Season 10 brought noteworthy adjustments to enhance the racing ecosystem and strengthen the game’s future.
Then, after some community feedback and bug discoveries during the season’s first week, it brought more changes!
Never a dull moment in Web3 gaming development, right?
After a bit of a fire drill featuring some late nights, long Zoom calls, and, most of all, MATH, we feel we’ve successfully addressed some of the community’s concerns and pushed some changes we feel great about.
Below is a change log featuring the most need-to-know aspects of what has been adjusted these past two days.
CROWN Stimmies
The original plan to allocate 2.9 million CROWN stimmies for Season 10 remains unchanged. After shuffling the schedule, we’re still aligned to be near that mark by the end of Season 10.
Regarding CROWN stimmies, we will always deliver on what we say.
If you missed the recent Rethinking $CROWN Incentives blog, give that a read.
Higher Entry Fees and Purses
Higher entry fees. Higher purses. That’s been the theme in the first week of Season 10, and we’ve done that because you wanted to raise the ceiling on certain entry fees by a lot.
Season 10 now features many higher entry fee races by popular request, resulting in high purse prizes. Responding to requests, some races now boast drastically higher stakes, catering to those seeking a more challenging and rewarding competition.
Varied Buy-ins by Race Type
Variety is the spice of life! And the Photo Finish™ race schedule, of course.
Diversifying the race schedule is critical, and with that in mind, we’ve implemented different buy-ins for various race types.
Handicaps, Allowances, Stakes, and Graded Races have all been added to meet community demand and to ensure a competitive landscape across all horse types.
This is the most flexible and light-on-its-feet aspect of our change log. As we check fill rates, we’ll continue to move to where the data tells us players most want to be.
V1/V2 Race Schedule Adjustments
We’re always looking to improve how the race schedule rolls out, and we think we’ve made a nice change to ensure CROWN stimmies are eventually distributed.
To address concerns about CROWN farming, there is now a two-hour window between the closing of the window on Version 1 (V1) races and the spawning of Version 2 (V2) races.
This adjustment was made after finding some players were jamming under-qualified horses into races just to receive easier rewards. That’s not in the spirit of the racing ecosystem and not something we want to see.
CROWN Allocation Cap for High-Derby Buy-ins
We want to ensure everyone has an equal shot at securing CROWN allocations, regardless of budget. With that in mind, we are now capping CROWN stimmies for races featuring buy-ins exceeding 6,000 $DERBY to balance competitiveness.
Higher race entry and higher purses came at the community’s request, but we want to ensure these changes don’t punish those already in a sweet spot. As always, we’ll watch this one and adjust accordingly.
Final Thoughts
At times, we break stuff! That’s game development, especially in Web3.
We try things, iterate, fine-tune, and move quickly. Our motto is ‘Progress, not perfection,’ with situations like this in mind.
We move, adapt, and keep the ball rolling.
Rest assured – we’ll make adjustments if race fill levels at elevated race entry fees decrease. The high-stakes races are designed for you to participate in and to assess the demand for such events.
Lastly, thank you. We value and appreciate your feedback and passion, as always.
We certainly don’t intend to implement widespread modifications during the season regularly. Still, this situation called for a look under the hood, and we feel great about the changes we’ve made, many at your request.
