Ultimate Conqueror — 10,000 USDC Tournament Highlights, Learnings and What’s Next!
The Ultimate Conquerors have staked their claim!
After an exhilarating 2 weeks, our inaugural Ultimate Conqueror Tournament has finally come to a successful conclusion. 1000+ players played over 38,000 PvP matches with 150,000 hours being played overall in PvP mode alone. A lot of friendly banter, some healthy debates and lots of Cards & Crowns later, we are truly humbled by the amount of support and love that our community have showered upon us. You have truly conquered our hearts!
Congrats to all the 100 winners and a huge thank you to everyone who participated and made The Ultimate Conqueror Tournament a huge success.
Watch the players sharing their first-hand experience of competing in the tournament:
Now that the tournament is over, let’s dive deep into a little bit about how it came to be, what worked and some interesting learnings.
Fighting the Bear
BUIDLing in a bear market is hard. But we took the challenge head-on. Fighting our way through the adverse market conditions, we launched the game on mainnet on November 25th, 2022 after a few weeks of Beta. This was only made possible through the hard work & determination of men & women across resilient teams at work in TC:ME.
Post-mainnet launch, we were looking at how to build more engagement for our players in the game. We as a gaming company always put the players first. This ethos led to us thinking of ways to bring in more engagement and excitement for our players within TC:ME. This was what led to us conjuring up the Ultimate Conqueror Tournament.
The Ultimate Conqueror Tournament was based on the PvP mode of the game, where players are pitted against each other in a real-time match. There were 3 important assets at play here from the game:
1) Crowns
2) Essence
3) Cards
Crowns were the asset that you get by winning matches in PvP mode. The tournament leaderboard was based on the number of Crowns that you earned during the tournament period.
Essence is a tradable asset within the game, which you get by playing the campaign mode.
Cards are fungible assets that are burned on use within the game. These are essentially the characters that you play with.
Trust is important
When we announced the tournament there was a lot of apprehension about it being legit because of the high prize pool of 10,000 USDC. That too in actual USDC and not USDC-worth assets. Overcoming this in a world full of scams and rug pulls was an uphill battle. Being a title out of SuperGaming where we have a pedigree of building games over a decade as a gaming studio prior to TC:ME with games like Maskgun, Silly Royale and Pacman helped us a lot in gaining some trust among some early adopters. The core team being constantly in conversation with the community whether it’s helping them out with tech support or having conversions with the team which led to product updates also helped cement that foundation of trust in TC:ME.
The community was the true Conqueror
Our community played a crucial role in making the tournament a grand success. From sharing feedback to helping each other out to actively participating in conversations. For example, one of the pain points from the community was that Cards were really difficult to come by. We combatted this by running multiple contests and Card giveaways along with multiple crew3 quests during the tournament that players could participate in to win Cards and NFTs. We also discovered a potential balancing issue with Crowns along with our players. We rapidly patched this within hours and rolled out a fix rebalancing the crown-earning mechanism within the game. This also helped in keeping the tournament fair for all players.
Tournament Kickoff — Mad rush to get to the Top
We started with a bang with the first few days seeing a massive rise in the DAUs and playtime. We crossed 10,000 PvP matches within 4 days of the tournament. We also doubled our DAUs compared to the week prior. On average, players were spending more than 80 mins in the game per day. Players rushed to play as much as possible so that they get featured on the leaderboard and get a head start. We saw top players grinding for around 4–5 hours daily to get to the top of the leaderboard.
The leading player, Emmanuel Pontipedra AKA “JÉNGKOZ” had a sizable lead in the first week.
This led to fun little exchanges in our community as well.
Keeping the fun going
The tougher ask for us was figuring out how to ensure that the excitement stays over the 2 weeks and that it doesn’t fizzle out after week 1. We took a very proactive approach to this by having multiple mini-events within the tournament, each with its own set of challenges. We had Double XP, which is tied to your account level, Double MMR, which is also related to your player level, Double Essence and Double Crowns days as well.
During Double Essence Days, players could earn 2x the Essence within the game which they could use to get more Cards.
The most exciting event was reserved for last — Double Crowns Day. For a short period of a few hours, players were able to get 2x the Crowns for PvP matches. This brought about a seismic shift in the standings on the leaderboard with players trying to win as many matches as possible to max out their Crowns.
All of these made the 2 weeks much more exhilarating for the player by bringing in side-quests of sorts in addition to the main quest. We also made some mid-tournament changes to make it fair for all the players in the tournament, both new and existing. For example, we changed how Crowns are earned in PvP by only using NFTs so that people abusing the system by only deploying NFTs don’t get an unfair advantage.
Community Owned Marketplace
We saw interesting player behavior during the tournament as well. Since we didn’t have a native marketplace for our assets, we saw players trading directly among themselves. All of the assets including Essence, Cards and NFTs were being traded among the players. Since you needed Cards for the PvP mode, there was a lot of demand for Cards, which were being traded against Essence. Players could also buy Card packs from the store, but a lot of them were trading them among themselves using Essence as currency. Essence was acquired in bulk by players who owned Buildings Buildings are used to mint Cards using Essence.
A few of them even set up shops to sell assets that they have.
We had a thriving player-owned and operated economy without an official marketplace. The community also came together by sharing tips and tricks for new players and helping each other progress in the tournament. All of the 1–1 transfers added to the more than 30,000+ transactions on-chain.
30,000 transactions on chain
We also saw over 30,000 transactions on-chain with more than 2.5 million in trading volume. For a game that doesn’t have its assets listed on any 3rd party marketplace, we are proud of what we have achieved. Essence saw the highest volume at 2.1 million with Cards being transferred on-chain the most with over 8200 transactions.
A last-minute champion emerges — A fitting finale
The tournament almost had a photo finish with the top spot being shuffled in a matter of hours. On the penultimate day of the tournament, the Top 2 positions shifted suddenly with Mae Rose Gantalao AKA “Rodel” coming from behind to overtake the leader Emmanuel Pontipedra AKA “Jengkoz”, who was leading from day 1. After an exhilarating final day, Mae Rose Gantalao, Emmanuel Pontipedra and Priyanka ended up in the Top 3 spots winning 1250, 950 and 700 USDC each.
You can view the full 100 winners list here
What next for TC:ME?
Ultimate Conqueror was our very first tournament. We are taking all the learnings that we had during the tournament and constantly making the game a much more enjoyable experience for our players. We will strive to bring a lot more exciting things for our community be it in the form of more tournaments, product innovations and otherwise. Like our tight-knit community, we also can’t wait to see what the future holds for TC:ME.
Until then, see you on the Battlefield!
About TC:ME
Tower Conquest: Metaverse Edition (TC:ME) is a free-to-earn, real-time PvP tower defense game that pits you against other players in a battle for glory! Get started for free on Web, mobile or PC and earn tokens by simply playing. With robust economics that are built to last, TC:ME is accessible to players, traders and investors alike.
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