MINES OF DALARNIA: New Economy Design AMA Part 1

Dear Dalarnians,

Today, we are thrilled to redirect you to the YouTube release of the 1st part of the recorded AMA.

Our Game Director — Keith McCullough, our Project Lead — Manfred Pack, and our Game Economy Designer — David Otero, have come together to produce this video, providing you with the most comprehensive answers possible. Tune in as we announce the Testnet (August 3) and Mainnet (August 17) dates for our next big update!

We would like to extend our gratitude to everyone who has submitted their questions about Mines of Dalarnia New Economy Design for the recorded Ask Me Anything (AMA) session, and we hope that this will be an enlightening experience for each and every one of you.

TRANSCRIPT:

MANFRED: OK, so, hey everyone and welcome to our first of at least two AMAs regarding our new game economy.

Before we get our AMA started, I think it would be best if we would reintroduce ourselves to you guys.

You know, Keith by now, I’m pretty sure about that. You also heard about David. Both of them would take a chance and introduce themselves.

I’m Manfred, maybe some of you guys saw me speaking in a and a before especially before the launch of and the project leader on the project. I have a strong background in game development as a producer and product owner and game director. And yeah, I’m trying my best to, to lead the ship with the help of Keith and David.

KEITH: That’s right. I’m Keith, you know, me from Discord and other other AMAs and everything. I’m the game director and yeah, excited to kind of talk about all these new features we have coming up.

DAVID: Yeah, and I’m David, I’m the game economy designer since last November and I have a lot of experience in rebalancing economies of already launching games and am very happy to be here.

MANFRED: So thanks guys. Before we, we continue with the AMA first of all, thanks to everyone for sending your questions on Discord and Telegram.

The quantity and quality was just mind blowing. It shows how involved you are in the game and, and how, how much you care about it and we’re very thankful for that. So that’s something that’s I think important to state from our side before we get going.

We choose to do those AMAs now to get you guys a better idea about how we approach the economy and game economy updates. It has a big impact on you as our community, it has a big impact on the project. Short and long term and I think we just want to make sure that we cover your questions, cover your concerns and explain to you why we do the things we do.

After receiving your questions, we decided to split this AMA into two parts.It was just as I said before, a huge quantity of questions and some very good ones that we want to be able to prepare for the best we can. So they deserve a bit more attention and more time to be addressed. And this is also why we would, you know, we’re going to split this thing and have like 2 AMA. in this format.

One thing that I think is important to state from our side early on is the decisions we are making for the game in general. And specifically now with this game economy, economy update, this is something that we are not making lighthearted. It’s somewhat difficult sometimes to come up with the right decisions.

But everything that we do is in the best interest for the game and for the community and everything is aimed at increasing our chances of having a sustainable game that is still around in 4 to 5 years and it is thriving.

This is how we approached the game economy redesign and this is what we are trying to achieve.

DAVID: Yeah. And although we won’t be focusing on lands in this AMA, we want to assure you that the land will cap its unique attributes and will hold the value based on his previous rank in the game. And even though our lands will be equal in the mining system, we have created a special feature just for land owners which favor higher ranked plots. This feature will enable landowners to profit from every single plot they own. And this is a significant departure from our old system where many landowners could only profit from one or two plots if at all. But with this new system, you can make all your land work for you.

We have also designed the future for all our long term players and long term supporters. We will dive into that next week, but we just wanted to leave this note here for all of you.

MANFRED: What a tease but yeah, next week will be interesting for sure.

So yeah, with that being said, I think we are ready to go and can dive into the questions, right?

KEITH: Yeah.

QUESTION 1: When will the new economy system be deployed?

MANFRED: Regarding the updates. Testnet is planned for August 3rd, so pretty much around the corner. Mainnet is planned for two weeks later on August 17th.

It’s important to state that this first update is aimed specifically at two major parts of this game, economy free redesign and its land management and one on one mining, those things are very important pretty much at the core of this game economy update and this is what we are going to start with.

