Cometh AMA recap: May 27th
Hello, there crew members! We are together again with another AMA recap. Even though we make these every month, you guys always have the best questions for our galactic counselor Jérôme de Tychey ☄️ — and he always has the best answers, with new advancements in the game.
Let us tease you with a small announcement already — really soon, we will have an AMA with the developers of Cometh 😎 Are you intrigued already? Let’s check the recap and see what else Cometh is bringing us 👇
Q — How was NFT Berlin?
A — It was great. Overall the feedback that we got in NFT Berlin was really positive, people really liked what we have done.
We presented our new rental system to a couple of games that we met at NFT Berlin, they liked the product and wanted to use it as well.
Q — Let’s talk about the current situation of Cometh. What’s happening currently?
A — When we released the game we made some assumptions about how the game could run. We met different unexpected results and we made corrections that we had to do. One thing that we realized is that we need to recalibrate how the crafting works. So, we’re changing the parameters a little bit for that. We will leave it to the community, you guys will be in charge of deciding how fast or how slow the number of cards from a specific collection is in the bucket. I mentioned the parameters just to point out that now we have a strong and active community of about 400–500 players that come regularly to play. You can ask yourself why aren’t we making more marketing for the project to bring more players right away. We have a core community of around 100 players that play super actively and about 3000 people that play on a monthly basis. We wanted to make sure that we didn’t have a number of cards that were just exploding while the number of players was still pending for some activation from our side.
We realized that we were not as good as we wanted on the onboarding side. We are making some progress on how onboarding is done. Onboarding by yourself is really tough for newcomers to really appreciate the game. There are troubles when you match with a really high-level player, that’s why we are working on how the matchmaking works. There is a change in the matchmaking that is going to be released with the next version.
We would like to organize an AMA session maybe next week or the week after with the devs so that you can get to know better about how we produce Cometh. But to come to the question why didn’t we activate and try to get from 3000 monthly active users to 30.000 monthly active users, right now we think that if we push hard on this acquisition we’ll face a lot of people who will come and try something that’s too hard for them to really appreciate. So we will change how the matchmaking works to make sure that newcomers are playing mostly against newcomers, and the matchmaking system is a bit fairer for them.
We have good news to share about the crafting. It was announced yesterday during the talk at NFT Berlin. The protocol was successfully audited and we are very happy with the results. We are probably going to ask all the people to get a better sense of how it works, what is good and what needs to be improved. We will be able to extend this crafting system to viral stuff.
We are also preparing a couple of surprises for you during EthCC in Paris in July. During the month of June, we are also going to start organizing events regarding blockchain gaming. At first in Paris but we are also going to try to be present in other cities as well. If we discover that we have a big cluster of players in Belgrade for example then we will just go to Belgrade and talk about it.
Q — Is there any news about the rental system?
A — The rentals are in progress. We’re probably going to test it with a couple of guilds by allowing them to use the rental directly from the chain. Soon enough the front end for the rental will be available as well. I think you guys are going to love the rentals because it allows for multiple rentals like you have your spaceship but you don’t have time to play, you can rent the spaceship to someone and say “I want %5 of the rewards”. Then that person can subrent it to someone else too.
The guilds want to have access to rentals and things that they can rely on in terms of tooling. So before activating them we need to have those ready. The main thing before activating guilds is to make sure that we can properly onboard them and they can properly onboard their users.
The hardest part of the rental system is done, we are now looking at the UI. So far it’s really simple and elegant. We are very bullish on the quality of this rental system. In the upcoming days, you’ll be able to use rentals if you are a guild member. We want to test it out with guilds at first and in the coming weeks let the players rent as well.
Q — You said some matchmaking changes are going to be done before the marketing process. Does it mean that we will wait 5 min in the queue to match?
A — No, that’s not the objective. Let’s say you have a deck that is not the best deck, the worst thing that can happen is that you play your first game with a base deck to understand what the game is and you get matched with someone who has a super optimized deck. The way we think the matchmaking is going to arrive is that it’s going to be two different leagues — a league of continuous players and a league of discovering players.
Q — Is there any utilization of the TUBE?
