Civitas City Council Meeting #1

Recording & Transcript of the 1st City Council Meeting, September 15, 2022. Feat. Kent Byers, Giorgio Crosali, Snorri Sveinsson

City Council Meetings are monthly roundtable events with the development team of Civitas. They are accessible exclusively to holders of The Chosen of Civitas collection and the most engaged members of our community. For more info on how to participate in them, see our #special-roles channel on Discord.

Recording

Transcript

Giorgio: Welcome everyone to the very first Civitas City Council. This is Error 404, or Giorgio speaking. Here with me is Fezzik, aka Snorri, Community Manager and NFT Producer of Civitas, and the one and only Ken Buyers, CPO.

Welcome, everyone. Today, the city council AMA is an occasion for the most engaged people in our community. This is an open mic event. Everybody can raise their hand and talk at any moment if they want. Anybody that wants to say something, just interrupt us and ask a question, just do it and don’t feel afraid. Okay. First of all, let’s talk about; I guess we can keep it off from the obvious event of the day, talking about Kent’s birthday. Happy birthday, Kent.

Kent: Aw, thanks, guys.

Giorgio: I wish for some very fungible cakes.

Kent: I got the big birthday gift already. They did the merge for me, and I appreciate the whole web3 community coming together to merge eth for me. A little bit too much, a little bit shy about it, but I’ll take it.

Giorgio: Yeah. And just the beginning of the merge, how do you guys feel about it?

Kent: I mean, it’s my birthday, so I’m feeling great about it.

Giorgio: That’s how the market is reacting at the moment, and not following haven’t before we merged the past 10 minutes; I don’t want to watch it — my wallet at the moment.

Kent: I think people are positive. If you read the comments, I think the global market conditions are the best right now, but I think the merge is a pretty exciting thing for the web3 community, and people have just been waiting for so long. I think we all got into web3 talking about this 2.0. What happened? And we all kind of joked about something that would never happen. So the fact that it’s there just shows how the progress is going in the space, the work the people put into it. And, I think overall, I’m super excited to see this happen and what this will mean in the future.

Giorgio: Snorri, what about you? How do you feel about this? ,

Snorri: Basically, exactly what he said. I’m excited.

Giorgio: I was expecting questions, following in any second now, but plenty of people are keen to hear our beautiful voices, and we are just speaking up for big events. We are just a few weeks away from our very first public mint. As Probably everybody here knows by now, there is going to be a Dutch Auction on the 4th of October featuring the Chosen of Civitas collection.

Kent: I’d definitely say this is our second mint. We did do the free mint previously, and I think everyone who participated in that just knew how good of an experience that was. It was really efficient. The website was clean and it worked out really well. And then there were a lot of good comments about it. I’m hoping to see the same, which I know we will because our team behind it has been working hard and making sure that the experience is going to be great.

Giorgio: Speaking of the team, we recently went on a hiring spree, let’s say. , we got a lot of very talented people joining in, including our Nathan here. Nathan, maybe, since you’re the newest person on the team, right?

Nathan: I mean, I’m almost amongst new.

Giorgio: Almost. Wow. Okay. Maybe you want to introduce yourself to the community since we had your Medium team article out. But maybe not everybody is aware of you and your position at Civitas. I guess it’s important for people to be aware of who you are. So don’t be shy.

Nathan: Well, as already mentioned, my name is Nathan. I’ve been doing various types of MMOs now for 20 years. Maybe the one that’s most relevant to what we’re doing is EVE online because a lot of the concepts that we’re working with in Civitas are coming from EVE online, and there are also quite a few people here on the team already, which I worked with, two decades ago.

And even something that I’ve been working with since. So joining Civitas and Directive was kind of like coming home. Aside from me actually moving back to Iceland too, that was also kind of coming home because I am Icelandic. I also worked on the Runescape franchise, old school, and Runescape also has some very interesting concepts, which, if you look at a lot of the people that are in web3. Well, we all have in common are those MMOs actually, which are Eve Online and Runescape.

Especially the trading part, I’d say , but also it’s the metagame, which comes with it, which is the large scale organizations, the alliances, multi-year warfares between global organizations and also of course, cooperation on that scale through games is rather unprecedented.

And that’s also what we tried to tap into with Civitas. So as a person that’s worked on, very large MMOs and large team teams accordingly, getting into Civitas, which is building on a lot of those principles, but also with a lot of the people that actually built those other MMOs with me before. That in itself is exciting, but also that regarding the web3 space where you have such a disruptive nature of the technology that you’re trying to merge into, what games are and what people’s ideas of MMOs are. Then you innovate on top of that. That makes it rather fascinating and terrifying at the same time. And that just makes me all in. Right. So that’s basically where I come from and why I’m here.

Snorri: I think you’re understating a bit your influential status on EVE online. You didn’t just work on EVE online.

Nathan: No, I mean, yes. I may have danced a little and known for my cheerleading capabilities. That’s, that is correct. But also when you think about it, I joined EVE online shortly after launch. Before that, I was on the board and involved in the investment round. I’ve been around for a while. I’m not young. But yeah, 40 people. And when I left CCP I had been leading EVE online, and we had grown to 650 people and 350,000 subscribers. So bit more than 10 X during that period.

Giorgio: Wow. Yeah. As Snorri said, you didn’t just work. You literally built it. Wow.

Nathan: I wouldn’t go that far, but I cheerleaded those that did, that’s for sure.

