Introducing new internal tooling, Casual Compietitions, randomness on-chain, and more!
Compietition Tooling
Over the last couple of months, we’ve had our resident Head Chef (Bonfire) in the secret downstairs kitchen, baking something special up. Today, we wanted to share more details on it.
Previously, every Compietition was manually coded, created and audited by Bonfire. This was essential in making sure MyPies worked smoothly. It also ensured that collectors like yourselves never had to stress about it. This worked well for creating bigger, longer-running Compietitions, but made short-term Compietitions less of a focus, since they both required similar amounts of manual coding and dev work.
That’s why we’ve built our own internal tooling: a Compietition Builder. This means we can now create Compietitions, with some minor changes, without needing to code and dev each one. Those of you who’ve been paying attention in our Discord will already have seen the first two examples of this being used for our Valenpies and Trait Raffle Compietitions.
You’ll notice a couple minor changes. First, the MyPies page won’t give you as much detailed feedback if you make an incorrect error. For example, if the Compietition says “Submit all Piesons” and you submit a Doughbot, it won’t tell you why it’s wrong. Previously, when we manually coded them, we would code in that “error” reporting for users. This is an important, even if sometimes minor, difference for you to be aware of.
(Notably, we have still built in some checks on submissions, depending on the given Compietition.)
This goes even further — it will actually still accept your incorrect submission, even though it wasn’t valid. While the MyPies tool might accept it, you won’t actually have a valid entry and it will be caught when we process the results after the Compietition wraps up. Basically, MyPies is now like your home oven — you can put whatever ingredients you want in it, but if you don’t follow the recipe, you won’t have a tasty pie to enjoy!
Of course, every Compietition still requires the team to put work into it, especially when it comes to the final results and selecting winners. You may notice on certain Compietitions we will be a bit slower than before for selecting winners or sharing results, but we will do our best to keep you all informed.
We recognize there are pros and cons to this new approach, so we welcome you to share your thoughts in our Discord. Our priority here is to make sure you’re all aware of these changes to the MyPies experience!
With that being said, let’s talk about what new things you can expect in 2024 from Pieland Compietitions.
Casual Compietitions
Now that we can easily spin up a short-term Compietition, you best pielieve that’s what we plan to do. We’re introducing a new format of Compietions in Pieland — “Casual Compietitions”. These Compietitions will be aimed primarily at having fun and being shorter term.
For the rest of 2024, we’ll be running at least 1 Casual Compietition every month! But keep an eye open for us to roll out more. When we do run one, the length of it will vary. Sometimes, it might be a 3-day weekend timeframe, other times it might just be till the end of the same day. It will depend on the Compietition itself and what else is going on in the world of Pieland at the time. We will always post about them launching in the #compietition-updates channel on our Discord though! (unless, you know, we do a few secret ones…)
Likewise, the difficulty and accessibility won’t always be for everyone. For example, we might do a Casual Compietition that requires one very specific trait, and maybe only 4 or 5 Octopies even qualify. However, to help keep this balanced and fair for the community at large, we will also keep our rewards and prizing relatively low on these. You can expect the prize pool to regularly be below a couple hundred dollars (or equivalent) for them.
A key note is that we aren’t intending to use this format to drive the Lore of Pieland. Of course, they will still exist within the Pieland universe, but will be rarely used for sharing updates on the main or side stories of Pieland. However, if you pay attention, you might notice a few easter eggs being dropped here and there…
So, if you’re not interested in taking part in these, you won’t miss out on a ton. However, if you want to get competitive with fellow collectors, have a chance at some prizes, and earn ultimate bragging rights among the same Trait holders, then you should get excited!
The TL;DR of the above can be summarised by a few general guidelines — not hard rules — that you can expect from a Casual Compietition:
- Occurring on a monthly cadence
- Runtime of anywhere from 12 hours to 4 or 5 days
- Various levels of difficulty and access
- Smaller prizing/rewards
- Not tied to the main Lore of Pieland
A Compietition Series
To celebrate Pi Day this year, we’ve launched a multi-series Compietition in Pieland!
The way a Series will work is fairly simple — we have multiple Compietitions, in which your results in each of the Compietitions will be tallied up for a final leaderboard. They will usually have at least 1–2 stages open to everyone to compete in, not just those holding a big collection. That means even a single Octopie holder can play in the Series.
What it will look like on a more detailed level will vary depending on the Compietition Series. Some of them might require multiple entries. Some might limit you to picking one of the Compietitions. We’ve got a lot of fun concepts and ideas here, that we can’t wait to flesh out and bring to life for you all.
But before we do that, we have to run our first one and get your feedback! So, if you’re interested in entering the first Pieland Compietition Series that we launched today, head over to MyPies and make a submission. Please make sure you read the main article on it here for full details.
We want to explore more ideas like this in the future, so we encourage and welcome any feedback you have on this in our Discord.
Randomness On-Chain
Another feature we plan to make a mainstay is using on-chain randomness to pick the winners of our Compietitions.
On-Chain Randomness is a great feature because it brings transparency and verifiable trust to the randomization selection of winners. The process for which we use randomization to select winners hasn’t really changed. But now, rather than running it on a closed-off database set-up like Excel or using Random.org, we’re using On-Chain Randomization.
This is possible thanks to the random selection tool built by Piece.gg on the Flow Blockchain. When we use this tool, you’ll be able to confirm for yourself that all valid entries were submitted into the randomizer, everyone had a fair chance (based on their valid entry or entries), and that it wasn’t tampered with.
We think this is a minor, but important, step to take. We also did this for the recent Trait Raffle Compietition. We used the Piece tool and some napkin math to do a weighted randomization draw for a winner, based on the number of traits in the submitted Octopie. You can see the results of this recent Compietition and the links showing the on-chain randomization here.
We hope this thorough breakdown of the latest updates and plans to our Compietitons has been helpful! As always, we welcome and encourage your thoughts on these topics on our Discord, Twitter, or Instagram.
Thank you — and happy Pi Day!
Note — You can also find a previous Compietition updates article here.