A — TUBE is coming, that’s part of the next update. With the next version, we’ll have the utilization of the TUBE. I don’t want to give you too much alpha on this, the developers will present that to you in the upcoming AMA.
Q — When it comes to the game itself do you think that it will be possible in the future to have some kind of segmentation where new players have a certain level to achieve when they can enter a ranked league, and then compete against higher-ranked players or still have a chance to compete in a lower-ranked league?
A — Yes, some of the things that we are pondering at the moment is having your completely optional version of the game as well on the side. So that when you want to discover the game and participate in some challenges, and slowly nudge those players who are here for the crypto and blockchain, then why don’t you put a wallet too and try it out. So the whole quest and the systems for onboarding go very well with this approach and we are doing a case study on how it will be to go this way. Right now if you introduce Cometh to a friend who is not interested in crypto yet, they will have to put a wallet, try Web3os, and so on. Onboarding is not yet perfect. It’s something that every single project in this space is trying to solve so I hope we will contribute to solving this problem. So it’s gonna be like this, it’s blockchainless if you want to try the game, and then it’ll be blockchainful if you want it to be. That’s something that we are trying to evaluate at the moment.
Q — When it comes to the in-game onboarding process, do you have some ideas?
A — Scripted games let you try the game, see the game, and then ask you to put your wallet and do a proper login and so on but making sure that you have this soft onboarding at first and then let you play against people that are like you, discovering the game or trying to optimize their best deck. Maybe also unlocking cards in a form of a quest like playing your first games until you have reached a certain level of ELO, you have new cards that can activate, and you’ve played a couple of games and won them you have now reached the level of experienced gamers and you can match with them.
In terms of new resources, it’s not going to work this way. We want the onboarding to be soft, but not impactful on the economy. We are probably going to rely on the simple cards, similar to how the base deck works at the moment, you unlock a couple of cards for you to discover the deck-building tools and create different archetypes of decks from the simple cards that you have unlocked. However, in the league, those cards are not going to be useful for the competitive players.
Q — Why have grinding/recycling fees increased?
A — Recycling efficiency, like how many cards you get back when you grind, these parameters we want to be left to the community, not to be our own decision. Right now we wanted to make sure that it has an impact. Since we have observed that it has an impact on the number of cards inside a collection, the number of cards created, and the rarity of the cards created, we want to make sure that the community is aware of the kind of decision they are making in terms of recycling. We will let the community decide how much recycling fees they want to pay.
Q — Are new cards coming with the new version?
A — Yes, many new cards are coming. There is a new mythic in the making and it’s orbiter-centric. The art of the new cards is mesmerizing. We have a new type of orbiter as well, so about 25 new cards are coming next week.
Q — Are more players’ stats coming — winrate, total games played, total L/W?
A — Yes. We are working on a better version of the profile so you’ll be able to check out how many games you played, which cards you played the most, etc. We are not super prioritizing it at the moment, but we should, I think. It’s definitely on the to-do list. Since we do regular ELO resets we are not prioritizing this kind of stats but we know that it’s important.
Q — Will there be a discovery game mode similar to Hearthstone arena?
A — Yes. That’s definitely on the to-do list as well. For that to happen we had to rethink how the onboarding was done and it seems like a very good approach.
Q — Is the tournament system going to be community gaming?
A — We are testing community gaming at the moment.
Q — With new cards added through time, will there also be balancing on existing cards?
A — Yes, definitely. Not really balancing on existing cards, that’s a really tough topic because we don’t want to break cards. People spend time building good decks around those cards, sometimes investing money in buying those cards from other players. Changing the way that the card behaves is not going to be fair to those players. Nevertheless, new cards are being introduced to add some power to existing archetypes and also to help create new archetypes. Rather than balancing cards, we’d like to introduce new more powerful cards that also have the powers of the existing cards.
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As you can see, it was an intense AMA session 🤯 Thank you Jerome for always having the most exciting updates for us! — and thank you Cometh crew for your interest 🔥
We’ll see you again in the devs’ AMA, in the meantime relax and enjoy the battles in the Cometh galaxy 💫
