Bullet Points

NEO blockchain should be live soon.

Improvement to quality of life (UI and UX) as well as game play, such as changes to how raids work and making it harder for whales to dominate.

Lots of feedback from the community about desired features, including changes to how the cutie and item market function.

You can check out the public road map on Trello.

Reminder that the tavern is going to get a rotating element system.

NEO Gameplay

The NEO blockchain launch is being prepped, and should be live by the time this article is out.

There’s a tutorial pinned in the Telegram chat, and possibly in Discord, explaining how to connect to the game and play using NEO. This week’s pawedcast might be useful to review in detail, especially towards the beginning, as Tehn goes through the process of downloading the NEO software package which is called O3.

Benefits of NEO: NEO presale cuties can be purchased in NEO or NEO gas. There are no decimals for NEO, but there is for NEO gas. Breeding fees will be in NEO gas. When you use up to 10 (?) gas, it’ll be free on the blockchain. So breeding will cost nothing. There will be a 4% fee based on the gas used. Basically, it should be very cheap to breed cuties on NEO. To be clear, the breeding price still exists. What will essentially be free is the transaction itself.

Gen 2s will be available for the presale for those want to try things out but don’t want to spend too much. Gen 0s will start being created after the end of the presale. Tehn also thinks that there might be some cuties that will be produced that will produce new attributes.

Quality of Life Updates

Power creep was a concern, and there was a lot of discussion in the Telegram chat, so the company has decided to take a step back and think about how things are going to be released.

The mechanism for the recycler is done, but the exact recipes need to be balanced. It could help balance out power creep. For instance, legacy items could be “powered up.” The main idea is to take existing items, break them apart, and use the materials that are created to craft. However, there likely won’t be the ability to craft items that can be found through adventuring because it would reduce the importance of grinding. The focus will be on upgrading items.

Tehn has suggested that during the leveling up, there’s a possibility of risking the item being destroyed in the crafting process. It’s not a bad idea as it would increase the complexity and strategy of crafting. Moreover, it better simulates reality. Working on an item and upgrading it does risk damage. For instance, jewelers risk the gem every time they heat up the fixture to soften it. Do it wrong and the gem cracks.

Basically, once the system is in place, not only will relatively useless items become far more useful, but there will be a lot more variety in the types of items. Instead of just having the samurai armor, there might be samurai armor of different quality.

Raids

There’s been a lot of conversations about the ability of smaller players getting something out of raid bosses. It’s true that a lot of the raids have been dominated by larger players. Unfortunately Raid V2 has not solved enough of the problems. The risk vs reward just isn’t necessarily all that good. According to Tehn, going forward, the raid system will be more interactive, or as I understand it, a round will be more dynamic.

Basically, it’ll be easier for people to get something of some value, so long as they’re playing a decent amount, even if the whales are the ones who end up taking the boss down.

Another feature might be to have multiple raid bosses at the same time so there’s more variety and option for the players. Sounds good. Options are good. And the ability for someone to get something of value and something they like/want, without whales constantly pushing them aside, is important, otherwise nobody will want to play.

Other Things

There is continued work on UI and UX upgrades as part of the quality of life changes. Most of the feedback has been pretty much the same across all methods of feedback. UI and UX are the most important aspects of the game that need to be changed, according to most players.

Selling custom skins is another suggestion that has been put forward. Custom skins for backgrounds aren’t too bad. However, custom skins on cuties might be used to manipulate the market and mislead them, if the skins make it harder to tell what they’re getting when they’re buying something.

Tehn also pointed out that there are risks of selling outside of the actual marketplace. Speaking of buying stuff, another suggestion is more stuff on the pawn shop. However, the idea is that youth potions should still be relatively expensive in order to reduce power creep and so on.

Another feature request that they’ve been thinking about is adding market graphs. I’ve requested this feature multiple times. As someone who studies economics and markets, having sales data is important. It’s called “price discovery.”

Slightly less requested, but interesting, is a bidding system, or actually an auction market. It’s how stocks are sold on public exchanges like the NYSE and other major exchanges. Multiple buyers and sellers place competitive bids to execute transactions. Finally, there’s the idea that it should be easier to find users who have the cuties that people are trying to find. However, Tehn is concerned that this idea could promote snooping, especially nefarious snooping where a player tries to figure out what breeding operations other players are engaging in.

And a reminder that the tavern is going to get a new focus. Taverns will have a rotating element system. It should be in beta soon. The beta testers, who include the guardians and some others, do give feedback to help improve features.

Summery

There’s a lot of changes happening within the game and within how development is going to occur moving forward. There’s a lot of community feedback, especially regarding the user interface and user experience. Here’s hoping that the game continues to evolve in the right direction.

Originally published on The B.C.U. Times Publication on Medium.