We need Kusama Treasury funding to keep our game running after recent changes in fee calculation.

Who are we? We are Evrloot. The first RPG based on RMRK NFTs that managed to deliver a playable game.

By sending your souls (thats what we call our in game characters) to wallets of ours, you can start missions that can yield rewards in the form of new NFTs.

We have minted over 90% of all existing RMRK NFTs on Kusama to date and 99% of them come from rewards that players got from going on missions.

There are approximately 2000 missions started each day.

With the recent changes in fee calculation by Gavin Wood himself in referendum 254 (https://kusama.polkassembly.io/referendum/254) our game was forced to shut down almost immediately. With an active playerbase of around 120 players, we had daily minting fees of around 1 KSM. Earning royalties from our NFTs was barely enough to cover those costs. But since fees increased by a factor of 10, we are not able to maintain our game anymore.

Since there is no way for us to let the players mint the NFTs for themselves without Smart Contracts or Pallets, we need to do it for them and cover the costs.

We also dont want to charge the players for playing the game. We are not talking about some cents, but multiple dollars per day to play a blockchain game.

To give some perspective on how much it would cost the players if they were to cover:

A player with 2 Souls and an average of 4 Missions/soul/day and two trades would be paying around 2.8$/daily (ca. 1,2$ for missions + 0.80$ for sending souls and resources + 0.80$ for trading) A player with 10 souls and an average of 8 Missions/soul and five trades around 22$/daily

These costs are too high in our opinion and after a vote in our discord server, the community agrees.

The proposed 333 KSM would last for approximetly 1 month. After that we would need to reapply for funding.

With the advancements in RMRK 3.0 on Smart Contracts we are soon migrating to Moonbeam to hopefully find a even bigger playerbase and further decentralize.

This means the funding would be applied for the period between now and the migration to Moonbeam.

The KSM from the treasury would be used to pay the gas fees required to keep the game running. So its entirety would go back into the system.

Never heard of us? Visit our website under evrloot.com or take a look at our game under game.evrloot.com

Additional comment on concerns from voters posted here for visibility:

Hi Adam,

first of all, happy new years to you and everyone reading this. I hope it will be a great one for everybody.



This will be my last response to this topic. While I like the idea of discussions, this is taking up too much time and space in my mind. It is hindering me on what I actually want to do, which is building and delivering to the people. Building not only benefits our players, but the space and Kusama as a whole and wasting energy on discussions like this will not get us anywhere. I can only repeat it again: This proposal is not a compensation for our efforts of pushing the boundries of Kusama and RMRK, this is simply a proposal to help us bench the costs for a short transition period, where not a single cent goes into our pockets, but everything comes full circle in the ecosystem. I am more than happy to have you in a public twitter space or in a discord call, so reach out if you are willing to do that.





Anyway, let me go through your claims one by one.





„I find it haughty to think RMRK is the sole reason for governance activity on Kusama. It certainly helped bring user into the ecosystem but it's not the one thing bringing all users to Kusama.“





I never said RMRK is the sole reason for governance activity. But I am pretty sure even you will agree, that governance participation will not noticeably increase with even greater advancements of technology on a chain, but rather by people who love products that live on a chain and are passionate about being a part of governing the ecosystem those products live in. Non technical people dont care as much about the tech as we do, they want to enjoy their experiences and be a part of something that feels fun and they can identify with.





„Let me get this straight, you want Kusama to front the bill for a small minority of token holders to continue farming rewards from your game until you can migrate your whole userbase away from Kusama and onto Moonbeam? Why should KSM holders vote to fund anything with an explicit plan to abandon the chain?“





The game is on Kusama, the players are on Kusama. The fees are paid on the Kusama chain. I am not sure what your point is here. Would your opinion change if we had 1000 players? Would that player base be big enough to rationalize it for you? This gives me real - being rude to the waiter but extra friendly when the restaurant owner comes to the table - vibes, maybe thats just me though. Like you already said, we are migrating because our operations turned out to be unsustainable over night, and we are migrating. Make of that what you want. We love the dotsama space and the tech behind it. We could probably go to Ethereum and earn a multiple of revenue than we are doing right now, because we are actually delivering something. But we love the ecosystem and the people here and at least for me Kusama and Polkadot is one big family





„You are quite literally asking for funding. All because you're using the funds in a certain way doesn't mean you're not asking for funding.“





I could have worded that better. What I meant was that we are not asking for funding of our project and the time cost that is involved in that. We are not asking for thousands of development hours being compensated with 100+$ each. And trust me, there are thousands of hours put into Evrloot.





