Is MetaGame Okay?
The good & the bad
I’m back!
For those unaware, I suffered a bit of a burnout & left MetaGame for a few weeks to heal, chill & get a new perspective on the whole thing.
Tbh, I didn’t chill all that much. I dealt with a shitton of backlog, spent a lot of time thinking about the bigger picture & the strategy, then spent a week in Paris for ETHCC - which didn’t exactly make me feel rested 😂
But, I did get a bit of a perspective!
Perspective
The main piece of perspective I got is that we’re moving too damn slow & living in our own little bubble closed off from the wider community 😬
Its been almost two years since we went on our way to build the onboarding system, tools & the connective tissue for the Ethereum DAO ecosystem.
We wanted to break the silos between organizations & crypto-native brains, but slowly became a silo ourselves. We’ve been stubborn in not wanting any speculative capital supporting MetaGame, but what’s the use of being a purist if you don’t get to build what you want to build?
All the while, time is running out…
MetaGame started when barely anyone was launching DAOs & community projects, nobody was comparing crypto to a giant MMO-RPG and nobody was talking about inter-DAO coordination & community-support systems.
If you’re around crypto twitter, you know things changed a lot. People are waking up to social systems being a needed layer on this economic engine & a lot of them are sick of money games, now looking for something more meaningful. These days, its all about DAOs & community projects.
I missed all of DeFi & all of the NFT waves being obsessed with MetaGame & DAOs.
Well, the time of DAOs & communities is here.
Our time to shine!
…and we’re not ready 😬
Why are we not ready?
I think overall, the main reason we’ve been moving so slow is because we never actually raised any funding to build MetaGame so almost everything we did was done on good will of the community.
Even now that Seeds have value, they are hardly a safe & steady income that people can rely to leave their full time jobs for unless they’re ok with their paychecks unpredictably halving 😂
This is great in terms of getting value-aligned individuals but terrible in terms of getting people to dedicate a meaningful number of hours per week 🤷♂️
Building a startup without funding & without a permanently employed team? What did you expect, peth? People to work hard & be accountable? Psh!
Many people came through, promised to do things, got assigned quests & roles but ended up wasting our time with excuses before entirely disappearing 😅
And currently, besides a few people leaving to heal a burnout, like myself & tommy, a bunch of people decided to avoid burning out so they took their families out on vacations to chill a bit. Damn you, summer!
Much love to everyone who did work hard, especially while Seeds were worthless. Surprisingly, you exist! Thank you to all of those who contributed in whatever capacity they could, thank you all for joining me on this wild journey ❤️
Now what?
We’ve built an amazing community, now its time to focus & ship!
There are a few things I think we need to focus on like finishing MyMeta, building the basic platform, shipping a lot more educational content, strenghten our wider network through more collaboration & meetups and onboard more guilds.
My current thinking is that we should focus on a few things to begin with then raise money & get a bunch more people to work full time.
Key takeaway:
We need to focus & hurry the fuck up.
Things I think we should mainly focus on:
Finish MyMeta & start getting other DAOs to adopt it
Onboard a lot of them to MetaGame
Write a shitton more Playbooks to ease ecosystem onboarding
And roles in highest demand:
Builders that speak TypeScript
Headhunters, mainly to help us find more builders
Interested in helping with any of the above?
Ask about it in ⁉-ask-anything or contact me @petheth
Or join the next Mid-week Storming to learn more
1st MetaFam Alignment - Liminal Village, Italy
We’ll also finally be meeting in real life for the first time ever ☺️
We’ve been planning this since last summer when covid fucked us over & its finally happening this September - yep, next month! 😱
Interested in joining? Read more about it here.
Anyhow!
Gnomeski is nice enough to keep on writing the bottom half of the newsletter going forward, taking some of the load off my back ❤️
Onto his section!
MetaGame Meta 👀
📐 Design
Designers Guild has their lead, Dave, on leave atm. A summary of workflow improvements through the year to date has been produced along with a Roadmap for ongoing work for the second part of Summer, builders willing. 🙏🏾
This includes, roughly in order- Adding blocks to Player Profiles, Megamenu, Playbooks UI, Role Selection and Top 3 Skills projects. Filtering and sorting of the Players List has recently been completed and just awaits deployment.
Ongoing for the Design Team are creating assets and components that can be re used in future UIs which should see workflows becoming increasingly smooth and faster over time, this should really start to kick in after Autumn/Fall.. Work smarter, not harder! 🤔 A vision of works beyond Summer is also outlined to include MyMeta Flow/Dashboards as landing pages and profile editing.
🛠️ Building
In the Buidlers Guild, TomBalls is a new member who is working to understand MG stack more, has already made PRs and is learning fast with help from dysbulic. 🤝🏼Dysbulics open sessions continue and he provides has been pair working with Michiel on some bugs and errors and also been working with chair on skills sorting. 🗃️
Dysbulic and blairv are exploring Docker Swarm as a test environment for setting up instances of MyMeta. 🔬
Dan13ram is just currently implementing the seasonal XP filter for MyMeta. 🌱
🦾 Penguin and Vyvy-vi have been working on features for a Necromancer Bot.
