Hello everybody and welcome to today's space. There shall be a brief moment whilst we wait for Magikraft game to arrive in the space. First to sit in silent contemplation.
Maybe we don't see the silence. Maybe we say some words.
What words would you like to say, Gaspod, as we wait for Magikraft the game? Well, hopefully everyone was really excited about the quest.
StarGG reviews. I don't know. Are you in a wind tunnel right now? I am finishing the dog walk so a moment of silence probably wouldn't be an ideal.
Okay, okay. So what we'll do, we'll wait for Magikraft. Who reckons we should accept? Coops request to speak until Magikraft turn up.
If you think we should accept coupes, request to speak, give some love hearts. If not, he can stay down there like a peasant and we can wait for Magikraft.
Well, Justin can't follow. Oh, there he is. He got the hard man. He was busy with his thumbs up. Oh, I've seen a magic craft.
Hey everyone so sorry for the delay was just running over on one of their eSports calls that we've been so hard working on at the moment. Sorry everyone hope everyone's good. It's max for a magic craft here. Awesome max awesome okay. Well now that we have magic craft here let me get into our youth
I'll be back with a new video.
Hello. Fantastic. This week we are going to be talking to Magicraft on this topic of read
finding mobers. As we've just heard, we are joined by Max from Magicraft, so Max, if you could just quickly introduce yourself and give us a little background about the game itself.
Yeah, for sure. My name is Max Jones for the past two or so years. I worked with the ABC in Sigma Summit, which was essentially these in-person business to business networking events, be helps them all around the world in South America, North America, Africa, Dubai, Europe, Cyprus, lots of different places.
I also worked with Coventures, which was the VC Fund started by the CEO of that company. Then I joined MagicCraft just a few months ago as one of the business developers, and now kind of heading up the esports side of the company as well. MagicCraft is essentially a Web 2, Web 3 hybrid game.
in that the game by itself is completely playable with no NFT or token interaction, which is what allowed us to get listed on platforms like the Apple Store and Steam as well, which is the new exciting one. And then what we've done as well is essentially built in Web3 functionality outside of the
game which allows tournaments and head-to-head and wagering with some fees that then redistribute to the free-to-play aspect of it. So players can both play for free and earn and also wager on themselves if they think they're really good at the mulback to really earn the big bucks.
fantastic, a good little in-depth brief of magic craft there. I think you summed it up very well as someone that has played the game for a considerable amount of builds now I think I've played. It's nice to hear you speaking of it as well. So what we normally like to do at the start of this max is we've got reviews on polkstart.gg and we've got a room
review of your game. So I'm going to read the quick extract from that and the pros and cons and then we can discuss. This review in particular over on polkstart.gg is written by our best writer on the platform. His name is George. So let me just go ahead and read that for you guys. Magic Craft is a unique
exciting game aims to revolutionise the MOBA genre by eliminating minions, gold and item shops. However, the game full-shot in areas, the character roster is not well balanced resulting in some characters being overpowered while others are underpowered. Additionally, the game's movement speed is slow for all characters, which can make gameplay full sluggish.
Lastly, the absence of gold and item shops can hurt the overall experience for players who are used to these features in traditional mobiles. Despite these shortcomings, Magic Krasser is still a fun and thence game in game that offers a fresh take on the mobile genre. Pros, super fun, easy to get into, unique approach to the traditional mobiles
a formula, cons, strange camera angle, no gold or shop for items and slow movement across the board. I do want to point out to everybody though this review is back from very early January which I believe is two builds ago but max if you would like to discuss our review.
For sure, that's an interesting one. I've heard a little bit of character imbalancing, which is something that we're essentially a process of constantly updating. I think with all mobbers it can be hard to get a fair balance. I mean hats off to Dota 2 and League of Legends that have hundreds of characters that are all so well-balanced.
