Disclaimer

I wanted to create a sort of beginners guide for managers to be able to explain to their scholars how things might be moving forward with a little bit of history. Initially I wanted to just write this out to our Discord server, but I just imagined that it would help other guilds who might not have been around for as long and don’t know how it was before compared to how it is now. I will be writing assuming that you don’t know much about the lingo and that you are 100% absolutely new to the space, but already involved somehow with Axie Infinity. Also, while I try to keep it as factual as possible, I will also be inserting some opinions here and there. In no way, shape, or form do I consider myself an expert, and I have entered the community in March 2021 so I am not an OG either. First time to ever put anything in an article, so I’m hoping this comes off as ~educational.

Foreword

I have always believed that Axie Infinity managers have the duty to provide the most value to their scholars as possible. I don’t subscribe to the idea that scholars are employees, and would actually prefer to migrate away from that term. In DGX, we as Founders, try and put our best foot forward to give our Adventurers a glimpse of the metaverse through the game. Although Axie Infinity is the pioneer in the space, there’s just so much that can be done outside of the ecosystem and you can be whoever the hell you want to be! I was watching an interview from DAVEvsAXIE (hands down in my opinion one of the most talented interviewers in the space) and Gabby Dizon (the big kahuna at Yield Guild Games, or YGG) and got struck when Gabby said, “Axie Infinity should not replace your day job. It should be your entry point to learning and starting to invest in the metaverse.” (nv). This is something that I think everyone should put first and foremost in their heads when entering the space- don’t throw everything away just to play this game. It’s also not for everyone, but if you’re already in the system, you should believe that education is your best defense, offense, and the way you’ll make it to the top! Do your own research (DYOR), study, put in the work, and know that in this space there is no one else to blame for your decisions but yourself. It’s the wild wild west out here and we all just learn to swim with the whales! Phew with that being said, let’s get right to it!

A Little Bit of History

In the “Golden Age”, you could farm 100SLP in Adventure, and 50SLP for completing the dailies: a total of 150SLP average minimum a day. With semi-recent movements, the dev team decided to cut this in half — if I’m not mistaken this was implemented in S18. At the time of writing, you can only farm 50SLP in Adventure, and 25SLP in the dailies for a total of 75SLP average minimum a day. I use the term average minimum because this is assuming that the dailies were actually completed, which takes 5 wins in the Arena mode. With this change also came about the 800MMR cut, where people below 800MMR will not be able to earn anything from either of the game modes (Adventure or Arena). This decision was majorly influenced by the need to remove bots in the system — which in the long term would slowly destroy the economy because “bot farms” extract largely from the ecosystem. The team has always said that they will prioritize incentivizing skillful gameplay in the Arena over mindless farming in Adventure.

Even with this supposed decrease in mint supply, ~200-250Mn SLP gets minted on a daily average, while only ~30–50Mn gets burned. Minting is the blockchain version of “creating” or “generating” a cryptocurrency token or a Non-Fungible Token (NFT), and burning is when it is essentially removed from circulation thus supposedly increasing its demand or value. The worst case was on November 5, 2021 when there was 44Mn burned vs. 1.2Bn minted — only 3.6% of the minted SLP was burned that day. This means there is still an overproduction of SLP versus the amount of SLP that breeders use to produce more Axies. You can check here if you want to see the historical mint-to-burn graph. To keep a healthy economy, ideally we want an almost equal mint to burn ratio- this happened around June/July 2021 when there was so much hype around Axie. A huge wave of people wanted to invest because Axie Infinity released a documentary that got everyone crazed and starting with crypto. This was the first time that Play-to-Earn (P2E) was heard of from a lot of people across the world. Imagine hearing for the first time that you can make money off playing games! From around 20–50k Daily Active Users (DAU) pre-Ronin (when we had to time breeding and transfers to avoid insane gas fees on Metamask), we shot up to the 3Mn DAU we have today in a matter of months. When everyone wanted to get in to breed and play, we hit the peak for SLP at 40c (USD), floor Axies were around 300$ a pop, and meta teams could easily be in the couple of thousands of dollars. A lot of people who FOMOed in (Fear Of Missing Out — bought in at the peak of the hype and thought that prices would just continue to increase), and I believe is the root cause for all the hate on social media about Axie. This brought in a new wave of people who were relatively new to crypto, possibly not doing enough research, and even taking out loans just to be able to afford a team. Not the most sound investment decisions, but a lot of us have to get burned before we learn, right?

