Neon Crisis | Recap of AMA, January 15th

Originally composed by Pnin with minor edits by Csaint02

For those who aren't aware, Neon Crisis is a new NFT series with a heavy battle/arena metagame focus, built on the RMRK 2.0 standard on Moonriver.

What does this mean in simple terms?

The most advanced NFTs seen to date, on a super cheap and fast chain, with epic bloody battles.

In these 4 Genesis Mints, 1k Neons will be minted with 250 available each week. In the first week, it took 2 hours to sell out. In the second week, 8 minutes.

This week's mint finished in under 5 minutes.

There's only one week left to get in on the Genesis Neons, which come with perks such as NFT drops, early alpha access, and, are half priced (not to mention several other mysterious hints at advantages to holding Genesis Neons).

This week's AMA was heavily focused on battle mechanics.

Adam, who is doing all the math, planning, and general orchestrating of all the magic behind these gruesome scenes, gave us some exciting alpha on what we can expect, and how the battle mechanics may look like.

Adam's background comes from his Economics degree from the University of Minnesota, and he's experience in machine learning algorithms. He started crypto in 2016 with Bitcoin, before moving into Chainlink and finally into KSM where he now runs a validator node and is heavily involved in the Dotsama ecosystem.

He quit his job in November to go full-time crypto, and he joined with Corndog to work on Neon Crisis through Baghunters.

The math is super complicated, at least to me, so I'll do my best to summarize what I understood behind all the...terminology that became a bit like a foreign language to me.

On Rarity

As stated previously, visual rarity pieces are being worked, but the team emphasized that visual rarity is only part of the puzzle. Statistical rarity might arguably be more important.

Additionally, it's important to emphasize how equippables can change rarity. For instance, if you have a rare mask like an oni mask, you can also equip items on the mask itself to push the stats even more and make it even more rare. This is made possible by the RMRK standard.

On Battle Rolls:

When you do a battle roll, you can roll a number between 0-100. This can be modified by other things such as equipment, stats, and other battle factors (to be discussed later), but the bottom bound is 0 (can't go negative), and the upper bound is limitless.

That said, the roll is NOT uniform distribution, but normal distribution. This means that there is a very high chance your roll will be between 30-70, and it gets significantly less likely the further out from the mean you get. A battle roll of 95 would be pretty crazy.

This means that battles are more realistic, fair, and, negative consequences like injury and death are far less likely.

Within the battle, a coin flip occurs, in which it determines who the attacker and defender.

If you are attacker, it looks at strength and agility, for instance, but defense is determined by other defending stats.

You may not get the chance to use all your stats prominently, which creates a robust checks and balances system.

You can choose if you want a jauggernaut, or featherfoot, and these rolls will help determine the effectiveness of your build in real combat.

On Injury:

10% of battles will result in an injury. Upon injury, there will be a severity roll in which your injury will need time to heal from.

75% of these injuries will be healed in a week. In the 99.99% chance you are 3 standard deviations from mean, it would take 388 days to heal.

If you hit 100 or higher, which is about 1/1000 chance, your character will die.

On Death and Zombies:

If your character dies, it goes to the graveyard contract. The team is still playing with the exact mechanism, but it could be a system where the NFT owner is given one week to ressurect their character as a super ultra rare (and powerful) NFT Neon Crisis Zombie.

If they choose not to resurrect the character, it can be opened to the public.

The cost of the zombie NFT will be somewhat prohibitive, to help ensure rarity on top of the statistical near-impossible rarity of this event.

In this system, it's an incredibly innovative way to incentivize game play, risking your character, and enforcing naturally gamified (and DAO based) rarity. Additionally, it's a fair system (everyone is exposed to the same risk of death), and, it "adds an edge" to the game where you can actually lose something.

Having real stakes is important for engagement.

There will need to be certain measures made to help prevent manipulation (setting up unbalanced battles with yourself to cheat probability in your favor), and the team is also seriously looking at integrating Chainlink VRF to be sure that random sampling isn't deterministic, as Solidity is somewhat deterministic (though you can commit to an action in the future to help preserve randomness and "can't take a bet back"), Chainlink VRF would solve all those problems.

On Not-Dying, the Dojo:

The Dojo is single player environment where you can’t hurt your character, but still gain experience.

It won’t help your character as much as real battles, and your experience won't increase at a drastic rate, but it will let you simulate fights with a number of different types of opponents spun up by a bot.

