The First Zombie Battleground AMA 😎

Lots of great questions from the Zombie Battleground community!

It’s been a crazy few months over here — the Kickstarter campaign, the game development, the marketplace, the email blasts, community management…

Whew…

All the while, we’ve been doing our best to answer your questions as they come in — yet some undoubtedly fell through the cracks.

So that’s why we decided it was time to do our first Zombie Battleground AMA (Ask Me Anything). Last week, we invited the community to ask us questions and upvote other questions to identify the most popular inquiries.

And here they are… the top 22 questions, plus 1 comment:

1. When can we open packs?

Next week!

2. When will we get the next update for the Alpha client?

Check your email! We sent out the most recent update of the alpha client last night (along with details for the iOS and Android mobile builds).

3. When will the weekly newsletter start?

Next week!

4. Could you elaborate on any marketing plans for bringing Zombie Battleground to a larger audience?

We have lots of things in the works: influencer campaigns, content marketing, guest posts & editorial PR, community engagement, social media campaigns, ad campaigns, tournaments and other events, etc.

But the best marketing, of course, is viral word of mouth. So we’re counting on you, the early backers, to help us make Zombie Battleground as amazing as it can be for the open beta later this year, and spread the word to all your friends and online communities!

5. When will the mobile version and PvP mode be out?

Mobile: Yesterday! We’ve already sent out invite links to all Kickstarter backers, so check your email and Kickstarter Update #32 for more details 😉

PvP: In the next month or two. Our blockchain engineers are hard at work making this possible — it’s something that’s never been done before, so we’re really pushing the limits of blockchain technology to make this happen!

6. Are there plans for a competitive tournament scene? If so, what kind of prize structures will the company be considering?

We have plans for tournaments, and we’ll have details about this coming in the future. But we haven’t made any announcements yet.

Right now our primary focus is on getting PvP, game balance, and pack rewards ready for the open beta as soon as possible. After that, we can start to shift our focus onto other features.

7. Are there any features that aren’t in the game yet that you are planning to announce? Not PvP, maybe a leveling system or a campaign?

There will be single player campaigns available for the version 1 release in 2019, but again, our current focus is on nailing PvP, game balance, and pack rewards for the open beta by the end of this year — this is what we see as the most crucial piece, so we can start onboarding tens of thousands of users as soon as possible.

After that… we’d like to hold off on making official announcements until we’re 100% sure something is feasible, but let’s just say we have lotttts of really cool ideas for features we want to add 🙃

8. With the game only launching with ~160 cards and some backers with over 450 packs, will we be able to sell or trade packs? or hold for future expansions? I’m concerned about the over saturation of cards. Maybe the “super packs” and “rare packs” offer variants such as shiny cards?

We have some detailed updates coming out in the next few weeks about how the card economy will work.

In short, we have our most talented engineers working on economic models to balance card rarity, and it’s one of our main priorities (and we feel one of our greatest strengths).

I don’t want to spoil everything, so just wait until next week when we release our first article describing the card rarity and economics… But there ARE super rare “limited-edition” cards (“shiny cards”, as you put it 😉), and these cards can be upgraded to various levels by melting down standard-edition cards into goo and using that goo to upgrade them to even rarer versions.

Don’t worry, we got this 🤓 We’ve been putting a ton of thought into balancing out the card rarity and economics, so stay tuned for more details in future articles.

9. Do you have any plans to allow the general community to contribute to the game in the form of custom artwork or decks?

Let’s just say… we don’t have any announcements to make at this time, but we have definitely put a good amount of thought into this possibility 😉

10. How will cards be rare?

We be publishing a series of articles over the next few weeks about the card economics to explain scarcity, balancing, and more. But in short, regular cards are inflationary (there’s no fixed limit on the number of them, so new players can still come in and get a competitive deck), while limited-edition cards are fixed in number (these are cosmetic variants of the cards that look way cooler, and have a fixed supply so they’re true collectors items).

11. Have you looked into integrating with opensea.io?

Our cards are backward compatible with ERC721s, so they will be compatible with any ERC721-based marketplace, which includes opensea.io and Rarebits.

12. Will we be able to buy ETH through the mobile app so we can buy cards through the trading post?

You won’t be able to buy ETH from the app, as we have to comply with Apple’s App Store rules regarding cryptocurrencies.

