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GM fellow agents. I very much hope you all enjoyed the holidays so far. I know I have!
“How are your animal pictures doing Chuck?”
*Note: this is a not a real picture of the author’s family, but is fairly representative.
Outside of being chastised by my family, I’ve actually had a really good week of unplugging and reflecting on how much of a complete and unmitigated disaster 2022 was for me. Much wealth was destroyed in the making of this film (I have main character syndrome) - but I learned a ton over the last 9-12 months. I’ll drop some Twitter threads later today on my takeaways for the year, but in any case, let’s get to a brief AVAX update and our special guest post.
Market Update
To the surprise of absolutely no one, Joepegs volume is down week-over-week during probably the least busy time of the entire year.
I called this out last week - I think most AVAX folks are pretty well-rounded guys, and many who are frequently trading are touching grass and completely off the grid this week. Also, I think many are exhausted from Plague Game finally ending last week
While lack of volume is to be expected over the holidays, I suppose that lack of listings comes with it as well. Most top projects are up in the last week. Ferdy Fish cropped up out of nowhere and has done insanely well. Admittedly, I don’t know much about the project, but memes are currency and their memes absolutely bang.
These are great. Please check out their Twitter. Certainly NFA.
Chad Doges continue to hover around 4 AVAX - just tremendous strength in their floor price. It’s pretty amazing. They’re minting their Supers in the second week of January I believe, so we’ll see how well the legacy project does once those drop.
Party Animals continues their token burning in anticipation of their OOPA collection. I think this is a REALLY bold move - APAs are one of the OG collections on AVAX and to go ahead and burn the collection in favor of something different is going out on a limb to say the least, but I personally love it. We’ll expand our coverage of what’s to come on OOPA as we get closer to their mint.
Guest Post - The Plague Game by tactical_retreat
Mint Media Disclaimer: Mint Media Disclaimer: tactical_retreat won the Joepegs mint bot contest and is a member of the infamous Cynical Hate DAO. He is also a fantastic writer with his own substack which can be found here. The below is an abridged and largely objective version of how the Plague Game unfolded.
The Plague Game finally concluded on December 23rd, finalizing an extremely stressful time in the lives of myself and many other participants.
For those of you completely unfamiliar, the Plague Game was a fully on-chain gambling/strategy NFT project hosted by Joe Studios over November and December this year. Players minted Plague Doctor NFTs that would be randomly sickened by the plague every twelve hours, dying if they were not cured by the application of a potion.
You can find the introductory post on the game here, the subsequent rule adjustment post here, and if you’d like to read my longer summary, you’ll find that here.
Gameplay
The actual mechanics of the game were… less than thrilling. Most people watched their doctors die almost immediately, as the initial infection rates for the first few periods were quite high.
It’s fair to say that without hundreds of doctors at a minimum, plus a hefty investment in potions to cure those doctors, your chances at winning a spot from the start were minuscule given how long the game lasted. The number of doctors ‘in circulation’ plummeted quickly the first few rounds.
A key mechanic that kept the life of the game shorter was ‘potion resistance’; each time a potion was applied to a doctor, subsequent potions would be less likely to cure the plague. This scaled to a level where players had to spend hundreds of potions for even an attempt to cure the doctor. Needless to say, this was a very tedious and time consuming effort in the final few epochs for most players.
There was an ‘Apothecary’ feature that allowed you to attempt to brew potions from dead doctors, but it was poorly implemented and shut down partway through the game.
Strategy
The ‘optimal’ strategy for this game is a very complicated topic, but effectively there were only a few options for how you could play.
Mint a ton of doctors, sacrifice many of them, and balance potion expenditure against the remaining doctors to try and keep as many and as healthy of a stable as you can, for as long as you can.
Wait until later in the game, buy a limited number of the most healthy doctors you can, and then market buy enough potions to make it to end game.
Have only a small number of doctors and get insanely lucky dodging infection.
All three of these strategies were observed and resulted in winning doctors.
Execution
I would give Joe a solid B for execution on this game. Things they did well:
Smart contract code (including randomness) as solid
Website was polished and stable
Doctor and potion art was nice and thematically appropriate
Created an interesting and unique game
Drummed up a lot of hype and got people engaged
Things they did poorly:
The website displayed some faulty information about the game
Feeding potions suffered from a number of bugs
Updating the rules post mint, and again during the game
Apothecary was a bad idea, made worse by a buggy implementation
Drama
No great NFT project is complete without a healthy dose of drama. There were several guilds openly playing such as Alloy.Space and Smol Joes some less obviously playing such as Cynical Hate DAO, and a number of smaller players who made large investments and made it to the end game.
As the game progressed, things became… tense.
The final few epochs were nailbiting as we waited to see which doctors would get infected, and which would not. And which players could dump 50-200 potions into those sick doctors to try to rescue them and drag the game out just a bit longer.
Bonus content
Enjoy this short video summarizing some of what the whole experience was like.
Conclusion
Chuck again - if you read through that thoroughly, it just goes to show you how smart people are in comparison to yourself. I strongly recommend you read TR’s fleshed out 3 part series on Plague Game if you’re on a beach somewhere and have the time.
Compared to what I’m seeing over on ETH, I’m actually fairly encouraged by what’s going on over here on AVAX. Do I think there’s work to be done? Absolutely. But, I really feel like we’re starting to hit our stride with innovative new projects and ambitious builders starting to move into our corner of Web3. Not to mention that we have the best shitposters on Twitter.
Looking forward to seeing all of you in the New Year - I’m fired up for what 2023 has to offer.
Cheers,
Chuck