EXR <> GLMR News AMA
The absolute latest info on Exiled Racers all in one thread.
Learn about, the NFTs, the game, the mint details and more all here…
Below is cleaned up written transcript (expect typos etc — its an AMA) compliments of XMK from our recent AMA with GLMR News.
You can listen here https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1eaKbNmZlonKX — or read the transcript below.
(NB: The 5 WL spots were already given out by the GLMR News team)
Letsgo.
BLR @exiledracers
Yeah, thank you could probably kick it off. I’ve got a few of the questions up that I’ve seen come through, so I can probably kick it off with a bit of the background of who we are. And move from there. How’s that sound?
GLMR News
Yeah it sounds great, Yeah.
Tell us about the Exiled Racers Team.
So firstly, thanks to everyone that’s joined this morning. We do appreciate it. We’ve got some interesting stuff we’re going to go through today. A couple of good questions I’ve seen come through. And of course we’ve got a very interesting announcement that we’ll be doing it towards the end of the call, which I’m very excited about. But yeah, for now, for those of you that don’t know me, my name is Ben or Blr from the cofounding group alongside Craig, Nil, Sanju, Luke, and Samit.
We’ve all got some seriously interesting backgrounds. One of one of our cofounders actually created the algorithm for the FICO credit score — used by millions in the USA. Craig has done some incredible blockchain work in his past. He worked at a massive agency as well, doing a lot of global executions for massive experiences for global brands. And then of course with the likes of Nil, Luke and Sanju from estudi-image that have worked on some of the most amazing creative stuff.
My background, I am ex. Google worked in crypto for the last five years or whatever started in 2016/2017. I was helping a lot of companies move over from Web 2 to Web 3 from a product and product marketing standpoint and sort of stayed in it.
What is Exiled Racers?
Yeah, so I think I’ll probably move on to what Exiled Racer is for the group here that’s joined and it’s honestly one of my favourite questions because we’re very different in how we approach things, so I want to walk everyone through that.
We’re basically positioning ourselves as moonbeam’s first native blue chip and NFT art collection with this bonus community driven racing manager game, which I’m going to go through. And what does that mean? Let me break that up into two sections.
Firstly, the incredible art our creative team have developed that we believe is truly setting a new bar for design here. And then of course the bonus game that will eventually be available to NFT holders.
So starting with the NFT art, as I’ve mentioned across many channels, we have truly gone deep on the creative side for these NFTs and I really do hope the followers of this project have started to really see that. We wanted to build with the idea of creating NFTs that have never really been seen or done before from a creative standpoint. All of these NFTs will eventually give access to our community to the community driven racing manager.
And that will bring me to the next part of what I stated earlier. All EXR holders that have a Pilot, Racecraft and a Booster will be able to eventually race in our racing manager. I don’t know if you guys have ever played the likes of Football Manager or Football Ultimate Team.
I guess it’s akin to the likes of any common Fantasy Football app or fantasy sports app whereby you pick a set of players. In this case, it’s your different NFT selection. You pick different Pilots, different Racecrafts, different boosters, and you pick one from each and you decide which one you think is going to perform best.
And then you stake or enter the race track and you wait for the algorithmic result which uses the attributes of your NFTs to decide on the result. And again much like football manager, you can then rewatch the replay of how that algorithm played out visually, so we’ll have visual representation of the algorithm which is going to be interesting as well.
We are planning on testing all kinds of fun things in the game which we already are within our alpha. We have about 40 people in our alpha. We have about 12,000 different races going on, which is interesting. We’re leaning into some really cool racing manager game types, including Group Racing, potentially pink slip racing (but TBD). Our head of product is working on the idea of creating a new way of rewarding gamers as opposed to just throwing out some coin and just saying go and make coin. And this is something really.
Yeah I guess one thing I want to make really clear — and I have stated many times in other interviews we are not making a typical play to earn type game. We’re very far from that. We are creating community experiences that are fun and have elements of rewards that we are working on. If users are here to make a bunch of random coins and farm out the gameplay, this is probably not the project for you, but we’re going to have some really exciting game elements that we think are going to be super fun for the community.