Giorgio: Okay, so we have our first request to speak from Animositas, which I ensure everybody rremembersvery well from the very first AMA.

Most supportive Ethlizard and also citizen friends. Oh, Grave Digger just jumped into the stage, apparently. I might have messed up something with the settings and people can just jump in. Interesting. Okay let’s allow Animositar into the panel.

Snorri: Hey, what’s up?

Animositas: Good. Kent, happy birthday first of all. And I appreciate you coordinating the merge on behalf of the celebration for the rest of us.

Kent: No problem guys, always here for you.

Animositas: Absolutely. Thanks for having the first council. This is great. I actually happen to be traveling this week. Otherwise, I’d normally be asleep at this time of the day.

I want to give some recognition to the team. I think the Shaman on tour concept and the mechanics that we’ve seen has really created a fair bit of engagement within the community, on Twitter, in the Discord, and I think, at least, I attribute some of our growth in terms of a number of followers and those engaged and interested in the project to that.

And my follow-up question is, what are some of the next activities, if there are any, that you can share from a marketing perspective to continue to grow the community?

Kent: Do you want to grab that one Snorri?

Giorgio: Yeah, all four of us might have something to say in this regard. So who’s taking it first?

Snorri: Yeah, it’s like, it’s all over the place. We’re heavily focused on the mint on the 4th of October, revealing what we’re doing slowly with time. And we have some really exciting things being announced in the coming weeks. Not sure what I can reveal regarding that but definitely stay tuned.

Nathan: Yeah, I think besides trying to get people to dance on TikTok as their characters. People should be dancing on TikTok that’s healthy for them. We have the upcoming characters unveiled before the mint and as part of the calendar of things happening leading up to the mint. We’re not done with our announcements, but the mint page itself already has a certain number of things that we haven’t publicly pushed out, which are for utility. We will be elaborating more on the utility.

Giorgio: More on the market marketing side of things. Obviously, they’re definitely going to be more whitelisting opportunities of different kinds. And you are also working out with several partners to make sure the voice goes as far as possible when it comes to making the mint known to the wider public.

We have several marketing beats that will lead from here to the actual mint. You guys have seen; starting September, we have been pumping out every single day. Some news, some leaks, some announcements.

Definitely starting the decision on the right track. You can expect these to escalate and escalate even more.

Kent: I talked about very early on when we just announced this project, I think on the Ethlizard AMA and others that we have that strong background and history, industry leaders working in AR. I think what we talked about back then. Kind of what you saw with the Shaman on tour is this first idea of “Hey, you’re gonna start having these characters and you can take them with you and you’re doing things with you no matter where you go.” And this is that kind of the first step that now you’re getting that feeling of “hey, I’m in Italy” or “I’m in Manila” or “I’m here, and I can see my Shaman or Zola.” And as we start getting the new characters, you’re gonna have that feeling you can take them with you. You just kind of see the pose where you are getting that feeling that you’re with them in person. As we develop more, this is just gonna be an expansion of you having a lot more interaction with your Chosen, which I think is super cool. I also wouldn’t mind, we haven’t put together all the events yet, but I think a lot of the people here are obviously pretty active on Discord.

I keep saying don’t sleep on the lore that we’re putting in. We’re adding a lot of Easter eggs. We’re looking to do stuff that kind of connects. To the Tower, each character has their own story, each Chosen, and it’s like, how do they know about the Tower? How are they aware? They’re all coming from different timelines. Every character has their own perspective of how they became aware of the Tower, which is in their subDAO, and journey before the play. It’s kind of right then, the next part of their journey. But everyone’s story’s gonna have some kind of connection. I’m going to look at how we bring that into some events too, for the people really going through the lore and finding little Easter eggs out of it. So we have a lot we can play with in the future.

Animositas: Thanks, gentlemen. Maybe last question, and you can drop me off stage for someone else who may have one. For each of you, what is the era that’s most interesting? What are the ones that you are personally most interested in playing with as we explore the world of Civitas?

Nathan: For me, it’s becoming more cyberpunk. Mainly because I played Cyberpunk the RPG. But likewise, I do have a fondness for fantasy, but there are more eras in the world, right? So far I’m more excited about cyberpunk because I can’t wait for those characters to be unveiled. They’re fucking awesome.

Snorri: I already bought a Shaman, so I’m going to have to pick with ancient.

Giorgio: Well, wait. Let’s talk about the real news year. You bought a Shaman. Wow, okay. This is the first new Shaman from the team finally purchasing a shaman. Congratulations. I hope you’re not the only one.

Snorri: I know of a couple. I do have an Enlightened though.

Nathan: On that note, it’s like the team didn’t get given any shamans. Everybody has to buy one.

Snorri: Same will carry over to the next mint, we’re not giving the team any benefits, but they’re always welcome to sweep floors.

Nathan: I don’t know, maybe they get whitelist what they get to pay .

Giorgio: No I can, as the person in charge of giving most of this whitelist, I can guarantee we’re not gonna give whitelist to the team.

Answering again, what’s going to be my favorite era? I honestly don’t know. Our developers are extremely creative and I’m very curious to see what’s going to happen with the still unrevealed ages. I’m curious to see what’s going to happen when everyone goes to get to some renaissance kinda character. But I haven’t seen anything internally. I’m just curious to see what’s gonna happen there.

Snorri: Yeah, it’s definitely a lot of errors and factions that we haven’t announced. So it’s, it’s tricky if you have a personal favorite and we haven’t even teased it yet.

