Splinterlands Town Hall - Full Text - December 10th, 2021 - Part 1
Splinterlands Town Hall - Full Text - December 10th, 2021
Aggroed (Co-Founder) | Yabapmatt (Co-Founder) | Hardpoint (VP of Engineering)
Nateaguila (Creative Director) | BreakingBenjamin (Narrative Designer)
Kbux (Developer) | Chatter (Director Of Growth) |Cryptomancer (Main Developer Of Chaos Legion)
LibertyLass (Executive Administrative Assistant)
Aggroed : Good evening, Splinterlands. This is the voice of Aggroed. It is a pleasure as always to be here on the ama streaming with you. Tonight is a Friday as it normally is. I don't even know the date. Where December 10th. I’m in Puerto Rico. I’m not at my normal desk, some of you might like the voice more, some of you might like it less, but I’m down here schmoozing, socializing, playing, working with a million people to go bring about a million different things. I am tired. I’m exhausted, and my voice is almost shot not quite but it's been party after party frankly but that's how crypto works. I don't know, it's been amazing. It's wonderful. I’m a little bit tired. A little bit out of it and we're gonna do my best to try to provide you an excellent evenings entertainment and knowledge base. The one of the standard rules for this thing, though, that I hope everybody understands is that this is being recorded and this is being streamed and we are chatting in the town hall chat channel and it's my request that people keep this pg-13. For those that are not able to abide by that request, you will find yourself kicked and or banned maybe not permanently but certainly during the times that we're streaming. This is important to us. So you are allowed any opinion that you want about the game or the people or whatever but we just ask that you say these things professionally. Try to keep personal insults out even if you're feeling them and that's it. In terms of the way that these town halls go, we start with the first hour really just being the team members just talking about what we're working on. What it is that we're planning, and what it is that we're all doing which in large cases is really just like futzing around with chaos legion because we're all a bunch of nerds we all love this and we're all doing that. After we've done that, then there's sometime in the second hour we'll do any of the questions that have been left in the ama section. Liberty Lass has gone through and gathered up those questions. Then we'll have an opportunity to answer those Then, lastly for the absolute stragglers who either have last-minute questions or have some desire to just like spontaneously have a new question to ask. Everybody will have a chance towards the end of this. So that's my life, my life is all about trying to bring in new people, new money, new intellectual property, new new ideas into this help grow this team and turn us from a single. Anyways we're gonna keep going here. It's just awesome. I mean we're we're really trying to build something pretty fantastic.I was speaking at coin agenda. Last week I was at the Central Miami and there's just like a million events down here. They're all they're all pretty awesome so that's that's what I have for you guys. Richard are you here do you want to go say hi and and talk to the people
Hardpoint : Sure. I’m here it's Hardpoint, Richard aka everything. We had a great chaos legion launch this week. That was pretty fantastic. The community did. I think I’ve been
having a lot of fun opening packs this week. Randomly getting a gold foil desert dragon
which was actually my highlight after the launch of my leak. So everybody had some fun with us on there but it's been great we had such a good response from the community.
If you go look at those peak monster charts, wow, look at that market volume. I think it's really exciting to see that kind of thing and see how everybody's doing on it. We've got some fun things coming up. We're going to get an update from one of our developers in a little bit and wow just like I said, I kind of shared this with the community this week. It's been really humbling just being a part of such a great and wonderful team. There's also many people behind the scenes. They're going into making this thing a reality and doing consistently better and better. How we do across the board so that's just really exciting and I’m really thankful. Especially thank you for the community and guys we're just really glad you're here.
Glad you're joining in having a lot of fun playing the new cards and just thank you. A big shout out to our mavs who did a bunch of QA testing for us last week. As well you guys are killing it and we appreciate you guys for supporting us all this time but thank
You. Matt you want to say hi real quick?
Yabapmatt: Yeah! Everybody, this has just been a fantastic week. I’ve also enjoyed opening my chaos league impacts with everybody else and hopefully just kind of indicative of the way things are going in the direction. Things are going in the future and there's just we've talked over and over about all the cool things coming up in 2022. I feel like Kathleen kind of kicked us off in the right direction even though it's a little before 2022, but we're gonna I really think the modern format which we're hoping to get in January or latest February of next year is really going to shake things up a lot. It's really going to make a much more fair playing field for the newer players or just generally players who don't have the alpha-beta
essence or promo cards. Those players will still be able to participate in the wild format and kind of have their own reward pool, but I think it'll just really kind of shake up the general meta of the ranked ranks even play. So I’m really excited for that obviously there's the general fail. Then we're going to be hardcore into land development in starting a Q1 of next year. So that's obviously, in my opinion, the most exciting thing that we've kind of ever done
since Splinterlands launched. So that's going to be really big. In the meantime, I’ve my main focus has been on the sps validator slash oracle software that'll be available for anyone
to run. Then players will be able to vote on the top validators to validate transactions and validate proposals through sps governance system and all that stuff. So I’m really excited for that. I think it'll be a really good step in the right direction for the whole plan of sps governance and really hoping that we'll have some type of initial test version available
by the end of the year or early January. So keep an eye out for that.