GLMR News — @BBapt15ta
How did you guys all come together, may I? I mean you and estudi guys. Both people from crypto and people from 3D art and design. How did it all come together?
Exiled Racers — BLR
I’ve been in tech and sport for most of my life, and that’s how I first met Sumit and Craig. Sumit and I played together in New York on a football team, and I’d always knew that Samit was a giga brain and I’d always heard about the different projects he’d put together.
He advises on the board of a few massive companies as well. He runs his own very successful company as well, and he was one of the early LinkedIn employees, so me and him instantly got on very well and I was always chatting to him about the crypto space, like trading and what not. So I knew he was all over it and then Craig I met through another friend also through sport through football and we got chatting very early because he was into crypto from a long way back.
I think one of the questions you have is how did we start Exiled Racers?
I just met Craig at a pub and we just started talking about it all and eventually we saw a perfect golden thread amongst this group and we started putting our heads together on the on the idea that I had — and they brought immense knowledge and experience to that and eventually we decided we wanted the best art we could possibly create in this space and just went hunting.
We all went hunting and it turns out it was actually right under my nose. My partner’s best friend — she knew this group Nil, Luke, Sanju and you know I’d actually knew a few of them for a while — without knowing how interested they were in the crypto space and how incredible their work was. We just got talking at a pub and pitched them as you do when you’re running a startup, and yeah I pitched that this is the most amazing project and that we’d love to work on it with them — and I’ve never seen such turnaround from a creative team ever. I mean, I’ve been in marketing and creative for 12–15 years, and I’ve never seen creatives like this. It was. It’s been an amazing journey.
GLRM News@BBapt15ta
I was surprised that you got the guys from estudi behind it because I’ve been looking at them and they have a pretty strong background. I mean Samsung, iPhone, etc. They have very nice stuff on their website.
BLR @exiledracers
They are incredible and we’re very lucky and we tell them everyday and I am the first to brag about them and they’re actually kind of sick of me bragging about them. But I won’t stop.
GLMR News @BBapt15ta
I think you’ve already been through how that’s not the typical play to earn game but one of the things I think you said earlier in another interview is that you want to bring gaming esports and web 3 market together. Given the current negative sentiment of the gaming community towards NFTs, how do you aim to do it? How do you aim to convince gamers?
BLR @exiledracers
That’s a great question and I think I might hop back on the question of how we started Exiled Racers, then it will make it much clearer how we position ourselves and what market we’re going after.
Like I said, I’ve been a long term crypto person with a sports and a gaming background and I’ve always been excited by what’s to come in Web 3. And in fact in 2017 I became the biggest holder which I still am of a project called crypto strikers which is now called RAP Strikers which was the very first NFT Sports card game. So an NFT with utility in 2017 and I was infatuated by it. It was the first ever trading card game and I didn’t even care what happened back then and I’m a classic degen and I just wanted in on this.
What we learned from esports, which is where a lot of the inspiration came from as well is that people love esports because it’s very light touch compared to traditional Triple A games.
But there’s still that level of fun and excitement and enjoyment and even that sense of community you get with being on any fantasy sport. I don’t know if any of you guys use the Premier League app, for example, but you know I’m in multiple drafts. It’s very light in terms of the amount of you know touches you need, and I think the reason why that’s becoming so popular is because let’s be honest, people just don’t have time anymore.
GMLR News @BBapt15ta
Even gaming I used to game a lot and now I’m lucky if I get maybe a couple of hours a week you know
BLR @exiledracers
Yeah, exactly and there’s so many people there’s so many people I speak to like that — who were all once avid gamers and now they just don’t have time. That’s the market weve found and that’s the product we’re creating for.
GLMR News @BBapt15ta
Let’s hope you succeed.
Going into NFTs themselves the minting, the first drop, is only for whitelisted members right?
BLR @exiledracers
Yeah, so let me let me walk you through what I can without delving too much into it, because this is a very sensitive topic because we want to make sure we do it absolutely right and we’d be very thoughtful of it and we have got a lot of thought process in the works.
But right now we are running a white list lottery where anyone can register now on our website. The winners of those whitelists will be able to get a mint or opportunity to pay for a mint. We don’t have many left as we are pretty heavily oversubscribed.
