White Paper 2.0 — what’s new?
Hey everyone,
Since we started working on Ether Kingdoms, we’ve collected a ton of great solutions and exciting finds that we think will be interesting not just to our players, but to our colleagues in the crypto-game world, as well.
We plan to publish one article per week, with the first one being an essay on how “crypto” crypto-games really are, and how much of the old-world gaming still remains in them. Then we will talk about the technological side of Ether Kingdoms, dissecting each little part of the game for your pleasure. Later, an article on the economics model of the game, and so on. We will announce our plan for the next 6–8 weeks in the next update.
Today, we’ll talk about the novelties in the game and what changed in our White Paper, version 2.0. Ether Kingdoms White Paper 1.0 was published just three months ago, but since then the project went through a lot of changes. So that it’s easier for you to follow all of the developments, we decided to collect the key and most important changes into one short summary.
Battle system. There are quite a few changes to the battle system when compared to the first release (strictly saying, this was the MVP). First of all, the battle is now divided into rounds, or the exchange of hits between the opponents. In the previous version of the game, the player whose life (HP) reached zero first lost. Now the result of the battle only becomes clear at the end of each round. Since both imps can die during one round, we’ve also added a result that didn’t exist before. This is a draw. Why would we do that? We wanted to remove the advantages of the first attack — in the previous version, the player who attacked first had greater chances to win. Now, if similar opponents are fighting, the chances are approximately 40/40/20 (win, loss, draw).
Rounds aren’t the only new feature we added to the battle system. Probably an even more important moment is the possibility to equip your imps with artifacts. This is such a significant new feature, that we’ll talk about it separately.
Artifact equipment. The MVP version was simple — you always fought an opponent that was very close to you in characteristics. Just in case, we’d like to remind you that we match players that have a similar experience level in the intervals 1–10, 11–20, 21–30, and so on. In the new version of the game, now that you can equip your imps with artifacts, everything changed dramatically.
Imps have a dozen or so characteristics — protection, attack, health, critical hit chances, dodging, additional attack, as well as ignoring and immunities. Ignoring is neutralizing all of the artifact bonuses of your opponent’s attacks. Let’s say, your opponent has a 15% chance to attack again. Using proper artifact, the opponent raises his chance to 30%. However, if your imp is equipped with an artifact with a bonus to ignore your opponent’s additional attack, his chance will go back down to 15%. Additionally, if you have an artifact with immunity to additional attack, your opponent’s imp won’t be able to attack the second time at all. Considering how powerful these artifacts are, they aren’t found that often.
There are two more important moments that are related to the artifacts. The first is that artifacts can not only raise, but also lower some of the characteristics. For example, a highly powerful weapon can give you the benefit of an amazing bonus to damage your opponent’s imp, but the cost is your imp’s HP.
The second crucial moment is that some of the artifacts require to be reloaded after being used a certain number of times in PvP battles. This doesn’t relate to PvE battles since bots are a mirror copy of your imp — you don’t want to use artifacts in these battles at all. When an artifact is out of charge, you will need to spend a certain number of imps to recharge it to its maximum capacity.
Leaderboards and lootboxes. Each week we will give players an opportunity to show who’s the best, while getting some cool perks in the form of artifacts and imps. Leaderboards can be different — for example, the winner can be the one who won the most number of battles, or the one who sent the greatest number of imps to fight. Prizes are given out as follows: first place will get a cool artifact and 500 imps; second and third places — also cool artifacts and 350 imps; fourth to tenth places — more modest artifacts and 250 imps; eleventh to the fiftieth places — basic artifacts and 200 imps.
Leaderboards start on Monday evenings and end on Sunday evening (UTC). You should check them out! Leaderboards are very cool!
All of the prizes are given out in the form of lootboxes, with their contents being fixed for the sake of leaderboards. So don’t worry, you will get exactly what we say you’ll get. There are also lootboxes in the Castle (which is now a functional building on the map), and these will contain different prizes. The Castle’s lootboxes become available at levels 100, 105, 110, 115 and 120.
High levels. Since we are talking about levels, we’d like to add that the MVP version only had 100 levels, with players reaching the top level very fast. So we decided to add 20 more levels — 101 to 120. The progress here is much slower. Just take a look at the experience table in the new White Paper and you’ll understand that it’s definitely not easy to reach level 120.
We aren’t going to stop here, though! In the fall of this year, we plan to introduce levels 121–130 for the most hard-core players. These will have special prizes and features!
Read the full version of new White Paper here.
