Second Council of Mortals Highlights

August 24th 2022

Audio Recording:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BDSyRL14SyowmomlBxDlcpaVdOkQ5iXZ/view?usp=sharing

The topics on the agenda are

1. Packs Should not be Infinite Supply - CopperPitch
2. Player Info Disparity - Agent K
3. High Marketplace Fees - Feanor
4. Client Server Status - Flavius
5. Roadmap Transparency - Professerf
6. Higher Utilization of the PTR - cautionfun
7. Clear Display of Win/Losses - Agent K
8. Sealed Mode - Hpain

For more details, see the official Discord: https://discord.com/channels/457152051239976961/991049969853169685

General notes

Council ended before the hour and 4 minutes were wasted at the start. The GU team spent a lot of time talking about stuff that wasn't on the Agenda and although relevant and interesting, could have been communicated in an announcement, blog or Reddit post. We already have so little time for this, and still so much time is being wasted. I would like to see CoM meetings go for 1h30m and start on time. People are recording, the team is recording, there is no need to wait for an audience.

Justin Hulog's (JH) sound at times was failing and made it hard to understand some parts of his discourse. Chris Clay's (CC) sound was bad too at times, but less so.

There were 5/8 topics addressed, the last few rather quickly. I'm OK with spending some extra time discussing important topics, but it's crucial for everyone to be concise and stay on topic to make the most out of the allotted time.

This CoM overall was worse than the first: less ground was covered, wasted time, off-topic information that could have been given elsewhere, bad sound quality and most importantly most topics were addressed indirectly. I indicate below where I thought this was most noticeable.

0. AOB (any other business)

• Impact of the community feedback / CoM so far (JH)
  • Feedback has resulted in adjustments to the roadmap.
  • Acknowledge community priority around game modes and work is being done to design these modes.
  • Which lead to tangents about lore, card design, card art. New information on these could be shared within the next couple of weeks.
  • Acknowledged community wants faster rollout of features that matter to them. Offered Daily P&E by the end of August as an example that this is being realized.

• Work is ongoing on the features detailed in the "Expanding Possibilities" section of the roadmap released in July.
• Work is being done on Lore and how it will be important for design decisions around different parts of the game.

1. Packs should not be infinite supply

• CC: irrespective of the solutions, the goals are aligned in the retaining of value of packs, which is currently not the case.

• There are ongoing internal discussions of the current devaluation of cards and solutions to fix this.

• Hard duration dates for locking Sets could create problems in the future for the Studio.

• Currently the economically efficient use of the Forge is to create Meteorite cards. Anything above that currently is mostly about flexing.

• Studio is looking into ways of bringing utility to higher shines and Daily P&E.

• CC suggested smaller releases between sets to help address the card value issue.

• The suggestions for setting limits to 1) pack sales based on a time limit or 2) free reward packs weren't seconded by the dev team, which in turn pivoted to alternative ways of retaining card value without committing to hard rules for pack sales or reward reductions.

• JH explained the problem that web3 brings to card value variations (drop in value) with balance patches and meta changes that are irrelevant in a web2 game (player can't sell assets). The studio is looking into ways of stabilizing value despite these balance and meta changes using web3 abilities.

• Studio is looking into ways to raise interest / give value to cards outside of pure utility.

• JH doubled down on the importance of linking of lore and rules of the world to game economy.

• JH explained how gameplay is different in mobile games and thus the need for flexibility at this point to account for that.
  I don't understand exactly how this connects to the overall topic.

• There is a 'Season Finale' coming. Studio is exploring different mechanics around the economy: marquee cards (higher level of lore and art); a 'wallet' that represents the 'will of Eucos with agency in this campaign which ties to the broader story at the end of Season Finale'. This will bring data to evaluate if a 'lore-based economy has legs' and if yes there are more ideas to double down on this concept.

• De-forging is under internal discussion.

• The economy and game systems are not mature enough AND there is a lot of experimenting ahead that precludes committing (at this moment) to criteria for rotating out sets.

• CopperPitch asked about parallax effects for cards. Alternate art is on the roadmap but not for the near future.

• JH mentioned the possibility of cross-utility of tokens and gave the example of GoG.
  We already had something similar to this with the initial airdrop of cards from Etherbots. What happened to Etherbots anyway? Is this game going to be developed?

