AMA session with Illuvium 04.03.2021
On the 4th of March, Discovering Crypto Club hosted an AMA session with such a promising project as Illuvium, which delighted us with future collaborations, products, NFTs, and rewards. Here you have a recap of what the AMA looked like.
Host: Hello, community! We are pleased to have Illuvium for an AMA session with us today. Please, as an introduction, can you please tell us about yourselves and give us a short intro about Illuvium? 🙏🏻
Kieran: We are Kieran and Aaron Warwick, the co-founders of Illuvium. My journey with Crypto started back in 2016 when I was in charge of partnerships for the world’s first over-the-counter crypto exchange. During the Crypto Winter, I decided to leave (in hindsight, not the smartest move) to found a food tech startup. It wasn’t until midway through 2020 that I started investing in high-yield DeFi projects. After a few months of farming, I recognized a massive trend in NFT’s and decided to rope Aaron into making a Pokemon-inspired game. Aaron is newer to the space, but his computer engineering background, storytelling, and game design allowed us to plan for a project that I thought could explode in popularity. We’re not there quite yet, but I get the sense our community knows something big is coming.
Aaron: Illuvium is an upcoming Collection RPG Autobattler set on a planet where the player is stranded. They travel across a variety of landscapes hunting monsters that some call Illuvials, trying to capture them into Shards so they can use them in player vs player combat.
Part 2: Twitter questions
First question from Twitter user kinymuem
In illuvium games, can we play without having to buy tokens first? How do users take advantage of this game? Does this game allow interconnection to play online with friends?
Kieran: You don’t need to buy the token to play. You don’t even need to spend any money on the game at the start. To get the full experience you will need to spend money at some point, especially if you would like to take advantage of the play-to-earn elements. The Overworld is single-player but with PvP you can play against your friends online, or make new friends. There will be lots of ways to communicate through the game though. You will be able to spectate matches in the leviathan arena and wager with friends or strangers. Twitch streamers will be able to show off their collections in cool ways. We think the encounter space is pretty hype and people are going to want to see that, much like people watch others do unboxing of Pokemon cards. Obviously we aren’t going to start as big as something like Pokemon, but neither were they back in the late 90’s.
This also doesn’t take into account other things we are planning for 2022 assuming that we have some mild success. Eventually we want to do a mode where you can play with your friends. Maybe VR. Who knows.
For now though we are focusing on our core game loop which will get the NFTs into the hands of players and allow them to battle. It’s not a huge variety of features, but it is the core of the game.
Wagering will be allowed only for 18+ users.
Second question from Twitter user mcqueen_eliza
Investors buy tokens whose prices are likely to rise in the future. The attractiveness of low-stakes tokens has increased. Do you have a token burning scheme to reduce ILV supply and increase investment attractiveness in the future?
Kieran: There is a maximum supply of 10 million tokens of $ILV. 3 million of these tokens are minted through yield farming. However, not all stakers will choose to take their yield as $ILV. Instead, if they want to use them right away they can choose instead to get $sILV which can be used as currency in the game. When they do this they are forgoing their $ILV which means that there can be as little as 7 million tokens. Additionally, 100% of the Vault (in game purchases) goes back to staked token holders. To do this we take the ETH and use it to buy $ILV from the liquidity pool. This creates an upward pressure on the price of the token. Another way that the token price can rise is simply through current holders not wishing to sell their tokens. Remember, yield from the token is locked for 12 months (unless you convert to $sILV) so the circulating supply can be quite a bit smaller than the total tokens. Why would holders not wish to sell? Because they receive distributions from the Vault. If we do our job well and make the game attractive to players, we believe that these vault rewards can be quite high.
We also have some NFT burning features which means that once the genesis set stops being minted they will slowly decrease in numbers over time, making those that people own more rare.
Third question from Twitter user Amr77821144
This creatures called Illuvials are going to be clasified thanks to their affinities and classes according to your medium articles, but apart from this will they be able to be clasified into evolution phases or growing states or this won’t happen to Illuvials?
Aaron: Most Illuvials in the game have 3 Stages of development, spurred on by a Fusion process. Put simply, to create a Stage 2 you need to have 3 Stage 1 Illuvials of that type, and have all of them be at a high enough level to Fuse. You could think of these Stages as “evolution” but in our world we simply call it Fusion. The more interesting dynamic is how Fusion works. Each Illuvial is nearly unique in that it has not only attributes relating to its type and level, but each Illuvial has a modifier to its stats that make it stronger or weaker than average. These are all small changes, but they can make the difference in battling in the wild, and in the Leviathan Arena. In the Ranked arena these modifiers are removed so that everyone is on a level playing field.
However, when you Fuse Illuvials the question is ‘which stats do they keep?’. The answer is that for each of the different attributes only one of them is chosen at random from the 3. This means that you could potentially get an Illuvial which has amazing stats from Fusion, or not so amazing. The same goes for the capture type. If you find a holo and a non holo, do you risk Fusing them and losing the holo, or do you wait until you have 3 holos? We have debated this for a while, but with holos there really is no choice. You can’t have a ‘half holo’. Because of this we thought it best to keep both systems consistent. When you fuse, one version will stay, and two will be destroyed. Which one is random. If you want to be sure you get high stats then Fuse 3 that already have high stats. If you want a holo, make sure you fuse 3 holos… and if you are fusing into the final stage, let’s just say that fusing 3 holos is so hard that we have made it extra rewarding.
Fourth question from Twitter user komando911
The company would accept some ideas for the creation of illuvials from the users? if so, by what means could we contact them to send them these ideas? or is it that all the illuvials are already created?
