[Axie] December Development Update!
[Axie] December Development Update!
Key Points
We are approaching 3 million community members and seeing record breaking usage of all of our products.
In response to this growth, we are investing heavily into growing our dedicated team and leveraging the many contributions of the community.
Battles, Land, and Origin are rapidly evolving, both in response to your feedback and new game engineering talent!
Greetings fellow Lunacians!
As we approach the end of the year holiday season, we wanted to start by reflecting a moment in awe of what we’ve accomplished together. In the past year, Axie Infinity has evolved from a gaming concept into a rapidly growing ecosystem and a movement which hosts fun experiences for all backgrounds and interests. You collectively make Axie Infinity what it is, and together we will continue to grow our community in ways that will shock the world. We are becoming a true digital nation, and we are deeply committed to finding ways to empower you and create true collective ownership of what we create together.
📈 Growth
Our community continues its upward growth trajectory from an assortment of objective criteria:
Over the past month, we have welcomed over 500,000 new Axie holders from around the world, and will soon approach 3M daily active users (DAU) given current pace!
These players are battling, and breeding Axies at a breakneck pace. As our community continues to grow, Axie growth velocity increases over time. In fact, we recently welcomed the 10 millionth Axie to our world. Congrats Ric.Fish for breeding it!
This player growth, combined with the release of our decentralized exchange (Katana) has spurred tremendous usage of our Ronin blockchain. Today, Ronin’s transaction volume has grown to roughly 4x the number of daily transactions of the Ethereum chain, and that growth has pushed us all to prepare for significant scale in 2022!
The world is becoming more and more aware of our community, and we’re doing what we can to help those interested in the play-and-earn concept feel welcome to Lunacia. You might have noticed that we’ve been invited to share information about our community within the press, and various conferences recently… which of course will only further fuel our growth.
Special shoutout to those that participated in our first Creator Cup in the Phillipines! We had over 40,000 viewers tune in from all around the world! Congrats Hezelya for taking home the win!
🌾 Land
We’ve named our ecosystem Axie Infinity, because we dream of a gaming universe that has infinite gaming experiences for Axies and the various gaming assets we own within our nation. One of the experiences further along in its development is the Land game (aka Project Kingdom or K), where Axies will have the opportunity to build bases, gather resources, and use crafting mechanics to compete against others for control of Lunacia. Land will ultimately be a place where creators can both decorate environments and even create custom gaming experiences.
This past month, the land team:
Welcomed a new art director, who has helped us quickly hone the game’s signature style. To give you a small taste, we wanted to share a sneak preview of the emerging style
Introduced a number of new assets into the experience, such as buildings and the surrounding environment
Further developed resource production, gathering, and crafting mechanics
We want to take this opportunity to update you about the timing for Land. In November of 2020, we released a roadmap with the Axie Whitepaper with estimates that we’d have a “Community Alpha” for Land gameplay playable by Q4. After significant internal testing we decided to delay this until 2022. We will give updates as potential timing becomes more clear.
The great news is that we have been able to add talented game designers and artists to the land team, and we want to allow them to have the opportunity to leave their mark on Land before we get it into your hands. Land is so important for the future of the community, economy, and we want to make sure it provides the experience you deserve. We know that some of you were hoping to play with Land this Holiday season, and we are working hard to prepare a sneak peak to thank you for your patience.
⚔️ Season 19
Season 19 brought both a large leaderboard prize pool (3000 AXS) and substantial changes to game balance prior to the season. We’ve heard a considerable amount of feedback from you around this balance change, and we have taken some initiative to improve the process going forward.
The last time a balance patch was released was on May 17th, as we kicked off Season 17. At that time, around 50,000 players were beginning to witness what became a period of exponential growth in our community. As season 19 was released, that number had grown to over 2.7 million players! That means that over 98% of you have never experienced a balancing patch, so for the majority of you, our balancing goals are likely unclear.
In short, the primary goal of card balancing is to ensure that each card is distinct and sufficiently powered so that all cards can be seen as having a balanced set of strengths and weaknesses. Additionally, with almost infinite numbers of card combinations, there are some that emerge that create clearly unfair advantages for their holders. We believe that a well balanced game is a more fun to play game. When we set out to release this recent patch, these were our goals.
Game play balancing is a process, and while this patch helped in some ways, some of the changes we’ve released with this season fell short of our goals. That being said, we’ve decided to evolve the game balancing process to engage the community in more direct ways. For example, we intend to establish a game balancing council, made up of top ranked, reputable players alongside members of the Sky Mavis team to get a broader input from players. We also are intending to release future balance patches outside of competitive seasons, and collect feedback from the community around these changes during the offseason, creating a window for feedback and input. Finally, we will make a strong commitment to keep gameplay stable within competitive seasons, but will have a community engagement process in the rare circumstances when a card or combo jeopardizes fair gameplay from within the season.
🌋 Axie Infinity: Origin
We also continue to make significant progress with our next generation battles experience, where we provide opportunities for players to experience a full, brand new storyline, non-blockchain “starter” Axies, the ability to attach power-ups to Axies, and much more.
Here are some non-final examples of what Axie power-ups may look like:
The team is also putting work into adding some graphical special effects to Axie battles. Take a look:
We are pushing hard on getting this game out to our community, putting extra engineering effort into accelerating our progress. We think it’s something you’ll find was worth the wait.
🐦 Ronin
As you’ve hopefully seen over the past month, we’ve been working hard on establishing the foundation of our ecosystem and making it available to our community.
In its first month of operation Katana has racked up 409,000 unique users and over 1.2 B in deposited liquidity! Remember that you can now farm precious RON tokens and become an owner of the Ronin ecosystem by providing liquidity for the AXS/ETH and SLP/ETH pools on Katana!
We were proud to launch the Ronin Mobile wallet as well, which has opened up access to our ecosystem for anyone, anywhere regardless of whether they own a computer.
We are hard at work on getting the RON token ready for launch. This will unlock a new era for the Ronin and Axie ecosystems. The RON token will ensure that Ronin is owned by the community that uses it while also ensuring the security and sustainability of the ecosystem. Remember the issues we had with dropped transactions recently? This will be solved by allowing users to use tiny amounts of RON to pay gas fees on the network. Don’t worry! These fees will be fractions of what we’ve experienced on Ethereum in the past.
🤝 Community Support
The support team has made an incredible amount of progress over the last 60 days, as we’ve established tons of new internal processes and grown our team to a total of 8. The good news is that we’re getting through a considerable backlog of tickets community members have filed. Our goal is to achieve a response of two days or less, which will require us to grow our team even more in the coming weeks. In response to the growing amount of predatory behavior on our Discord and social media, we’re also looking to build an additional team that protects our community in a more deliberate way. Stay tuned for more information on this team in our next update!
🛠️ Sky Mavis
Within the last three months, Sky Mavis has grown from a small team of 35 to more than 80 nation builders. Big plans call for many hands, so this level of growth is our attempt to push harder, faster, and further to deliver upon the promises and commitments to everyone within our beloved community. Every day, we’re receiving applications from our fans all over the world... we’ve truly appreciated the love and support! We have a high standard for new team members, and we go to great lengths to bring in the best and the right people for our cause. In addition, our internal structures are actively being shaped and prepared for considerable scale. We have an incredible ambition to bring amazing experiences to our trainers within our Lunacia community. 2022 is going to be an incredible year!
Want to work with us?