Fireside Chat

Josiah: If you have 5 identical heroes, you can merge them up to get a hero of the next raity tier. Yes, the heroes get burned. (If you merge 5 Tomoe (Rare), you will get a random Epic hero in return.)

We think that is a good sink of heroes out of the system. Common heroes and Rare heroes will be viable for a long time if you build them correctly, but the dungeon campaign progression will need you to merge to get higher rarity and stronger heroes.

Nalin: The way we are currently imagining is, the set up (the preparation) selecting heroes and the equipment is not something you are blind to. You will know whether if the squad that you have is weaker or stronger than the recommended squad for the challenge. You will know wether or not you should move forward.

Chromas will also be attainable via merging.

Josiah: Okay, everybody is here, we need to start a raid, this raid will give us rewards that we need for this recipe of a legendary sword that only this raid can give to us. *Choose Raid, Choose Difficulty, Click Start*. I can look at this raid start-up screen, and it says I need 15 other people (15 + whoever started the raid = 16). Okay, so requirement says "I need 2 healers, 2 tanks, 6 dps and 5 support. Here's the recommended power level, and the elements that you'll be fighting". You are looking at all these information and ask "Okay, who do I know canfulfil these roles to get us the best chance of success." And then you can invite individual players or when you start a raid, a notification will be sent to members and they can join. Once 16 people have joined the raid, the guild leader will look at all the things, bars, meters. "Okay we meet the reqduirements and even exceed them, let's go." Then the timer countsdown. When the timer ends players will be notified and the rewards will be distributed to players who contributed. There will also be a recording of the raid and all of the statistics.

This is where the asynchronous part comes it, because we are stll in the alpha it is not going to be a synchronous multiplayer with 16 different people. What we are doing is setting up all the foundation for the expansion of raids becoming something that is much more interactive.

Nallin: For the rewards, there will be rewards for everyone that contributed and individual rewards.

Josiah: All heroes has their skills created. Its done.

Josiah: If we are not building a game that involves trading, I would very gladly share those information to you. But, for total transparency, because that information may influence purchasing decisions, we have to be very careful about what we share and when we share it.

Sometime in the near future, since we are very close to like me signing off and everybody stops touching the heroes, at the very minimum we might say something like "Oh, this one's a healer, this ones a tank".

Josiah: Our designer works on our partner studio and he did a lot of work to give each character a unique ability for each of the 70 characters. Then I reviewed it for like a dozen times now.

Some of the discussions that we had along the way were "What isthe culture of this person that they should reflect?" "What is the element that this person comes with?" "What is the role that this person is all about?". Because ultimately, out of all the aspects, role is the one that influence the character a lot.

Josiah: Yeah, there will be abilities. Wether it will be upgraded, when a hero levels the effects of the abilities change with their level.

So you are not necessarily going in and dumping skill points to improve, you will just be leveling up the heroes.

Nalin: There will be passive abilities, basic combat abiilties and ultimate abilities, all of those level up.

Howie: There are few things to unpack here, market price of (Founder) NFTs and what are design philosophy in maintining value.

Founder NFTs will always have restricted supply. The supply is not gonna increase. If more players come into the game and they want to own and collect heroes, we encourage that. But, in terms of market price of that asset, we don't have control of that. So we can't really dictate if these NFT Assets are worthwhile. That is for you, as the players to determine yourself.

What I can say on the otherhand is what does holding a founder NFT represents? You (Founder NFT Holders) represent someone that is engaged and believed in our vision before the game even launched. And that has a unique status to us as developers. And so, when it comes to non gameplay related perks or things like that, those people who hold Founder NFTs have a special place for us. We will try to reward and give you access to, maybe experiences, that will fit that unique status.

Josiah: We definitely don't want to devalue anything, or we are doing our best not to make it feel like totally interrupting those actions. It's very important from a design philosophy/perspective, the intention of this game is to not be pay-to-win. Heroes of the same rarity tier share the same capability, and by buying Founders Heroes you are not necessarily setting your self up for success.

