We have a claim period for Ragnarok claim tokens (RCT)!
The announcement came a few hours ago, and we are talking about April 20th as the date when the claim drop starts, but you have time to claim your RCTs for an an entire month.
Image from @ragnarok.game's post
RCTs are not the actual Ragnarok NFTs, they will come later, but the claim tokens are tradable, fungible and probably can be broken down in sub-unitary denominations too, which helps for wider distribution during the airdrop phase and to accurately match the snapshots on accounts. Otherwise there would be a rounding to about 112 HIVE/HP which would be very disappointing for small accounts. Why around 112? Because that turns out to be the needed HIVE/HP at the snapshot time on January 6, to receive one Ragnarok NFT.
So, after you claim the RCTs from the same site as the LARYNX tokens (https://spk.dlux.io), you will be be able to trade them for HIVE and HBD.
Some will want to sell them since they are "free", others will amass them because they give access to a higher number of NFTs.
For those who intend to play the game, for the chess part you need 10 pieces, 5 Pawns and 1 of the other pieces: King, Queen, Bishop, Knight, and Rook.
As I understood (maybe wrongly), you could start the game with fewer pieces, but what would be the point? You would likely lose. Here's a refresher on the Ragnarok game mechanics.
But if each NFT card has a chess archetype associated with it, that means you'd need more NFTs to make sure you'll get all chess pieces when you claim the NFTs with RCTs. Am I right? Otherwise you'd need to buy the missing chess pieces NFTs from other players, once NFT market opens. I guess here's where we need to make a decision how to proceed, if we want to play.
In this way this is a bit like Splinterlands (only a bit). You don't know what you get from a pack (i.e. claimdrop of NFTs in Ragnarok). If you don't get what you need, you need to buy the NFTs from other players. The difference is in Ragnarok you can't buy more RCTs to turn into NFTs later, like you buy packs from Splinterlands. Maybe I'm pushing with this comparison.
What else have we learned from the Ragnarok announcement?
Next step will be the revealing of NFT cards, "within a few months":
within the coming months, the NFT art will be finalized, and you can then start claiming your NFTs and revealing which ones you get.
Since the claimdrop lasts a month, I guess few months become fewer.
Judging by what else is planned for "later this year", we might actually see the revealing of Ragnarok NFTs during summertime.
As for the later part of the year, some pretty sizeable chunks are slated for then: public testing of the game, voting mechanics and functional DAO.
By how the rough scheduling looks like, I believe the gameplan is to launch Ragnarok into the wild at the beginning of 2023, maybe even on the January 1st, to have seasons coincide with calendar years. Or maybe not, just wild guessing here.
I hope the development could go as planned, because there's obviously still a lot to do and excitement will grow exponentially once we have the NFTs and especially after we'll be able to test the game. I'm obviously looking forward to both these phases!