It is really hard to get fair character balancing. If you buff one ability by a tiny amount that actually has really big knock on effects unfortunately. So we are still reworking and there's some big stuff for essentially reworking entire characters. But it's an interesting take. I hadn't heard the character
I definitely agree with that on the movement speed can be a little bit slow. But what I would say is that magic craft, and I think this is a thing taken across all of Web 3, is that they try and lean towards whatever the community's feedback is as much as possible. And we've got kind of report a bug.
and you know suggested improvement forms live on the website. So all of this obviously feeds to a database that we're always taking into consideration all the kind of tweaking the game, fixing things, editing, stuff like that. But oh my god, it was some good feedback. I'm gonna have to look more into the reviews on your site.
Yeah, fantastic. I think I like the way you're talking about the game being built around the community feedback and the bug reports because I know some of this stuff has changed already. I'm pretty certain on not the current build, but maybe a build ago. They did tweak the camera angle slightly, but it still just seems like a weird camera.
I'm wrangled to someone that has got as many hours in Dota 2 as myself. And I'd look like how you touched on that as well. Of balancing is a constant thing in movers. So whilst there could potentially be imbalance now, there's always going to be imbalance in movers. Dota's been going on for years and I've already watched them in the DPC banning the same champions over and over again.
So I don't really hold that against an early access mober to be fair. So the next question I've got for you is the game is a twist on mobers, but what gave you the inspiration for changing away from the traditional way mobers are made up and going more towards the style that magic magic craft is aiming towards?
I think specifically it was the fact that MagicRot was always kind of born on wanting to be a mobile first game. I mean it still performs very well on the PC and I think if you played the PC yourself as well you definitely played a little bit better if you're on the PC. But we went mobile first and you know the average mobile player has maybe got you know 50 minute break
and they want to play a quick game. So we kind of took into the ideology of you want a quick 5 minute match. And in 5 minutes, if it's just based on you know you have to grind for a few minutes with typical mobiles, they're 15 to 45 minutes. I played a fair bit of Delta to me probably five, six years ago now.
But we wanted a quicker, faster pace. I would say that probably the biggest inspiration probably came from battle right if anyone's played it. It was a game quite similar to us, where it's just nothing but action-packed, head-to-head, player and skill based only. You know, there was a certain amount of customization in the fact that you could come
kind of taking different traits and things like that that gave you a boost to this ability, but then you lost x, y, or z or the other ability. But that's what we wanted it to be purely skill based, allowing people to jump on super quickly and just bash out a few games, you know, very quickly.
And you mentioned there that you've gone mobile first and picking a time slot that works for people on mobile because as you say you just want to pick up and have a quick go.
is really important with that. Is there been any other considerations in the game to make it more mobile first? And how do you see that impacting on people who maybe do end up playing on the PC?
I think part of it is optimisation. The game itself is although it's quite a big download on PC. On mobile it's very well optimised and it can run on the worst of worst phones. I mean we've tried it on like the bottom of the level Android phones. I mean they're not even called Android at that point but obviously they run on the same OS.
And part of that was, you know, we always had the Philippines in mind when it came to mobile base games because it blew up for action, infinity. And that's where, actually at the moment, that's where the vast majority of our players are. So, you know, it was clearly from the start a very good one to target.
What I was saying is, well, obviously that, you know, when you make a mobile game, you go for a little bit more of a simpler game. I mean, bang my mobile legends did a very, very complex game on their phone and did fantastically well. But we wanted to make it a little bit simpler than that. Generally most Web 3 games are a little bit simpler in general, right?
and more just to the core game play itself. I would agree that it definitely would take away a little bit from the PC aspect but I think in the long run there'll be more of a as we grow as a player base there'll be a bit of a divide between the mobile players and the PC
where you almost have different leagues. It's not really that fair of an example to have mobile players against PC players because generally when you're on a PC you can just essentially PC a player. I hate to say a lot of the time we just beat mobile players.
and mobile-based leaks and it's actually something we're already looking to implement in our community tournaments and things like that is a divide between PC and mobile. I think that's a great point and a beautiful segue into my next question of how are you planning on facilitating competitive and kind of eSports play?
