Roadmap Addition: NGMI
The music industry is a tough business, not everyone who embarks on the journey is gonna make it! That’s why today we are announcing a brand-new feature, not originally on the roadmap or in the whitepaper, that we’re nicknaming “NGMI.” NGMI will be up next after we ship Practicing & Busking. We are slotting NGMI in before we move on to Bands & Genres, Gigging and then on to the Singles Charts (release v1.0, which will be what we consider the “beta” release of the Blockstars core game loops).
The NGMI feature acknowledges the tough realities of the music industry, and that some Blockstars might not make it all the way to megastardom — but not all is lost, and sometimes the journey can provide unexpected benefits to others.
How Does It Work?
We have always maintained that you, the player, should have agency and control over your digital assets. The truth is that some of you probably have some Blockstars that don’t quite have the right balance of skills and attributes for your style of gameplay. You’re looking at their stats (especially after the Stars & Stats v0.2 release) and are thinking, “this one’s NGMI.” Wouldn’t it be nice to have some options, beyond selling them to other players on the secondary markets? Well, soon you will have!
The NGMI feature allows you, the player, to fire any Blockstar under your management. When the Blockstar is fired, they will be “burned” (i.e. removed from the blockchain). At this point you might be thinking, “hold on, burned from the blockchain, why would I want to do that?” Well, you will in certain situations, and here’s why.
When a Blockstar is fired, they go back to their “normie” life. Their dreams of music stardom may be over, but their regular life is just getting back on track (and who knows, maybe they’ll still have a role to play in the industry in the future…). And you, the player, gets to benefit from everything that the fired Blockstar has learned during their career, however short it may have been, in the music industry:
(1) Transfer Knowledge. You will be able to transfer all XP that the fired Blockstar has accumulated (both base XP, and earned XP through Practicing & Busking) to one of your other Blockstars. The higher the current star rating of the fired Blockstar, the more XP it has to give. This allows your other Blockstars to benefit by leveling up faster.
(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 (and a chance at a more rare / skilled) Blockstar from the next collection. This is delivered in the form of an “IOU NFT”, which will be tradable on the secondary markets as well. 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.
Why Does This Matter?
Digital ownership. We fundamentally believe that you, the players, should own the assets with which you play the game, and that includes removing “unwanted” Blockstars from the game, and even the blockchain! This is the revolution in gaming that blockchain and web3 are enabling, and we want to embrace it with open arms. We’ve always said that we want to build Blockstars from the ground up to incorporate everything good that blockchain enables, and this feature is fundamental to the notion of digital ownership. You, the players, get to retain the value of your digital assets and decide how to harness that value.
Additionally, we believe that the ability to transfer the skills and experience from an “unwanted” Blockstar to a Blockstar you want to continue to invest in just makes sense — in the real world, everything you learn is teachable to someone else, and that is the case in the Blockstars metaverse too.
What Does It All Mean?
Naturally, as Blockstars are fired, the supply of total Blockstars in the Foundation Collection will decrease. This will change the rarity of the remaining Blockstars (both cosmetic and functional), and so we will update the data on our end (in near-real-time), and submit the data to third-party sites as well (slower, and done in batches). We want to ensure that you are able to track those changes in as close to real-time as possible.
As total supply diminishes, and there is a simultaneous increased demand for lower-level Blockstars due to their new utility (and increased scarcity), we also anticipate market price dynamics to change. We can’t predict what the future will hold, but we believe that adding this feature adds additional player agency, and new “win scenarios” for players. For example:
- Players will have the agency to choose their secondary / tertiary Musical Skills, meaning more granular control over band optimization.
- Players can now choose to invest heavily in Practicing with lower-level, cheaper Blockstars for the sole purpose of transferring their accumulated XP to other, more skilled, Blockstars, or selling them for their experience on secondary marketplaces.
- Players can keep their higher-level Blockstars Busking and earning $ROL, while the lower-level Blockstars are out Practicing.
- Players can convert current lower-level Blockstars into the chance of a much higher-level / rare Blockstar in the next collection.
There are so many other ways to think about this feature, but at its core, it is designed to do one thing really well — provide additional utility to each and every single Blockstar in the game. Up until now, utility has mostly been imbued in the rarer / higher-level Blockstars. With NGMI, additional utility is unlocked in every single Blockstar, and we can’t wait to see how our community responds, and our players make use of this new feature.
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.
Niko Vuori | @nikothefinn | Founder & CEO | Blockstars