Aggroed : Yeah! That sounds pretty awesome. I guess, I should say while I’m down here,
I’ve been trying to put together some of the like side deals or not side deals, but like the volume discount sales that we announced and we're getting up to the first like million packs.
A lot of this is like people are waiting until I told. I guess the post said you would have more
time but I probably may get another post out that like we're going to close the volume discount sales by the end of the year. So the last real day that we'll be taking any new orders is December 28th. So it's been it's been pretty awesome to go see just how many packs people are purchasing and new groups coming in. So I’m like right around a million packs. It's a little bit less but gearing up towards a million. Then, I think like there's a couple extra million of like people that want to do the volume discount, but they're waiting
until closer to the end of the year before they participate because they don't want to miss out on airdrops and other things that they're doing but that to me is pretty exciting and
it's good to see that kind of like that volume and just a lot of appetite for cards. A lot of like new players like these are not folks, that like some of them are guys that have been here
forever and then some of them are like I’ve never met this person. This is a brand new guild. This is a brand new group. This is really exciting. So, I don't know that. To me is just
we have a certain vantage point running this game but we're still left here trying to like sift
through the tea leaves and figure out how much demand is there? How much player growth is there? What are we doing to to facilitate and grow this ecosystem? and we have a lot of levers and tools that we can look at but it's exciting it's exciting to see like the bigger sales come in and people buying and people excited for what we're doing. So, that's some of like the other things that I’ve been working on of while I’m down here. Just trying to keep that all together. Is Nate here? Anything you wanna add?
Hardpoint: A little muted, there. Nate, while Nate's getting on here, there we go, got it.
Nate Aguila: Yep! So, yeah, I guess we should we should meet everyone when we start the team.
Aggroed: Yeah! Sorry, Nate.
Nate Aguila: No problem. So now that's exciting. It's exciting to hear all the growth and
everything that's going o. I know growth internally. We are active. I’m actively doing interviews for a lot of the creative side right now. The narrative team is really coming together in order to just embellish upon the story. The foundation that we're building and
what's exciting about that isn't just adding flavor to chaos legion. It has more to do with sounding establishing the groundwork. The foundation that we're going to use to jumpstart everything that's happening in predatory including the land expansion so that's even more
exciting because everyone's been waiting for land hey wind land. As we start to, not today but, as we sneak peek more and more about what we're doing with land, you're gonna see that the stories with chaos legion and all the work that the narrative team has been putting into those stories are going to bleed into land. So when you get that plot in praetoria and you're claiming it, you're claiming the deed, you're turning that claim in for an actual deed where there's an actual plot located in Pretoria with specific coordinates and you zoom in to see where that plot is and you go, I have a plot near the town of new Everett which I read about in some story back. When this is character did this heroic thing and this is so cool and it's going to add a whole other level. I think to owning land and hey it might even impact the price being near one of these epic story lines so that should be pretty cool. So I’m really excited about what the narrative team's doing. I’m excited to hear from one of our narrative designers pretty soon here on the towel hall tonight.
Aggroed: Yeah! We can. Let's get them in just a second, but I like you dropped like a
16 minute story that about the splendor lands and the journey that the hero was on. Do you want to go talk about that at all and just tell it was a a youtube video but talk about
that a little bit what are we building? Why are we building it? Why is this lore like part of? what we're doing?
Nate Aguila: Absolutely, so we want to make it so that, well let's back up a little. Let's explain where we came from splendor lines originally was just a simple card game
and as we add more and more features, more functionality, more depth to the ecosystem it's becoming less and less of just a card game. What I mean by that is, if you play a game like magic the gathering or hearthstone or any typical card game there's a sense of detachment I guess that maybe that's the word you feel very much like that is exactly what you're doing is playing a card game. When land is released this is really going to be the first
step towards opening things up well beyond card game and we've been setting the stage the narrative team has been setting the stage to where we can easily make that transition from you're playing a card game. You're up you're a battle mage. I mean, when you go play and you play the battle on the screen, what i'd like to do is when we get closer and closer to
battles 2.0 I want the player to feel less like they're participating in a card game and more like they are being pulled into the game as an actual battle mage because that's the player
journey that we are are creating is that you have a place within this Splinterlands and that's going to become even more real to you when you go set up a plot of land. Instead of shop
within the Splinterlands.
Aggroed: So now tie that back to the story.