If you are currently responding Max your microphone is still muted. Hey sorry I cut out for a second now I'm not sure what happened to my Wi-Fi. Where exactly did you guys hear up until?
You finished off about the different leagues for mobile and PC and I said it was a beautiful segue to my next question. Hello.
Can you hear me now? Temp and anchor?
George, can you hear me? I can in fact hear you, gaspote. I believe that Max may be experiencing Wi-Fi difficulties. Hey, can you guys hear me now? Yep. Yes, sir.
Well, it's good to know people in the audience can still hear all of us. Crypto hado, thanks for the big help. I can hear you, Max. Can you hear me?
Oh, nice one. Very exactly. Sorry, I cut out at some point there. Where did I get to when I was explaining about the different two piece mobile? If you can open to. Can you hear me now?
Can you hear me? - All right.
So we heard about the different leagues separating mobile and PC and then I was asking how you're planning on facilitating more competitive and eSports play within the game.
And he's gone. So we're in a short intermission while Scmagicraft finds some better Wi-Fi and reconnects to this glorious space. So this is a perfect
time to hear from our ad people. Make sure you go down to boaks.a.g. If you want to see the best reviews and guides and news and other things related to gaming.
Hey, sorry guys, not sure what happened there. I think my phone just glitched out or something.
Can you hear us now? I can hear you loud and clear. Okay, well, you did cut out just to the end of your sentence, so that works out nicely. You were just covering off the idea of having
different leagues for mobile and PC just because of the differences that people might be able to experience in the play. And I was just wondering how you're planning on facilitating competitive play and esports within the game.
So what was the question again?
How are you planning on facilitating competitive and eSport play within the game? I think part of it is through the tournament system. I mean obviously we've had this kind of ongoing thing where the tournaments of our house
and getting bigger and bigger. So we originally started it with community tournament where we did a series of 3v3s with we had finance, Tonke, we had, I believe you guys had a team as well, right?
Yes sir. Yeah nice one and then we had EZR which was one of our professional teams that we've essentially own it own a section up. That was kind of our first tournament so that's the grassroots right you know that was streamed by us, commentated by us all in house. What we then did is we did the 1v1
community tournament which a lot of our amazing community members and it's insane how good these guys are at the game it's ridiculous I played 1v1 versus some of them there's no way I will ever beat them. We had one with those literally last weekend and with that when we leveled it up we had professional shout-casters from the Philippines
and then actually in July of 2019 in collaboration with the Filipino National eSports League and Sigma which is an international event on the LHTW. We're hosting a huge tournament out there. We've got about 120 square meter set up.
40 different esports teams taking part and it's almost to top off our Filipino League out there. So there'll be eight weeks of tournaments with I believe eight different teams per tournament. So it's going to be a huge almost league over about two months with the grand finale being at that physical event.
That sounds very impressive and very exciting for anybody that's in the Philippines if they're able to attend that. So the next question I have for you, I think you've kind of touched on it already but just for anyone that's joined up late or didn't quite catch it. First part is are the NFTs heroes and then that
follows off into the will you be adding more heroes and how will you be balancing the balance issues that come along with everything MOBA? Yeah for sure so essentially yeah we've got three NFT heroes so far we've got True Shot which is almost the archer character we've
got vague, it's not vague. We got Corass which I believe is our mage character and then oh I can't remember the last guy off the top of my head, Bajorn maybe, who is our kind of warrior character in the game. So those three have already got their NFTs. We do plan to do NFTs for all characters in the
future that are NFT gated in the lobby. So we're going to add functionality where if you want to essentially you've got to have that hero in your NFT collection to have to play it in the lobbies. So if you want to play Bajon, you've got to have Bajon. What we're also planning on building is a number of usage
in utilities based around the 10% lobby fee. So, you know, out of that 10% lobby fee, we're going to take, you know, if it's a $10 game, that means we're taking kind of $2 away. We're going to take 10% of that 10% and send it back to the Genesis NFT holders, giving them a passive income. And we're also going to take a certain
that 10% and give it back to each specific character. So if Bajorn wins a game, some of that 10% lobby fee will go towards all the Bajorns. Long term as well, we're planning on adding in lands as well and using our kind of tech as well.
