Mithraeum: Hidden Agendas
The complete story of how Metaguild, rose, fell, and may yet live again
If you take away the aesthetic, game design, comprehensive UI, blockchain component, and everything else that makes a game a game, being a player in Mithraeum boils down to a series of choices, big and small. At Metaguild, we talk a lot about these choices: the micro ones (moment-to-moment clicks, resource management, settler allocation) and the macro ones (diplomacy, taxation, resource allocation, etc).
Writing this tonight, I’ve been working on strategizing for the Mithraeum: Bronze Age round on behalf of Metaguild for a little over a month. These past few weeks have had some spectacular victories, a handful of draws, and some heartbreaking defeats. Through it all, the resilience of our generals and their dedication to players has been the thing that has kept all of us going, kept us pushing for that next triumph.
But when we debate whether to play it safe or try for more, we know it’s not really a question at all. We’re shooting for the top of a tall mountain, and while nothing is guaranteed, we want to make sure everyone who joins us on the climb may share in that potential success if we do achieve what we hoped for. Through everything Metaguild has done, our guiding light has always been our mission: commitment to protect our players’ interests. It is no different in this Mithraeum round; we have established incentive models that focus on long-term enterprise value through reinvesting in the community rather than shorter-term goals like profitability. We allocated 90% of the total rewards to all active community participants in this round.
In Mithraeum, the ‘Macro’ game is all about staying in sync with your teammates and tracking your opponents’ progress down to the transactions. As the saying goes, keep your allies close; and your enemies closer.
The game world consists of zones, which in their turn consist of players’ settlements. Events are constantly unfolding in the game world between settlements: battles, sieges and alliances that form and dissolve.
Dominating your foes early on helps establish a narrative that builds an impending sense of doom as you prosper, driving your enemies to surrender. Our initial tactic was to organize our players into large groups; Mithraeum is a numbers game; therefore, outnumbering your opponent is usually a good strategy. We eventually settled in Minervesco, Luristaronia, and Centrusico. This strategy allowed us to gain radical control of the ecosystem in our zones of interest while externalizing the burden (and risk) of continually fending off attackers and optimizing our production.
Mithraeum is one of those games that you can win or lose in the draft. If you do not jump in with the right teammates in the right positions, you might be doomed from the very beginning. That is why we made sure to have our most loyal players dispersed around the three key zones we had laid our sights on, ensuring that we would have individuals we could rely on in case we were to be betrayed or deserted. This will be important later on.
As players grew in skill and experimented with the game’s lattice of checks and balances during the first weeks, our generals had already conjured a plethora of viable strategies. Some players gravitated towards early-game gambits and militarizing, while others preferred long economical wars of attrition. Most significantly, our coup-proofing strategy consisted of keeping a watchful eye on our own people via our chain of command. Players, for example, were told to monitor each other’s performance, as well as that of the general staff. Everyone was reporting on everyone, or at least was believed to be. And for the most part, no one ventured to cross the line.
Yet this ballooning state was no omnipotent monolith — for the war that was about to break out in the following weeks redirected with ease energies and massive amounts of resources, the policies and institutional arrangements dictated by the coming war reshaped the course of events.
A week into the round, we were approached by two entities, namely Tombstone group and DegenDAO with whom we signed a nonaggression pact. This agreement will later develop into an Alliance. Fast forward to the last week of the round, one of our players in Merizima began to climb the leaderboard in the wake of the horrific events taking place in Ukraine. The issue was that Meizima is a zone controlled by the Tombstone group, which is mainly comprised of Ukrainians — having their advancement delayed due to their real-life circumstances while our player was climbing the rankings made for a sticky situation as he became a threat. Overtaken by emotion, they reached out to us all while unleashing overwhelming negativity, and let me tell you; it wasn’t pretty.
We tried our hardest to hold negotiations where we could correct a skewed situation and reach mutual understanding. However, during this process, what we learned was that their collective did not recognize our efforts to compromise nor acknowledge our rights to the lands we occupied and that our suggestions and stance on the issue, even up to this day, echoed unheard while they offered no solutions of their own.
The previously mentioned occurrences triggered a Domino effect, which will last until the conclusion of the round. Tombstone group was out for blood, and they had their sights set on overtaking two of the zones we had previously agreed upon Metaguild having rights over. A Tombstone player in Luristaronia was constantly supplied massive quantities of resources. Concurrently, other Tombstone players militarized thousands of settlers in Centurisco, our weakest zone. The presence of Tombstone troops on Metaguild territory was the psychological weapon deployed to keep us on edge.
Around the same time, some of our own members began bridging xDai; others went rogue and began accumulating enormous amounts of resources in a single wallet in an attempt to capitalize on the developing tensions with the Tombstone group, they will later on attack their own comrades. A sharp and occasionally violent debate had ensued in our ranks. Previously enthusiastic players became cautious critics of the political status quo.
Faced with disaster on all fronts, Metaguild had little choice but to begin militarizing, committing to saving the situation. The following events saw huge losses of settler numbers and resources, losses that were “senseless” because neither opposing side gained an inch of territory or an obvious advantage in the balance of power, the states behind this carnage are portrayed as static, two half-blinded giants stubbornly and self-righteously battling to “bloody stalemate” precisely because on our side everything was calculated down to the seconds, we ran all kinds of simulations, and time was on our side. At first, the perpetrators held numerical superiority on the battlefield, but this advantage began to erode as more and more loyal members offered up their private keys and resources to fuel a counter-coup.
Production and exports of copper, the lifeblood of both enemy states, plummeted as the Tombstone group recognized they had little to no hope of competing for Luristaronia. And Metaguild pursued a military strategy of dual containment and attrition against the renegade slowly depleting their resources. This situation completely spiraling out of control was not at all inevitable, for it was HR dependent. However, as planned, both groups of conspirators were ultimately neutralized. Metaguild emerged victorious in both Luristaronia and Minervesco but suffered minor defeats in Centurisco, a moment of both celebration and relief as the final 24 hours were the most grueling. The immediate legacies of these events are etched upon the sleep-deprived bodies and exhausted psyches of our generals. Our flag does not fly because the wind moves it. It flies with each and every single one of their contributions.
This turn of events portrays the battle as a moment of truth — the blockchain aspect and potential earnings at stake contributed significantly to the realism; people became emotionally invested, eliciting strong emotions. War brings out people’s true colors.
About Mithraeum
Mithraeum is a multiplayer strategy game based entirely on blockchain that enables users to build arbitrary diplomacy protocols through custom smart contracts written by users themselves.
Mithraeum.io | Discord | Twitter
About Metaguild
Metaguild is a decentralized community of investors, crypto enthusiasts, and gamers united under one common goal: increase awareness about the alternative financial system game models through play-to-earn blockchain games.
Metaguild.com | Discord | Twitter | Medium
