Blockstars v0.3 (We Talking About Practice)
Blockstar’s first gameplay feature is here! You can now practice three of your Blockstar’s core skills — Musical, Writing, and Social Media. When you practice these skills, you earn XP that allows you to increase your Blockstar’s abilities.
So…Practicing?
Malcolm Gladwell famously suggested that 10,000 hours of practice made The Beatles masters of their craft. And in the same spirit, a talented Blockstar practicing 10,000+ hours of their skills will help them gain mastery and become superstars on the Blockchain. Since time in Blockstarverse is similar to time in the humanverse, this actually means practicing 10,000 IRL hours. That’s a lot, but read on to learn about how different levers may influence the efficacy of each practicing session to help speed up the process.
Earning Experience
In our second release, we revealed Blockstar’s many skills, abilities, and star ratings. One of the innovations we are experimenting with is the idea of your NFT’s abilities evolving over time. The practicing feature is our first step towards realizing and testing this idea.
At a high level, to evolve and become better at a skill, your Blockstar must earn experience (or XP) for that skill. XP can be earned directly (e.g. practice Writing to earn Writing XP) or indirectly (i.e. when you practice certain skills and your Blockstar becomes better at Practicing in the process, they will indirectly earn Practice XP). Indirect XP is usually earned at a slower rate, but there will often be multiple ways of earning XP for that skill. The chart below summarizes all the direct and indirect XP earning channels for Practicing.
How much XP and how fast?
The amount of XP you earn depends on a variety of factors that includes (but is not limited to) your Blockstar’s abilities, the skill you choose to practice, the location you are practicing in, and the duration of practice. Experiment with practicing different combinations of skills and locations because you may find that some combinations will produce better outcomes. A general rule of thumb to remember is that the more premium the location is, the better your chances of earning more XP are.
In this release, we are unveiling 11 locations! You can expect new locations and even limited time or seasonal locations in the near future.
Salaries and other costs
To send your prized Blockstars off to practice, you’ve got to pay them their well deserved salaries. Each Blockstar has their own unique salaries listed on their stats page. This number represents how much you need to pay your Blockstars daily to work. Your Blockstar goes to work when you send them off to practice their skills, busk, or perform future band-related tasks. You only pay your Blockstars for the time you book them to work. This means that if you book them to practice 1 hour, you only need to pay them for 1 hour of their daily salary. This also means that if you stop their practicing before the 1 hour is up, you will not be refunded for the full 1 hour of time you’ve booked.
In the above section on earning XP, I mentioned that the more premium a location is, the more likely it is that your Blockstar will earn extra XP. This, of course, sometimes comes at an (extra) cost. The location cost is broken into two categories — flat fee and rental. Some locations will require a flat fee to practice (e.g. transportation to a location or entrance ticket to a venue), some will require a prorated rental fee (e.g. leasing a recital hall or fancy stadium), and some may even require both. You can always see a detailed breakdown of costs by hovering over the (i) icon next to the Spend section on the Practice dialog.
So why does practicing matter?
Practicing is only the very beginning of gameplay. Even so, it already unlocks so much potential and value for your Blockstar. In this game every skill is interconnected and improving any skill will have a domino effect on the performance of other skills and areas of gameplay.
A simple example of this can be seen in the practicing game loop. As noted in the above section on earning XP, lots of variables go into the XP earn calculations. One variable is your Blockstar’s Practice ability. The higher the Practice ability, the more XP your Blockstar will earn when they Practice. And when you practice any skill, your Practice ability will increase. As you can see, increasing just the Practice ability has a snowball effect on how quickly you can make an impact on the progression of other skills. Not to give away too much under the hood, but some of these practicable skills are going to be pretty core variables in how much your Blockstar earns (hint: next feature… busking) and how well their songs and albums perform.
I’ve talked a lot about why practicing matters to gameplay, but what about outside of gameplay? Utility. We believe that more utility and the potential to increase abilities to generate more rare stats means more enduring value for the owners. Ultimately the market will decide the value of each Blockstar; our hope is that a Blockstar with higher skills and utility will have greater value in the market.
Wen Play? NOW.
To access the feature visit https://app.blockstars.gg/blockstars. Click on the Actions button and select “Practice” in the drop down.
And like always, if you do not own a Blockstar and want to play this feature, you can find some listed at https://magiceden.io/marketplace/blockstars
Join Us!
This is just a teaser of what we are up to! If you are intrigued by Blockstars, be sure to read much, much more about the game design, tokenomics, and development roadmap in our whitepaper, come and chat with other community members in our Discord and follow us on Twitter. If you want to join the team, check out our job openings here. We will also be posting news about upcoming features, roadmap progress & important events regularly right here, on our blog.
Sherrie Chen | @sher_nft| Chief Product Officer | Blockstars.gg
