Lords and Ladies of Castelia, we eagerly share with you this Royal Decree
Castles updates are coming! This post will give you a quick primer on what we’re doing & why, as well as a glimpse into the future.
TL;DR upfront
- All new Royal Seals are untradeable, existing seals can be traded still, and can be deposited into the new system at your leisure
- The new Royal Seals cannot be exported as NFTs or FTs!
- Mint Fees across the board = 0.15 for most Castles actions
- 20% of mint fees are going to the Royal Courthouse wallet for distribution to holders
- Changes coming for Dungeons to make the gameplay more enjoyable, as well as more accessible to new users!
- Changes coming for Crafters (lumberjack, carpenter, etc) to make using them less tedious!
On to the details!
You read the TL;DR — and you’re either excited, mad, or confused. Maybe all of the above?
Let us explain the reasoning, and hopefully that will at least allow you to understand WHY we’re making this change.
Since the beginning of Castles, Royal Seals have been integral to our gameplay and to the demand of our flagship NFT land, the Castle itself. Castles make you new seals which in turn fuels your Crafters and Barons and more. This part of the game has always worked well! The problems, we believe, come when people use their Castles purely for Royal Seals & dump them on the market at any cost, with no interest in the game itself.
On one hand, that is the nature of the Blockchain — players should have control of their assets! We stand by this concept.
But the other hand shows that Royal Seals are too easy to dump, and the fact they are always a 1x NFT floods the market and causes friction for everyone as well as FUD.
So our solution is for Royal Seals to be used for gameplay actions only. You can use them in-game EXACTLY the way you always have — for recharging, speeding up exploration missions, etc., but you can’t directly sell them. You can of course still sell your crafters, lands, and any other assets you have, so the spirit of player ownership and asset control is preserved.
We hope that this facilitates gameplay interaction first and foremost. Ultimately, if anyone only used Castles to sell Royal Seals, they can choose to sell their Castles or play the game in whatever capacity they want and sell products (like lands, packs, resources, etc.) instead.
Onto the next controversial change — increases to minting fees.
Firstly, fees allow Castles to continue operation. Believe it or not, but we’re one of the longest running games on WAX! Tons of projects have came and went, ceasing operations entirely, but we haven’t let that happen to Castles. We intend to keep it that way! There are however some unavoidable maintenance & upkeep costs associated with the contracts and website that we have to keep up with, so we need some kind of fees for that practical purpose.
The other reasoning for the fees changing is to continue with a baseline value for assets. If there is a base WAX cost for the NFTs and assets due to the minting fees, the value of those NFTs will rise to meet that change over time. This should be a good thing for stability.
The last point: 20% of the fees are going to a familiar, if neglected, place: the Royal Courthouse!
The Royal Courthouse was designed for players who wanted to feel like they had a stake in the success of the game, and it worked wonderfully for a time. We’ve given out hundreds of thousands of WAX to the bounty holders in the past! But for a long time now the Royal Courthouse has collected no new funds, and thus has given out nothing
This is a mistake on our part, and one we intend to fix. So out of every 0.15 fee, 0.03 (20%) will be sent to the Royal Courthouse & will be paid out to holders as before. We may update the payout process a bit too in the future to be easier to track & claim your WAX! Stay tuned for those details.
We’ve heard your feedback — using crafters has barely been worth the effort for awhile now. A big part of that is how much time it takes to use them — minting 10 at a time, recharging 9 at a time, etc. So we have a new system in development to make this process SIGNIFICANTLY faster for all users! We’ll share specifics in an upcoming blog post, just know this is being worked on behind the scenes.
Like Crafters, Dungeons has been disappointingly tedious and severely underplayed compared to the work we put into it. Changes are necessary to make this worth your time & increase your enjoyment, as well as make it both convenient and accessible to new players!
We’ve got plans being finalized behind the scenes for this too. We aren’t quite ready to share specifics, but they’re coming along.
To tease some of these ideas, the goal is to integrate some of the newer tech we have built into Castles & update Dungeons with a Hero lending contract! While I can’t strictly promise it will all work out the way we want it to… tests so far look great.
We hope that this system will be able to get new players playing with only the investment of their time, and existing players will be rewarded for the use of their Heroes!
How!? Details forthcoming…
This hasn’t been a huge blog but hopefully it has been one that excites you — we aren’t giving up on this game, ever! And we’re committing to making changes to make this work for everyone.
As we fix and rebuild our Kingdoms together, there may be bumps on the road — please have patience with us! We’re not perfect, but we believe we have the same goal in mind as you do: a great game, with great art and assets, built on WAX for long term success.
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