QUESTION 2: You need a few months to upgrade, with respect, we have been waiting for months and months for various reasons. Another waiting means DAR price will not be increased and may be decreased due to larger cryptocurrency equal system, can you speed up?

MANFRED: Yeah, I think there are a couple of things that this applies to. We had like this prolonged longer than expected downtime recently after the marketplace breach. that we have to address here, I think. But then also in general how we operate with updates with the game.

About the downtime it’s unfortunate that it took so long, like we are not happy with that, but it’s very important to state that we took the whole situation very serious and when we made the decision to take a chance and also migrate with the game because it’s new for the game to improve like the whole user experience and be able to grow.

We immediately started with property due diligence and there’s only so little that we can speed up in the process. This is not only about us, you know, reworking our smart contracts and doing our job. It’s also about getting in touch with network providers, getting in touch with third parties, like bridge supporters. So everything has tendencies to external parties and this is why a couple of things took so long.

On top of that, we’ve been very, very eager to do proper due diligence and dig into all the details that we could regarding all network options. So yeah, it was quite a complex process for us but there was really little that we could do to speed this up. Even just putting manpower on things would not have helped us there.

Then in general about our update structure and how often we update the game, I think, especially after the release of the whole last year, we’ve been constantly adding content and new small features to the game. And that was the right thing to do because the game needed those updates. But ever since this year, we decided to focus on the bigger and more complex features as they will really push us forward those features that we’ve planned on we have on the roadmap for this year and including the game economy out there but not, not stopping there, more bigger features are coming. Those things will help us to really push the game forward, to drastically improve the experience in the game.

And I think in that regard, it’s the right call to maybe have larger gaps between updates, but then have significant updates. And also we really want to push the quality of the upcoming updates, right?

Like we are not happy if we have a bug release or something. So I think for us it’s better to take a bit more time, than to risk, to affect the game in a negative way whether because of the game economy or just bugs in general.

So, I think moving forward, we have a healthy update schedule, there are a couple of updates coming this year and, it should be a good pace for us moving forward.

KEITH: Well, I say it’s always tricky, it’s always tricky with, with the game to balance that, you know, making sure that everything is tested and making sure that all the plans are in place, against, you know, getting releases out quick and I think that’s even more important in Blockchain. Point here is that, you know, we don’t want to take too long to do things, but we also don’t want to rush, don’t want to introduce, you know, exploits and bugs and things like that.

So, yeah, there’s always a balance there. So this year, as Manfred said, we’ve been trying to go a bit more, a bit more, cautiously and slowly and make sure we’re making careful decisions and, and releasing, solid builds and things.

QUESTION 3: Will the backpack be upgradable?

KEITH: So for the backpack, you know, right now we don’t have plans to make it upgradable. It’s really, really carefully balanced so that the amount of resources that can be taken out per run doesn’t make the economy go out of balance and that, you know, we have to kind of control how much can be gotten per dig over time.

I mean, I think having an upgradeable backpack would be really cool. It makes a lot of sense in a lot of ways, but we have to do it in the context of introducing resources to the game economy per run per hour, all those kinds of calculations.

So for the short term, no backpack upgrades, long term, we’ll see. Certainly it would be cool.

DAVID: Yeah, even because we have balanced everything around the plot side, not the back side Exactly for that. So at least for now this will keep us to maintain the pack to the old system.

KEITH: Yep.

MANFRED: Well, I don’t think there’s anything to add here. That was just pitch perfect.

QUESTION 4: You said that the backpack consists of 50 slots. We would like to know the number if it is clear how many each slot receives from which source.

DAVID: Yeah. So first we can explain how we arrived here.

So we have our main goal for this new economy. It was to revamp the economy to achieve in the mid to long term, a significant increase in both the in game economy and our token economics. And we have set for ourselves to do that, making sure that not only the entire game becomes more engaging and more fun, not only for players, but also for landowners, but especially making sure that the value of all the already existing NFTs and the resources of course was kept and that was our starting point. And a core part of this was ensuring that each new mining ground. So each dig yielded a similar amount of resources as before.

