Community Quack AMA #1: Recap
The focus of this AMA was to review community ideas concerning the development of Waves Ducks. Inal, together with Bram (Mr. BlackTurtle) had a lot of ideas that have been shared through a special form. In the time of the AMA, they were able to go through 30 of them. So here are all the ideas and questions that have been anwsered.
Community Idea 1: In-game sounds and music for Duck Wars.
Inal’s comment: We are currently implementing dynamic backgrounds and sound is something that certainly can be added in the future. However, we first need to find the resources for that. If sounds or music were to be implemented, we would definitely make it optional.
Community idea 2: Weekly lottery to increase EGG buy pressure, which involves buyng 1 EGG every week for a chance to get 10 EGGs.
Inal’s comment: We already have community raffles from time to time on social networks. If they were to be held more often, the community would be oversaturated. We can use this particular raffle idea, but not as frequently.
Community idea 3: Permanent Telegram referral bot with small rewards. There used to be one and it brought a lot of users in a very short time.
Inal’s comment: Bots are great for outreach, but they are easily exploited with fake accounts. At the moment, our team has no solution to that, but your ideas are welcome.
Community idea 4: New item, Nest Warmer. It would increase farming yield but would only allow to claim EGG after some period of time. This item can be upgradable like mantles, with the yield multiplier and lock-up period also increasing.
Bram’s comment: It can overcomplicate some aspects of farming, especially the yield callculation, but a more straightforward solution acheving the same goal might be interesting. For the same budget and effort, we can develop several features that are more interesting and more used.
Inal’s comment: It’s hard to implement since the farming smart contract is very complex by itself. Adding another mechanic will be costly in terms of time and resources and there’s no guarantee that it will be used by a lot of players. It can even be harmful, since the daily EGG distribution is capped at 100, and if someone significantly increases their yield, other players will be getting less.
Community idea 5: Farming reset which will allow to trim inactive users who still get rewards but don’t collect them due to abandoning the game or losing access to their accounts. This will leave only active players in farming.
Inal’s comment: Resetting personal farms is not something we are going to do.
Community idea 6: An option to choose vEGG as a farming reward with increased rates, like x1.2 in vEGG compared to regular EGG.
Bram’s comment: Users don’t seem to be interested in vEGG right now, but this idea might be useful with other circumstances in effect.
Inal’s comment: It will likely confuse newcomers.
Community idea 7: Remove the G, H, I, K genes and start with the L, M, N, O genes in the incubator to make it worth for players getting new ducks through Waves Ducks Hunt.
Inal’s comment: I love the idea, and there seems to be no downsides to that. We will likely do that when the Waves Ducks Hunt app is released.
Bram’s comment: It would be OK to replace a couple of genes from the incubator, but not 4 at once. Otherwise, I support the idea.
Community idea 8: Reintroduction of duckling feed limit tied to Duck Wars.
Inal’s comment: Unfortunately, there are too many bots in Duck Wars, and unless the problem is somehow resolved, feed limit is not going back.
Community idea 9: EGG listed on more exchanges.
Inal’s comment: There were several listing negotiations started about a year ago, but they have been paused, and now we’re trying to list EGG again. EGG’s main market is on Waves, so listing native tokens on other exchanges is hard. It can be done via ERC20 or BEP20 versions of the token, but there’s no liquidity or use cases for them. Another problem is that play to earn is not something the exchanges are open to at the moment due to a generally negative experience with such projects. We will be trying to list EGG on other platforms regardless.
Community idea 10: Introduce a system to let duck owners who buy a special hunt pass rent out ducks with attached quests for others to fulfill. The duck owner gets SPICE passively, while the duck users get vEGG to upgrade their skill trees for completing the quest.
Inal’s comment: This is good for sharing experience with your friends or relatives and spreading the word about the game. Similar scholarship mechanics are quite successful in other games, and we will consider implementing something like that in the future. But it should be as simple as possible.