Nate Aguila: Yeah! Definitely, so as we create this storyline, behind the card set a chaos legion what's happening right now you're reading these stories and you say hey mate that's cool. I mean that's cool to read about that's neat. It makes me want to go buy that card
more not just because of the stats because I know the story behind that character and that's cool but wait until the day where you log into the game and you are pulled in and you're looking at ground level at a building that you're constructing they're within the splinterlands and now the stories are going to matter much more to you. You're going to be like, okay
are there demon creatures overhead that i need to be concerned about? or if I decide to leave my little building and go on a quest in the wild in between all the regions and tracks and plots how's the story affecting my day? How's the story lines and all the plots and subplots and layers and depth affecting my ability to complete my quest? or What I want to
do in this this this virtual world? So my vision at least creatively is to make the world feel more and more and more real to the player to the point to they feel like they're living this story as someone who exists within the Splinterlands not just sitting at a table playing a card
game any longer and I think that there's a lot of cool stuff planned. There's a lot of stuff that we want to do and it all starts with the stories. That's why I’m so excited, I’m not going to get too deep into the story line about that sixth story that just came out but I will because I’ll let Joey do that but what I’m going to do is say, hey look when Joey came to me with
this story because the narrative team was like okay we want to put out a story every single week and Joey was right there he's like I’ll be first I have it in my head. I have this inspiration. I know what I’m going to do. I’m like, what are you going to do and when he told me i was like, wow, that's pretty ambitious. It's more ambitious than probably the previous stories but
let's do it so he went and did it and at the same time while he was finishing up the story we were thinking more and more about the audio because it's been brought up before. Particularly by one of our mavericks aj Brockman. He had dm to me about story time about adding voice acting. So I had been a little slam at the moment at the time so I didn't pursue it, but I was like this is a good time. So we went ahead and I contacted who I
knew to be an excellent voice actor because he had sent a demo reel when we were first looking for help creatively and I told him, hey I’m going to stay in touch with you because you're really good so hey, the opportunity to present itself the guy had excellent turn
around and I think we've had nothing but positive reviews from everybody about how much they love the voice acting you really brought Joey's story to life and then add that with Asari as talented and beautiful and almost haunting music in the background. It was just like a recipe for us perfection. Then of course we displayed on that youtube video the, we have a concept artist who does this amazing art. He's responsible for all good portion of the backgrounds, the wallpapers that I share a lot of the time and he illustrated that concept art
for the stories and I think that meshed well as well. So I think that over time I'd like to further improve our multimedia capability but I thought that was a great start, I thought.
Aggroed: All right. I think that's a good time, maybe we can go introduce the author and maybe you can share a little bit about who you are? What you do? What got you attracted to the splinterlands? what is it that what's your vision for like the lore and what we're doing inside of the game world?
Breaking Benjamin: Yeah! Can you guys hear me? Okay, so my name is Joey Schmerdla my in-game name is Breaking Benjamin. I was in the US Army for 23 years as a helicopter pilot and operations analyst. I’ve also got a couple books published in Amazon. I started playing splayer lands in August and I just absolutely fell in love with the game. The passion of the team behind it and I’ve pretty much been all in ever since. So when Nate sent out the call for creatives, I jumped at the chance. This is pretty much my dream job and I’m super super team for creating such an awesome environment to work in the attention to detail. You see is just incredible and then at the same time the leeway that we get to work on what we're passionate about. So as Nate said I work as an air designer on the narrative team. I wrote war begins so let's talk a little bit about what we do on the narrative team, we're responsible for coming up with the card concepts and the lore and the background behind them. Then we also, like Nick mentioned, work on the land world building short stories
hopefully novels in the future and ultimately we want to bring Splinterlands to life and really
immerse you in it so you feel like you're part of this entire world. So, yeah, war begins I think it's the sixth story in what we're calling the Tome of Chaos. Ashley and Scott Roble wrote
the first five and they did a great job setting the stage for what's about to happen next and if you haven't read their stories you're definitely missing out anyway war begins is about the first major naval battle between the splinters. The chaos legion, then hats off to the artists
Mata Majeski and the voice actor David Dada who really just brought the whole thing to life and took what I had written to to a whole another level . Moving forward, you're going to see more of Rick Lonnon, you're going to see more of theophile from Creepin and Bara
Dahlin and her pals from defend and I think you're going to find that this blurry line's war lore will introduce you to new characters that aren't necessarily, like political leaders or military
commanders but average people like you and me who find themselves caught up in this whole struggle against the ks legion and they either become heroes and legends or they die. If you've been reading the lawyer, you're probably wondering where exactly the
chaos legion came from. Why they're here? What's happened to the widow's council? Who's actually is this Silas of the rift dude and as dark buddy god and What are they planning? What's going to happen with these ginormous freaking tentacles erupting on mount praetorius? and never mind how the rift watchers riftwatchers fit into this whole thing.
So if you want answers, keep your eye on the tomb of chaos. Let's publish on or peak d or however you say that. Anyway that's it for me.