Giorgio: Kent what about you?

Kent: Me, I’m a big fanboy for fantasy stuff. I grew up with the Wheel of Time, the Hobbit, Lord of the Rings, and all that kind of fantasy stuff. So I’ve always fallen back into any types of characters that might fall into that era. I think that’s already the beautiful part of what we’re doing just by everyone having characters that they connect with and they feel like, “Oh, this is something that matters to me because of ABC.” This works in Civitas. We don’t actually have a barrier of “Oh, you can’t have a cyberpunk character with pirates; what are you talking about?

But that absolutely works in Civitas with the idea of the Chosen, coming in and having it work together. As we sort of look and understand the eras and the role that the Chosen play in a subDAO and on your land and what you can do with them, we have a lot of freedom to sort of look at characters that appeal to everybody and find a place for them. It’s a pretty special thing that we’re building to be able to do that.

Giorgio: I guess that answers your question. What about you? Are you excited about any age, in particular, more than others?

Animositas: I would say I’m probably similar to Kent. I’m, I’m also a sucker for the fantasy genre. And I would say anything in that sort of medieval setting is of interest to me. I also am interested in anything futuristic. So maybe the cyberpunk phase will be attractive. Just looking forward to seeing some more details and the utility. I’m definitely one of the more meta gamers, so the concept that individual eras will have advantages in different phases of the game as your Tower evolves is interesting to me. I’m curious to see how many people decide that they want to kind of play that meta on top and be buying and selling, swapping their avatars to get advantages as they progress with their city. I’m torn between those that I think will be basically attached to their original Mint character or the character they picked up first if they didn’t mind it versus those that try and really minimax their accounts.

That’s a piece that I think is interesting, and I’m looking forward to seeing what that power differential is. Obviously, I’m attached to my Shaman, but I also tend to try and minimax when I play games, so that’ll be a hard trade-off for me.

Kent: I think we definitely have some mechanics and game. The job board is a way for players to keep the characters that they feel that special bond with. But you have the ability to scale as needed by hiring other Chosen to fill your temporary needs if it’s for a quest or on your buildings or an expedition or other things like that. So you have the ability to keep the ones that you want, or you might have a connection to, but you can also scale and minimax as needed by working with them, the Chosen within the community and the other players within the game.

Animositas: Will that structure be supported for swapping or loaning, characters through the Civitas game itself? Or is there gonna be a need for a third party?

Kent: It’s all completely within the client. It’s different from the idea that we have is much different than a scholarship program. Where there’s like a contract between the NFT holder and that lender. What we’re kind of looking at is doing a much more interesting step where it creates an instance of your Chosen within the client itself. So this way, there’s a much nicer opportunity to kind of scale, to give more players the opportunity to try other Chosen either just “Hey, I want to look like the Shaman this week. I have never had it before.” So you have that opportunity, or if there’s an event going on, or you’re building, you can get quick access for it. You’re not as limited to that scholarship loaning program. It’s something much more inclined, and the user experience is much better for that.

Animositar: Could my Shaman potentially be loaned to multiple people at one time? You mentioned instance mechanics.

Kent: It’d be something where it’s more limited early on. But as your Shaman levels up or other in-game mechanics, we need to flesh out that design and ensure it’s working as intended. There would be interesting ways that can kind of scale. As people are more invested in the game, they should be getting stronger and better, and that’s also the opportunity where their Chosen could be instance out to more characters than before.

Animositas: And you mentioned the experience and development of the characters. Can you give some good examples for those of us in the audience? What are some of the best or most engaging ways that players will be leveling up their characters to help develop them?

Kent: There’s a lot. I don’t think I can go over them all, but just to make sure, we can talk about it. Obviously, we have a lot of ambitious ideas and things we wanna do that are AR-related. So definitely characters; basically, ensuring your character engages with the game design is the key in what’s important.

But additionally, this idea of sensing out is that way, whereas your characters level up and need more work experience than moving. It’s your chance to get that into the hands of other players, where they can be leveling up by farming that out and having more people involved to help level up your Chosen.

But in the whitepaper we’re pushing out, we have things about sending your character on expeditions, which are sort of like passive missions to send them out in geolocation places to help get resources there. Obviously, you’re assigning them as workers in buildings, and that’s gonna change too because your character could potentially influence the yield or the performance of a building or, in some cases, could potentially change the output of what a building could produce.

So there’s a lot of strategy around that for there. And then there’s still a lot more things that we’re sort of working on and we could have a weekly event or a seasonal event focused just around Ancient Culture Chosen. So there’s definitely a need that you want that diversity of either Chosen you own or build to access a Chosen you don’t have. If there’s an event going on and you’re not blocked off from that, you have that quick access to it.

Giorgio: Before you continue, just a reminder to everyone that is online at the moment from the audience. If anybody wants to jump in, ask any question, interact with us or just come up and say hi. Feel free to do so. This is an open mic event for everybody. Just press the button to request to speak, and we’ll let you in.

Kent: I think we’re also planning a larger AMA with the Ethlizard community, which is going to be very Chosen focused. So if there’s a lot of questions thinking about just that. We’re gonna have a dedicated AMA coming up about that.

Nathan: But also to a part of the marketing. It is in the marketing part of our calendar, but there’s…

Kent: Hey Nathan. I think your mic is a bit choppy there.

Snorri: I was starting to think that was on my side.

Nathan: How about now? Can you?

Giorgio: Seems to be working.