Bram’s comment: The passive earning for Waves Ducks Hunt is already there, at least partially with the introduction of virtual locations, but maximizing rewards by being slightly more active as a duck owner is an interesting idea nonetheless.
Community idea 11: Adding AR puzzles to Waves Ducks Hunt, where instead of showing the outright location of reward, there would be some kind of route leading to a bigger prize if you can meet all the conditions.
Inal’s comment: Brilliant idea! We actually had internal discussions on something similar. The exact vision is to be figured out, so feel free to share ideas about the appropriate riddles or tasks. Our main goal is to make such a system fun and not too complicated.
Community idea 12: There should be a mechanism where you can place your ducks as a loan and receive USDN with a cap on the number of ducks and earnings per month.
Inal’s comment: There’s a major problem of determining the duck’s market price, since it can be manipulated. It’s almost impossible to implement in a secure way, because NFT prices are too volatile.
Community idea 13: Timer for the marketplace auction.
Inal’s comment: Honestly, I don’t see much value in that, especially since 95% of users prefer buying out to bidding
Community idea 14: Some eggs in Waves Ducks Hunt spawn farther away than the maximum distance and sometimes in unreachable spots. How about increasing the egg opening range?
Inal’s comment: This issue has already been addressed and eggs should be spawning correctly now. As for opening distance, earlier we introduced the rope feature that will let you draw eggs closer if they’re out of reach, but it is not free to use.
Community idea 15: Random rewards for opening 5 eggs in a set amount of time. These can range from small amounts of SPICE tokens to genesis ducks.
Inal’s comment: The core game is about getting random rewards from golden eggs, and we will be expanding the reward pool, so there’s no point in doing something like that.
Community idea 16: Set market fee to 20% for timed auctions and add a deposit fee for selling a duck. If a duck is not sold in time, deposits are lost.
Inal’s comment: Why would anyone want to put the duck for sale if we were to implement this? I see no point. Besides, when you put your duck up for sale, you miss out on farming rewards, which in some sense works as a fee.
Community idea 17: Add a bonus to farming for the collected EGGs. If an account has collected more than 10 eggs per day, then the bonus is 2%, and if more than 50 eggs, the bonus is 5%.
Inal’s comment: Our future leveling system does practically the same, so there’s no point in implementing 2 similar systems.
Community idea 18: F2P players get a free customizable duckling. Instead of SPICE, they get vEGG in golden eggs. They can buy cosmetic items with vEGG and improve their skill tree. If they want to get SPICE instead of vEGG, they have to buy an NFT duck and use its capacity. Additionally, if they want a cosmetic item but they dont want to do anything for it, they should be able to buy that item with EGG.
Inal’s comment: Currently, there is no way to play Waves Ducks Hunt absolutely for free, so implementing this would mean changing core mechanics 180 degree. But I agree that there should be ways to play just for fun, not for money, maybe some guild on guild activity, we are working on it.
Community idea 19: Customizable player icon on the map, with different styles purchased for vEGGs.
Inal’s comment: I like that idea but it’s up to our designers to decide, whether it will fit the current visual style of the game.
Community idea 20: Reward multiplier that increases as more players aggregate in the same area, up to 10 players and x1.5 rewards.
Inal’s comment: This opens up more exploit opportunities by incentivizing people to create additional accounts on multiple devices.
Bram’s comment: I agree, it is very risky.
Community idea 21: Inside golden eggs, you can also find Legend Books divided in parts. Each Legend Book part has a little fragment of Waves Ducks lore. Once you collect all fragments of a Legend Book, it will give you a rare cosmetic item/card for battles/other reward.
Inal’s comment: This is actually a nice idea, we will seriously think about adding that.
Community idea 22: An option to play completely for free. Accessibility features: quick access button for the farm owners that leads to the farm screen, and an “invite friends” button.