Josiah: Right now, equipment follows the same rarity tiers as heroes. You have Common, Rare, Epic, and Legendary.

Common Equipment is the only type of equipment that will drop in dungeons and raids at the moment. So, anything that is rare or better, which will be NFT and will be crafted through guilds (crafting), will only be acquired through the marketplace.

That being said, Common equipment does have different power ratings. Equipment drops from different dungeons will have different power ratings.

For example common equipment that drops in dungeon 1-1 will be viable for that power level, and common equipment that drops at the very end might still be viable in that range. Equipments at the same rarity/tier will still have varying power levels.

Nalin: To make onboarding players easier, in the current iteration of the account creation starts with an Age Inquiry, Acceptance of Terms and Conditions, and Credentials (Email, Username and Password). Subsequent log-in should not be required from the same device, but is needed for using new device or fresh installation.

Until you need to use buy and sell trade interactions, wallet connection is not required.

Josiah: The design philosophy of Guild of Guardians is to make a lot of the NFT Minting Processes social.

If you look at a lot of games in the market right now, you can see that its very much flooded with games and experiences that wants you to work by yourself. You are given all the tools to succeed right of the bat. That's cool, some people love that experience.

But some people really want to make the things that they are doing something to share with others. We look at that and said "That's the gap that we want to fulfill". And, we know that people want to do it. The reason why MMORPGs are huge, because people wants to do things together.

That was a big pillar of designing the core experience of Guild of Guardians.

Of course, we did not forget the people that don't want to socialize at all. We like those experience that you are able to mint and play on your own. So, there areplenty of opportunities in the game that you can do. It will be slower, of course, because want you to socialize. It won't nearly compare to Guild Activities.

Josiah: There are currently no plans, no mechanics in the game for you to acquire pets aside from getting it in the marketplace.

We have big plans for pets in the future, and that contributes to why we don't want to keep adding Pets.

Howie: Pets are interesting one because they are kind of like, Economic Multiplier. We want to be very careful in the balance around this because it could imbalance the economy. That is why we want to get more data before we do anything about pets, about introdicing these Economic Modifiers in to the economy.

I'm Imagining things that are like events or promotions that can contribute to new Legendary Pets but there is variety of methods to do these and to be honest its pre-mature to give any solid answer to this. I'm sorry.

Josiah: Pets are special because their abilities directly contribute to the amount of resources in the game. They are basically Buffs, more or less. So we want to be extra careful about how to distribute those.

Howie: Just a clarification, nothing is cast in stone here in Guild of Guardians.

We have philosophy where we build hypothesis, experiment, and iterate.

So, with that being said. The intention with Chromas is its a skin that is meant to provide aesthetic that are non-power related. We do intend to create systems that let people showcase these skins to the extent that having chromas gives you more flex in the game. But making the chromas more powerful, no.

Josiah: As little as possible. We acquired the Intellectual Properties for Legacy Quest to kinda build Guild of Guardians but the intention was always to do 100% Asset replacement along the way, if not 100% code rewrite, but very close to that.

Howie: A lot of free-to-play games have multi-currency economies and some part of that is lock away what's called real currency with a hard currency and soft currency. With our games, there is not that boundary with the currencies. You have an external marketplace where you can trade all the currency back into fiat currency. That makes up the dynamics to it.

But also, having multiple coins fragments the liquidity of the game's tokens across various different types of coins. That makes it easier for bad actors to manipulate the price of any one of those currencies.

Having multiple currencies have its disadvantages and advantages. It can be a away for developers to take a cut in transaction cost. On the other hand, it makes it easier for people to value the currency that they think has the more value.

As we introduce more features or areas of the game, then maybe there might be an emergence need to have more currencies. We are open but right now there are no plans for that. But if you can provide me with a very strong justification of why multiple currencies work and it does make other types of gaming economy sustainable, then I'm open for it.

Howie: Guild tokens provide economic power. As such, they have intrinsic value based on the activity of your guild and the value of how the community value these tokens.

