Recap
The villains Marve and Lecter have been apprehended and order has been restored to Upland. It was all thanks to the brave squads of Uplanders who dedicated their efforts to cracking riddles and tracking down and stopping the threat to Upland’s expansion. With the tickets to NYC returned, we were able to reward the SF Heist Grand Prize winner by giving them the first flight to NYC. It was a blast, and marked a seminal moment in Upland’s history that now takes us into an era of growth, with new possibilities for all Uplanders, veterans and visitors alike. With thousands of Uplanders and over 50,000 properties already minted, Upland’s growth can’t be stopped.
Opening NYC
Uplanders are hungry for new areas to explore. Since it’s one of the most iconic and valuable cities in the world, we’ve selected NYC as the next city Upland will be expanding to.
NYC is huge, of course, so it will be opened up in stages. The first part of NYC that will be opened up is Manhattan. Manhattan will be opened in several phases, starting with the first 5 ‘bubbles’ : Midtown, Upper West Side, Lower East Side, Upper East Side and Village/Chelsea.
To commemorate Upland’s expansion, we’ve pre-selected a very unique and special property to be gifted in NYC: Lazy Llama Cafe, at the corner of E 1st St and 1st Ave. We just couldn’t resist starting with this perfect property, and this is why the first bubble to open up will be the Lower East Side.
Lazy Llama Cafe will be gifted to the SF Heist winner on Friday August 7th at 1:30pm PST, but all other properties will remain locked at that time. The first properties for purchase will be unlocked and go on sale once we reach the 40% minting threshold of properties in San Francisco (the exact timing will be announced beforehand with plenty of time to make the necessary preparations).
The rest of the bubbles will be opened on predefined minting stages of SF: 42%, 44%, 46%, 48% . When SF hits 50% minting, all of Manhattan will then be made available. Manhattan will still be in Vanilla mode, as we want to keep all activities and new-feature-releases focused in SF.
To kickstart the celebration Friday, we’ll also have a few opportunities to grab some prizes throughout the day. Stay tuned for more information.
New Minting Countdown Challenges
To get everyone excited about the opening of NYC, we’ve created a unique ongoing challenge that will reward the Uplanders who are contributing the most to the final push to open NYC.
With the first property in NYC, we are also introducing the Minting Progress Bar, which will measure the total percentage of properties minted in San Francisco. We’ll be using this bar to determine when the next set of properties will be made available. When you click the progress bar there will also be a challenge board showing who has minted the most properties since the challenge started, which will determine the winners (properties that were minted prior to this challenge starting will not count). After we reach 40% minting in SF, we will then have similar challenges for each of these minting stages: 42%, 44%, 46%, 48%, and 50%.
As part of the Fair Start Act (explained below), this challenge will include 2 tiers, giving newer players a better chance to participate and win. There will be separate challenge boards and separate winners for both:
Tier 1: Pros and Directors
Tier 2: Visitor and Uplanders
*(both calculated by net worth)
The winners in each category will get UPX prizes as well as early exclusive access to visit and buy property in each Manhattan bubble when it opens up. This is a really exciting opportunity to be amongst the first to land property in NYC, which is sure to be a hugely popular destination for all Uplanders!
Introducing the Fair Start Act
One of the most unique aspects of Upland’s economy is that we’re focused on making it work for everyone. In order to ensure that new members of the Upland community can participate in our economy, we’ve created a new collection of policies called the Fair Start Act, or FSA. The FSA, for example, will reserve a certain percentage of lower cost (and unminted) properties for players that are either Visitors or Uplanders, meaning Pros and Directors will not be able to mint these properties directly. The more Uplanders that can get off to a good start, the more thriving of an economy Upland will have.
Cities in Upland will be generally categorized into 3 tiers, according to an estimate of their real world property value:
- High End (about 15% of the low cost property designated for FSA)
- Middle Tier (about half of the low cost property designated for FSA)
- Affordable (about 75% of low cost property designated for FSA)
Different areas and cities will have different amounts of FSA designated property, in accordance with formulas designed to keep the economy balanced.
As in the real world, Manhattan is an expensive piece of real estate in Upland. This is why the Manhattan launch is the perfect opportunity to begin rollout of the FSA. As part of that rollout, we will also make property available in Brooklyn, which will be a “Middle Tier” city (borough). In the near future, “Middle Tier” options will include places such as Daly City and Brisbane in the SF area. We’ll communicate the details around the first properties in Brooklyn as we near the time.
The FSA will slowly expand as more properties are unlocked. The FSA will also allow us to launch much more affordable regions (Central Valley CA is one example) later on, where players have more room to play for free, and still commute relatively easily to SF to participate in events, businesses, and more.
Prizes at the Discord AMA
The Upland Team is very excited to invite you to our first ever Discord AMA. This event will take place on our Discord server this Sunday August 9th at 9am PST. We’ll be answering questions and sharing ideas live for 1.5 hours.
Uplanders in a different timezone can post questions in advance. We’ll do our best to address every question asked. We will be utilizing two separate channels on Discord, one for asking questions (#town-hall-questions) and one for our answers (#town-hall-answers). This will make it easier to keep our answers organized and ensure a better reading experience.
We’ll also be giving away a couple UPX prizes. The first prize will be given away to a random participant in the town hall (question required). The second prize will be given to the most interesting question asked during the AMA, as determined by the other Uplanders. This will be determined by which question has the most UPX coin emojis attached to it. One UPX coin emoji = one vote. No other emojis will be counted toward the vote for most interesting question.
Have your questions ready. We hope to see you there!
Until next time,
Llama out.