With changes being planned and expansion required for SEED usage, ideas for UI prototypes have been explored for facilitating that. UI components generally are in review. Michiel has been working with Sourcecred (among other things), connecting with Sourcecred and Aragon and exploring how to implement MintGate (see Innkeepers Guild section below). Next step is chatting to 1hives Sourcecred manager also to find out how they work with it over there. 💡
New folks have been joining builders guild chats and some will hopefully get more engaged. A great way to get into the flow of building MetaGame is to tune into the pair programming sessions done mostly by dysbulic, sometimes Michiel and occasionally both together. 💥
Other things under the microscope are Guild and Role creation processes.
🍻 InnKeeping
Mintgate is proposed by Misanth so that only fully fledged Players and Patrons can set-eth-address for receiving SEED and that this should only happen once fully on-boarded. 🔐
eowulia and tommy completed the seasonal Purge with 40+ more off of the list now and 4 converted to Patrons. 🚿
🧚 XP Fairies Guild
Misanth has also been working on general weights and permissions overhaul, going more in depth with emoji functionality. ⚖️
Peth introduces a new format for did-a-thing posting. Using Branch, Description, Effort, Impact and Artifact sub headings. Hopefully this will help with assessing how much value to drop on specific posts. 🌡️
📚 Playbooks
Nothing new has appeared this week. Gnomeski is still sitting on an Impostor Syndrome PB that needs finishing touches. Michiel has been calling for Playbooks to take the form of Videos moving forwards. Maybe Writers Guild/Playbook Raid can have a hand in helping with scripting for these in future? 🤷🏽♀️
📈 Tokenomics
To stabilize the Seed market, Bacon & Fearless have also been in talks with the Reflexer Labs, team behind a non-pegged stablecoin - RAI. We’ll be adding the stablecoin to our balancer pool & they will be adding a lot of liquidity.
🌉 Bridgebuilding
Besides taking some time to heal, peth went out to ETHCC. There, he re-established connections with the wider meta & Ethereum ecosystem as well as made a lot of new connections. Besides a few new guilds that will get onboarded, he made a lot of connections interested in investing in MetaGame 😱
📹 VideoLords
B0gie has been working on an awesome MetaGame explainer video, all scenes being created and animated and music added at present, looking great. Considering Twitch as a streaming platform.
Fearless Thompson has also been working on
Recording Upskill sections for Guild Innkeeper Vids and writing the Vid descriptions for those. 🖋️
Filling Video Content threads with useful links. 🔗
mZ gave a talk about Tokenomics which was recorded and is being edited for release. 💰
🤿 CryptoVoxels
Tenfinney continues to develop the virtual aspect of MetaGame at an amazing rate and to a great standard, Check out this vid here as words simply fall short.. 😮
🗳️ Voting in Metagame
This has mainly revolved around DAO value/wealth management.
MetaGamers were asked by peth if they thought Treasury funds should be deployed to support SEED value and majority response was for this to happen but spread out over the next 3 months. 🩹
Emoji Weight reductions by 90% for all default channels, as proposed by peth, was a clear majority vote.
DAO members unanimously voted in favour of gating set-eth-address for only Players and Patrons.. to the exclusion of Curious and Engaged Octos, as proposed by Misanth. 🔑
Bacon promoted the use of RAI as a stabilising addition to the SEED Pool, which from the vote is a very well received idea. 📶
An over 70%majority voted in favour of adding RAI (stablecoin) to the SEED pool to help stabilise SEED price. ⚓
💬 Guest AMAs
Fearless Thompson has been smashing yet again! Having organised 2 AMAs with folks from Babylon Finance and Reflexer Finance, with some help from Bacon.
Babylon Finance delivered an AMA on Tuesday the 3rd in response to interest in the benefits of using a MetaGame Garden for earning yields from SEED.
Reflexer Finance AMA was on Weds the 4th in response to a request to learn more about how the communities can align and how their stablecoin can help SEED price stability.
Onwards! 🐙
Besides the real life gathering cooking up in Italy next month, there’s all the usual meetings happening next week as per regular schedule 🙃
Mondays:
Champions Ring - the 14 raid leads stand-up meet
Headhunters Align @ 10am PST / 1pm EST / 7pm CET / 10:30pm IST
Tuesdays:
Free Code Camp @ 6am PST / 9 am EST / 3 pm CET / 6:30pm IST
Content and Shilling Strategy @ 8am PST / 11 am EST / 5 pm CET / 8:30pm IST
Shillers Align @ 9am PST / 12pm EST / 6 pm CET / 9:30pm IST
Designers Align @ 10am PST / 1pm EST / 7pm CET / 10:30pm IST
Wednesdays:
Builders Align @ 7am PST / 10am EST / 4pm CET / 7:30pm IST
Innkeepers Align @ 9am PST / 12pm EST / 6 pm CET / 9:30pm IST
Mid-week Storming, Feedback, AMA - open office, coworking @ 10am PST / 1pm EST / 7pm CET / 10:30pm IST
Thursday:
Free Code Camp @ 6am PST / 9 am EST / 3 pm CET / 6:30pm IST
Jammin on Playbooks @ 9am PST / noon EST / 4pm UTC / 6pm CET / 9:30pm IST
Fridays:
Free Code Camp @ 6am PST / 9 am EST / 3 pm CET / 6:30pm IST
Cohort Onboarding @ 8:15am PST / 11:15am EST / 5:15pm CET / 8:45pm IST
Community Gathering @ 9am PST / noon EST / 4pm UTC / 6pm CET / 9:30pm IST
Saturdays:
Creating Virtuous Cycles with Durgadas @12.30 pm PST / 3.30 pm EST / 9.30 pm CET / 0:30 am IST