Nathan: Okay, good. No, I was gonna say it’s like two in earlier. Question about chosen and about how they interact with everything. Is that part of the marketing beats that are coming and while the whitepaper isn’t exactly a marketing beat, there is a large white paper update coming, which actually covers a lot of the interaction with Chosen and cities and DAOs. So that’s one thing to look forward to. A huge whitepaper update.

Kent: Absolutely.

Snorri: Speaking of that, it will be coming in the next couple days.

Kent: Does that mostly answer your initial questions or is there anything you’d want us?

Animositas: Absolutely. That is a good overview. Certainly looking forward to the whitepaper dropping; I know I and the rest of the community will have a number of questions as we see the updates to it. So looking forward to interacting with you all some more and diving in deeper. Thank you.

Kent: Anytime, man.

Snorri: Thanks.

Giorgio: Oh, and by the way, when can we expect your next video with all fans of your channel?

Animositas: Are you asking me when? Yes, soon, right? This is, I think this is the answer I’m supposed to give. No, it’s fair. , I actually, I do think the answer is soon. I know, I’ve been steering towards the whitepaper drop as a chance to really dive into some of the next topics. And we’ll have some questions and probably some thoughts of my own that I share on some videos upcoming. So the answer actually is soon and dependent on the whitepaper; we’ll narrow in on timing forward.

Kent: Perfect. I’m excited for that.

Snorri: That was actually perfect. Giorgio asking when and you answering soon.

Giorgio: I guess we deserve it. . So speaking o whitepaper, I know, especially you guys Kent and probably you Snorri, I know you’ve been working on updating to the latest version, and there’s a lot of stuff going in, are these going to be sensibly bigger than the one that is public right now? Can you maybe tell us more about it?

Nathan: It’s 4.7 times larger.

Kent: Yeah. We basically, this one is very focused on the game overview. We’ve obviously, through Discord and leaks and a few other AMAs, at least discussed a few ideas, but now we’re feeling a lot more solid with the team in terms of the direction of the design and everything else that just having that lot more kind of front-facing that people can kind of read a more kind of end to end overview. There are still things in it that we want to update or add. We’re just very early on development to really say, “Hey, this is a hundred percent what we want.”

But I think it’s gonna give you guys a lot of content and I think additionally a lot of questions. I think that it’s gonna be pretty exciting to make sure we can go over those answers and then update as needed.

Snorri: Yeah, it’s definitely designed to kinda answer our commonly asked questions already, but I am, of course, expecting more questions, obviously, from that.

Nathan: I mean, we can release it early on this court and be online and available and even update the white paper live with answers to those questions. Right. And amend the text if it’s unclear.

Snorri: What about a live reading?

Kent: Maybe we get Peter, I think Peter, on our team, would be amazing for just a sit down with Peter and live reading.

Snorri: I would pay for that.

Grave Digger: Sorry to interrupt, but I just have no idea how to raise my hands. I just hop in. Is okay?

Giorgio: Yeah, apparently, there must be some setting that I miscalculated the part. People are able to jump in. So everybody’s been very educated so far about it, but yeah.

Okay. Welcome on the stage. Happy to hear your voice. Finally.

Grave Digger: It’s enjoying observing how smoothly it’s all going. I also enjoy the twitch showcase. It was very fun to me. I have a question about the recent reveal of a new character Bhaltair. Yes. His name? So he seems like Zola, like he’s looked like a warrior. My question is, what’s the basic difference? Except, of course, the gender between the two of them, between, or actually all the warriors.

Kent: Not everyone is a, a word Balter is a lot more of a chief, like a leader of, of his community. I think you’ll start seeing this with some of the lore that we’re going to be putting out. And that’s why it’s very important that we define where these characters came from and their background. I think maybe just the era and the time that you might see some ancient cultures definitely have a lot of stories that might touch base on conflict, a struggle, or war. That’s a sign of the times while we move through other characters in different eras. It’s really gonna change a lot.

And that’s the really, again, the very exciting part of the faction, but our goal would be to definitely kind of shed like, Hey, where do these characters come from? What is their story? What got them through Ninsiku the Shaman to Ninshiku the Enlightened? What transition made that happen to them? And I think that’s gonna be really exciting. But the big part will be that once a community has now got a Chosen, it’s really good to be up to them to take that story forward.

We’re defining what happens before the SubDAO, before that city joins, where they came, and some of the background. And that will kind of play a little bit of the role that they have with their in-game interactions and what they can do. But it’s really gonna be up to you as a player to say, “Hey, this is kind of this foundation, and this is who represents me; this is how I wanna take them forward in my subDAO. Do I want to be a mayor? Do I want to join the council in the subDAO? Am I a leader or am I just someone who helps rally this? That’s really gonna be up to you to take that story forward. So, well, not everybody’s going to have this military look, but it’s really gonna be up to you to define these characters.

Grave Digger: I got it. I also want to clarify one thing as far as I get them: no matter which character you play, for example, let’s take Shaman. You could have the opportunity to attend various events throughout different eras. Right?

Kent: A hundred percent. No matter what era you’re in, these characters have value in their purpose. That’s why they’re the Chosen. That’s why they’ve all come together in the world that we have where this Tower is. Because they were all chosen from different timelines to be a part of this and grow that society. So, Nathan’s going to be that cyberpunk Chosen and Snorri is going to be the Shaman, and they’re going be working together, building something together.