If someone thinks guilds are not run in a good way and thinks he can do a better job at it, he can get a guild token and run that itself.

A player's decision of buying a guild is not something we can dictate as developers, we can only provide the mechanisms of how guilds work and how economic benefits are shared. It is up to the players to come up with their judgement of how much guilds are worth.

Josiah: We talked about this in the past, and its written somewhere even.

"We reserve the right to sell more Guild Tokens that has the equivalent capability of the Adventurers Guild Tokens" that way there won't be a shortage of guild tokens.

We have a really big iteration to Guilds coming up in 2022 that, in my opinion, will solve the problem of people

Josiah: Right now, pets are something you just equip and the bonuses of the pet just passively help you. We have big plans for pets.

Howie: Energy works just like in many other games. You are given certain amount of energy that you can consume per day by playing the game.

The purpose of that is to have some control on player progression. We do not want a player to finish the game in a very very short amount of time and be left with nothing to do until the next content update.

Regarding how energy tokens work, in Alpha we want to simulate the live game. We want to create the conditions of what a live game should look like, even though the rewards are not as sharp. So, Energy token should have an impact in the Alpha.

Energy Token works like giving a permanent buff to heroes by reducing the fatigue. It allows you to get resource a little bit more quickly. It is quiet overpowered in one sense because it is one of those things that if you own, you have it permanently and it doesn't get consumed.

Josiah: It is a booster that you have in your inventory that you can reuse on a 24 hour cooldown. When you use it, you gain the abilities of the booster for a specific amount of time or runs or however the booster works and you can just keep reusing it.

Fatigue basically applies to heroes that you use back-to-back. After using a team for 5 times, let's say that is 5 fatigue points and that is a max. But you still plan to use it to go to another run, you are going to be charged extra energy to use that team again. What the booster does is it ignores fatigue accumulation.

It means that you can continue playing your favorite heroes more efficiently. Booster doesn't negate fatigue completely, this is also why building different teams is recommended

Josiah: Right now, there might be something around outside of guilds but maybe like 90% of social things are centered around guilds.

Josiah: Quick note from me on this one is we have not decided, yet, how to treat each NFT type. Like what changes or what doesn't change about them when they go through the market.

Keeping the levels in heroes in the market might be a good thing for players, but it will aso create its own market of people leveling heroes and selling them, and players basically just buying their way through the game. Some people might like it but from a designers perspective, this is bad.

I'm also thinking of ways of personalizing the heroes more so than they are already are. Like for example, adding data such as "Who created this hero? What it did? its history, basically".

Josiah: We will not develop the tools or the system for the scholarship system.

Josiah: I don't want to set a pay barrier for people to pay the game. If we want people to play this game on mass, we can't make it so that you have to spend money to start paying. I just don't think that's how the market or the industry functions like that anymore.

I want players to come into our game and see that they have all the tools that they need to pay socially, to play individually. If they want to, trade with other people and set up their own personal contracts if you want to form your own scholarship with somebody.

Howie: I'm pretty neutral in the existence of scholarships. I see scholarships as a thing that evolved due to the preconditions of a base game. If its too expensive for new players to play the game, then a system like scholarship will naturally evolve. Now, are we going to promote that system? No.

Having said that, the design philosophy on economic side of things is that its (GoG) is supposed to be free-to-play for players that who want to play, not limiting them on a pay wall.

We want as many players to play this game as possible, and making it expensive for players to play is not the way to go.

Josiah: We did a survey on this things on what the other games are doing right now. And no, it looks like a bannable offense on the games that we surveyed. That information put us on the path of implement one account per player.

Josiah: No, you can only be in one guild per account. If you have multiple Guild Tokens, you can use one of those to start your own guild. Otherwise, you would sell those guild tokens to somebody who wants to start a guild. Or you can figure out a way to set up some kind of a scholarship system.

Howie: What do you mean by rewards? Like cubelets and things earned? No. You get the same rewards from the dungeons. But owners for example gets different types of economic incentives for owning guilds.