So after a gazillion simulations and discussions between us, we have designed this new mining system where you as a miner have a 50 slot back and each resource takes a different amount of slot. So one piece of copper takes one slot, iron and silver takes five slots, each ozymodium takes 10 slots, gold just like copper takes one slot, ragnarite and aquarite takes two slots each and jungle gems kryptonite and rocksidian takes five slots also.

And these numbers along with the 50 slot bag and the power level cap on some plots will ensure that on average, each player gets roughly the same for each dig as before. And that’s why we have the 50 slot backpack right now. And we are not planning for it to be upgradable because we want to maintain that pack to the old system, so that the old NFTS don’t decrease in value.

So in the game, you will have your backpack represented by a grid of ten by five, and you need to gather fragments of each resource. You need to collect as many fragments as the space that resource takes in the bag. So copper takes one slot. So you need to take one fragment for you to have one piece, one entire piece of copper.

But for example, silver occupies five slots in the bag. So you need to gather five fragments of silver to have a whole piece of silver.

And then finally, mining bonuses are a thing of the past. I’m talking about that feature where if you dig first, you get more resources than the next miners and eventually the last dig of that plot yield at much less than the first one that’s all gone, and now when you mine in a plot, you can get exactly the same amount on the first dig or on your last dig.

To spice things up, we have a time bonus now. So you are rewarded with an after bonus if you can get out of the plot fast.

And I believe that pretty much covers all the mining systems.

MANFRED: So maybe one little thing to add or to clarify is that fragments are not some sort of new resource that you could get out of a mining run like they, you need to deal with them in the mining runs, but at the end, it’s about like resources as before.

So don’t expect to get fragments or silver or something that you will get after a mining run. This is not, this is not happening.

KEITH: The focus obviously right now is kind of on the economy and how, you know, this will change the economy, but also the gameplay, David explained changes quite a lot with resource mining.

You know, you do see the resources themselves right in the mine at all times, you can see little, little nodes that have their graphics on there and there’s new models for that and everything. And when you, when you break them, you get little, little resource fragments and sometimes you get more than one from a node. So you don’t have to necessarily go seek out, you know, them all over the map or something. But it definitely changes the way the game feels a lot. I think it’s a lot of fun.

The bag sounds confusing but I think when you see it in practice, it sort of makes sense, it’s just filling up and you can discard and destroy resources if you have them in your bag that you don’t want. And, you know, kind of pick what you exit with and then, yeah, you’ve got your time bonus. Killing monsters, drops time gems, which will give you some time bonus back.

So there’s some tension about like racing, killing monsters, taking a risk to, you know, maybe die to full time bonus. So there’s a lot of new gameplay in there. It harkens back a little bit to the way back Mines of Dalarnia 1.0 web game from many years ago. It’s got a little bit of that feeling with some of the new feeling too.

So it, I think it’s gonna be a really fun change and really shake up the way the gameplays as well as you know, change the economy a bit.

MANFRED: Yeah, I think we are all quite excited about it.

QUESTION 5: Are the recipes for crafting EQs gonna be the same? What can we expect with regards to crafting rss required? and also, the value of our already existing equipment NFTs come new economy.

KEITH: Yeah, some of the balance has to change a little bit. You know, when we say that the same resources are coming out of a dig, that’s mostly true, especially if you’re targeting a resource. Like if you’re digging an Ozy plot, you’re gonna get the same amount of Ozy give or take on on average. Same with gold and Ragnarite.

But one thing that is changing because of the way the bag works and the way you’re targeting specific resources is that you’re not just gonna get that kind of like free copper, that kind of cascading we used to have where, you know, you’re digging Ozy plot and then you just get some copper because that’s how it worked with the depths. You know, if you want to get some copper, you’ll have to go get some copper and devote some bags slots to that.