Aggroed: Awesome! Well thank you for your creativity. Thanks for choosing to spend your time and your effort here. Thank you, I, my kids listened to this app was like at bedtime. We used to like read the stories all the time but then they wanted like a little bit more adultness
and so it's an app that just has like 50 maybe 150 stories on it and there's just an actor that just reads through them all. As I’m like sitting there, listening to this, I’m like, we need like our own audio app where all of the history and all the tome and everything that we build for the Splinterlands is like available and like parents can go pass us off to their kids and they can go hear stories of heroes and villains, bravery, fear, greed and all the different like range of emotions that our characters will have that. Our community might have just my vision for this thing. I keep getting some scope creep because I want so many of these projects that are like successful card games. Don't just stay card games. They don't always go in this direction but they'll start as media like animated series or comic books or something. Then they'll go turn into trading card games or the vice versa of that but I really just want to hear
stories. I want to learn about these characters. I literally want some. I want like a theme park or like an island or something. Then at some point when like we go down there and
you're wandering around you're like you're on praetoria. Like there's just so many different people that are like basically larping or play-acting. I don't know, so there's a lot of different things that I think that we can do. Nate is charged with doing all of them. I’m really just excited to see what we can create and and just how many different ways we can pour our creativity into something that can be immersive for our audience. So that they can be just entertained and just feel like part of a community. Feel like they they have this common lore and story that they can draw from and feel connected to these characters. They're like some
people just say you can't just leave. Like you can't walk away because I have this like affinity for the lord of darkness because I keep thinking of him as like administrator of darkness. Like the poor guy just has to go like run all of all of mortis. Like, he's this big dude maybe he involved it just so that's my that's my like take on him I know that's not really the thing but that's what I think of like that. because of that it's become one of my favorite cards and so like the way that these lore weaves in and out of these stories. Like that's what binds us to these characters emotionally and it's like that irrational emotional peace is so
much of what binds us as a community.
Hardpoint: If we do get an island, can we get an airlines that's called the Fomo Airlines? because then you ride the fomo express there we go so you can ride the fomo express this is the split the Pretoria
Aggroed: Yeah! I mean the whole island thing is not out of the the total mix of things. I mean, we, this game is growing. This community is growing. There's so many people
that are here, excited and like as we've been able to go earn some more money, it means that we can take some more risks as a business in terms of hiring more devs and hiring more creatives. I mean, do you want to speak to that a little bit Richard? Like, can you talk a little bit? Just about, like, what is our dev organization look like? I think we have Kbux in here too. Maybe he can kind of talk through some of what he's doing but just like give us a sense of the organization because it takes time for the things that we do to manifest and appear but roughly speaking, even with like all the sort of ancillary, things we're doing there's like a multiple of just how many people we have on this project just relative to a
couple months ago. So maybe, you can talk to that.
Hardpoint: Yeah! Absolutely. Me and Matt were talking about this recently. Actually I think or it was me and you, one of us was talking about what's happening in Q1 and we started listing off all the people that we have on the roster now and that have come online. We quickly were talking about multiple projects, running in parallel. You asked me you're, like well, what about Splinterlands? How are we going to focus on that? I was like, well we got probably three or four times the resources on deck doing Splinterlands that we had
during the summer. I think that's amazing to me to think about just the capacity that's being brought online to develop more of this platform to build out you said scope creep but it's there's building an island maybe not in Q1. Yeah, but definitely some really cool things like
Matt said we're talking about land and even for Matt to even say that land is in Q1. I think is a moment a landmark, moment for us because I don't think Matt was saying that about three months ago. No, so it's gonna be starting to really get worked on at Q1 that's not really
no I know i just think it's really cool though because the energy on the team. I think Matt you reflect that right when we were sitting down the chaos legion, Aggie wasn't able to
because he was traveling. We were talking about how smooth this release was right. how big this release was Kryptomancer, Nate and a lot of the other devs that worked really
hard well all of those worked hard but like all of them focusing on that made that possible made that release possible as smooth as we've ever had. For a major release and I think more than anything that says to the community just what's changing in Splinterlands is that we're able to do that. So, we're up of over 13 developers right now dedicated to building
really cool defy tech here. We got a lot of cool ideas, a lot of different ways to make this happen. Speaking of that, you talk about how do you show signs of the debt organization's growth, well, look at our release notes, if you guys go look at our release notes you'll notice that there's increasing trend and frequency of just how much is actually being released.
Every single week and actually deploying sometimes multiple times a week. so I
think that's just really a testament to just that capacity spinning up here and starting to really hit home and we kind of looking forward just a little bit our next big milestone is the general sale and I mean, I don't know about you guys but like we went from releasing 1.5 million packs with untamed to releasing 15 million packs with chaos legion. We're going to release at the general sale something close to 12 million packs at once on one day. I mean that makes the devs we sort of sweat under the collar is that gonna be a big day where everybody just comes to buy a lot of packs and we're gonna have a lot of pack openings. So we're actually all the devs heads right now. I just met with them this morning and I was like,
guys we need to make this happen and it needs to be as smooth as we possibly can. So that's really where the team's focus right now is like getting that general sale all set for the general sale really adding in the stuff for scale but guess what that's not all we're doing while that's happening. Matt and myself and actually speaking of just talk about capacity homestead hacker came in and was helping us with moderation lead and has been helping us organize our our social media platforms but he did such an amazing job we've
pulled him deeper and deeper into the organization. He's actually starting to help us build out our business analysts role in our project, management role, and he's been helping me
really working really close with me and what that means for us is actually working through in detail sps governance with Matt we're really getting all that specs laid out. We have a bunch of cool idea. We started throwing some things out there for the community to see
in the last month. Now we're starting to really talk about the reality that looks like maybe
in January might be a reality or February. So it's definitely something we're doing and not only that when we came out last month and we said, hey guys, we really care about your feedback. We really want to start making improvements to the platform. We dropped a totally new website out there called feedback.splinterlands.com and if you guys go out there, you'll start noticing that our change notes are aligned with your guys requests. We're starting to hit some of your guys's major ass out there very excited about that because that's something we care about. We care about you guys, the value the community is the value
the players for the value and we're doing what we can to start making you have the cool
little tweaks that you've always wanted in the game, but we haven't had the capacity do we have capacity now to start making those things happen and I think that's really cool when you look at that and you start seeing a dev organization start to function. Start to move forward and guys I just want to say this like, it's exciting being on this team, is exciting
guys that we've hired in the last couple of months are literally I’ve been doing development over 24 years these are the top guys in the industry that I’ve ever worked with, it is exciting to get in a room with them and talk about how do we make this platform amazing how do we
build out better capacity for scale how do we make better interaction with the players and better support with our bridges between other chains. It's really exciting and and it's just
one of those things that just kind of every morning I wake up and throw myself back at this just because I’m really excited where we're going. Who's on the team and it's not even that just the devs guys I just want to say I get to work very closely with our support team
the guys that help the community when we have issues and when there's something broken. Those guys are amazing. I love talking to biz and all the support team out there.
