Poking EOS Knights

Finally, after letting all that hubbub about that launch of EOS main net pass by, I'm looking at what's out there. What prompted me was this in-depth post about EOS Knights and I just wanted to test it out.

I had registered my tokens back when they were ERC20 tokens, but I did not realize that an account was generated for me based on that. My fault, really. I knew I had a public private key pair and I put it into the Scatter wallet, but I did not realize I had to add to do an extra step of setting up the identity which loaded the corresponding account that was set up by the token swap procedure.

Instead, I went through the EOS account creation process to make a named account (I used NameValue which worked well enough, but there are many options). It seems counterintuitive to have to pay for one of these, but rest assured that not much of a cut is taken from these services, most of the cost is in purchasing the resources for staking so that your account is usable. At least I now have a better sounding name. At some point I want to transfer everything over to that account but that seems a little complicated. For now, I got an EOS account named something like gghdoygsggjl (12 characters long, and that's not it. I just made that up).

But let's see... EOS Knights. An idle game running on EOS, where you fight goblins for materials to craft better gear, the same old formula. An open marketplace in which to trade them for EOS.

Yes, your eyes didn't fool you-- game is taking place within a picture of a phone, as if it were emulated. I suppose it's to get consistency with the actual eventual mobile experience, but it's still kind of funny to see that.

When the network is smooth, it's a satisfying experience. Scatter, which resembles MetaMask, integrates seamlessly, and I would describe the experience as "what I wished cryptokitties felt like". And the main difference is not having to worry about fees at all. I'm sure this is obvious but people should prefer staking for resources over fees any day. The only down side is that in periods of busy activity, one might need to stake a lot more to maintain smoothness, and in the current state of EOS oftentimes you just have to wait it out and go so something else.

About the game itself, you need 0.1 EOS to start with a character, and 0.1+0.2+0.4 for the maximum of three characters. Having three characters is a must for this game given how it is designed. As characters kill goblins, there's a drop rate for loot based on the luck attribute, the dungeon properties and the floor of the dungeon. Every 10 kills brings you up a floor. While the three characters attack their own zombies independently, the kill count is added amongst all three characters. Also, after the characters respawn, each character takes with them one piece of loot (the rarest piece).

A few pointers:

• In the beginning, respawn early and often (expected value wise, if the drop rate is p, wait until 1/p monsters are killed) so you can craft basic gear with the drops.
• Uniques start dropping at level 40, so try to get gear that will push you there, and then start prioritizing luck.
• I've managed to keep my inventory in check by immediately dropping common items that I roughly know how to find using the early revive on the right stage.

In case you're curious, I've made a tiny bit of EOS from selling materials and loot.

And this is my main character:

So far the highest floor I've hit is level 60. And I'm not spending more than the minimum amount, essentially. Is this game fun? Well, it's as fun as an idle RPG can be. It's the same psychological addition to progress. But it's pretty cool to see the some EOS games in a working state. For now, I'll be interested in seeing what the future holds for EOS... I can say that I'm pretty impressed with the set of tooling available right now, and many things are familiar to STEEM, such as voting for block producers and staking/delegating resources. Still, it's complicated, and hopefully that will change as things develop. Anyone else here exploring it all?