So, there will be some changes in the rewards which might necessitate some traits of the recipes if we know that, like for example, less coppers entering the economy on average when we bring down the copper cost of things a little bit, that sort of balance will, will still need to happen. But the important part, the real rare resources, the things you’re focusing on those should still be coming out at the same rate and those recipes shouldn’t change too much.

DAVID: Yeah, and the game will be much more strategic for sure. Both for the player side and for the landowner side, we will tackle that on the next AMA for the landowners and the replenishes. But yeah, your NFTs will get the same value and you will have much more fun digging in the plots.

QUESTION 6: Regarding the new economy roadmap, I see on phase 0, migration to a new network. Does it mean we can’t proceed to phase I while we are still in the BNB chain? Same with other phases, if the previous phase is not yet finished, we can’t proceed with the next phase?

MANFRED: So, yeah, regarding migration, first of all, not being able to migrate to Arbitrum Nova right now is not stopping us from rolling out new updates like the game economy updates are coming and everything that we have on our roadmap can be released on the BNB chain.

The reason why we want to migrate and I think that’s very obvious for our community is that we want to improve the user experience and be in a state where we can really grow the community and onboard new players and keep new players. And there are a couple of things that we are looking for with a new chain that will allow for that.

But no, we are not, we are not in any way affected by not being able to migrate right now. In terms of releasing new features, those features will come regardless.

QUESTION 7: Do you plan to reward players who report bugs in your new economy model in proportion to the importance of the reported vulnerability? Because instead of telling you and fixing it, he can use it to his advantage and make the game worse. Because my personal opinion is that we encounter too many shortcomings and problems. I don’t know if you have a team that will address these issues before the players. But I always know that players will find vulnerabilities sooner.

KEITH: Yeah, bug bounties. So, yeah, this is something that has been a discussion for a long time.

You know, our community on Discord and, and everywhere is fantastic and really contributes to a lot of bug reports and calls out a lot of issues and we want to make sure we can reward that. So we have a formal bug bounty policy that we’re putting together should be revealed in the next month or so.

You know, it lays out like exactly like the different tiers of bugs that we recognize and what the bounties are for those gonna be higher numbers than we’ve had in the past. And I think it’ll just really help make it clear that, you know, people are rewarded, recognized for reporting issues, especially exploits or things that, you know, threaten the security of the game. And just generally speaking, you know, make sure that people are getting properly recognized for helping the game.

MANFRED: Yeah, and also in terms of how you report those things, we will have an announcement about that.

We will have a very formalized way to receive reports and to review them. So everything will be, I think, pretty straightforward and transparent once we do the announcement.

KEITH: Yeah, it definitely could be a big improvement over the past way we’ve had it where it’s somewhat unclear and arbitrary what kind of prizes or bounties people get. This will be much better.

MANFRED: Yeah, totally. But to be honest, I’m not going to be sad if you don’t get any bug reports, right?

KEITH: Like, yeah, there won’t be any bugs report. So the bounty has no purpose.

QUESTION 8: You should disable the mining bonus given in the first % of digs. This just makes land management more complicated.

KEITH: Yeah. So, disabling the bonus for the third percent of digs. I know that David already kind of mentioned this, in the previous answer, but that’s no longer part of the game. You just have your bonuses as a time bonus that you get in that run. There’s nothing that you don’t get more or less resources. If the plot is at 100 or at 1%, it’s just the same resource output, regardless, all the time.

DAVID: Yeah, it will be much more easier for both landowners to manage their lands and for players to understand exactly what they will get back from their digs.

MANFRED: Oh, yeah, totally. I think that’s maybe an important thing to state here, right?

So to anyone listening, we really want to make the game a more welcoming experience also to new players. Again, we want to grow the community.

So, hey, if, if you have any, anything that, you know, I would be of help in that regard, let us know. We, we do read those things and we, I mean, we evaluate your feedback and input. So you’re welcome to share it with us.

