Hm, well that escalated quickly!
24 hours after writing my Ragnarok Speculation post asking various questions about the game... an AMA pops up today and we got a bunch of answers.
Good stuff!
Yes the NFTs can be rented out, there will be a marketplace for rentals.
It's nice to see that renting cards will be a thing. No fun to have valuable cards just sitting around when you could be putting them to work. However, this is a bit of a double-edged sword. If cards can be rented that makes the game even more deflationary and encourages hoarding to the extreme. Still, it seems like the benefits outweigh the negatives. Let the free market decide.
This raises a few more questions though. XP tokens earned from rented cards belong to the person that rented the card... right? Also, even if it was possible to level up a rented card... you'd never want to do that... because you don't own it (I assume). It's a complex game and it will be difficult to get everything answered all at once, especially considering the game will likely be in a constant stage of development during the testnet year.
The pawn can become any piece, but the piece must have died first. You resurrect a fallen teammate by sacrificing the pawn's life.
No, spells are once and down per entire match, even when revived. Spells reset when you play a new game vs a new opponent.
Standard Chessboard, 8x8 grid/ 64 squares.
Fewer pieces but more room to maneuver.
The board will be played corner to corner, unlike on the sides with normal chess. Each side will have 2 walls to defend from pawn encroachments. We have actually been playing around with this idea for the Bishop, the pawn will have a novel move also. Something as edicted suggested could make the game flow better. We need to test more to come to a conclusive decision for v1.
Corner to Corner... eh?
So like... this...
And then I assume you put the king in the far back corner so he's hard to get to... Queen and Rook next at H7/G8... then Bishop, Pawn, Knight... then 4 Pawns in the front. Weird.
I was thinking perhaps we should just give players a full chess set. All 16 pieces, but the extra 6 pieces past the original 10 would be "NPC mortals". They'd be ghost proxy pieces; the mortal shadow of their respective God/Titan.
So you'd have 2 bishops, but one would be the "real" Bishop and the other would be the mortal version. If the mortal version got attacked by any piece it would just die for free. If the mortal version attacked another mortal version: again instant death to the attacked piece just like real chess.
However, you could make one of the possible moves trading places on the board, so if you had both bishops alive and the mortal version had good positioning, you could switch places so the god piece was in position. Also if a mortal attacked a god/titan it would do some amount of damage to it (but then promptly die instantly). Just a thought.
Although... I had this idea before I realized the game was played from the corners, which also seems cool so now my idea doesn't seem as good. Guess I'll have to think on it more or actually wait for testing to begin. I'm a pretty good black-box tester and I even worked for Sony Online Entertainment for a year doing just that (a lucky gig indeed, as most testing is boring white-box checklist).
Sybil Attack?
The game will not be botable, there are too many components. But we welcome bots if anyone can find any use for them.
I must say... this is a BOLD fucking claim to make. At the same time, creating a bot for any one of these games wouldn't be that easy. One that incorporates all three would be quite the undertaking. Still, if the reward is high enough it will happen.
At the same time it might actually take years for the SIP to generate enough yield to make some of the prizes worth it. A lot of the value will be generated simply by players wanting to play the game and the deflationary nature of the NFTs themselves.
there is a yearly fee to opt into Ragnarok and to turn on EXP coin rewards for battles. There are many HBD sinks still yet to be announced.
Wow, right, I forgot about this... a yearly fee... I wonder how high it will be. This is yet another huge barrier to entry to bots. Good stuff. I hope it's something insane like $100 or more :D. Elitists only! This is a spectator sport after all.
Also I think the subtext here implies that every year during the "reset" all the cards will be de-leveled to level 1 and everyone has to start all over. Might be wrong so don't quote me.
The claim drop is for the HIVE/HP balances, so if you delegate HP, the account delegating the HP gets the claim, not the person who receives the delegation.
Another interesting fact.
How many big accounts on Hive are delegating to others and will be AFK during the claimdrop? There are going to be A LOT of NFTs that do not get claimed (most of which centralized exchanges), and all of those unclaimed NFTs are going into the prize pools to be won by community members later on. Pretty cool.
The game of Chess is reduced to 10 pieces and will have a time limit. The 1v1 has a time limit also per round. With testing, we are clocking games at a range from as low as 10 minutes to games as long as 40 minutes.
Interesting game length
That's about how long it takes to play a MOBA game like League of Legends, except LOL games have a minimum length of 20 min instead of 10. It's significantly longer than playing a Hearthstone game, but I suppose that's to be expected considering this game is essentially 3 games in one.
I hope there will be some advantage to playing/winning one game a day (daily quest), although again mechanics like that incentivize bots to come in and exploit the economy, which is obviously annoying. Perhaps if the reward from daily quests could only benefit the account in question and not be a tradable asset then it would be okay. But then you start entering the realm of farming and selling accounts directly as we've seen all too often.