And it doesn’t matter what era they’re in, but they all have those traits. And the story and background with them of how or why they’re there. And it’s up to them to find ways to work together to move that society forward.

Grave Digger: Yeah. Very excited to see what’s, what’s it going to be like. Like this mix of ancient plus cyberpunk. Something like that, amazing.

Nathan: Yeah. I mean Grave Digger, like to your question, think of it this way: we’re just generally quite inclusive in the way we think and do things. That’s why we have subDAOs. It’s a very inclusive concept. Right? So if you have an event, and these are regular events, right? So there are quite many of them. If you are participating in the event that is around cyberpunk, the fact that your character is cyberpunk will have an additive effect on them, but it doesn’t exclude anyone else. Does that make sense to you?

Grave Digger: Yeah, sure. A hundred percent. Yeah. Thanks, I guess.

Nathan: Well, thank you.

Snorri: Yeah, good to hear your voice, man. I feel like I’ve known you for ages.

Grave Digger: Thanks. Yeah, I’ll stick here. Stick around.

Giorgio: Please do. Reminder if everybody wants to hop into the mic, feel free to do so. Apparently, I also messed up something with the setting, so it seems that everybody can jump in at any moment if they want to do so. Just do it in an orderly manner.

Snorri: Yeah. If you’re a dev lurking in the audience, feel free to jump up as well.

Giorgio: I definitely spot more than one people from our team on board here, but they are probably too shy or still haven’t taken the first coffee.

Snorri: But yeah. , we’re not necessarily just looking for questions. Like, if you just wanna come up and chat or share your feedback or concerns or anything, tell us stories, feel free.

Giorgio: Yeah, we’re definitely not gonna punish anyone for being straightforward. There is any concern, feedback, or criticism.

We’re very happy to address anything on that matter as well. We welcome honest opinions of any kind, positive or negative.

Kent: I think we could maybe, what people are thinking of some questions to ask. We can kind of go and think a little bit about some of the common things that were sort of brought up in Discord in the last 48 hours since we kind of announced this mint and what does this mean?

And I think probably the biggest reoccurring question, and I know we wanna cover this in a lot of future AMAs but since we have a lot of our really strong community members here and people who’ve been with us for day one, I think it’s kind of good to talk about it is what does this collection mean and how does it function by that?

Adding new characters into it. And there are definitely a lot of people see the current state of the web3 or NFT collections, and people get really worried when they think, “Hey, I hold something here, but you’re adding new things to my collection. What does that mean for me? Am I being diluted? How does that work?”

And I think we’re taking the very first steps of where gaming projects have to go in web3 in terms of how we are treating this as games of service and how do we have the capabilities that we can add new stuff into the game. But still respecting the rights of the holders who support us who want to have our NFTs and they feel protected.

And so I think you’ve all noticed that with Ninsiku, when we first announced him, it said addition 750. And if you guys look at our auction page, you’ll see that there are characters there that have a set amount. And I think what’s really exciting for that, which I really want everyone here to understand and feel, is we will add new characters.

It is a game that we’re committed to, and we’re going to be working on this game and adding stuff for years to come to make sure it’s a great experience for you guys. But we need the ability that through events or new characters that have a purpose for design, that we can add things into the game for gameplay and make it exciting for you guys and everyone playing.

But at the same time, respect that “hey, I have this really rare Shaman, and what does that mean? So the way that we’re handling that is the idea of that each character is a very locked, fixed supply. So we’ll never add more Shamans. And, the Bhaltair that we show, there’ll be a supply for that, and we’ll never increase more.

So we will, over time, have a larger collection, but we’re going to have that with diversity. And this goes with through this kind of city council, we all say characters that we like or things from different eras. And there’s going to be a lot of people playing Civitas that have different connections to different characters for different reasons.

And so we want to make sure we offer that and they can find a character that has meaning to them. But at the same time, it’s going to be rare and it has a purpose. And so we’re all going to have characters that fit us, but it’s still going to be rare. So if anything, the more characters that we add over time, the more rare that Shaman’s going to get.

And he’s going to have a purpose in the game, and other characters might not have that same utility. So there’s always a reason you want that Shaman. And so the more diversity we get, the more exciting I think each chosen gets and why you would want that Chosen. And I think as people start seeing this, they’re going to get way more excited of why they want different Chosen and why these have a purpose.

And this is definitely the way gaming projects have to go in web3. And I think we’re the ones really leading that and really understanding about making kind of a collection that kind of has a purpose that we can keep growing with you guys.

Oh, see a bunch of people wanting to speak now

Snorri: I’ve got some devs wanted to join and Gobi has a question or wants to talk.

Giorgio: Oh yeah. Everybody, All of a sudden, everybody realized. Nice.

Snorri: Yeah, he must have hit a sensitive note there Kent.

Kent: Yeah. That’s why we bring it up. Right.

Giorgio: By the way I think, I’m not one hundred percent sure, but I was checking permission on the channel. I might have messed up something and some people might not have been able to actually request to speak. If that the case and anybody want to say something or as a general advice. If somebody want to ask something but doesn’t feel like speaking or joining the mic, just tag me in any of the channels and make sure to bring the question up into the stage.

Kent: I think we can grab Gobi. Gobi is looking to ask a question.

Giorgio: Yeah, definitely just wants to give this advice. Time for Gobi.

Gobi: Hey. Hey, can you hear me?

Giorgio: Loud and clear. Welcome.