Perhaps, eventually, virtually fighting dummies of existing NFT builds could be possible (I'm asking)?

There will be limits on Dojo use. For example, if you are injured past a certain threshhold, you won't be able to utilize the Dojo, or there could be an experience cap on what you can earn through Dojo training.

On Cost:

Every action will have a fee associated with it, and that fee will go to the DAO treasury which has a use to be voted on by the community.

Most frequently, you'll pay a small fee to enter the battle, just like you would an arcade, and the proceeds would be used to sponsor tournaments which could mint ultra rare items or characters. Perhaps the funds could be used to even buy a kanaria.

The models are endless with the arcade model.

On Betting:

You do not have to wager anything, but there will be a betting system for those that enjoy gambling their assets on their Neon battles.

NFTs, MOVR, and other assets will be supported for wager.

There will be further discussion on how to quantify value of assets being waged (how do you quantify the value of an NFT?), and, how do you protect individuals from unfair bets?

There are two major plausible solutions:

1. Obsfucate open battles so you don't know who you are fighting, and the smart contract would look at your current state of attributes and equippables for a certain range of fairness.

This is difficult because on-chain privacy is really a difficult thing. Commit reveal is an option, but only if the players own multiple NFTs (hiding which Neon you’re fighting with). They can see what you own, but they don’t know which one you’re battling, which would take a 2nd transaction to reveal heroes, then battle. This is less favorable because it takes more user interaction.

2. You could call it part of strategy, where you can see your opponent, and there could be a "handshake system" where both participants must agree to the terms.

For instance, a maker would create a battle with a character, with a wagered NFT, and a taker could propose their own character, with a wagered NFT. The maker would have to "handshake" to start the battle, thereby accepting the battle conditions.

In the future, there could be other systems, such as collecting a pool of participants and completely randomizing them all, modifying available equipment after seeing your opponent as a component of strategy, or, having different systems for different types of battles (ie, round robin, tourney, etc).

On Battle Factors:

There are a number of factors which affect your battle stats and rolls.

There are 7 battle independent factors (which I failed to entirely notate so take these notes lightly), each with their own multiplier affect.

Some are Luck, Battle Experience, Comraderie, Unique Number of Battles (not the same opponent?), Injuries Sustained, how many battles you've fought in x amount of time, etc.

On Equippables:

All equippables will be balanced. For instance, a boost in attack may result in a loss of speed. This allows players to customize their characters to their heart's desire.

In a fun example, imagine a naked character that's been maxed out on everything related to high luck, defeating an OP tank.

On DAO:

There will be a DAO that can vote for changes, including the power to adjust multipliers as the stats and analytics come out in the case that a certain character build ends up substancially overpowering all other types.

There is an issue in which whales could cause some manipulation in this voting system, so it will need to be discussed. That said, because of the RMRK system, multipliers are entirely customizable and can be modified to adjust for balanced gameplay without difficulty.

On Visuals:

Kenji is the team member on UI. He described a visual somewhat reminiscent to street fighter, but also similar to trading cards. Stats could change dynamically, and he is still determining the best way to be visually engaging in battles so that there can be some excitement to spectating aside from a simple "you win/you lose" message.

On Timeline "wen play":

The math is 80% done. Most the heavy calculations are done, and they are being drafted formally into a technical paper so that Cicada (lead dev) can integrate it into Solidity.

The full roll out of the game would be after the release of the RMRK 2.0 standard, which is based on their team, but the alpha testers will have access to a minimal implementation which would represent only half the stats, just to start.

Reaching this early alpha stage is expected in a month or month and a half.

Fun Ideas:

Gang Battles- Perhaps having a "gang battle" would be fun where individuals would be able to team up with one another and change their comraderie effects this way.

This could lead to full wars, garrisons, etc.

It would be cumbersome to design algorithmically, but it could be fun.

Perhaps it could be a group battle againts the exclusive 1/1s, in which the 1/1 is the final boss that the gang would have to overtake, and to whom is the victor remains the spoils.

Gameplay Arenas- What if players could own different NFTs that are Arenas other players could battle on that favor certain character types? What if they could charge a tax for use of their Arenas?

Or perhaps the NFT is an equippable that is an Arena affiliation for your Neon so that a randomly selected field could further affect the battle roll?

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