The Problem(?)

So what is the reason of the oversupply? Could be a couple, but I am guessing that it began because of the semi-recent Bone Sail-Bumpy nerf. For those of you that didn’t already know, they made this change mid season, which never happened in the previous seasons, making it very controversial. This lead to a huge dump in the market for that specific meta breed, and a lot of people lost so much money in the process. Traditionally, Seasons last for around four weeks, and Off Seasons at around two weeks (but there was a time that it went on for about a month). Patch balances are normally announced once the season begins, so this means that breeders have a small window to make profit with their breed farms. This Bone Sail-Bumpy “balancing” was announced mid season because the team noticed that it was being “abused” because it was “overpowered”. This might have caused breeders to get a bit shaky with their investments — if they were used to having a window of breeding to funnel most if not all of their managers’ share SLP in (some cases even buying it off the market just to breed and burn) the change sort of set the precedent that suddenly the dev team can notice something overpowered mid season and could totally destroy their breed farm. Breeders would naturally try to reduce the risk of bringing out a new meta team, and therefore were not so aggressive with breeding, thus essentially slowing down the daily average of SLP burned. Since the only utility of SLP right now is just to breed and people were scared to put so much money into it, there isn't much pressure to buy and burn the token. This, and the fact that it was announced that Axie Infinity V3: Origins (we are currently at V2: Blood Moon Rising, V1 was the first iteration of the game as sort of an auto-battler but I wasn’t there back then), could potentially change the whole game mechanic, is not a very good assurance for breeders to continue to invest. This is but one of the reasons out of possibly many more which caused some to not be in the best of spirits when discussing Axie.

Axie Infinity Today (socials, mostly Twitter)

This brings us to today, in a world where you can hear all the Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD) about Axie, SLP, and everything related to it to be “dead” or that its a “rug”. Rug, or getting rugged, comes from “having the rug pulled under you”, which is like being taken by surprise and the team walking away with all your money. This happens in a lot of other NFT projects especially when the dev team isn’t fully doxxed (aka you don't know who exactly is handling everything behind the scenes). The fact that you are still able to play today and have a whole community to back up the system definitely destroys the rug argument. Now is Axie “dead”? We have to be able to see the scenarios to make a good judgement.
First off, what does the recent S20 balancing announcement mean for everyone? Pretty soon, Adventure earnings will have been culled, dramatically reducing the amount a scholar can farm on a daily basis. If someone was at 801MMR just doing the adventure mode in fear of losing in the Arena to farm 50SLP daily, this is not the case anymore. Those people will now need to win their arena matches to be able to earn their SLP. Here are the changes reflected based off the substack:

https://axie.substack.com/p/upcoming-season-20-and-economic-balancing

Assuming that Scholar A is anywhere from 999-, and that their average win rate is 50% with 20 energy — they will only be able to farm 10SLP per day. Assuming further that this person is able to do this everyday for a month, they’ll farm an average of 300SLP/month. Depending on your manager’s share agreement, Scholar A will probably make 90–210SLP/month — something that you might have been able to earn in a few days before the changes are rolled out. To highlight this, I made a small table of comparison of how much is potentially farmed daily at each MMR bracket assuming a 50% win rate for each of the energy tiers:

While indeed this may cause a lot of people to want to leave the game, this might be what turns it all around. Even if you’re making less of the volume of SLP, if the value eventually goes up, you might eventually be making the same amount in USD value. What factors should we consider when checking for if we want SLP price to go up? Essentially its lessening the mint rate, and increasing the burn rate, aka lowering the supply and increasing the demand. Here are some:

1. SLP issuance/farm rate goes down (- mint rate)
2. Breeders continue to breed at current rate or higher (~+burn rate)
3. SLP utility increases (additional burn mechanisms, +burn rate)

What’s in the horizon?