Gobi: Excellent. Hey guys. I literally only just managed to get into the AMA so I don’t know if you’ve covered this already, but I have two questions. One is related to the Dutch Auction itself. I sort of just want to get an idea of where your decision making came on the Dutch Auction being from a 4 eth down to a 0.3, just due to the size of what that can mean — having been through a previous Dutch auctions, including Illuvium and stuff like that, knowing generally where those can land from a price standpoint in the spectrum of the max to minimum.

Specially given your 75, 7500 ish sizing or 7,100, something like that, of the, ,

Kent: 48 altogether, but 4,400 for this.

Gobi: Ah, okay. Alright, cool. That’s the first question.

Kent: Maybe we tackle the first question first. So, yes the first goal is actually us looking at whitelist for communities. So our first priority is making sure that we’re running and understanding how much of that is for the community and partners that we think are very important for gaming and gaming and communities that care about gaming and getting them involved. Just like the same thing we did with our Ethlizards friends on the last free mint. So that’s our priority first of determining that allocation and making sure we have the right people involved that we think add value and that we want to be a part of us. Once we have that locked down, then we determine what that allocation will be for the Dutch auction.

Now, when it came to us looking at the price. There’s a lot of really important factors that go into it, but the first thing probably is we have easily in our view, one of the highest production values for the NFTs in the space. We’re not producing a JPEG or an image with the promise it’s going to be some amazing game or something.

You’re going to see two years later where we’re doing that upfront work, high-quality animations, effects, audio environment with its characters, and assets. And it’s not easy. It’s a lot of work. We have a very large team putting in altogether thousands of hours and more, to deliver this for the team, the community, and everybody else.

We’re not promising something, we’re doing the work upfront. So definitely we, we take that into account of the quality, which is important to us. But secondly, we also looked at how do we price this? And it is super difficult and I don’t think almost any of it necessarily makes everybody happy.

But we took that into account. We looked into the reception that we definitely got with the free mint, but we’re also doing super exciting, very interesting, tangible rewards that are physical plus on-chain rewards if you go through the auction pages attached to that. And so our goal isn’t necessarily to drive everybody at the highest price, and you see we have a very aggressive decay rate, like on that high to get to something. But there’s a lot of really top-quality rewards for people who do participate in that. With a trip to Iceland and come work with our team, design a Chosen with our award-winning art director, and a lot of amazing stuff on top of that. But at the same time, when we did the whitelist allocation, we’re putting in a very strong kind of discount of what we see the value of this NFT at that 0.25. So we’re working through a balance through both, but. This is a lot of sort of that reasoning kind of behind it. If that makes sense for you, Gobi.

Gobi: Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that’s brilliant. I must admit, I did really like your announcement page when it comes to all of the information on it and getting down to the prizes and everything. Just well thought out in improving hype and having some form of excitement there. So I thought that was great. My second question is completely removed from the first. The second one is surrounding you touched on it before, about different characters having different capabilities within the game, within the game world, what they enable, and what they don’t. So it’s more down to, I was just going to ask the question surrounding when may we know more about individual traits and the rarities of certain traits and what they potentially could mean in relation to various aspects of harnesses to characters or anything like that?

Kent: I’ll say the various answer everyone loves to hear soon, but in reality, we definitely know that. Each goal we’ve had has been like an angry milestone of how we open things up next to the community. So the free mint we did with the Shaman was like gateway one that kind of says, “Hey, this is the quality we’re hitting.”

It introduced people to now start visualizing what the game could be through the characters, the way they move, the way they look, and the audio. Then we started introducing the lore. Now, these next Chosen that come in, take that to like 2.0. Now we start going, “Hey, there are different factions.”

What do these factions mean? How do they play? Going to exactly your question of like; What are the values, and what do these do in the game? So this is our gateway to do that. Now, in terms of what that means for gamers. And we are pretty active and I don’t, I’m trying to do my best to not just leak things and have Nathan and everyone and Fezzik and everybody else hit me in the head later.

But we have a lot of things coming up where this is that anchoring point that gets us into showing actually what you’re doing on the land now in the gameplay. And this is like directly involved now of like what your characters are doing in it with your buildings, which is that first step of excitement. Like, okay, now I see the world. I see what you’re showing me and this is what these characters mean. And now we’re moving straight into what does gameplay feel like and what are you doing in the world? And now I’m doing what I’m doing as a game or with these characters. So everything we do has a purpose to help guide people into what we’re building.

That’s definitely the next thing on our roadmap. And then with that is when we start looking at individual traits of what these characters do and why they’re different and like why they’re exciting and the sort of buffs or blessings or what they do as a worker or stuff like that.

What did that mean? So this is really that anchor and where it’s right on our roadmap right after this to start sharing this with everybody.

Gobi: Awesome. Thank you.

Nathan: I wanted to add to that actually, which is well, number one because you joined a bit later, there’s a whitepaper update coming that has a lot of things about the game itself that includes the characters and, also the things that they can interact with.

So you can start seeing what could possibly happen there. But more importantly, the way that we develop games and how we do rapid prototyping, there’s a built-in concept there, which is that the characters that we use to develop and rapid prototyping are the characters that exist. That means that when we are trying up new systems and features inside the game client, the characters being used are the Chosen.

So, we might not be able to tell you what all the individual traits are being used for and how they would be in the like closer to a live game versus alpha beta. But inherently the traits that the Chosen have are the ones that are going to be used first to actually prototype and used in features.