So we’re doing our best to manage that, but it’s exciting because we’re always going to make it work for our community. We’re going to do our best to keep it fair and simple. We also have a lot of whitelist competitions going on. And I mean the response has been fantastic. This community has been actually beautiful to watch. To be honest, we have a channel in our discord called wl-competition, and we have I think we’ve had over 100 entries into our last whitelist competition. And some of the entries are just mind blowing.
And we’re going to be announcing the white list winners actually later today, or at least the finalists, which you can then go and vote in for on our discord, which will be exciting.
And then once we once we get those whitelists out to everyone they’ll be able to mint or have the opportunity to pay for a mint, and then we’ll figure out if there is anything remaining we might do. Anyone that’s registered can have the opportunity to mint what’s remaining from those that aren’t minted from the whitelisters, so it’s not a public mint per se, because you have to register for the wireless lottery.
GLMR News @BBapt15ta
It’s not very easy to get whitelisted you know cause your competition is not just the typical tweet retweet or mention and get lucky
BLR @exiledracers
Yeah, and I’m glad you recognised that because that’s absolutely intentional. I mean, I’m sure everyone on this call has looked at some competitions — How sustainable is it lwhere you’re just having like, share, retweet, tag your Gran…
We’ve tried to make a different approach here where if you want to engage with us we love you right? And that immediately filters out a lot of people that didn’t care to engage with us at all. So there’s a level of barrier that we intentionally create to find the right people for our community. If that makes sense.
GLMR News @BBapt15ta
I was talking maybe a bit further into the future after this first drop. Do you plan to?
Become public, you know?
BLR @exiledracers
Are you asking about more NFTs? This will be our first drop we have spent months on it and we have the option to drop more potentially in the future but we want to just get through this first and get an understanding from the Community how it’s liked and what they want to do next as well. We’re going to be very closely tied to the community for this project.
GLMR News @BBapt15ta
So, uh, from what I from what I’ve gathered there, there will be three types of NFT, right? Pilots, Racecrafts and Boosters.
BLR @exiledracers
That’s right, that’s right.
GLMR News @BBapt15ta
Yeah, so how will minting work? Will I be able to choose to mint a pilot or a raft race craft? Or will it be completely random what I get?
BLR @exiledracers
I’ll touch on it, but I won’t give it all away because it’s part of our storytelling which we spend a lot of time on. We have a content road map for the next 6 to 8 weeks and ideas that we have to keep the engagement up. So this is a very big part of that, but I’ll give you a taster.
You won’t be able to select your faction. As a whitelister you’ll be able to get a mint key. That Mint key will be for a pilot, and when you mint that pilot you’ll get two other keys as a bonus for being a Genesis minter. And — you can imagine what’s in those two mint.
We’re going to be walking through all the details of that. We’re going to have lovely content visuals and explainer videos on how that’s all going to work. It’s going to be very exciting, but we wanted to reward our first drop users. We’re very focused on the first drop community.
GLMR News @BBapt15ta
OK, so I’ll I’ll try to press it a bit more we.
We don’t we have to pay for each of the three mints or did you mean like if I mint the first the pilot, I’ll be getting the next two free.
BLR @exiledracers
Look expect a bonus that’s all I’ll say :)
GLMR News@BBapt15ta
OK, now it going into the NFT themselves. Now that’s many people have recognised that’s beautiful detailed artwork. Can you go into the main differences between the different factions? And how, how, how will that play out potentially into the game?
BLR @exiledracers
Yeah, absolutely. This is a great question. So for those of you that don’t know or haven’t yet, I do suggest while listening to this, you open up the art and science of high fidelity NFT design. The blog post we put out a couple of days ago. But basically we have three NFT types. We have Pilots, we have Boosters and we have of course our Racecrafts.
Our pilots are broken up into Mercs, Augs, serfs.
And then we have different ranks for each one of those — which do play a part as well in terms of the visual appearance. Each one of these pilots have different attributes associated with them and there will be slightly different attribute enhances by faction, but we will not be revealing that. That’s another part of our content and mapping, but know that different factions have different benefits if that makes sense.