Josiah: We won't be changing the reward for guilds depending on their guild tier.

Josiah: Yes, and yes. You can create NFTs as a solo player.

Josiah: I think this is a reference to Legacy Question. Like I said earlier, don't expect aynthing from Legacy Quest to be in Guild of Guardians.

Howie: I'm reluctant to talk about specific values, since we are getting to Alpha soon enough and these are kind of the things that we can experiment. Like how engaging is the game and how many hours does players want to play this game.

We want high engagement, multiple points of contact over the course of the day. Energy systems is something that we want to test and iterate on.

But like a default position would be something like, log in to the game 3x a day and play a session. You won't be able to play continuously through the game but like you'll have 3 intense sessions to play the game.

Josiah: We checked some data on similar games like Hardcore RPGs, Mobile RPGs, Gacha RPGs and people are like spending from 30 minutes to an hour in game and we balance around that.

Josiah: Yes

Josiah: No.

Josiah: I don't think so.

Loots from dungeons doesn't necessarily drop from monsters but more of when you reach the end, the loots you get are shown to you. You just automatically get it all in the end.

Josiah: We'll see. I think I've mentioned that earlier.

Josiah: The price of Gems fluctuates constantly. What I might say right now will change 3 hours from now. The transparent answer is we don't have a concrete answer for that and probably won't just because of how the system and all the stuff works.

Howie: This is critical because Gems are the lubricant to the economy. They are necessary for the NFT Minting related systems. As such, it is important to get it right, but without the game being played its hard to advance to just set a value.

Josiah: This is a question on, how reliable are the AI? etc.

"AI is very tough bro, I'm dissolved haha, especially if you are a perfectionist."

But I think the real solution is to set up a series of ground rules that you know that you would a.) love for your AI to do and b.) hate for you AI to do.

In terms of solving problems, the development team said that they could solve the problem but it will take a lot of time but they could also just add damage reduction for traps entirely for companions.

Josiah: No.

Josiah: At the start, for a while we treated cubelets like an NFT. But we decided to not to do that because cubelets are so integral to the minting process that allowing players or Guild Leaders to get cubelets from them by buying those, didn't really resonate with us.

We have a system right now that is not complete and is not ideal, where if you are not in guiilds, cubelets have a much more limited utility. The goal is to solve that.

Josiah: The people who buy NFTs are basically buying shortcuts. They are buying the ability to do harder content, more easily and faster.

If you don't buy that stuff, you can still do those, you just need to acquire those resource yourself. And, you have all the tools to do so at your disposal.

Josiah: There will be a total amount of energy for every players that will not change depending on how many heroes you have. But there are also Energy Tokens that gives you a way to use your energy more efficiently.

Josiah: No.

Josiah: No. None of the numbers there have any indications on what we have today.

The roles are kind of the same, but the values and numbers have changed a bunch.

Josiah: No. You can't do that. I should think about that though.

Howie: That's interesting but there is no design around merging Guild Tokens.

Josiah: Not really sure about the average dungeon run. In the past, there have been a minute or two minute runs but that changes everytime we change difficulty. Last time I checked its like two minutes.

Does it pause in the middle? Yes, of course.

Nalin: Everyone deserves an opportunity to go to the bathroom.

Josiah: Yes, that is our official stance on the pause. You deserve to go to the bathroom.

Josiah: Competitive elements and PvP elements are all on the table.

We will eventually head in that direction.

Howie: But don't expect these in the alpha.

Josiah: In the past, I have put a lot of emphasis on skill being a pretty big factor in how your chances of success and performance in dungeons. And that is still true.

Our gameplay team is pushing the most recent updates out and there is a lot of work going getting things like dodge, attack animations and input delays, etc.

There will be a ceiling for skill a complexity. It will be there, but not too high.

Nalin: The game should be easy. The challenge should not be doing the things that the game require you to do, it should be on the arena that you have chosen to be in.