And that’s part of our philosophy of making games. And that’s why to Ken’s point a Chosen character is a full character, animated effects, all of it. It goes into the game plan, and traits are the ones that we actually tag, gameplay on top of. That makes sense.

Gobi: Yeah, no, that definitely makes sense. I think we can all attest to the quality of the characters the moment you guys release the AR little game and just seeing the whole thing in 3D, is brilliant.

Kent: We talked a little bit about that and I don’t wanna repeat all it because a lot of people heard it, but that’s also one of those kinds of gateways. Like I said, we have an award-winning kind of background in AR as industry leaders and just the whole idea now that you’re feeling like you’re taking the chosen with you is that kind of gateway of us kind of building into “now what else am I gonna be doing with these characters? I’m out.” So everything we’re doing is opening a door to our next big feature and just making sure people are involved in every big beat along the way.

Gobi: Cool. Thank you very much, guys.

Kent: Anytime man.

Giorgio: Thank you for the question Gobi. As always, if anybody wants to jump in, feel like asking something on the chat, just make sure to write down your question somewhere and tag me so I can make sure to see the question. And yeah, I noticed that, wow, we definitely have a lot of people joining in at the moment. We started with 40 people. We are over 117 people listening at the moment. That’s great. We’re happy to see that. And in the meantime we got, some of that sneaked into the stage without seeing anything Monty here. Also known as Kristján. Now I just,

Monty: Yeah, I thought I was just here to sing Kent’s birthday song.

Kent: I’m waiting. Can I get it in Icelandic?

Monty: Yeah, I’m not going to sing, there are other people here but happy birthday. And I’m not bringing enough cake, so there are a lot of problems going up, but I’ll get one.

Giorgio: What is going on with cakes in the office, because I mean it is gonna be coming recurring inside joke. I’m not sure the community speaking that up. Actually, I’m pretty sure they are because people started asking questions about cake for the 70 K mark on Twitter. So I’m wondering what’s gonna happen at 100,000.

Monty: We are working on something there, but we are having fun and these milestones are coming quick and fast, so obviously we try to communicate them with everybody that’s following us. But, it’s been awesome to watch the community grow so fast in the, in recent weeks after we started releasing the character videos and then, the AR event. And obviously, the more people interact, the more we can do and the more we can create. So it’s a lot of fun.

Nathan: Yeah. I mean especially the character unveils leading up to the mint. I mean, there’s, there’s another one next week, right? And in the next week, you’ll see the whitepaper update too. We have a lot of people joining the team, so we have more asked the teams articles waiting to be published. I’d also say that to the people especially if they’re recently joined, do check out the mint page. It is our source of truth for a lot of things, including the mint achievements and the, remember the mint achievements actually also become traits on your Chosen. So it’s actually tradeable if you do not claim the trip to Iceland, you can actually sell it. Which is very web3 isn’t it? But yeah, do check out the mint page, and please tag us if you have questions in general.

Monty: Yeah. And, and I mean from my point of view, being on the communications side, like you mentioned, new character reveals, etc are coming up or teasers at least. But I can tell you that every day now from the beginning of this month to the end all the way up to the mint and all that, there’s gonna be something major out every day. So there’s a lot of things to be excited about and there’s a lot of things just to, there’s a lot of good reason to check in very regularly. I think we’ve gone through most of the questions or is there anything else?

Nathan: I’m the text channel in case people are shy and don’t want to step on stage. I was checking the text channel for questions. Did anybody tag you?

Giorgio: Yes. Somebody just tagged back just to tell me that the Audi was fine. So know that wasn’t a question, but good to hear. Thank you.

Snorri: It’s good feedback.

Giorgio: So, yeah. Anyway, speaking of the perks of the mint because I mean, those traits might be very web3, but some of the perks are very fungible. As you mentioned the trip to Iceland. And then I have the feeling that the message didn’t go through as much when it comes to some of the benefits of participating in the Dutch Auction. Maybe we can recap a bit some of the most interesting prizes that are tied to the Dutch Auction. Just to get people a bit more excited into participating in it.

Kent: Yeah. I think one thing, I don’t think we have mentioned it, on the auction page. But I think it’s kind of good for people to understand a little bit about those rewards. Again, I don’t know if I’m leaving things or not, but one thing to think about too is, I think the interesting thing about some of those rewards that you guys can see on the achievement page for the Dutch Auction is some of these rewards that happen, is they show up as like a trait or something on your NFT itself. And I think that’s super exciting for people who participate and win that reward because now the value of that reward is with you, the holder and it’s really up to you if you want to use that to claim that or just have it living there.

It’s up to you when you wanna claim it in, hopefully, you want to come, cause I do want to see you, the winner in Iceland, but if you feel that’s not for you, then you have that kind of ability to also trade that NFT for someone who does want that chance to come work with our art director or meet the team. So there’s a lot of power with that. If for people participating in that I think those kinds of rewards and how that is shouldn’t be underestimated. And I think these are going to make those characters that you do get from that Dutch Auction have the be pretty exciting to be a part of that and really take your time and kind of go through those rewards. We spent a lot of time internally, making sure that we were crafting these and we thought they were exciting and they have value. So if there’s kind of feedback on it too, I think we would love to hear that too. We’re definitely trying to make sure that we respect everyone who participates, and we want them to be a part of this, we appreciate every step they are with us, and a lot of these rewards go with that.