We'll be tying in, we're building in the background a platform that allows us to essentially do this whole tournaments and 1v1s and heads-to-head systems for all the big mainstream games. So we'll start off with CSGO, but in the long time we'll be able to do Dota 2 League of Legends, Strange Enough FIFA as well, Xbox Games, there's kind of no limit to it.
We plan to have that ready surprisingly not so far away and we'll add NFT utilities and that and obviously the entire thing is going to be powered by magic craft which is why we're still pushing this kind of slogan of MCRT will be the currency of Web 3 eSports.
As for the balancing, yeah, I mean it's a case of other periods of time as player traction picks up, there'll be more of a requirement to have more NFTs. So we will mint more NFTs. We've only been playing those characters and here are balancing. It's like I said earlier on, I suppose I already touched on it. It's a constant amount
of just tweaking small tweaks until everything seems fair. I believe it's in the pipeline for a lot of the melee characters that everybody knows are a little bit LP at the moment. They're going to have some drawbacks. We're definitely going to scrunch the numbers and make some tweaks to the character meta at the moment because I agree there's definitely an imbalance at the moment.
Yeah, it's good to know. My main concern with anything where the playable characters are the NFTs, regardless of how you do balancing, it then does create a situation where certain ones will be good because they're
the time before the balancing and then maybe they get a nerf and then people are going to feel hard done by it. They bought this character that was good at one point. He was stomping but now he's basically useless and they're not going to be able to offload it to anyone else or do something like that. How do you plan to try and alleviate
that and balance them in a way that this doesn't become the norm and it isn't buying around the meta game. For sure that's an interesting one and maybe we've kind of got a little bit of an ulterior to solutions to that. I mean essentially we've kind of got two solutions to that. I mean number one is that we're introducing NFT renting in the near future.
So rather than having to buy one of the upfront NFTs, whatever the mint cost is, you could just rent one from someone that already has one, play it for a day, play it for a week, play it for a month, and that kind of gets rid of that problem, right? The other one that we're doing is introducing profit sharing on NFTs.
So, you know, at the moment there is a restriction for everybody that plays our game daily at the moment. There are free lobbies that reward free MCRT if you win and there's not sorry paid lobbies, but lobbies that are NFT gated for just essentially the VIPs, right? In the future we'll be introducing
a system where if you hold the NFT, you can rent it or give it to someone else for a period of time. And then that person and you and the player, so the player and the investor will share in the profits that is won by that free-to-play player. So both of those kind of alleviate the need to essentially buy an NFT.
Because you know one of the other things is it was trying to tap into obviously the investor community, but also the player community So get into almost the accident infinity model of scholarships and spread of capital so we want MCRT to be played by you know hundreds of thousands of people and the Philippines is definitely the biggest
demographic for online games at the moment. So, you know, for them to earn reasonably $4 or $5 of MCIT a day is very, very easy, very feasible. But for them to upfront pay for an NFT that may cost $200, we want to get rid of that barrier to entry and make it, you know, remove those bariturant eventually to all
I think accessibility is key, especially with games that rely on PvP because you need to hit that kind of critical mass of players, but they're actually to be a game. So I think anything to increase
accessibility is a really good idea. And kind of leading on from that because you're in testing now, how's the play testing been important for the development of the game?
It's been an interesting one and you know obviously this is the first game they've developed so it's been a constant kind of line-in-improved model right? So we've actually just started a new model so we go through essentially three rounds of QA now so our game studio
So we're going through multiple rounds and we try to
and essentially spagger the initial QA and the community QA from when it actually goes out to fix the most important bugs and then obviously there's always going to be more and more coming up. So we try and spot as many of them as possible and kind of fix them as soon as possible but there's always going to be bugs that make it through unfortunately.