We also have a secret rank that we haven’t announced yet, which will be eventually.
The pilots have a couple of attributes which you’ll eventually see when we give the NFT holders access to the game. We don’t want to be giving away too much there. We then have boosters. We split those up into racecraft boosters and pilot boosters, and there’s all kinds of different things we’re exploring there that are super fun and exciting that allow usage in the game because they enhance certain attributes of — either your racecraft or your pilot.
And hen of course, we have the race crafts, which again are split into Mercs, Augs and serfs. And broken down into different ranks with again unrevealed rank there. — and then what we’re actually also looking at doing is creating what we’re calling “genetic connectivity”. So if you have an Aug we are going to create an incentive to create a full Aug stack, whether that’s an Aug Racer, booster and pilot.
If that makes sense, so we’re trying to create some interesting dynamics there.
GLMR News @BBapt15ta
Yeah, well it makes sense if you’re a gamer, I think it makes sense now to get on from the same faction, but not something else. I wanted to ask is concerning the ranks, you know, we all the attributes be purely cosmetic, you know. So the rarer NFT don’t automatically beat the most common ones in the game you know and turn it into play to earn
BLR @exiledracers
Your visual elements are tied to your rank but it doesn’t make you perform better.
If every one of your races is different. And every time you enter a race, you have a different stack you can imagine you’re not guaranteed anything, right?
Because you might go up against the race track that you have not got the best setup for. But the next race track you might absolutely do, or the way you set your race stack up for that particular race against the particular racer that you’re up against. It will be different every time.You obviously do your best to put together the best stack for that race against that racer. But yeah, that’s how we built this game.
GLMR News @BBapt15ta
Yeah, well, that’s good to know. Yeah, well a question this is actually came up from one of our members in Twitter: Will the game be browser based? Will it be available on mobile?
BLR @exiledracers
Yes, so it it’ll be Web 3 browser based so you know right now we’re doing a lot of our stuff on the Metamask browser and that’s kind of where you can play. You can also use it in the Chrome app as well. You can use the Meta mask browser and on desktop we’ve been using Chrome and obviously it is a browser based so you’re good with whatever you use there.
But this is optimized for desktop browsers atm.
GLMR News @BBapt15ta
OK, any plans for mobile or no, not yet?
BLR @exiledracers
Yeah, so we’re starting here. Obviously we’d love to do everything. But we’re starting here. We’ll see how the pickup is and what the expectation is, and then we’ll grow from there. We definitely want to create the best user experience as possible, but you know, this is web 3, so we’re moving as fast as we can.
GLMR News @BBapt15ta
Yeah, well, what about what about ETA? Will it be available right after minting? Or do we still have to wait a bit?
BLR @exiledracers
Yes, so it’ll be very similar to how we’ve been announcing our NFTs. It’s going to be an event every time you get leaked out information, right? We obviously have a bunch of stuff that we need to do to get this thing working. We are running an alpha so the game is being used, but our intention is to create an engaged user base and an educated user base. And you can’t do that by just dropping everything all at once. So we’re going to run the exact same strategy we’ve run with the NFTs, but for the game. And this is going to be, you know, staggered over time to get people engaged with get them, learning to get them understanding every element. So it’s not just a big dump and you have to figure it out.
GLMR News @BBapt15ta
Well, you have quite a plan laid out.
BLR @exiledracers
A lot of us in the in the team have been in the commercial industry launching products or campaigns for 10–15 years each of us. So we probably have like 40–50 years’ experience between us in launching things. There’s a big reason why we do the things we do and a lot of the things that we do are very intentional and it will help the user base.From an education standpoint, it’s actually very important to help users understand every element of the game.
GLMR News@BBapt15ta
…And creating the hype around it.
BLR @exiledracers
Yeah, I mean that’s a nice bonus, right?
GLMR News @BBapt15ta
So this next question, and it goes back to the key point you wanted to make that this won’t be the typical play to earn game, but I think there’s going to be a game economy right with its own currency in game currency.