This topic ate so much time and in the end no concrete measures were advanced to help retain card value; except for making smaller set releases, which frankly I don't follow the logic, except to make cards even more scarce? I would really like to see someone explain the reasoning for how this would work. From the omissions I conclude that the studio does not consider the amount of free packs distributed weekly to be a problem for retaining card value, or at least this is not something they seem willing to address at this moment.

2. Player info disparity

• Agent K wasted way too much time (5 minutes!) explaining his point despite saying at the start he would try to keep it short.

• The topic is about hiding player names to avoid peeking at the player deck history and how this creates an unbalance and an unfair advantage. Also to discuss the possibility of making player IDs accessible.

• CC said the current state is "there is equal opportunity", which is not true because if someone makes their name ??? or squares, quickly looking up player IDs is not at the same level of difficulty for everyone.

• CC argued that increasing privacy would have a detrimental effect on building additional features around the game, like GUStakes. The studio wants to foster 3rd parties to build tools around the game.

• Open deck lists is not a perfect solution, but the balance is in how easy to make it available. CC said "open decklists, sure"? Sound was bad. And then "when it comes to player IDs we're sending that down already making it available in client isn't something I'm necessarily opposed to".

• Agent K mentioned that access to Workshops (other people's game decks and usage stats) is publicly available but only a few people know and use this information. CC doesn't want links in the client to lookup other people's Workshops.

• JH considers the unreadable player names an 'exploit of the openess' of the data available around the game and something that needs to be fixed.

• There was an off-topic explanation about how important it is to have data available for more serious / professional players to improve their skills.

I think there is a fix coming, but no concrete details were presented. It was really hard to extract any substantial information on this. The topic would have benefited immensely from a more on-point address of the problem instead of going off on tangents that don't really seem to be top of mind to the community.

3. High marketplace fees

• JH - "this is a question that is top of mind"

• JH considers that this "affects high value trades", meaning to me he doesn't consider the other trades to be paying high fees. He proceeded to provide average values for trades since fees were introduced until now.

• JH - "part of the reason we have fees is you don't have to pay for minting, transfers and for gas on L2".
  They are trying to create a system where they can pay for the cost of the platform while making sure the low value trades are possible irrespective of gas price.

• IMX is looking at fee caps for high value trades across all projects, not just GU.

• Studio is looking at Daily P&E mechanism where if you use higher shine cards you get lower fees on those trades.

• Smaller value trades would not be possible on L1 if gas prices would need to be considered (the current fee structure 'pays' for the cost of facilitating this service).

It would have been interesting to hear a comparison to fees paid in other markets, including NFT markets for other games, but the reply was focused on "high value trades", so the issue of people feeling the fees are overall too high was not really properly addressed, except that they must be this high to pay for the rest of the free stuff.

4. Client Server Status

• When will the game get out of Beta? When mobile comes out, essentially.

• The game is still very much in Beta, trying new things, developing features, etc.

5. Roadmap transparency

• There was no discussion, only JH re-hashing things he had already said while being open to hear more feedback from the community and Eclipse saying that Professerf, who put forward the topic, didn't have to come forward and explain his point. So yea.

• 51:54 The studio is hiring high level executives and those jobs are required to calculate more precisely when certain features the people under them are working on would be released.

• Senior Community Manager coming in at the end of September.

• Marketing team is being fleshed out.

• 52:32 "Clay is actively seeking a Creative Director jumbled sounds ...talked to some of the top ponents in World as we bring this on".
  Sound quality here is very bad.

• Studio is "hiring and chasing after product managers".

• "Growth is the biggest priority by far. We need to bring our MAU up and get more players into the ecosystem, which makes it healthier for everybody".

• 54:00 "Communication updates - one solution can't understand the words, too fast GU leadership... starting now and will be next week or next month"?
  Just bring people from the team to Twitch regularly and respond to the chat there. Super simple, convo is automatically recorded, very effective.

• CC - "Improvements to matchmaking are in internal show-off stage" - stability of the system and avoiding back to back queuing with the same person.

• CC - "Combat log up and running internally, still a lot of polishing to put on to it"

• CC - "Continued work on the tutorial is ongoing"

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