Yeah, sorry about that. My my microphone decided to not let me unmute this time so I was getting to chat to myself So yeah, there is always the good point of no matter how much testing you do games will normally come out with something that is a bug. It's almost impossible to ever find
find or get rid of bugs like that. But when you're working with a community and they're doing all this testing for you, some people do feel hard done by it to be used just for the equivalent of say free working labor to find all these bugs for you. Are you
at Magikraft doing anything similar to like a bug bounties that reward your communities that are finding any of these bugs in the game to report to you between each different build phase or how has the relationship been with the community around doing this testing with them?
Yeah, for sure and you know what I'd say like I've worked on web 3 probably not as long as you guys but but quite a while now in community like there is a difference between a week community and a strong community The magic are often community there are people that have been with us for two years now that are just holding constant health and has improved I'll give you an example in here in the chat amazing
using how to call with him. He's probably one of the, he's almost the leader of our biggest community in magic craft and I absolutely love them. Yeah, we run bug bounties in the past, they've worked very well, we've got lots of feedback. Like I said, we have this kind of constant improvement method and we always try and reward people.
So if you've been in the magic craft telegram and you've scrolled through in a couple of days a chat, there's tens of thousands of messages. But people that make really good suggestions, James tries to read, James is our CEO obviously, tries to read all of the messages. Any good suggestions, he pings our community members, please send them
this guy, $100 of MCRT, for example. So the list of people that have been rewarded for MCRT have taken initiative and spotting things in critical areas, but also good suggestions that we can improve in the product. We've tried to reward as many of them as possible, and we'll continue to try so.
I think that's good in keeping your community on side and giving you that support really is important because as a company you can't test enough yourself without getting enough people involved. You mentioned near the start I just wanted to kind of circle
back to it, the way that you've set up the game to be able to go on traditional platforms. How important do you think it is for the growth of the game to be on platforms where traditional gamers are already looking?
I mean, there's kind of pros and cons to it, right? You can add the integrate NFTs directly into the game and it's essentially the strongest it can be possibly be, right? And you gain some advantages to that, which is kind of
get in rid of barriers to entry, right? But you're almost killing yourselves into like the total addressable market, right? You know, if you compare current Web 3 gamers to the entire Web 2 gamer database, you know, it's like it's nowhere near there. So why would you
not line yourself in an opportunity where you can tap into those Web 2 users before they're ready to take on to Web 3. So you're almost the established brand for these Web 2 guys. Don't even know they're playing a Web 3 game. We've been trying to make it as widely as accessible as possible. So we're listed
on, OVO, Wombat, Elixir, Steam, iOS, App Store. We're on pretty much every game Swift as well as the newest one. Well, there's sort of all these different platforms as many of them as we can possibly be on. I mean, it takes a lot of integration time, but it's worth it. You pick up new users and you make the game
is accessible as possible. So I think it's a no-brainer for every game to see if they can get onto Steam. I mean even like we did a countdown to some announcements last week so we announced that we listed on Steam or that the list of on Steam was coming. It's in June by the way. That we did a
new fundraisers as well, but we've got the Filipino tournament and we were running a community tournament as well. So we announced them all in I think two days. And out of all of those posts, whether it was like we raised the evaluation of 46 million, the steam one just completely destroyed it. We got 42,000 views on the steam Twitter
post in a week or so. So clearly the community wants these high level web two partnerships. The traction from a steam partnership compared to a one-bat, even though one-bat has huge user bases and decks volume, steam just crushed it in terms of reception from the community.
Yeah, it's great to hear about the idea of accessibility and being on as many platforms as possible to make it as accessible to anybody that needs to find this. They've got a lot of places of just stumbling across Magikraft. One thing you mentioned there was the idea that people would be playing this game without fully knowing
it's a web 3, like I doubt you're doing some sort of like smoke and mirror stuff to make sure they never find it out that it's a web theme. They just think it's web 2, but with that sort of idea in the forefront of them joining it as a web 2 game, do you have stuff in place that is then going to
there to help educate them and bring them towards the Web 3 side if they maybe are interested a little bit more about that aspect of the game. Is there going to be some sort of like magic craft education system to help onboard them from the Web 2 experience into the full whole magic craft experience?
experience of being a web 3 person.
