Fourth Council of Mortals Highlights

October 27th 2022

If you think I misrepresented some of the points or missed something important, please let me know and I will edit the post where necessary.

General notes

• The sound issues I have been reporting are gone. Everyone sounds good now and can be clearly understood without interruptions.
• Matchmaking has been upgraded and back-to-back queuing into the same person shouldn't be possible anymore.
• Same as last meeting, not much concrete information came out. A lot of the issues the CoM raised are still under internal discussion (no decision made yet) or under active development.
• Team is looking into avoiding set rotations altogether. No sets will be rotated until the end of the year.
• Bug reporting and fixes roll-out underwent a major overhaul and is working internally much better now. This was IMO the most interesting part of the meeting.

Recordings

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bn_AXoQ7mg4_7XyZ2Luo1LAzryN-RwiC/view?usp=sharing

Discord tab crashed twice during the recording. First time the whole browser froze and I had to close and open again. Second time was just the Discord tab, so the gap was shorter. Would love to link a complete and clean (no other sounds) recording, if anyone else has one. I'll try and use the Discord app next time to see if that fixes the problem going forward.

I also found willy_6eyes Twitch stream. The gaps in my recording are listenable here.

Link to GU official notes

[link goes here]

Max. attendants: ~ 125 people

GU team members:

• Chris Clay (CC)
• Justin Hulog (JH)
• Daniel Paez (DP)
• Eclipse (Ani)
• Arash
• the_muel

The topics on the agenda are:

1. Increasing $GODS Utility - JFA
2. Set Rotation (to be made into an opportunity) - JFA
3. Lack of Achievement Progress - JFA
4. First Turn Advantage - Cautionfun
5. Bug Bounty - SamBam

For more details, see the official Discord post: https://discord.com/channels/457152051239976961/991050088262541362/1034953210504433694

0. AOB (any other business)

1. 0m40s Impact of the community feedback / CoM:

• Matchmaking was upgraded to OpenMatch and the check to prevent re-queuing into the same person went live this week.
• Feedback on meta and balancing is being taken into consideration for new card creation and balance, including Light's Verdict (LV) and changes to MJ and beyond.
• Following the discussion that limiting the card sets are important to the economy of the game, LV had a limited supply and the team overall is happy with Light's Verdict results.
• Internal meetings for the roadmap take into consideration the CoM feedback, although the impact may only be seen several months later.
• Internal discussions on API (see previous CoM) are still ongoing.

Comment: When the point about MJ packs not holding value was raised by CopperPitch during the 2nd CoM on the 25th of August, the GU team had already been preparing LV for several months; there was a Google-cached LV buyer's guide blog page from the 17th of August that had the exact same low drop rates and limited number of packs that were applied while the set was available for sale starting in late September. This makes it a bit disingenuous to portray the terms of the LV sale - with low card prints - as a consequence of CoM input.

Also CopperPitch's point was about too many packs being distributed for free as WR rewards and not having a defined limit for MJ pack sales (and I would add not having a big enough player base to drive a sustained demand for cards in the secondary market). The limited set was proposed as a solution to fix card value, but the way it was implemented actually accelerated the release of MJ cards into the market, without a parallel mechanism to increase the demand for those cards. As a consequence, a few weeks after the LV sale ended, MJ cards are cheaper than ever (for the most part), and MJ packs continue to be a bad financial proposition, at least in the short term.

So the point that the CoM made about limiting card minting was sidelined, because there were no changes to pack rewards from WR and seemingly no limits set to sales of MJ packs - even if the GU team doesn't agree with these proposals, it would be good to see them addressed at least, one way or the other.

What we got instead was a very expensive new set that nobody was asking for. The set may have been a commercial success for the GU team, and the cards seem to be holding value (some even appreciating considerably), but this was not the objective of the original proposal nor an acceptable solution for the problem (the MJ problem remains and was made even worse). On top of that, this scarcity comes with significant P2W complaints, as it puts the access to competitive decks behind an ever increasing paywall. This has also been pointed out abundantly by community members, along with the feeling that LV was quote, "a cash grab", which certainly doesn't help build any sort of positive bond between the current players and the GU team.

1. 4m55s Increasing $GODS Utility - JFA

• DP - Plans are being made for an economic revamp during the next 12 months. This will bring a lot more utility (more use cases) to the token. These new uses will be released as they become ready, instead of a bulk release later on. There will be experimenting involved to help inform improvements for future releases.

• 7m10s - CC makes a distinction between things that cycle $GODS through the ecosystem and others that sink $GODS from circulation. The team is interested in community ideas on how to get players to sink $GODS from circulation. Buying packs with $GODS is a cycling mechanism not a sink. CC gave a potential example of a baby Dragon trinket that sits on its hoard and gets more elaborate with more $GODS locked up by the player (this kind of links to staking?)