So I just guys you got to keep just pumping the team up keep dropping some of your love out in the channels. Just really appreciate it and really excited to see where it's going to go
over the next bit and more than that why don't we bring on Kbux, hey Kbux.
you there I think on youtube
Kbux: Hey!
Hardpoint: Hey! So tell us a little bit, what the life in a developer here? Like, last week.
Kbux: Oh! It's been, I mean it's been the coolest week of my career.
Aggroed: That's what I love to hear, easily.
Kbux: I think just the excitement of the launch. This I mean, I’ve been a gamer since I was six and I’ve stayed up. I’ve taken a week off work for launches of different games and to be able to be involved in that at the same time staring at ten different graphs the ent, yeah, starting at midnight and seeing how they all go. Watching every single tickm Making sure things are on point. The duality of the excitement and the kind of making sure everything's good is just that kind of like had me jittery all night.
Aggroed: Yeah! The apprehension. Right like, oh crap, this thing better, this better roll out
Smooth.
Kbux: Yeah! A lot of people, but I mean the last couple months we've been doing it's like it's not one big tweak. It's been a thousand little tweaks to the system. We felt really good going
into it but my brain wouldn't let me get too comfortable. I just needed to stay on.
Aggroed: So one of one of the things I’ve said is like if you were to go print out the entire code basis splinterlands, it's like as big as warren peace. Is that a fair statement?
Kbux: Absolutely. It's so cool and the code is cool. I mean because it's like
just digging through. It's like there's market code. There's battle code and there's events code. There’s tournaments and like it's so cool like you're looking through the game into all how all the pieces work it's been that part's been so cool to see.
Aggroed: So what so you had that anticipation as like a new as a gamer but also rolling it out like. What did you think of the rollout? Were there technical parts of this that could have been done better? or Did we nail it and then like what if that is now out What is your next big project that you are tackling?
Kbux: Oh, sure. I mean, I’m definitely a plan for the worst kind of guy. Then everything good is everything after that is good. So I was thrilled how it went. I mean, I could give you a thousand little things I wish I went the kind of wish but went better but when I look at
people were able to open packs. People were playing battle. I was actually watching both our stream on youtube but kind of like I had a couple of other streams and I was unmuting each one at the time of different streamers playing the game just to get that kind of real
live insight and how people are watching and playing. Yeah, I was thrilled. I didn't see
any huge hiccups given the amount of activity. The activity was unreal. We went from like something like 1.4 million market items to over three million market items in a few hours
and the system handled it. I was just so thrilled that the system handled it.
Aggroed: So how is it doing? Is the market are we going to be able to sustain this? Are we one pack away from doom? Where are we at?
Kbux: Yeah, not at all. I mean, we have these testing environments. We have these development environments and now that we feel good about where we're at and we had to do a little bit of a lift on the back end of the market so as people saw little issues. Reporting those issues and tech support's been really helpful for us being able to kind of like tweak
little things like today. We put out a little tweak around the low price of a certain card was showing something weird so we're able to get that fixed. There is no like problem here that we can't fix and I was just thinking we might see one million of a particular card or you
know 500 000 a particular card listed in the market those are the things we'll be testing
this week in our testing environment and if it doesn't work we'll fix it and we'll be ready
Aggroed: Awesome! So what is that your next priority or what is your as your sifting through the code and the goals of our team? Like what is your next baby? How do you see your job here? What is your like next priority? For like here's this task, go do this but it's like what's your vision? and what are you trying to ensure happens here?
Kbux: I mean at my core, I want Splinterlandss to be a place that developers love to be
at and love to be it for a long time. So what developers love, is they love feedback so I’ve been focused on one thing they love is feedback. So I’ve been focused on that deployment speed that Richard and Hardpoint mentioned so we can deploy our code many times a week
and it's no big deal. So we can get those quality of life fixes we can get, little bug fixes we can kind of just continuously be updating the system that's kind of at my core is what I care about because the more devs love working here the cooler the game gets on top of that. I just I want to play this game every day so the more stable it is the more it scales the faster we can get land out, the faster we get the modern and wild format out. Actually the modern wild format something I’m probably most excited about because my alpha and beta decks are not that strong. So it's kind of I feel like when people say it's kind of like the new player's
chance. I feel like I’m that person and I find it right. Yeah, it's going to help a lot.