„While I agree the fee change was jarring and was sort of a "rider bill" on Referendum 14, it certainly wasn't something that came with only 3 hours notice - very misleading. Referendum 14 was submitted at block #15,657,166 and was approved at block #15,680,413 for a total time of 41 hours. If you're going with the first publication of the fee change, Gavin merged the change on December 4th 10:51am UTC, nearly 5 days before it was enacted on-chain. Also, if you remember in ~Q2 of 2021, the fees were reduced 10x when KSM was worth 10 times its current price. To say you weren't expecting this fee to return to its original amount after KSM lost 10x its value is, with all due respect, simply naïve. It was written on the walls.“





I agree that we could go through each and every proposal that gets published and probably even follow Gavins commits on github and try to understand every line he writes. But in practice, this is not what we do. One the one hand because there are only 24 hours in a day and every person in our team is working a full time job „on the side“. On the other hand I dont feel like this should be our responsibility. Isnt this what the whole Parachain thought is about? Having something you can trust on, build on top and dont have to waste pressure time on. I am personally relatively new to this space and did not expect the fees to 10x, maybe I should have, looking out for stuff like this in the future. We are trying really hard to be as up to date in this space as we can, but it feels overwhelming even for us.



Your argument that there would have been anything we could have moved in this proposal is just as naïve as our thought that a test chain is there to allow people to test stuff and not constantly worry about running out of KSM to pay gas fees. 



„Claim: Evrloot has minted 90% of all existing RMRK NFTs Truth: This figure is actually ~35%, yet unique holders of Evrloot NFTs only make up ~1.44% of all unique RMRK NFT holders.“



This was admittedly a wrong stat. What I had in mind is a statistic we tweeted about a few weeks ago:

twitter post Where we were minting close to 90% of all NFTs. But thats obviously just a 7D capture and not all time. Maybe I should have focused more on the utility we are offering, total minted NFTs is a stupid stat to go for anywhere, anybody can do that with minimal experience in javascript and enough KSM. What matters is what your NFT can do, which is our strong suit. Sorry for that.

Now lets get to the provable wrong statements of yours.





„Claim: Active userbase of 120 users Truth: Since block #15,000,000, 67 wallets were responsible for 90% of all non-team Evrloot SEND interactions“





I love that you took the time to analyze this and even printed out the list of all users that sent evrloot NFTs, because its even more than I thought. So we had 196 non-evrloot-wallet senders since block #15000000 . Every game EVER has a small amount of players put in the most amount of time and effort and the rest of the playerbase gradually investing less and less time compared to those. Obviously it wont be any different for us. Lets say 60% of those wallets, that sent evrloot NFTs, are actually players (why would they not, they can use their NFTs and get more for basically free by playing our game -> UTILITY), thats pretty much exactly 120 players. What I based my number on is unique wallets starting missions through our frontend on a daily basis. I am pretty sure most game studios go with users per month on this important stat, but we went with unique active DAILY wallets. And now we even have the blockchain data to prove it.





