With @peakd adding a nice little Zing icon to the payout symbol recently (if a post sends beneficiary amount over 50% to @zing.fund or @zingtoken - and same for @sps.dao as can be seen here @splinterlands), I'm coming back with a post talking about some zing stuff we've been doing lately and thought it'd be a good time to give people a little bit of an overview as to what to expect with our upcoming Beta launch.
With funding still being very tight and us having to focus it on certain aspects in terms of funding the game mainly, we may have to cut further corners such as allowing players to purchase a healer but not generating the "2d profile pic nft" for the beta. This basically means that our generative artwork installation of making every healer look unique and suitable as a profile pic usage with the "verified" sticker on @peakd to prove someone using it actually owns that nft - may have to wait a bit longer until we can focus on finalizing the programming of it with some additional funding. This basically means that when someone purchases a healer, they'll just have a healer in the game and the nft but not the detailed and unique looks that'll come with each minted healer. It'll still be tradable and playable, but trade at your own risk as the rarity in terms of visuals will come later - it won't affect gameplay however as mentioned, it'll only be visual, which means that players won't know how rare their generative healer is in terms of 2d visuals if they decide not to wait and trade healers back and forth on the market.
We're still working on the opening vial animation which has taken a bit longer than expected mostly due to our team being spread out over many timezones and certain actions requiring another action to be done by someone else to move forward which has made things impractical and taking longer than needed - a lot of waiting around there unfortunately but we hope it'll be worth it once it is live.
We are also planning a promotional event in terms of claimdrops once opening is live and players can start earning collection rewards in different forms than the current achievements+closed vials, we hope to share more info on how we will launch that event and who it'll affect soon!
Anyway, now let's get into the day-to-day of players once beta is released.
If a player has purchased a healer and an alpha vial, they will have all the necessary items to play the game properly at the start of the beta. This means, they'll have a starter creature, one of the four starters. They'll have a healer, one of the three classes, and they'll have necessary items to heal their creature (healing gloves equipped on their healer from the alpha vial), capture device to attempt to capture wild creatures (capture device from alpha vial) along with capture ammo and empty alpha cards - all from alpha vials. This means, they can battle wild creatures while keeping their own creature alive and attempt to grow their party by capturing more creatures and in turn healing them as well.
The battles will be limited on a daily basis starting off. We will give players the option to pick when these wild creature battles occur based on their time-zone and a focus on a particular timespan, i.e. 6-10pm on any given day. We may give players some benefits if they can have a larger timespan to get lucky with extra encounters or based on certain stats like Luck that healer items will have a chance of having.
Here's an example of how a certain day could look on my account.
I wake up at 10 am and have my timespan set from 12pm to 10 pm. I get a notification at 12:24pm that a wild creature is in my vicinity, I open holozing.com and go for the battle tab and there I see the encounter waiting for me to click "enter". The game starts to load in a different tab and I see there is a Miu waiting to battle me, the game now gives me the option to pick which creature I want to start out with from my party, I go for my level 2 Wrackoo.
The first round is about to start as soon as I pick what action I want to perform, do I want my Wrackoo to perform a move or do I want my healer to perform a healing spell on Wrackoo or do I want to use an item from my inventory such as the capture device or do I want to flee the battle which may not always be possible based on how angry this Miu is!
While trying to decide, I glance at Miu's HP bar as that's the only info I am given about this wild Miu. I can't tell what level it is or what its 4 stats (Attack, Agility, Defense & Health Points) are nor how rare they are in terms of how close they are to the max a Miu can have on any given stat for that particular level. I know however that it must be somewhere in my partie's level range and I know how much defense my Wrackoo has. I also know that my Wrackoo is of the Grass creature type and Miu is of the Normal creature type, meaning its damaging abilities are all going to be normal/physical and nothing that's going to be very effective towards Wrackoo or not effective - they'll be quite normal. This means that based on my Wrackoo's defense and knowing that every attacking move has a certain min-max window, I will need to let Miu hit my Wrackoo quite a few times until I can try and determine if it has higher than average attack stat. At the same time I will also be hitting Miu with Wrackoo's physical move ability to see how Miu's defense does.
A few rounds go by where Miu and Wrackoo go at it hitting each other with physical attacks and the HP of theirs now stands at 40% for Miu and 32% for Wrackoo.
Made with Sora.
Miu has been hitting my Wrackoo quite hard, no critical hit has occurred so I decide I'm interested in finding out what this particular Miu's attack stat is at. I prepare one last attack by Wrackoo to take Miu lower, so my capture attempt has a higher chance of success. After the next round my Wrackoo is at 13% HP and Miu is at 19%, now I have a decision to make, do I first heal Wrackoo before attempting to capture Miu so that if my capture attempt fails Miu won't bring him down to 0 HP, or do I risk it to avoid the odd chance that Miu decides to flee the battle due to his health being so low.
I decide to risk it and try to capture Miu next turn, however it fails and Miu scratches Wrackoo to finish him off. Now I have to pick another creature in my party to send out for the next turn so I go with Infurno. I try to capture Miu one more time and this time I succeed!
Miu is now captured in my alpha card and I can now see that its attack is quite high on an epic rarity while its defense is also looking quite good at blue rarity while its Health Points and Agility is on the lower green rarity level. Its level is also 3 which is slightly higher than the average my creatures in the party were. Not bad, will make a good creature for my party!
My healer gains some XP while Wrackoo unfortunately doesn't as he fainted in the battle and Infurno doesn't either as he didn't deal any damage to Miu. I look around the area to see if there is anything to gather for my profession, there's a couple apples on that tree so I use my capture device to extract them into my inventory, this only costs a little capture ammo compared to attempting to capture a creature. I then also aim at where Miu was standing as there's some dust in its place, I extract that with my device as well and it tells me I collected 1.32 Holo Dust into my inventory. I exit the battle and get back to my inventory page on the website. Here I can see Miu's current health at 19% so I place Miu onto my party and cast an off-battle heal on Miu with my healer. My healer loses 20% mana but Miu gains 62% health. I place Wrackoo away from the party into the resting zone and hope he revives soon so he can eat some food and drink some water to regain health and move points. The inventory page also tells me that I now have an extra 1.32 Holo Dust and 2 red apples in my inventory, I place one of them in the resting zone for Wrackoo to eat when he wakes up.
I am now ready for the next battle!
While waiting for the next wild creature I get another kind of notification, someone challenged me to a PvP battle! I look at my creatures real quick, Miu is at 81% health, Infurno is at 100% and my third creature, Walle is at 100% as well. I accept the challenge.
Made with Sora.
Anyway, not going to go into this more here as the post got quite long already, just figured I'd give you a quick little preview of what to expect the beta to be like. In the next post I may go over the differences between a PvP battle compared to the wild PvE encounters and also touch a little bit more on professions and healer items and their effects.
Thanks for reading, half of the author rewards going to @zing.fund.