🔬Overview

Welcome

An implementation of Andre Cronje’s Rarity with rare gold, community governance and optional pay to play constraints.

We invite you on this journey!

Background

Our team forked Rarity the day it was deployed on Fantom and started to deploy it on Polygon. Rarity was described at one point by Andre Cronje as a DeFi lego blocks approach to blockchain game development; it made sense that the same lego blocks could be important on other blockchains. We loved the core idea of rarity being achieved via an active economy and market driven rarity supported by an ever growing economy. This was such a contrast to NFTs that are just jpegs.

As the work progressed we gained a deep technical understanding of Rarity’s mechanics and design and we had the benefit of observing how the ebullient Fantom community interacted with its rubric.

We decided that Rarity had three main problems that, as master of our own destiny on a fork, we had the agency to address:

1. Gold was not rare. Items (goods, armor and weapons) had an intricate and well thought out pricing in gold as part of the cost of crafting them. Since any bot developer could mint unlimited Summoners and automate leveling up perpetually without any cost other than gas, we foresaw that the Rarity economy would be forever flooded with gold, which would never be able to discover a meaningful price nor achieve a well-functioning economy.

2. If the first problem was the abundance in the gold supply algorithm, the second issue was the supply of Summoners themselves to the economy. Summoners level up to get gold, and if done by bots, this directly to ever-increasing gold supply.

3. More nuanced, we decided that, despite the goal of the project to create different economies, a purely pay-to-play approach was limiting and that this limitation was avoidable. For example, if one of the determinants of winning a battle is level, would you prefer to compete with other players who, like you, ground through levels using hard fought XP? Or would you prefer to compete against some wallet that simply purchased the Summoners with the highest levels? Extrapolate this to complex DND play. Do you really think that this highly intellectual-reward driven activity will flourish in a context where players can just buy their way to a result? We felt that while pay to play had massive potential within all sorts of tokenomic innovations it could also limit the code's utility.