„Claim: Users with 10 souls spend $22 per day Truth: There are only 4 wallets spending this much per day with a high cost estimate per SEND interaction and absolutely no wallets spending this much with low cost estimate per SEND interaction„





There is a fundamental aspect wrong here (READ THE PROPOSAL):





I never said a player with 10 souls is spending 22$ per day. It says „If the players were to cover“! We are paying for all Minting fees related to our games, plus sending back the souls of the players back after the mission finished. Thats why we had to stop the game, we couldnt pay for these fees anymore. This is not about the send remarks players are creating. But since you did the calculation: Its insane that 4 wallets are already paying over 22$ per day ONLY for sending. This is about covering the minting costs and send remarks that are created on our side! A send remark is one of the cheapest remarks you can create on Kusama because of its relatively small size. What we are doing is minting NFTs for them based on the results of a mission. Minting one of our Fish for example (our most popular collection) takes not only 2 completely separate extrinsics, because of the way remark minting works, but its also approx. 14 times its size -> MINT (almost the same as send) - 3 RESADDS (one resource for a nice thumb on singular, one for our game, one to be equippable -> every single one being 4 times the size of a send) - SEND of the NFT to the player. Minting a fish costs us around 20 cents. And we dont have NFTs with 60 resources, like the abomination of NFTs you created, Adam.





„Claim: Users think these fees are too expensive and are unwilling to pay them Truth: Current holders of Evrloot NFTs have endured a total net loss of 958 KSM on Evrloot NFTs so far. Clearly, users have no issue spending KSM on Evrloot. You also hosted a poll in your discord which does not verify Evrloot NFT ownership, so we have no way of knowing if your poll is actually the will of Evrloot NFT holders.“

What is this statistic supposed to mean? We had an initial sale volume of around 3k KSM in total from our very first collection, the Book of Lore and our Souls. So per your definition that would be a 3k KSM total net loss for Evrloot players? Following this definition, players actually were able to recuperate over 2k KSM by new players joining in and them being willing to pay rising floor prices because the demand rose and the utility we offer. 

If this is your actual definition and viewpoint I actually find it really sad how you view this whole space. While paying for a dinoxdino egg was, in my opinion, quite the net loss, I dont think purchasing a soul of ours is. You actually get something. You get utility, an ingame on chain marketplace, a merchant that offers trades to you on a daily basis, new content at least once a month. You dont get empty promises and month of not hearing anything.

 For the discord poll: Nice try in getting us to use your rmrk dao site again, but no thanks :)





Regarding Moonbeam and your opinion of them needing to help us cover this difficult period:





The amount of support and help from a technical, business and personal perspective from their Moonbeam council and Derek himself, is already a multitude higher than anything we experienced here.





Addressing Paradox, because I want to comment on two of his/her concerns:





Hi Paradox,





„The proposal is not well presented and on the surface it just seems to be adapted to gain the maximum allowance of the track. Dare I say that Adam presented a better counter with his responses.“





Not sure what you mean with Adams counter. Having the Moonbeam foundation cover? They will say the exact same thing Adam is saying right now: „The game is not on our chain and neither is the current gameplay“. Where we are though, is Kusama. We are not milking Kusama for anything. We want to provide something for the users of the chain and thats the chain we are asking to cover those expenses.





„I agree with the position that the relay-chain should not be conflicted with non-essential activities, likes games. It is primarily designed for chain security and fees should be adapted in adherence to this principle.“





While I understand this position I hope you can understand ours as well. We loved RMRK and what they were building and wanted to create something ourselves. While their advancements to EVMs and Pallets and thus Polkadot are finally happening, back in March, Kusama was the only way to start building with RMRK. We were RMRK first from the beginning and still are, so this limitation effectively hindered us at starting this anywhere else. We could have obviously waited a year more for the dependencies to be ready, but thats not how we operate and thats never going to be how we operate. We want to build cool stuff, do it as fast and good as possible. If that means Kusama, we will be on Kusama, if that means Moonbeam, we will be on Moonbeam. We would much rather deliver something at 80% perfection and create cool experiences for everyone involved, than to crawl towards the unachievable 100% and waste precious time and resources.





„Should the relay-chain treasury pay for a project that adopted a poor business model? I think this proposal is best suited for the destination SC chain in this case Moonbeam.“





This was never really about the business model. While we do have multiple approaches to earn revenue from cosmetics, the marketplace, potential new souls when the playerbase grows, we first need to focus on delivering a pleasant experience. Selling eggs and letting buyers wait for a year before anything happens is horrible in my opinion, but is the business model of 90% of other collections in this space. Regarding Moonbeam -> I addressed this earlier.