Since we launched the Waxel World over a month ago the big hype of course ended and the first concerns from within the community are starting to come out here and there.
You can be 100% sure that we are reading all the concerns and more importantly are really listening to them.
Yes, things are not perfect and they will never be as it is in the nature of things.
We do our best to make everything as good as possible, but finding a solution to the concerns we hear from the community is not as easy as it seems (especially having to always consider the big picture).
Let us therefore go a bit into detail so you can understand where we are coming from with the Waxel World, where we want to go and what the current biggest concerns from the community are.
Waxel
- The vision of us is to establish Waxel as a brand with a strong community behind it where everyone is welcome
- It should be a place you want to hang out, get to know new people, interact with others, build friendships etc.
- The NFTs are one part of it that you can collect / identify with, the game another one where you can use the majority of NFTs to play and earn and the hopefully soon to be launched merch store will give you an option to identify with Waxel in the real world
- When we grow enough there could also be real life events, plushies, toys and much more
- One of the most important things you have to realise is that Waxel World is a game and should therefore be seen as one
- You should play it when you want to and not see it as a source of static income
- We are more focused on the play compared to the the earn part as games should be seen as something fun / relaxing and not a job
- The “earning” should be seen as a bonus that you never really had before blockchain / NFTs existed
- Yes, currently it is just a clicker, but with the housing system everything will change and we will add more and more stuff in the coming years
Current concerns
1. Prices for Waxel NFTs on the secondary market
- The price of NFTs is decided by the supply and demand of the community and not the team
- We as the team have no direct influence on the price of things besides adjusting values for the game / adding new features that create more demand for certain assets (looking at the housing system)
- We already have some ideas to add additional supply sinks (especially for Citizens) besides the housing system but nothing is 100% decided yet
2. The need of having to buy profession books every ~21 days
- As stated multiple times the profession books are mainly there for us to be able and cover the WAX costs of being able to run the smart contract (RAM / CPU costs) as we can’t rely on income from the secondary market
- We can and will adjust the price of the books according to market conditions and demand for the smart contract
- To be on the safe side we initially wanted to start with a higher price compared to the daily WAX needed for the smart contracts in theory and the real world on the mainnet can differ
- A fixed price on the books can be seen as a safety net as it gives a theoretical minimum WAX value for each profession (cost of book + Citizens)
- If you don’t need more materials and don’t see a good ROI on the secondary market at the moment then don’t blend new professions
3. Professions / items listed on the secondary market with just a few or 0 uses left
- As far as we know, it is not possible to prevent the listing of NFTs on the secondary market as long as they are in the wallet of the person that is holding them
- “Staking” the profession / item to be send over to our smart contract so the person owning the NFT can’t list it anymore is not an option as otherwise we would have to pay the CPU costs for every single transaction and with theoretically unlimited professions that is a cost we will never be able to pay
- The amount of left uses is displayed in the immutable data of the NFTs and you can filter for the amount to be on the safe side before buying one (if no value is displayed, the NFT will have the maximum amount of uses)
Team
- We are just a small team of 3 people:
- Frittchen: Responsible for marketing, social media, collabs etc.
- CoinCobra: Responsible for the website, Discord, brainstorming etc.
- Ryu: Responsible for the development of the Waxel World, Discord bots, scripts for the website, some of the art etc.
- Frittchen and CoinCobra have a 2 year old son they have to take care of and CoinCobra is still working full time
- Ryu is the only person in the team that is a trained software engineer, but in a completely different field than blockchain / video games
- No one from us ever developed a game so everything we do here is learning by doing and all that on top of a blockchain that is a very new technology
- Because of our small team we have to hire developers, artists, musicians etc. for different tasks to get things out faster / we are not having the skills to do them on our own
- There are not a lot of good and reliable people out there that can do these things and therefore they are not cheap to hire
- Waxel is pretty much the only income for Frittchen and Ryu as this is their “job” and after having to pay taxes, healthcare, hired people, ads etc. there is not as much left as you would think for living (especially looking at the current crypto market situation)
- Considering all of these things you can see why things take longer to develop for us as we try to make things as good as possible before we release them
- If we compare other projects to the size of our team and resources we have, we must say that we are very proud of what was achieved in just 1 year
We are open to every suggestion from the community to make things better, but not every suggestion is automatically a good one looking at the overall picture and there are also technical limits of what can be done.
In detail the whole economy is very complex and making just one small change can have a huge influence. Therefore we have to be 100% sure about changes having a positive and no negative impact.
