Blockstars v0.5 (NGMI) and an update on Bands
The day is finally here (for Origin holders, at least)! Blockstars is releasing the biggest features the team has worked on to date — NGMI. We’ve written about this feature and why we snuck it onto our roadmap a few months ago.
What is NGMI?
NGMI or Not Gonna Make It is a new feature in the game where you can fire a Blockstar (that you know will not make it in your gameplay plans) and transfer that Blockstar’s knowledge and experience to another Blockstar. This is a HUGE time savings feature because you can absorb a large amount of XP without having to grind through days of practicing or busking.
Here are the 3 benefits of NGMI:
(1) Transfer Experience. You will be able to transfer a portion of the XP that the fired Blockstar has accumulated (both base XP, and earned XP through Practicing & Busking) to one of your other Blockstars. As always, there are some boosts if you transfer to and from Blockstars that have compatible characteristics (hint: personalities? musical skills?).
(2) Learn New Musical Skill. If the fired Blockstar has a primary Musical Skill that the recipient Blockstar does not have (and the recipient Blockstar has either a secondary or tertiary Musical Skill slot available) then the fired Blockstar can teach the recipient Blockstar that Musical Skill. This enables your multi-skilled Blockstars to fulfill the musical requirements of multiple individual Blockstars in a band.
(3) Earn New Blockstar. The player gets a new Blockstar from the next collection (that has a chance to be a more rare/skilled Blockstar). This is delivered in the form of an “IOU NFT” or Tour Crate NFT in our new Tour Crate collection. These crates will be tradable on the secondary markets. The NFT will reflect its rarity “bucket,” so you can make better decisions around whether to list it for sale, or hang on to it for gameplay purposes when the next collection is minted & revealed.
Types of Tour Crates
You have a chance of getting one of 4 different types of Tour Crates.
Roadie Crate
The Roadie Crate is the most basic of the crates in this collection. It is an early journey crate and has only collected a few stickers on tour. Although basic in style and design, it does hold the keys to unlocking a Blockstar in the next collection.
Promoter Crate
The Promoter Crate is the most common crate in the collection. This may be a good benchmark to strive for because it has been on the road and seen a few things. The experience it holds may be adequate-to-great. What will yours release?
Tour Manager Crate
It is hard to become a Tour Manager. Through blood, sweat, and tears… this crate has been through it all. After many tours, it has seen a lot, heard a lot, and collected a lot. This must mean the experience it holds must be abundant.
Band Agent Crate
This is the ultimate crate in this collection. Not only does it contain all the experience and battle scars shown on the Tour Manager crate, but it also contains the spirit and passions of those with strong star power.
This very rare crate must hold rare attributes and instruments… right?
Salaries, Stars, Skills and other Considerations
Now on to more logistics with firing. To soften the blow of this involuntary termination of your Blockstar’s services (because yes, your Blockstars have feelings too), you must pay your Blockstar a few months of severance. The cost will be equivalent to 120 days of their daily salaries and it will be paid at the time of firing. In exchange, your Blockstar leaves your management on good terms and happily transfer all their knowledge to another Blockstar under your management.
After the transfer occurs, there will be no change to the recipient Blockstar’s max abilities and star potential. However, because the recipient Blockstar absorbed a bunch of XP across all their skills, their abilities may have improved. With ability increases, their current star strength may also increase. This is a great way to quickly increase your Blockstar’s current abilities with very little time and work.
How to Access NGMI
You can play this feature today if you own an Origin token (yay for Origin hodl’s early access benefit) or in the next few weeks if you own any Blockstars. Note that you will need at least 2 Blockstars to be able to fire a Blockstar and transfer all their experiences to another Blockstar, so get some now before the supply decreases!
To access it, go to the My Blockstars section in the game and tap on the “Action” button next to the Blockstar you want to fire. You will find the new action for “Fire” listed in the last slot of the dropdown. From there, you can select the recipient Blockstar, and see a summary of the XP and musical skill that will be transferred. To complete the process, there are a few more confirmation steps you must go through. Remember, firing a Blockstar is a very permanent action and there are no takesies-backsies once you do. Once you fire a Blockstar, you will no longer be able to see them in your collection or play with them in the game.
Changing Rarity
Similar to the evolutionary nature of the Blockstars themselves, the Foundation collection is ever-evolving and ever-changing, based on the actions of the community. Once the community starts firing their Blockstars, expect the physical attribute counts to change. As we’ve mentioned before, sometimes the value of an NFT corresponds with the scarcity of an NFT’s traits. This means that the actions of the community may change the overall rarity of the remaining pieces in the collection. I do want to reemphasize that even though the rarity of each trait may change, the Blockstar’s max potential (which is tied to the original collection rarity) is minted at birth and will never change. In the future, we will be working with our partners to update these changing trait counts and other evolving stats across different platforms, but for now, you can find the most up-to-date counts by checking out the Physical Attributes section of any Blockstar.
Applications to Gameplay
We wanted to release the NGMI feature before our next big feature Bands and Band Genres because we know that our community is already trading and training their Blockstars with band requirements in mind. As we were thinking about how to design for both flexibility and depth of gameplay, we made the decision to go deep by having very specific musical skill and band size requirements for each band, while opening up the flexibility for play by allowing users to substitute requirements and have more control over their Blockstar’s musical skills. NGMI allows users to pick and choose which skills they want their Blockstars to have, so that they can more easily satisfy certain requirements for bands.
An Update on Band Genres
Lastly, we’ve been tweaking the requirements for the different band genres over the last few weeks (we wrote in detail about Bands & Genres a couple of months ago) to make sure it is balanced for gameplay and still has strong real-world ties. Huge thank you and shoutout to all the community members who gave feedback and helped us get to these changes. You can see the updated, final band genres in our whitepaper, and the changes we made are highlighted below.
And also thanks to community feedback, we decided to lighten up some other band requirements. We had previously stated that players can only have one band per *genre* and a max of 5 bands per wallet. We have now changed this to one band per *sub-genre,* and no limit to bands per wallet. While this does have some implications for how we had intended for players to compete against each other (we’ll have more details on competition rules soon), we recognize that especially the wallet limit added unnecessary friction. This friction has now been removed, and we are grateful for all the community feedback that helped inform this decision.
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
