever participated in, and I can’t wait for the next one.”
However, not everyone got so lucky!
Epic Fail Contest
Underpinning the Meta Contest was a cheeky Epic Fail Contest to reward the breeder who got dealt the worst hand by the Lunacian Gods.
We’d like to give a special shoutout to Axie Rancher, who was able to cash in his disaster of a breed for a complimentary Virgin from one our judges — Chief.
The moral of the story here is that sometimes it pays to lose!
Gas Issues
Perhaps the most (and really only) unfortunate aspect of this tournament was that gas costs were exorbitantly high for the duration of the tournament. For those who don’t know, breeding Axies requires users to submit 3 different transactions — Once when breeding, again when morphing to a Petite and a final one to morph the Petit to an Adult.
Network congestion resulted in gas costs roughly 3–5x higher than their normal amounts, all of which strongly made us consider postponing the tournament for maximum participation. Luckily we pushed through, however this is still an issue for the network at large today.
Thankfully for the sake of judging, we were able to leverage Axie’s Showroom Discord channel to get a sneak peek at what a Petit looked like without having to spend the money on gas to morph.
Across the board, many of our players said the only drawback was the high gas costs, something completely out of the hands of MetaClan and Axie as we all wait for ETH2 and more scaling solutions like the Optimistic Virtual Machine to go live on mainnet.
Key Learnings
Just as with all our quests, MetaClan aims to give our partnered games valuable insights from their users on what their experience was like. When users submitted Axies for our contests, we prompted them to fill out a suite of questions like:
- What is one area of Axie breeding that you really liked?
- What’s one area of Axie breeding you would like to see improved?
- What have your takeaways been for the first MetaClan quest?
- Is there anything you would like to have seen done differently for our next quest?
Without going too deep, the biggest feedback for Axie was the gas-intensive nature of breeding, something they’re conscious of and actively searching for solutions today.
On MetaClan’s side, we had some awesome suggestions regarding better communication with read-only Discord channels, live streams of the prize ceremonies and community involvement on quest structuring — all of which we will 110% be implementing!
Level-Ups
For those who participated in our first quest, they were granted a custom MetaClan x Axie POAP — an NFT which could be claimed to mark your participation in the quest on-chain.
All of those who claimed their POAP were also “leveled-up” in DIscord, signified by an upgraded role on their Profile.
As MetaClan expands, we fully expect to let members leverage these levels to claim higher-tier loot, join private channels, and participate in exclusive governance discussions.
If one thing is for sure, it’s fascinating to watch the interplay of onchain NFTs and Discord roles play out before our very eyes.
Next Quest
If you’ve made it this far, surely you’re keen to get involved with our next quest!
While the details are still being ironed out, MetaClan has reached soft consensus that we will be working with The SandBox Game for our second quest!
By tying together elements of voxel editing with creative ideas and MetaClan estate designs, we’re quite excited to see what our Guardians come up with to build out our presence in one of the hottest virtual world games in all of crypto.
Closing Thoughts
We’d love to give a very special shoutout to Axie Infinity for taking a chance on MetaClan as our very first partner. They were extremely supportive of the entire process and we simply could not have done this without them.
We’d also like to recognize AxieGG for their numerous contributions regarding structuring, Virgin Axies, and judging insights, as it was their deep knit Axie team which helped propel this quest to what it became.
We’d like to praise MetaCartel — who graciously seeded MetaClan with an ecosystem grant to fund our prize pool and get the first quest off the ground!
Lastly, we’d like to thank you — the player — for your continued support and dedication to our mission of creating an unboarded global community of gamers.
If you haven’t done so already, head on over to our Discord for everything you need to know about MetaClan and our future quests!
If you want to go fast — go alone.
If you want to go far — go together.
Until then, this is Coopahtroopa, signing off.