DAVID: Yeah, even if we don’t always answer for every one of them, we read all of them and discuss inside the team. So all feedback is very welcome.

MANFRED: Absolutely.

QUESTION 9: Also any compensation for the landowners for the down time of 3+ months?

MANFRED: So, currently, we don’t plan to do any compensation related to the downtime.

I think it is important to mention here that what we did back then is something that we would do over again, like the important part for us was that we move forward in a way that it secures the assets of our community. And it puts security in general on top of our priority list.

So I hope nobody has the impression that we did not do enough, but the way we decided to move forward, I think it would happen again if something like this would have to happen, but it’s not going to happen like we, we really improved the situation there. So don’t expect that kind of breach in the marketplace to happen again. Yeah, I think that’s it.

KEITH: Yeah, I think keeping the competitions running and the game up during that time was really important. You know, we want to make sure that we still had a community and the game didn’t just go away and people could still interact with their assets.

You know, the game was still alive. And there were still reasons to interact with it, that was really important and definitely the, the right move for the game and now that we’re back and everything is back on the chain again, we can move forward and bring these new features on and upgrade the economy and do all the things we wanted to do before the the downtime happened.

MANFRED: Yeah, I mean, the only alternative that we would have had is like shutting down the game and even with a total shutdown, it would still have taken us three months to be back online.

Because the, the way we proceeded with the competitions. We did not split resources that could have helped with resolving the issue between, you know, game updates and working on the problem, everyone who could have helped focus on the problem to resolve it.

So, yeah, it was the best way forward for us.

DAVID: Yeah, and we were not sure in the beginning also, but it proved to be the best course of action for sure.

And instead of just rewarding landowners or players for the last three months that we were off chain, we think it’s best and it feels better to make what we have thought already that is designed features to reward everyone all our loyal players and landowners.

So we think that that was the best way to do this.

QUESTION 10: With the increasing variety of replenish capsules , could please make the crafting smart contract “smarter” so that we can input the number of each capsule we want and proceed with a single transaction, burning all the resources at once?

DAVID: So in this new system, mainly to cut down on gas fees, capsules will be just like a recipe in the smart contract function. By this, I mean, that capsules won’t be resources anymore. You don’t need to craft capsules and then deploy capsules in your plot.

When you want to replenish a plot, you go into the land management inside the game client, you select the plot you want to replenish, you select what you want to replenish on your plot and it’s done. It’s a way much easier to manage for landowners.

KEITH: It’s a big quality of life improvement. It’s a lot more clear. You just have one nice screen where you see all your options all laid out. You know, it’s less movie pieces, less confusing aspects of it. I think it’s gonna be a lot, a lot better.

MANFRED: But we have to, we have to stress that by rollout, it’s very likely that it will be limited to just one plot at one time for security reasons.

We are looking into expanding that and introducing an option to select multiple land recipe combinations at once. But I can’t promise that it will be ready by August 17th.

KEITH: Yeah, definitely.

BONUS QUESTION: What happens with existing replenish capsules?

KEITH: Yeah. So for old capsules, we’re going to add a breakdown recipe kind of similar to what we had for the old old capsules, the capsules for land 1.0 where you can break them down into component resources.

And so, you know, all your old capsules can be kind of burned and exported as the resources that were used to craft them.

MANFRED: So, yeah, I think this brings us to the end of the very first recorded AMA from Mines of Dalarnia. We would like to thank everyone who’s listening to this, who sent us the questions.

I hope that our answers will be able to satisfy you and to give you what you hope for out of this AMA. If you have any questions left, there’s new questions coming up based on our answer, again, please feel free to reach out to our amazing team on Discord and Telegram.

We will be back next week with a very specific topic regarding the game economy and how it affects land specifically.

So next week, we will deep dig so to speak and more.Thanks everyone.

KEITH: Thanks everyone.

DAVID: Thank you.

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