LiveOps: Dreaming a World-Sized Map

Echoes of Cryptalia proposes a narrative-driven system for its Live Operations, that holds both the strong conviction of the relevance of creating new exploratory content for our players, as well as putting forward incentives for segments of our player base that are best inclined to competition and straightforward optimization. As an NFT powered blockchain protocol, we are relieved from LiveOps strategies that rely on marketing concepts such as Battle Passes, which basically impose the utmost necessity to every single player in their base to buy them in order to stay relevant.

We propose only a cyclical release of new sets of Hero NFTs, designed to widen our player base instead of suffocating it, as well as other assets, including but not limited to, Lands and Cosmetics. These minting Sets are, in its core, an invitation for more Heroes to join the curated universe that our game design team will create in an ongoing fashion. This expansion is all our protocol needs in terms of securing a healthy revenue input for the team to continue producing content. Echoes of Cryptalia’s freedom to use this approach stems from the deep implications of our Gamified Staking aspect: as long as our team focuses on putting forward the correct incentives for widespread staking (which, in our case, simply means playing the game), the input expansion of our token provided by the coming of new player provokes no imbalance whatsoever to our economy, as long as a series of responsible conditions over market token behavior and distribution are met.

For that reason, our LiveOps strategy doesn’t come along with undesirable side-effects, such as an excessive pressure on players to incessantly buy assets simply to survive, as many games in web2 often do. Instead, our Live Operations are purely and essentially fun-centric: we will expand in terms of game mechanics, of narrative techniques, storylines and of gameplay experiences that provide competitive engagement without harming the play experience of players who are motivated by exploration. To do otherwise means not being available to see a fundamental truth of games: if a game is considered not fun enough for players to engage with it in an economically sustainable way, it's not meant to be. If those times were to come upon our team, our counter action will be the only reasonable thing to do: take it as a design challenge and propose modifications or a different approach, as far as it's reasonable to do so. We’ve designed, above all, ecosystem verticals and value flows that we consider to be healthy and sustainable, but we’re also a rational body that knows that sometimes you have to adapt, as long as it doesn’t compromise the core principles of our building ethics.

On competitive experience, not only we plan to provide a Player vs. Player feature when economic and development conditions are met, but we also propose a seasonal, rotating feature that places a “main quest” for the community to collectively pursue, in the form of a series of narrative-driven, competitive-focused Quests that culminate in the confrontation of new Shrieks designed to keep the game fresh and interesting. Each of these seasons will feature a unique Shriek with a particular storyline that players can fight to beat either first or in the most spectacular fashion, perhaps even collectively, as decided by our LiveOps team for that purpose. We expect this to be an interactive process and an opportunity for the design team to truly build around the aspirations of our community and to experiment, together, on which kinds of featured Shrieks and adventures work best for everyone engaged with Echoes of Cryptalia.

Seasonal Shrieks will hold Legendary Items in the form of 721 NFTs and will be accessible for those players that have an aspiration to take their optimization processes to new levels and push the frontline of the Hero World League towards new horizons. An ever changing, ever growing world, much like our own, will pose an ever challenging, ever refreshing experience for spikey players to channel their competitive spirits and skills in new and exciting ways that will also come with the most interesting rewards in the game, without ever losing an inch of narrative and world-building power.