Aggroed: Awesome
Hardpoint: Yeah, I mean..
Aggroed: Go on Richard.
Hardpoint: I think a lot of what the fun thing is with all of us devs is jumping is we're
jumping into bronze. I think if you go and you could find all the dev accounts you would be like bronze and silver. We're all stumbling through I don't know if Chatter is here, Chat are you around? We were just talking about this, are you muted right now? Hold on a second, let me see if he's muted. Yeah your server muted hold on a second, there you go. You're in server muted. So you there Chatter
Chatter: I’m here.
Hardpoint: Yeah! So we were just talking about that. Do you want to tell them what we're thinking? Well let's
Aggroed: Chatter, please introduce yourself real quick and then tell us what you're
thinking?
Chatter: For sure, yeah! So I’m the Director of Growth here at Spinderlands. Kind of just
helping out on the marketing side of things. Also the only team member who can't grow a beard on the team. So a little bit of my pride there but otherwise doing well but yeah, I know what Richard and I have been talking about is potentially kicking off a learning stream so
taking out kind of biz and bribro and all the other support members who are already super good at the game and teaching us regulars or newbies how to play.
Hardpoint: Yeah! Teaching us how to get out of bronze. We need some tips and I actually,
we were thinking it's all about that new player experience that's something like a lot of the old-timers have been worried about when we've been talking to him is like how do we
really help on board people into this game and the game is quite sophisticated when you get into it on the face of it's like some cards but then you start getting all the rule sets getting all the levels there's a lot of stuff to learn here. We were thinking it would be really fantastic if we could get a series up on youtube that people could follow through and watch and really start at bronze and really find their way up into those higher levels of the game especially as ks legion launches. What's really cool about it is it's gonna be a real opportunity for a lot of people to buy some packs at a real affordable place and be able to jump in the game and really enjoy it. I know there's a lot of people waiting for that. So we're really excited to see that happen so and I mean you say about like I know there's a lot of fomo about people selling out. Imean our intention honestly is not to have the car pack sell out day way one we want new players to come into the game we want new blood here to be able to enjoy the platform. So I mean obviously, we can't stop everyone from buying it up but we're definitely
excited to see a lot of new players join. When the packs become more affordable so
and have a lot of great content for them to learn how to play the game but that kind of brings us back around like background, Kevin real quick, Kevin like maybe you can what is it like with the dev team and like playing the game and you came from a like a corporate environment what's the difference to you when you come from a corporate environment and all of a sudden you're in this world where everybody's passionate and everybody's like playing the game they're loving the game what is what is the difference to you.
Chatter (Kevin): I think, we just talk about the game all day like we're not we're not talking
about the local sports team. We're not talking about this something somebody
read on twitter. I think that's the biggest difference is we talk about the code but then we talk about the game. Then we talk about ideas and crazy ideas around rule sets and then we talk about what other cool things could we do with land. It's just the obsession of the dev
team is real and it's different than anything I’ve experienced.
Hardpoint: Fantastic
Aggroed: I have a theory that this game is like crack for devs. I mean, I know a lot of people like playing it and they like playing it like repeatedly but I didn't realize like when I designed this thing, I didn't understand the developer life cycle and the sort of just how much you have to write some code test it out review it a bunch come back and reiterate on that and normally in. A dev career the speed of doing that is probably not measured
in three-minute intervals but when you get to play Splinterlandss, this game is very much like puzzle solving competitive puzzle solving but what you're so much of what you're doing is really coding how your team should operate this tank. This healer. This dps. That crowd control in this order because I’m anticipating that. I didn't design it this way but when I saw the reaction amongst ever all these different types of people that come in it is like wildly entertaining in particular to developers that's been my experience watching this
Chatter: Yeah! 100 I think when I first started playing, I was looking for the youtube video or website that said what's the three best decks and I’ll just go use those and because that's what I’m used to with every game I’ve played before this, yeah, the fact that the rule sets are so different like as soon as I saw the reverse speed rule set I’m like oh man, okay this is different right because there it's even those really slow bad cards can be so powerful
Aggroed: Yeah
Hardpoint: And what's interesting is, Matt can you tell us a little bit how land is going to impact the game and make that even more interesting?