Aaron: At the moment the only place we are looking on a daily basis for inspiration is our discord server. We do read Telegram as well, but most of our really active users who are very knowledgeable about the game live on discord so it has naturally become the place where we can talk to them about ideas, or just read what users are thinking. We do take a lot of suggestions into account, as long as they fit into the overall framework of the game. Because we are decentralized and community driven we think this is the best way to be. From the ground up we tried to make the game in a way that allows us to easily adapt to things over time. This has caused some delays in the build because it adds a layer of complexity, but over time we believe that we will gain this time back.
At the moment we have completed 6 lines, but we have about 80 or so Illuvials that are at some stage of production.
If people want to join as contributors then they can always apply and show us their skills. The best way to do that is via email to either myself or Danny, who is head of partnerships and keeps us sane on a daily basis.
Fifth question from Twitter user Sammy123vn
Many platforms have not yet been able to exploit the full potential of the NFT and digital arts, they only have them as tokens of symbolic value. How important are NFTs within Illuvium? What is their role in the platform and games?
Kieran: We agree with this statement; there have been few games that have capitalized on the potential of NFT’s. Mainly when talking about collectibles not having functionality or playability. In Illuvium, our NFT’s have both and are super collectible. Owning an NFT in Illuvium gives you access to monetary gain and the ability to immerse yourself in an entertaining and addicting battle mode. The Leviathan arena is additional and where whales can utilize their Deck to fight it out in a winner takes all style battle while also betting on the outcome.
In Illuvium, almost everything is coded as an NFT. The only things that aren’t are cosmetics and your Subordinate Drone. When you mine stuff in the world, you’re pulling out NFTs. When you forge them into weapons and armor, you are burning those NFTs to make a weapon NFT, and so on. We can do this because, on Immutable X, you are dealing with sub-second transaction times, and there is no GAS fee for doing it.
This allows us to make sure that your items are fully secured and owned by you alone. When you sell them on the marketplace, it will be a secure transaction.
There is nothing more important to the game than NFTs.
Part 3: Live questions
First question from Telegram user @daniyel100
I would like to have a long term investment with your project but at the moment I have doubts, how can you convince and convince me that this project is very promising?
Kieran: There are a few fundamentals to look at when investing in crypto projects for the longterm. The biggest one is the team. With the right team a project has the ability to deliver on their promises and pivot quickly if required. The second is the tokenomics, ours have been reviewed by several leading crypto personalities within the DeFi space. The last thing you look at is the longevity of the idea, and given that we are only at the beginning of the NFT gaming evolution, I would say we are a safe bet.
Second question from Telegram user @chzrles
Its good for the wellbeing of any project that has a governance system, to have a mechanism that prevents the holders of many tokens from having too much voting power. Illuvium use quadratic voting to reduce plutocracy, but how does this system work?
Aaron: Yes we use quadratic voting. It works pretty much how it sounds. Each person who has staked tokens gets to vote, but the power of their vote is not 1:1. Instead each votes cost a number of tokens that is a power of 2. This means that a lot of small holders can have much more influence than one large holder.
Third question from Telegram user @banhmikhong
What is the future trend of DeFi, in your opinion? What is the biggest flaw DeFi is facing today? And is Your Project looking to solve the problem?
Aaron: The biggest flaw in DeFi at the moment, at least as far as games are concerned, is the high GAS costs. Because we are partnering with IMX we don’t have to worry about that. Minting and transfers will be sub second and GAS free. This will allow us to have NFT items in the game at all price points, including free to play elements. We think this will be what is needed to start to attract regular gamers. But those regular gamers expect a better quality of art than what exists so far. We are aiming to fix that.
Fourth question from Telegram user @Nickkiii
Which area are you focusing on at the moment? (DeFi, Stake,Dapps..) and what is your goals in this year ?
Kieran: Right now we are focussed on our IDO which will be run on Balancer later this month, and also releasing our first game demo, which will come prior, around midway through this month. After that we look to begin our yield farming, which includes flash pools from some of our partners. Then it will be full steam ahead to get the beta out, for a game launch by end of Q3.
Fifth question from Telegram user @Billal12345
Vast majority of Crypto projects are built just for the sole purpose of amassing wealth for themselves. So, I want to know the value you aim to add to crypto industry that will bring greater abundance to the industry?
Aaron: We have been upfront from the beginning that we are a fully decentralised project where 100% of the Vault goes back to the token holders. It is true that the team has tokens, but we want all of our team to go next level on this project and so far they are doing it. We have people that work until all hours of the day to get things done. A small part of that reason is because they want the game to be as valuable as possible.
But there are many things would could have done differently if we just wanted to make money ourselves. We certainly wouldn’t have set up the Vault to give out 100%. We wouldn’t have made a council where members can vote in a quadratic way, to steer the project over time. We probably would have made something much lower quality and a lot less effort. This game has been an incredible challenge to build. We are trying to do things in ways that aren’t usual.
For example, we built it from the ground up to be fully deterministic so that we could run simulations quickly to help us with balance. We made it fully data driven so that new abilities and characters can be added quickly after voting. We did all this so that the community really feels like this is THEIR project.
We have done everything we can to make this feel like it is a group effort. In the end it is up to people to decide if they like it or not, but hopefully they will at least appreciate that we are trying to be open and honest as much as possible with the decisions that we make. And when we make mistakes we will own it, and fix it as fast as possible. We aren’t going anywhere.
Useful links
Website: https://illuvium.io/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/illuviumio
Discord: http://discord.gg/illuvium
