Communication and Community Engagement — Summary of Oct Informal AMA
Effective communication is essential for a company to engage with community members, especially for a dedicated start-up such as us. Hence Plair CEO, Patrick Tang, conducted an open and transparent “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) on Telegram Group informally during the previous weekend!
The Informal AMA
We highly appreciate our community to engage actively with Patrick and we answered the questions raised by members in the Telegram group. For those who missed the occasion, we have compiled the transcript and put together the answers in an easy to read format so you’ll have a full picture of the development roadmap, our vision for the upcoming marketing plan and more.
For the full transcript, please refer to our Official Telegram Group
1. Tournament Features Update
Self-creation of tournaments
Creation of tournaments is being tested next week internally. So you will see these being released game by game when we are ready. Some pose challenges others may not have. Our devs and my CTO Paul have been working diligently on the process.Tournaments on Mainnet Beta
We have heard from the community they want more tournaments on the platform. Our CEO has instructed the team to have tournaments running 24/7 now.Regarding filling tournaments during the Mainnet Beta: currently, the tournament’s primary purpose is for testing the platform so we can improve the product. Every filled match gives us more data so that we can tweak the platform which we built from the ground up, so that it can be implemented en-masse. Thank you to all beta testers and we appreciate everyone’s patience as we improve match by match!
Remember we will not just be tournaments. Tournaments are just the 1st vertical. We will offer multiple verticals that will allow users to all types to come on and play or watch.
No-show for tournaments
We will implement penalties for this. So if you don’t show, you lose your fee (no refunds).Smart contracts
Smart contracts will turn on soon.
2. Development Roadmap
We are doing fine money-wise and we run pretty leanly. We can complete our road map on what we have. We obviously as any startup will plan for an equity raise later on.
Game servers scaling
We are confident with scaling the platform to cope with potential userbase growth and handling hundreds or thousands of tournaments going on at the same time. For CS:GO and TF2 tournaments we have partnered up with Gameye so scaling should not be a problem. They handle all the servers for us. As they are a startup also, we are helping each other through bumps in the road. It’s been an interesting and fruitful process.Source code
Plair 10000000% owns our own code. We do not pay 3rd parties for the core products. This would be a horrible mistake. As startups can go out of business and destroy yours. I would never have my company rely on another to survive.Streaming
Streaming still on the roadmap for Q1 2020. We are already working on it. We will prioritize Streaming over Quest / Coaching / e-Shop as this will bring in the nongamers.Fee delegation
Fee delegation is on the to-do-list. We will handle this in due time. We don’t want users to pay gas. We will.New games
We will announce our next game as soon as we can. We have to balance the integration time and popularity of games. IE League: It’s not happening for a while.Pubg for instance in on our list. We need to see how compatible and API is and what are the costs and time it takes to implement. We would love to also be able to get 100 Plair players into the game but we all know how difficult that is. Some strategies we have been playing is the winner of the PLA would be the last person to die. All of these things are under consideration. We did TF2 because it was an extremely easy integration from CS:GO to TF2 due to our relationship with Gameye.
3. Marketing Strategy
Guerilla marketing campaigns
We are currently still testing with our users in beta. As most of you know, marketing is extremely expensive. Our team is a starting some guerilla marketing campaigns to pull influencers into Plair. So expect some decent players to come onboard to help you hone your skills very soon.Axeso5 and Bitrep on marketing
Axeos5 and Bitrep are onboard still. Axeos5 will integrate slowly as they are watching what we are doing. We need to mature the product a bit more before they can start.Referral bonuses
Plair is also planning to implement referral bonuses for bringing new players to accelerate mass adoption.Growth in wallets and gamers
Blockchain is still a fairly new concept in the traditional world so we are looking for creative ways of onboarding traditional users by hiding crypto. We believe fiat gateway will be the way.
4. Fiat Gateway
FIAT gateway
We are looking at different partners to implement fiat gateway through credit card, bank transfer etc. which we will then explore working with an exchange to purchase those tokens from. It’s going to be open market.Fiat Integration
You will see fiat gateway integrated into 2020. We are waiting for options from the VeChain ecosystem.Fiat gateway process
We do have a plan for users to just be able to purchase PLA on the platform and everything be behind the scenes. Credit card → to PLA → Snipe Heads. Mass adoption at its finest!
Summary
Thank you for those who participated. In the future, we would continue to engage with the community and all feedbacks are highly appreciated. Our team now continues to #buidl and carry out marketing as planned.
Do check out our platform and follow the official Twitter account to stay updated on our daily tournaments! We run frequent promotion campaigns, so make sure to join the various tournaments for Dota 2, CS:GO and TF2. Now, get ready for more features and games on the platform!