Yabapmatt: Yeah! I mean, that was kind of before land was even thought about the idea was to add these new kind of cards to the game. These items of spell card so after you pick your team with your summoner and your monsters, then you you submit it you see your
opponent your team and your opponent's team on the battlefield. So the idea is now you get another kind of round before the battle actually takes place where you can equip items and you can cast spells so it's basically like now that both teams have picked their cards. You have to review the battlefield quickly and make changes. Basically through the items of spells and say oh man they have a lot of magic damage and I didn't plan for that or whatever they have a lot of sneak guys and my back line is really bad. What spells what items can I use to try to fix that and then at the same time your opponent's gonna be looking at the exact
same thing. They're gonna be that like anticipation like oh he my opponent he or she is probably gonna do let me try to counter that or whatever. So I that's in my opinion gonna take the game, the skill and strategy element of it to a whole another level. Also make it much more difficult for bots in my opinion as it's gonna be much harder to to do that evaluation of the battlefield step for a bot and a human. Then rather than just go ahead, Okay we'll just sell these packs with these new cards in it. We kind of came up with this whole entire land idea to let the players mint the cards right. So I think just the new cards
themselves are really cool and really advance the game in a lot of ways but then the fact that it's going to be this land system where the players the end goal of land is to mint these actual cards which have actual value in the sense that there is a player base that will want them and need them to play the game. That to me is still pretty unique even in the world of
blockchain games and land blockchain games there's actually something that they're
producing a good that is desirable by people which very much mimics real-world economies right you have land and factories and resources and the goal of all that is to produce some type of good or service that people want and need So I don't know, it's just like so many different things all coming together into what I would just call awesomeness and it is I share
everybody's frustration that we keep talking about this week after week and how cool it is Then it's not here. We don't have the timelines for it yet and that's why I’m also so excited
for Richard and then all the new people we have on board. So this can actually happen and
it's not gonna happen but it had to be pushed back because there were server problems or it had to be pushed back because we also want to do this or oh whatever something happened it's like no we can just do all those things at the same time and and it's really just
going to happen and we have plenty of people to deal with any other stuff that might come up in the future but it's yeah not only is just the land itself cool but what it's adding to the game it's going to be just really awesome.
Aggroed: Sorry, are there, well I just want to, are there other folks that I need to bring
on I don't have the full agenda in front of me. am I missing. I want to be wary of time
Hardpoint: Absolutely. I think that's it though.
Aggroed: Okay, Then, well let's
Hardpoint: Chatter, did you have anything specific you wanted to share tonight?
Chatter: Yeah! I was gonna leak a few updates if that's okay? If I can take five
Minutes?
Aggroed: Yeah! I think that's good.
Chatter: Great! Yeah! I mean just kind of hearing out what the rest of the community has been saying. Just want to say there's a few things in the works right now on the marketing side of things. So first off is linterfest official, planning is underway. We're looking at a
Q2 or Q3 kickoff for that. So hopefully, you guys can all come, attend, meet each other and have a big kind of fun little event location is tvd. We've looked at Vegas and a couple other places as locations. But again, that's not rock solid yet. So, more to come on that side of things. Then the other thing I want to kind of talk about is tournament. So we're partnering up with Zen Sports to kick off a kind of annual or year-long tournament next year in 2022. So, what that's going to look like is monthly tournaments. Each one of those will have prize pools and at the very end. There's going to be a ladder system for each one of those monthly tournaments leading to a championship tournament at the very end, where there's
going to be a huge prize pool for that. So, look out for that and announcements to come in the next couple weeks here and then. Lastly we're also going to be doing a one-off tournament with Zen Sports 2 that'll be probably January which is just going to be chaos legion only packs. So, you guys will get to kind of look at the gameplay and see the new
cards and how everything's interacting for some of our best players.
Aggroed: Now is that in the field of esports? Are we doing esports yet? Can we say that
as a company?
Chatter: Yeah! Absolutely! We're actually hiring an esports manager right now. So if anyone's looking to potentially join the Splinterlandss team, we're hiring two positions right now. One is the esports manager. I think that partnership with Zen Sports is going to be really the first kind of testing and stepping stone to really propel us into the esports realm. Then we're going to be looking to actually develop and build our own esports league internally too and so kind of following the steps of what hearthstone's done. What league of legends and all those other esports have done we're going to hopefully be doing the same and be kind of talked about in that pool of mainstream games there.
Aggroed: Hold on. Why is that important? Why are we doing that? Like, how does that fit in? I mean, we have like a development road map where does like esports isn't part of development. Why would a company do it? What is the benefit to the community? Like,
What should players be excited about by this?
Chatter: Yeah! Absolutely! So, I think the main thing is really branching into the mainstream gaming splinter or splinterland sorry not right now on spider-fest is so focused
On kind of exploring that blockchain gaming side of things getting the people who are already invested in the crypto side of things. The blockchain gaming side of things it's a very easy transition, but I don't think a lot of the mainstream kind of gaming populist knows too much about Splinterlands right now. So, I think getting that esports and getting kind of
in those top 10 placements on twitch. Having all those tournaments yada yada yada are going to help us really propel us into that new cohort new demographic. So, ideally that's going to kind of grow our game twofold in the next year or so.
Aggroed: Awesome! All right. I want to go, I want to let mancer on because that mancer has been when we talk about a smooth roll out a lot of the code that got rolled out was
Kurt Thuman's baby here so answer I have unmuted you. Do you wanna, are you there?
Are you able to come unmute yourself and pop in the chat? There you are
Kurt Thumans (Main Developer): Hi, guys! Yep! I’m here. So, it's been a very exciting week of course. I’ve been sharing all the excitement along with you guys. It's really great
to see that chaos legion rolled out very smoothly as I had hoped it would. For those of you who don't know, I’m the main developer who's been doing a lot of the chaos legion stuff.