There are three card types: Gold, Silver, Bronze. Gold is the rarest, followed by silver, then bronze. Gold cards give you more EXP coins per win, with bronze cards giving the lowest amount of exp coins per win. There will be gold/silver/bronze versions of all cards. There will be no "special" cards persay, the cards will all be unique, especially the kings and queens. There will be ultra-rare gods with a very low mint count.
Gold cards give you more EXP coins per win?
Weird.
Not sure if I'm reading this correctly. Can a gold card and a silver card be the same exact card except for the amount of XP it generates? I'm guessing no but... unclear.
The team consists of 14 people right now.
Again, think of how crazy it is that this game has 14 employees and the company itself isn't taking any kind of salary for making the game. This is unheard of in the WEB2 economy. You build a game, you siphon as much value as you can out of it. Blizzard and other companies go so far as to ban your account if you try to sell it. Why? Because you don't actually own your account; they own your account. They own the data and they own you. Web3 is crazy and most people don't realize what's going on here.
Yes! There will be rewards for those that participate in the public test net. We will also offer bug bounties for any bugs found during the initial testing phase.
Again, I make a good tester.
I'm prone to trying weird strategies in games like these.
Should be interesting.
Gotta break the game to fix the game.
There will be a one-year public test net, simulating an entire tournament, before Ragnarok can be eligible to be voted on to go live.
The rough estimate will be between 17-170'ish Hive per NFT on the safe side
So it's possible that I get an airdrop of TEN THOUSAND NFTs?
That's insane.
Guaranteed to get 1000 at least.
Intense: potentially getting airdropped 100 decks.
Can't complain.
We want to make it easier to run than hearthstone resource-wise, most games use a lot of unnecessary jazz that hogs your resources.
The game has been in the works for the better part of a year now. The game mechanics are about 80% done, albeit that last 10% usually takes longer. The art is about 80% done for the Norse Mythology set. We are not here to be pretty, we will push out a test net that may not look pretty but will show core gameplay.
This is better than I thought.
Hopefully testnet launches in Q1, eh? #dreambig.
I'm glad that Dan realizes that the key to all of this is to eventually let the community develop the game. Give the players the tools to build animations, art, and other skins, and then allow those skins to be tokenized and provably owned by the creator. Let the game develop itself. This is the way.
As the system is not finished, EXP coins will be based on wins, but also damage dealt and stats inside the game itself. So only fighting kinds, in the end, will not result in more EXP coins, and you may get a win, but it won't net you high ranking points, which ultimately determine the top 100 each year. Also, kings cost more to heal than others, so one would want to protect their King at all costs.
This all seems a bit weird to me... because aren't both sides going to sustain massive losses the vast majority of the time? Also, there must be a loser in every game... so every game the king of one side will go to zero and needs to be healed at a bare minimum. Guess we'll find out.
Considering the yearly reset and the massive quantity of XP it will take to level up spells... we could probably just destroy all spells every year and make players refarm them from scratch. On that same note spells could be hyperinflationary and easy to get because level 1 spells wouldn't be super great and they would get destroyed every year. Doesn't get more deflationary than nuking to zero!
If anything it becomes more and more obvious just how valuable XP currency is going to be. Every card can be leveled up eight times. That's ten gods minimum that need to be leveled up (probably more if we want versatility). Even crazier... every spell can be leveled up 8 times, and considering gods can have literally dozens of spells... wow. Picking and choosing what needs to be leveled up is going to be a BIG deal.
Not paying the entry fee to generate XP tokens is going to be a big mistake IMO, even if the entry fee is very expensive. I'm sure many rich players out there will be looking to avoid playing 30-50 minutes just to get XP tokens (2 games; 1 win on average) and would more than happily purchase yours at fair-market value. The grind is real. The demand for XP tokens is going to be intense, even as an inflationary/deflationary proof-of-burn token. Them token sinks are massive.
spells?
We are looking at around a 33million total NFTs. This does not include spells.
We are comfortable saying it will be between 3.3 million to 33million total NFTs, excluding spells that are in-game mineable only.
You can only get spells by farming the game?
Wow. Again, that is pretty intense. Again, I wonder how they are mined. Are we planning some kind of single-player campaign for this thing or (much more likely to start) do they just drop randomly after winning a game? Guess we'll find out.
Airdrop HBD?
We will be doing more games. We can consider HBD in the future. But this drop is for HIVE/HP only to make it a much simpler process.
lol oh yeah...
I forgot that Ragnarok is the seed for other games and airdrops.
So intense. Need Moar! Gimmit the tokens!
Conclusion
This AMA has been quite enlightening. We learned a lot, but there are still more questions and much more development to come... including a massive year-long test-net. Again, everything sounds promising. And here I thought 2022 was just going to be a boring depressing bear market. How silly in retrospect!