MonsterQuest review after game started 10 days

By GameFiH2 | h2crypto | 2 Feb 2022

Nice gameplay plus a great team can definitely increase our chance to make a profitable GameFi investment.

This is my 2nd article talking about MonsterQuest. This project launched their gameplay 10 days back and I enjoyed it very much. In this post I'll explain the fun part of the game and my observations to its project management quality.

Game Modes

As we all know that GameFi includes both the game part and the financial part. Most people are attracted by the financial part first - "how much can I earn and how long does it takes?". The number of people being transferred into players depends on how well the gameplay is delivered.

MonsterQuest provides 2 game modes at the initial stage.

Adventure

The basic game for starters to know how to play. It's as simple as:

Purchase a NFT box
Randomly get a Monster by opening the box
Use the Monster to do "Adventure"
The player gets token rewards in USD and the Monster gains EXP if win
Monster still gains EXP if lose

Players will lear the play-to-earn concept been implemented from the adventure mode:

The RNG(Random Number Generator) mechanism to decide win or lose
Limited play times per day according to Monster's energy
Better NFT introduces better rewards
Understand how `elements` work
How to claim rewards

Dungeon

This is where the game becomes more interesting. Based on the knowledge and skills learned from adventure mode, players could challenge dungeons with different difficulties.

In the Dungeon gameplay, players need to do strategic thinking as:

What monsters are suitable for adventure and what are better for dungeons?
Which dungeon should I challenge for current monsters' levels?
How to assemble the best monster squad considering power / element / remaining mana(for Skill Attack) / equipment?
What's the best EV(Expected Value) I can achieve by wisely choosing Attack or Skill Attack?
When should the player keep fighting and when to escape?

Even though I played for more than 5 days, I still do not have a conclusion. But here are some tips to share:

Dungeons provide more EXP to monsters for each fight. Choose those you want to level up first in your squad.
Leveling up equipment to increase the win chance is recommended.
Escape is sometimes necessary, don't risk yourself too much.

What's next?

From the white-paper there is more gameplay under development.

Daily quests - The missions that you get everyday. They give you extra $MQST tokens when you complete them.
Endless Tower - Reach the Top of Leaderboard to earn BIG REWARD! Should be the PvP game mode to compete with other players.

The 2 Strategies

Rarity is the key

Same as other GameFi, the quality of NFT greatly affects the rewards earned. You'll need some luck to get good cards when opening the NFT box. There are 5 rarity you may get: Common / Uncommon / Rare / Legendary / Mythical.

The reward differs a lot from the NFT rarity. Players need to think wisely which box to purchase in order to get the best ROI.

Element matters

In Adventure mode, players can only see the win chance before elements are taken into consideration. Gladly there is an indicator showing Effective / Neutral / Weak for players to know the element effect.

For players who want to play safe, choosing the enemy with `Effective` element factor could be a good idea. For players who want equipment badly, they can always pick the most challenging opponents at the rightmost side.

We can check this element page to know how the element works.

In Dungeon mode, different enemies with different elements appear one by one for each level. It's obvious that a variety of elements in your team can benefit your upcoming strategy.

Observations

Community transparency

Since the beta test I noticed the dev team tries to provide a high level of transparency to the community. They made announcements often to have the community engaged.

What's been done?

Firstly players may feel unsafe if they don't get updates especially when the game initially launches. So what's been done recently is something MonsterQuest would like to share.

This was the patch note they published in the Discord channel after the game launched. What an engineering style note I love very much. :)

What's next?

Secondly they share what's next to provide confidence and imagination. The following was the example Tweet they made before important actions:

Maintenance heads-up

Moreover there will always be bugs and issues that happen unexpectedly. The dev team gave maintenance heads-up to make the community aware of the status.

The following was the example regarding maintenance on Jan 29. It clearly described the situation and what efforts they made regarding the maintenance. With detailed explanation, most community members can accept and trust the team.

I think all GameFi projects should learn from this.

Core team involved

Finally, they have core team members on channel to answer questions when needed but not only moderators.

Not long ago there was an incident introduced by seed influencers who dumped tokens. Except for making announcements to explain the situation, they held a voice AMA to face the crowd and answered all the questions. That's a really responsible action.

Apart from that, due to core team members living with the community, they can take fast and decisive actions to polish community consensus.

Take the same seed issue for example, in 2 days they burned all the tokens in seed wallet and declared from now on the team will use cash to pay influencers so no more seed tokens will be dumped.

Feature release tempo

Another observation is about project schedule. There are 2 things worth mention.

Presale & Staking

MonsterQuest token presale took a vesting mechanism to reduce the token selling pressure. There will be 25% token vesting per week.

To address this, on the day of the first time IDO vesting the team released single token staking feature with 450% APY to reduce the tokens in circulation. In the physical economy, this kind of action is not uncommon in national banks for currency management.

And there is one more incentive with staking - up to 30% in-game bonus regarding Rewards / Exp / Drop. This benefit encourages playing and may turn a portion of investors into players.

Postponed NFT Market

In the beta test, the market for players to trade NFTs was already tested and worked well. But we don't see when the game first launched. In January AMA one of the founders, Venther, talked about it and said to target the release in February.

I didn't hear the AMA so I don't know if there are reasons. But I understand it's good to release key features one by one to make the product as stable as possible.

Conclusion

We cannot deny the winter of GameFi continues to challenge all the crypto gaming projects including MonsterQuest. Even for investors there is no guarantee for IDO to be lucrative.

In my opinion MonsterQuest did a great start. The inverse Oracle mechanism is interesting to me and I expect to see the stableness it could bring to the game economy. I'll keep playing and watch how it goes.