13. How many cards will we find in the packs? 150? more?

Each pack contains 5 cards, and there will be 160 cards for the initial open beta release by the end of this year.

You will be able to find all 160 of the cards in the game through opening packs. However, certain limited-edition versions of these cards (such as the Kickstarter exclusives) only exist in a fixed quantity and cannot be found in packs.

14. Is there going to be a news board or announcements section within ZB for news, events or stream/video promotion?

Not within the game itself (at least initially), but we will post updates to the loom.games website, to our Medium publication, our Twitter, and our Discord announcements channel.

15. How did Loom come up with the Zombie theme for everything? It’s well done and very appealing.

Thank you! It all started with CryptoZombies.io, which is an interactive programming tutorial where users learn to build their own blockchain-based collectibles game on Ethereum.

That site blew up in popularity and put Loom Network on the map — it’s now the most popular Ethereum coding tutorial in the world.

So we took that early fame and used it to inspire the rest of our company branding. In fact, Zombie Battleground was originally called “CryptoZombies Battleground” before we dropped the “Crypto” to make it more mainstream (and that’s why James kept messing up and saying “Zombies Battleground” in the Kickstarter video — old habits die hard 😅).

Then Roy and his team of artists took the concept to a whole new level with Zombie Battleground. When we saw the concept art, we were totally blown away because it’s a complete reimagination of the zombie theme.

The world has never seen zombies THIS cool before 😉

16. Are you going to change my name from Sapper to Zapper? And are you going to debuff me?

That’s up to the game team… we’ll see. But Zapper kinda sound like a zombie that would electrocute others.

17. Could you explain the uniqueness of running the game on the Loom platform, compared to other games running on Ethereum directly?

It wouldn’t be possible to run a game like this on Ethereum.

For one, users would need to pay a gas fee every time they played a card or attacked! Then their opponent would need to wait 15+ seconds (and up to several minutes when the network is congested) for the transaction to get included into the next block before starting his turn.

Because Loom uses DPoS, transactions are able to get confirmed in less than a second. And from a UX perspective, users don’t need to pay fees per every action they take, nor do they need to sign each transaction because our tech handles that transparently in the background.

18. What factors do you think resulted in Gods Unchained (another blockchain-based CCG) getting a lot more exposure and raising significantly more money?

Looking at their smart contract, it looks like 50% of their card supply was bought up by only 12 individuals, and 75% of the supply by around 30 individuals.

So the size of their raise seems to be due to a small number of people spending an enormous amount of money on cards, rather than due to a large number of players participating.

In terms of exposure, we reached 12 million mainstream through our ad campaigns to make them aware of what we’re building, and we have 23,000+ people on the waitlist waiting for the open beta — which is pretty good in our minds!

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Hello there.

20. Will some kind of melting mechanic be added to the game so we can use that dust or goo to purchase future expansion cards or cards we need to complete our set?

It’s in the works. You can currently see a “Melt” button when viewing cards in the deck editing screen. You’ll be able to melt standard-edition cards into goo and use that goo to upgrade cards to various levels of super rare versions.

21. If I don’t open my Kickstarter packs until after more cards are released will I have access to the new cards in those packs or are they not part of same pool?

There’s no benefit to waiting to open your packs. All 160 cards are available, though some of them are “embryos” — they’re still in the incubation stage and act like a placeholder for your cards. So as soon as our art team finalizes the artwork and adds them to the game, you’ll see your zombies.

22. Will there be some sort of guide to explain every aspect of the game (e.g. officer, general, feral, status effects, etc.) to make stuff easier to understand?

Absolutely! Our content team is putting together details about the game and how to play… and we’ll share that with everyone soon.

23. How will you accommodate people whom are not familiar with Ethereum and blockchain tech?

We’ve been saying that Zombie Battleground is “truly scalable” because it looks and feels like any normal mobile or computer game. You can play the game without owning any cryptocurrency, having an Ethereum account, or even knowing what a blockchain is. All the complicated tech happens behind the scenes.

All you really need to know is that this technology allows you to totally own your cards and trade them with others 😉

Thanks for all the questions, everyone! We’ll do this again at a later date… but for now, there’s lots of work to be done.

Enjoy the game!

Relentless is the world’s first desktop and mobile card game that runs fully on its own blockchain. Learn more at Loom.games.

Brought to you by Loom Network — the blockchain platform of choice for serious dapp developers.