Right now even if the present looks bleak, there are just so many things to look forward to in the future! While it may not dramatically scale the prices of tokens upwards to where everyone playing the game becomes stupid rich, at the very least we can look forward to some things they can introduce to the game to make it more fun and engaging!

iOS Adoption (possibly within Q1 2022)

While hints that the iOS version is coming out soon, it is still unclear how this will directly affect the economy. However, an increase in the player base provides more diversity and could introduce a different playing style. Majority of the players right now are scholars that have already built their own sub communities (Filipino, Latam, Indian, African, to name a few). The introduction of iOS will possibly bring over more American and European gamers, and simply add to the current base of the already large sub communities. Here are but some of the questions out there and what’s to consider:

1. Is there a version of the game that is F2P (free-to-play)?
2. Will it be enjoyable to iOS users?
3. Will those F2P Axies be able to earn tokens?
4. What will make those users want to spend money to buy Axies from the marketplace (therefore increasing burn rate) if they can earn for free?
5. Will iOS users be willing to play if the token price is not ideal?
6. Does this coincide with the release of V3?

Axie Infinity Builder’s Program (possibly within Q1 or Q2 2022)

This allows the community to be able to build their own Axie inspired games based off what they want to play. Imagine being able to use your Axies in a MoBA (like DoTA, LoL, Mobile Legends), in a racer (Mario Kart), a brawler (Super Smash Bros), or even an MMORPG (WoW, Ragnarok Online). The sky is the limit and this is definitely something you’d want to look out for because not only will it introduce a new dynamic to the game, but it is also made by community members!

https://axie.substack.com/p/axie-infinity-builders-program

Axie Infinity V3: Origins (possibly within Q2 2022)

A huge game update which is said to possibly change the entire gameplay and the meta that surrounds it. Some leeks and speculation include (some might have been already confirmed as well):
Axie’s Eyes and Ears potentially having an effect/skill in game
Body part upgrades (get a better version of the skill + change in graphic)
Skins (change the way your Axie looks in battle)
Emotes (be able to react to your opponent in battle)
Community System (built-in chat, place to hang out, guilds?)
More Axies required to participate (ex. 5v5 instead of only 3v3)
New and improved Adventure mode (Adventure leaderboards?)

https://axie.substack.com/p/axie-january-development-update

Land Gameplay (possibly within Q4 2022 or Q1 2023)

Disclaimer, full opinionated part coming. This is arguably the biggest change that will affect all of Lunacia. This has to come out absolutely amazing for it to pull everyone back and in to the space, or it will be the last launch that Axie has. The anticipation for Land play has been since 2021, where the team mentioned they were first going to release it towards the latter part of the year. However, after designing the game in 2D, they decided that they wanted to scrap the whole thing and make everything in 3D. While I have zero game dev experience, after consulting with people who are, I learned that this will take longer than expected because it’s essentially starting from scratch (hence possibly even releasing in 2023 depending on the size of the team working on it). Speculations include being able to:

1. create a “guild hall”, also might be dependent on the size of connected land plots
2. assign different “jobs” for Axies (shops, inns, taverns, etc.)
3. go questing, farming, and looting passively,
4. protecting resource nodes (king of the hill style?)
5. earn new resources, possibly also different tokens ($WOOD, $STONE, $GOO, $SHELLS)
6. participate in co-op modes (dungeon raids, boss raids)

https://axie.substack.com/p/axie-january-development-update

Conclusion

So to sum this up, as Jihoz has already mentioned before, we’re going to need to go through a lot of “painful medicine” before it gets better. We don’t even know if or when such improvements will be released. But at the end of the day, as I’ve highlighted in this last leg, there is just so much to look forward to in Axie! What your manager needs from you right now is to engage your own community and that of Axie- ask questions, post your artistic talents, talk to other people, build strategies, speculate, and be yourself! The strength of Axie is not in its massive war chest/treasury, not in Sky Mavis or any of their team members, but in its thriving COMMUNITY. Be honest, stay humble, stay educated, and stay cool. If your manager doesn’t tell you this enough, on behalf of all of us, thank you for continuing to have faith and staying with the program. Let’s continue to learn and build together so that we can retire in a few years and sync our consciousness in the metaverse! 🤪

That’s it for me now. Maybe next time I write about other stuff. Maybe this is the last thing I write. Who knows? But what I do know is that if you’ve made it this far into this article, you’re in it for the long run! Catch you on the other side. Let me know what you think or if I stink, all comments appreciated! It’s ya boi, Magic signing off! ✌️

Oh yeah sometimes I’m also funny on Twitter, blow me up baby: https://twitter.com/Magic_CTG
*This article is reposted from my Medium page which I first wrote it: https://medium.com/@degenmagic/starting-out-now-with-axie-infinity-8f92231b9816