BLR @exiledracers
Yeah, so this is a good question and one that I want to tackle head on right now because I think it’s really important we go through this right? So right now we’re looking at all kinds of reward dynamics for the game. We haven’t settled on anyone in particular. Right now we have in the alpha an off chain in game currency EXR and we have experience points as well which users will be able to earn and use in certain ways which we’re working on. But we’re also looking at working with some interesting partners to make some pretty interesting things possible in this game.
And if we pull that off, that’s where we want to head to as opposed to doing the usual: here’s a random coin and you know you can do whatever with it. We want to have a really thought out plan for the economy of things, but we’re going to be running things like, tournaments and big events and have things like DAOs guilds that sort of fun stuff for leaderboard sake, and then eventually we’ll have you know some kind of rewards that we think are actually going to be more beneficial to the community and to the game long term.
GLMR News @BBapt15ta
So let me get this straight from what I’ve read, you’re going to first have your own in game currency, not on chain token, you’re going to study how it works, the economy, and possibly make it into a crypto asset later.
BLR @exiledracers
Yeah, so I mean that’s an option, right? And definitely one that we’ve been pushed by advisors to do, but we also have a new way of thinking about things that we think we’ll actually be much more beneficial to the Dotsama ecosystem, and that’s the biggest hint I can give you guys.
Right now, so we have we are looking at rewards as a concept beyond what the current play to earn is. Play to earn is very limiting in thought for us in managing growth and community and sustaining things for this game right? Remember, this is a bonus utility of the NFT and we want to make sure this is a play to enjoy game first before we start layering all these financial things on top of it. So we want to look at rewards differently in this game.
GLMR News @BBapt15ta
You had previously hinted that you were looking at NFT trade marketplace, in the end you choose moonbeans for the marketplace. So how did that come to be?
BLR @exiledracers
I mean firstly have you ever met Miami she’s honestly one of the biggest giga brains you’ve
ever met. She’s amazing and very smart. And her team’s incredible and they’ve done amazing things and they’re very collaborative and they also have the same ethos we have where they’re looking at putting the art first.
And they have a very strong art community as well, and they’re trying to lean into that stuff. So we wanted to partner with someone that reflected our vision. Their whole brand and ethos — we realised that they’re amazing creatives, but also that they have amazing technical chops for such a small team — so lean yeah but they can move fast and they’re very collaborative.
You know how we wanted to grow with them — which is why we came up with the concept of having a private auction of one of our NFTs, which we’re still figuring out, and they’ve just been very, very collaborative.
GLMR News @BBapt15ta
Well, I think you have some big announcements for us, don’t you?
BLR @exiledracers
Yeah, there it is.
We’re very excited by it. The Biconomy team we’ve known them for a long time. I actually used to work with Aniket, one of the founders on many things back in 2017 when I was doing a lot of different crypto advising and projects and just watching him develop Biconomy was incredible. He just saw the market and how hard it was to get the web 2 people over to Web 3 because of the massive barriers, such as gas and they just started building out these incredible products. It was incredibly easy to integrate their technology into the stuff we were doing in our smart contracts.
We actually got approved for a grant from them because they saw the interesting mint process we were running, and they’re like wow. This is really cool, and so they are partnering with us, giving us a bunch of support on some of the development aspects, and they’re obviously very tight with the moonbeam crowd as well, so we’ve got a very nice ecosystem now building out together. So we hope to set a new standard for some of these mints and NFT experience, especially on the blue chip side, we wanted to start setting a few gold standards for how we think it should be done, and we hope we set the bar high for others so that the Community experiences the benefits from it, right?
GLMR News@BBapt15ta
Yeah, well Biconomy they’ve been more and more relevant on Moonbeam they’ve integrated recently and there’s a lot of projects they’re partnering with. Stellar comes to mind and yeah, well, less gas is always good. Not that it’s a big problem on Moonbeam, given the visa.
BLR @exiledracers
I’m really really happy that you guys got me on here lovely to speak more about EXR. We know we do spend a lot of time on leaking information and for sometimes that can be a bit frustrating for a typical crypto community who expects everything right away so it is a different approach but one that we’re very passionate about and we think will be a long term benefit for everyone and also for other projects that come to Moonbeam.
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