• DP explained a point about balancing 3 types of usage for $GODS without one type disrupting the others through changing the $GODS value too much.
  Comment: maybe there is room here to adjust for example DP&E rewards or forging costs if some of the features would bring a big change in token price. I think increasing the $GODS price is always a good thing, and adjustments to sinks priced in $GODS can always be made by the team.

• Arash - team is looking at short term features that would give more value for staking, in particular to people who don't own a lot of $GODS. The team is interested receiving more ideas from the community.

• JFA mentions the suggestions that have already been put forward to making staking more attractive, like additional tiered staking rewards or the Evolutions system - both would work as a way to sink $GODS, ie, take tokens out of circulation. JFA also mentioned other existing proposals, like a discount to pack purchases with $GODS or adding raffles, a chance for cosmetics or high value cards, etc., when packs are bought with $GODS.

• DP replies that these suggestions are being taken into consideration internally and some could eventually be tested, but explains that incentivizing pack purchases with $GODS (which is revenue for the studio and pays for operations) would eventually require selling $GODS in the open market. And this would defeat the purpose of helping sustain the token value.
  
  

2. 17m40s Set Rotation (to be made into an opportunity) - JFA

• Set rotations are used to drive demand for the new sets and to simplify the design and balancing of the game carrying the product forward. What happens often is that most players play the leading 'Standard' mode and legacy modes are usually made less relevant. CC argues that expansions in GU have a limited impact compared to other TCG, because Genesis and Core make up a large part of the card pool. The GU team therefore thinks there is an opening to keep the main competitive format (Ranked) unrotated. This is a harder problem to balance, but considering the desire for older sets to retain their value and utility, the GU team is looking at ways to make this possible, but also how they would go about with set rotations. So the problem is still being analysed and no decision has been made, however the unrotated solution is currently the preferred one. The GU team will be reaching out to the community for feedback once they have a more complete analysis.

• Not having set rotations brings additional challenges dealing with 1) problematic cards and 2) cards with low value / usage. The team is looking into ways of dealing with these situations, including banning cards - but if this were ever to happen, the community would be involved in the decision. In any case, it is not going to happen this year.
  
  

3. 27m10s Lack of Achievement Progress - JFA

• DP - important for players to hit new achievements no matter how recently or early they started playing and have a visual representations of those achievements. Then also be able to take them out of the game and display them elsewhere via web3. The GU team is exploring the design and implementation of this feature. Also on the table is how the achievements could bring benefits to the player, instead of being just a trophy.
  Comment: Forum signatures with API calls that update the sig based on the account stats is nothing new; I'm not sure exactly what web3 would bring new to this, compared to simply querying a server API. There are for sure cases where other platforms support reading web3 data and display it, but from a standpoint of simply displaying game stats, querying a game server should be equivalent, I think.

• CC wants this not only as a showcase of achievements in a competitive setting, but also as a trader and as a progression guide to new players.

• JH - Immutable is working on other games and there could be a persistence of identity across different games; also a link to the achievements across multiple games and what they could unlock.

• JFA asked for the removal of the non-working collector titles from the UI while waiting for a fix to be released. And also for a change to the rat user profile image.
  
  

4. 36m20s First Turn Advantage - Cautionfun

• CC - GU team is still working on solutions. One possibility is changes to the pip system (not very likely); another is to adjust the Sanctum mechanics and rewards. Once some solutions are ready they will be made available in the PTR. There is no current date estimates for this, but is high on the list.

• cautionfun asks for data on first turn advantage so players can better prepare. Convo went into adding that information to API endpoints (which CC will look into with the team) and then went back to simply sharing high level data that the GU team uses, which should not be a problem.
  Comment: I like the idea of both players indicating at the start which turn they prefer - and if both chose a different turn, they get it!
  
  

5. 45m50s Bug Bounty - SamBam

• the_muel - no bug bounty program because of a bottleneck on how the reports are managed internally.
• The team gets plenty of input from community.
• In the last 6 months there was a reset in the team; the initial process wasn't working; the team has been changing and improving the process ever since, but the positive effects have not yet been felt externally.
• Bugs is a broad umbrella that requires engaging different teams and this makes things harder.
• The process has been greatly improved since, including a QA team that helps with releasing updates more frequently.
• The majority of bugs are in-game with card interactions or client soft locking - biggest focus.
• There is a daily bug triage going on now.
• Weekly bug meetings with key devs - setting up a strike force to get fixes done faster.
• Big focus on test automation (Game Driver) will be important piece to put in place.
• There is a public bug Trello board - where some old bugs are still listed - this means these old bugs are not an easy fix and end up getting blocked because they require complicated solutions. The priority column is effectively where the strike force is working at the moment.
• Some bugs are just hard to find and in some situations it could be more efficient to just spend time refactoring code instead of keep trying to find the bugs.
• A better platform for communication and transparency with the bugs is necessary - the team is currently testing out and improving the Discord bug threads.
• CC - combat log will help with accurate bug reporting.

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This was cross-posted to Reddit, for reach.