Inal’s comment: You can play the game for free, but you won’t be getting any rewards unless you get a duck. As for the invite button, there’s no incentive to use it without a referral program.
Bram’s comment: I think we should make it easier and more rewarding to invite friends into the game.
Community idea 23: Temporary costumes in golden eggs that give you special skills according to the class they represent:
- Ninja: For X time, you get a chance for x2 reward when opening a golden egg
- Sniper: For X time, you can open golden eggs from x2 distance
- Magician: You are able to stop the timer for X golden eggs
- Berserk: X eggs of other players will appear simultaneously around you with the same timer
- Graffity artist: you can paint X other players’ eggs into golden eggs (it ensures you get 100% of the reward)
- Tracker: During X time, you will be seeing what is inside of your golden eggs
Inal’s comment: I love this type of abilities that give you temporary bonuses. It might take some time to implement, but it sounds very interesting.
Bram’s comment: I think it is better to give players a choice when they upgrade their skill trees. They might choose one skill tree and the others will be locked, which wil effectively introduce classes with their own strengths and limitations.
Community idea 24: I have read about future ranking. Could be cool if instead of wallet address, you could pay a little to change it for a customizable name. Also you could pay to show your customizable duck beside your name. Maybe also background color on ranking, a flag and even customizable moves and sounds for your duckling showed in ranking. Example: when someone clicks on your customized duckling in the ranking, it will do a dance in front of your flag, a celebration, a move or make a sound like a horn, a monkey, a horse, whatever. All that available with EGG and vEGG.
Inal’s comment: We thought about adding Twitter handles that would be clickable and would lead to players’ Twitter accounts. As for special moves and sounds, those are unlikely to be added. But name customization and integration with Twitter, down to choosing one of your ducks as PFP, is something we’re considering.
Community idea 25: introduce a weekly vote to choose a new Duck Wars background from the community. The community offers background ideas, and whoever wins according to the voting results, gets their background implemented as well as some goodies, maybe vEGG.
Dasha’s comment: We can easily start doing that, the question is, whether our designers will be able to draw those backgrounds quick enough. We will probably try this next week.
Community idea 26: Add some lore behind ducks as characters.
Inal’s comment: We’ve had some ideas on the ducks lore tied to Duck Wars, but it requires some changes in the mechanics. Adding lore to the game as it is now doesn’t make a lot of sense. Community ideas on the implementation with the current mechanics are welcome.
Community idea 27: Divide the map into 1 sq. km plots and auction them off for USDN. To participe in the auction, you must have 5 EGGs in the wallet. All the received USDN must be spent on the Waves Ducks developement. Each land owner can customize their plot with pixel art or put their favorite duck and other features to be visible for everyone. Then, all players can buy and sell those lands on the market for EGG with 5% fees.
Inal’s comment: We can use this idea in Waves Ducks Hunt, maybe have an ability to set some restrictions or rules by the land owner to somehow interact with other players who hunt there.
Bram’s comment: I like the idea, sounds fun and interesting. We could also add it to the AR mode, so that you could see who owns this land or some other info.
Community idea 28: Add a roadmap somewhere on the main page with dates to motivate new players.
Inal’s comment: Great idea, we will definitely do that.
Community idea 29: Adjust your marketing strategy. The events in New-York, Korea and Madrid have failed.
Inal’s comment: That’s not true, we have received a lot of positive feedback and quite a few new users who stll play. Also tested some things out. These events were offline and they are over, so now we’re focusing more on online marketing anyway.
Community idea 29: Show us statistics and info: How many new players joined since the Waves Ducks Hunt launch? Since the NY event? Korea? I dont know what would be worse, if you have no stats or if you dont show them because they are heavily negative.
Inal’s comment: We have statistics, and they’re not negative. I don’t think that we have to publish them after every event or marketing activity. Maybe we can add some numbers into the weekly report once a month or so. And we cannot disclose everything, because the competition is watching.