Giorgio: Still keeping on the subject of traits and stuff, what was really suggesting to talk about was more about the individual different kinds of prizes that are tied into the auction. Because we mentioned the trip to Iceland, and that’s, the top one can hope for. But we have also different other kinds of prizes that I believe are very cool. Like for example, the physical token or, the swag bag with the art book. What else do we have in there that people should be looking forward to?

Kent: Yeah, there’s lots of pretty exciting things too that will happen on-chain too, in terms of we have ideas for a lot of really unique buildings. That will be something that we create just to reward the people that did participate in this for airdrops. So there are a lot of things that you’ll be receiving in-game for potentially participating in the Dutch Auction, kind of going through those rewards. But yeah, as swag bag and I think if you guys. We basically have so much cool art that we haven’t released yet because there’s just so much and it’s too much work for our marketing team and our community team to actually get all that out to show you guys. And I think if you saw everything that our super-talented team has been working on, it would just blow your guys’ minds.

So we definitely wanna be putting that stuff together. And part of the swag bag was like hoodies and other things. I think there are a lot of exciting things about like the tangible stuff and things that are in-game that it would be really exciting to show and a game also see that you participated at this moment and how early you were part of this project is being rewarded. And I guarantee you there’s gonna be players seeing that in the future, looking at it and wishing that they were part of that.

Nathan: Yeah one thing is getting a physical CITI token or even a trip to Iceland. For me personally, being part of deciding on an archetype. Which is one of the things that are there, you work with the art director to create a character. That is a pretty unique opportunity in the gaming world where there are not a lot of other ways to really be part of making a game than that. So I’ve had that one quite exciting, especially long term.

Monty: Yeah, because you mentioned the art book that is being done here. It’s based on this mint and because we’re doing leaks, if I remember correctly, it’s 128 pages or something like that. It’s somewhere around that note. So it tells you just the amount of assets that are available towards the characters on this mint and then sort that speaks volumes for the details that are going into this. So that’s gonna be super cool as well.

Kent: No idea like how, how jealous I am of some of the rewards. Because I don’t even have those things and I want them for myself. So I have quite a bit of just jealousy on when we are working through this going, “Oh, I want this, I want that.”. , so I think these are gonna be super awesome.

Giorgio: Ironically, the trip twice is probably the least interesting for most of the team since they literally are there already.

Kent: I don’t know what you, but I’m in Asia. All I see is people having cake every week and I’m pretty jealous.

Giorgio: I’m based in Polland myself, not in the office yet, although I’m due to visit there soon. Because in the spirit of being the decentralized. Me and many other people on the team are obviously not on-site, you included. Web3 office.

Nathan: On that note, we are still basically hiring. So if you or know of somebody that is game design or engineering especially, and everything web3, even if you’re in growth marketing or anything like that, send us the line. You can ping us in the general channel, but also there is a career page on playcivitas where you can go through and just even send a general application.

Please do that. That’s the easiest way to actually play a part in designing the next characters and the land and everything for Civitas and being part of the prototyping team is on the gameplay client as well. I mean, it’s all up and running and we need more people to do more of it. Whether you’re interested in the game itself or it’s the characters, or it’s the procedural generation of land through Unreal Engine and Houdini. I mean, there are quite a few opportunities to jump on because when you’re doing a web3-game versus just a game, the complexities of the opportunities are far more and that’s what makes it so exciting. If you’re thinking about entering web3 as a game developer, or you are in web3 and want to get into the game aspect of the condition between the two, absolutely hit us up.

Giorgio: We have Mr.Thor on stage. Welcome. For everybody here, Mr. Thor is our general manager of Directive and Civitas, if you want to say hi to the audience and introduce yourself. We crossed the one-hour mark, we’re going to wrap up soon.

There is a question from the Ancient Tribes channel. Not sure why Nathan is replying on text rather than on stage.

Nathan: The question from Gobi, with the mint achievements. The first one says to win the first 25 mint wallets go into the draw, he presumes that it’s with the Dutch auction, given it will be the first cab off the rank, so to speak. That’s correct. So of the first 25 unique mint wallets overall in Dutch Auction as it is the first. The other one is on the “Hodler” it mentions a successful bid, it just means that you go and mint. If you don’t complete the transaction, you are not eligible.

Thor: I just wanted to chime in a little on Kent’s birthday. Happy birthday dude. I wanted to address a little bit the rewards because you guys have been talking about the characters and the rewards and everything. One of the things we’re doing is we’re making this art book that really shows all the details and the art that goes into making the first character collection. We’re really excited about the quality of that. We’re making this coffee table book but then also inviting someone to come over to Iceland. Because for us it’s all about building community. And you guys were here with us, the most important aspect of Civitas from our perspective, the community that’s gonna be building the actual game within the game. And it would be awesome to hear about how you guys want this community built as well because we’re building it for you.

Giorgio: We’re going to start closing the event. The City Council was the big event of the day.

I am very happy to see many people here, the OG and most engaged people. The council itself, we don’t have a defined cadence for these events to happen. We are thinking monthly, but maybe monthly might be too much. But we’re definitely gonna for sure have stuff like this happening whenever there is some major event going on.

Besides these private events, we’re going to have a public AMA, open for public and more structures around it for people who maybe barely know the project.

Today you’ll also get some art leaks on the discord.

Kent: Thanks everyone for showing up, it was a pretty amazing birthday. Just seen so many amazing names here that I’ve seen so much in Discord and talking to since we came out and continue to keep talking with us. I think it’s the best, best way to spend a birthday, honestly working on Civitas with you guys.

Thank you everyone for coming.