So, I integrated a lot of the designs in various places on the web pages. I did the shop screen. Made sure the cards were actually working from a technical standpoint and
develop the new abilities. So, I’ve been involved with chaos legion for a few months now since we started working on it and going forward now that it's launched the next big thing. For me, is going to be working on the modern and wild ranked formats. So, that's going to be a really big thing and I'd say it's too early to really give a definitive timeline on that yet. We're hoping for as soon as possible and definitely Q1, but the development for that is still
in the very early stages. There's a whole lot to be done. So, we'll be sharing more news and more information on that as we get a bit further along in that process. I think next year is going to be really fantastic. We've got the land coming up. I’ll probably be working on that a bit, as we transition into that. So, yeah, it's been been a really exciting way to finish off the year here at thechaos legion launch and a lot more good stuff to come, yeah.
Aggroed: I’m stoked. Thank you for your hard work, the dev team. I feel is killing it and
and actually one last thing I want to talk about before I sort of move into some questions
is, Nate a lot of having more developers doesn't get us super far without having creative be in a position to provide enough content, to make sure that the dev team is busy. Do you can you tell us a bit of what is the state of the Splinterlands creative team? Can you give me a sense of like the organization that you've built so far? The next steps of where you think it's headed?
Nate Aguila: Oh, yeah, sure. So, hopefully, I hope that most of the players are happy
with the elevation of overall production value that we've given to the game. As we progress from one set to the next so we just try to strive to get better and better and better. So, with chaos legion, the pack opening scene looks cooler. The card frames are cooler. The art is cooler. Everything, even the the shop page, the interactions, the features, the functionality, the story page that complements the chat page. We basically try to take where we were and with the additional members of the far, hopefully, elevate that to a whole
another level and to me that's just a taste of what's to come. I think the players are going to be really happy with the fact that we're not just sitting back and saying okay well this is the new standard now. We're not done pushing the standard up higher. So that's going to
involve bringing on more and more and more creative people. I just had an interview earlier today with a ux designer, I have another interview on Monday. Then I have interviews coming up for ui and I am actively pursuing trying to bring on board top tier aaa talent. When it comes to the artwork, the animation and all the rest. So, I think that as we start talking about because we've been talking about doing things in parallel that's gonna become more and more and more of not just something we can do, but something that we will be doing on a regular day-to-day basis is having our roadmap is going to get way bigger, way more impressive, way more ambitious. As we bring on all these other people and right now the top priority for me is probably ux. Then right behind that is ui. Then of course I’m hiring on a whole bunch of other people, but those are the two at the top my list that I’m looking for right now. So for those of you out there listening to the stream. If someone in the industry,
particularly, if they work for a top tier gaming studio or really have their brains wrapped around blockchain and understand all the little nuances and they're into ux or ui. Then send them my way, you could send them to create splinterlands.com
Aggroed: Awesome! Yeah! I don’t know if the audience knows this, but when we're making new products, we have kind of this assembly line that we work on from ideation to fleshing it out, through design. Through manufacturing a lot of what you'll see on the front end with the creative team. Then really putting it in place with the development team. Then kind of specialized role within the development team for like devops and keeping this stuff running. So, I don't know. Did, I think, we had a pretty good first hour but if there's
anybody that wants to kind of chime in and talk if I missed anything I want to make sure that everybody has a chance to speak. Anything we missed?
Hardpoint: We're good. I think it's exciting. I just want to say, I think it's really exciting times for the community in Splinterlands because I think we've already been getting announced in
a lot of bloomberg wired. We were mentioning bloomberg and wired this last week which was really exciting. I think what you guys are going to start seeing over the next little bit as we get closer to general salem once general cell launches just a lot of new blood which is going to be awesome for the community to really see this thing grow and expand. Just really excited about that.
Aggroed: Awesome! Yeah! I know I’m a little tired and I know that like my brain is just filled with all the things that I have to do. Like a million different categories now but I have never had so many different groups, in so many different way. So excited for this project
like little things. I don't know. If you guys know the name Brock Pierce but especially down in Puerto Rico, he's like a pretty beloved character down here. So he gets on stage and he's talking to Michael Turpin who's another beloved character the guy that's doing like bit angels and they're both talking about my project on stage in front of a room full of people and I shouldn't say my project. I should say, our game, our ecosystem. It's just like
to have literal billionaires on stage in front of other billionaires talking about what we're doing here. I think we're breaking new ground, and I’m pretty excited for that. So you can't, I don't know how I could ever recreate the sort of magic of what we've done to get here but I’m pretty excited. Okay, so now, Lliberty Lass, could you kindly provide us with that list of questions? God you're so on top of things.
Yabapmatt: All right. I’m gonna try to stick around. I haven't been around to answer
questions in a while. So I wanted to sit around for a little bit and do some of that
Aggroed: Yeah! You were always welcome. Good, sir, there's you like that sounds fantastic. So let me, I’m trying to get this on my phone because my computer's being a little bit wonky, but yeah
Splinterlands Town Hall - Full Text - December 10th, 2021 - Part 1