Yeah, it's a bit of a tricky one about how you traverse onboarding Web2 users to Web3. We've been working on flows, but because you have to kind of abide by certain rules on the App Store and Steam Store themselves as well, you've got to be a little bit kind of cheeky about how you do it. When we were originally listed on iOS and the
It was fine to on the main page when you've logged into the game. Essentially not redirect through a hyperlink but say get MCRT now. Because MCRT is just a ticker sign, right? In the steam, unfortunately, we had to remove that. So what we're working on is essentially as many smart systems as possible.
We can redirect people out of the app to our social media, but we can't direct them directly to the website because that promotes NFT and cryptocurrency content. We ping them to socials where obviously are most highly ranking SEO videos that come up first. Generally, how do you onboard the Web 3 of Magicraft? We've got loads of
video tutorials out there. But mainly as well, I think this is going to be the biggest one. Well, I mean, that's it. If anyone goes on to the socials of magic craft, which I'm sure they do with League of Legends or Dota 2, then they instantly realize and see all the different routes to where they can go within the Web 3. What we're also doing, this is probably going to be the biggest one, is we're#
have an integrated chat that's cross-platform. So the chat within the Web2 game will also link in with the telegram and a chat within the Web3 lobby system. We can't directly go to our people and do like announcements and notifications within the game itself that you should go and play on the Web3 lobby to play with Real Cash now.
But we can't stop a chat that's promoting that sort of content. So that's surprisingly, that should pass through all the regulations. I mean, we've got a team of lawyers at Magiccraft that's been looking for all the essential, not even loopholes, just ways to do it that don't break the terms of service. And there are some ways to get around it. So we've been doing the best we can.
about, big on the front when it comes to that stuff. But that'll be the big one, you know. If anyone's looks at our telegram is nothing but people sharing links to their Web 3 lobbies and related to the token price and things like that. If we can plug that in with the Web 2 game, anyone's playing on the Web 2, they're going to see all these different hyperlinks. Obviously they're clickable, take some straight#
Sounds like a very unique and interesting plan indeed. So what do people have to look forward to in the short to midterm future of Magcrafth?
Well, I mean like I like I say to everyone you know magic craft isn't just the blockchain game. It's not meant to just be played. It's meant to be watched. It's meant to be the esports of while the web 3 esports game right. So the big ones is we've got community tournaments going
coming up we'll be doing weekly live streams at professional shopcasters our esports teams are going to be getting a lot more active we've just released our Asia servers so all of the Filipino KOLs that were actually some of the biggest actually infinity streamers are going to start
streaming as well. So we're expecting a big influx. We've got some minor bug fixes in related stuff to cameras and bugs and stuff like that coming up soon. But mainly tournaments in the next few months. Loads and loads of just eSports content coming.
Fantastic to hear indeed and I believe one of the two ornaments is hosted by none other than polka starter dot g g on the twenty-twenty-sixth at two p.m. UTC and a
Apparently, there are four slots left for teams. I am being told in the chat as I give this little plug to our tournament that we are doing. So as we're coming towards the end here now, Max, just to wrap it up, where should people be heading if they want to find out more about Magikraft?
I would say jump straight onto the MagicRef Twitter. It's got all of our most up-to-date announcements. You'll see the seam announcement is number one. From the MagicRef website, jump onto the YouTube or the website as well. It's got all the information linked to the token, the coinmarker,
all of you to actually come here and listen to us so we are not just talking to ourselves. I have been joined again by Gaspod. You can find him everywhere as Gaspod and thank you to Magic Craft for coming up as well. We have also got news. Review
news, games, guides and all sorts over at polkastarter.gg. You can also find me everywhere to do with polka styer or just on George in the meta on everything as well. I look forward to seeing you all next week for the next press play. Until then, have a fantastic week and goodbye.
Thanks everyone have a great one. Bye bye