Domination: A Massive Online Collaborative Strategy Experience (MOCSE)

WTF is a MOCSE? (mo-see)

Massive Online: a shared virtual environment.

Collaborative: involving two or more parties working together.

Strategy: a plan of action designed to achieve a long-term or overall aim.

Experience: an event or occurrence which leaves an impression on someone.

In the coming months, Kaizen Corps will be working on the first release of Domination. The first MOCSE.

At its heart, Domination is an experiment, with the purpose of discovering how large groups of players can coordinate to achieve a set of group-oriented objectives.

More on the experimental nature of this project later...

We are in the VERY early stages of development and all of this is subject to change.

Our plan is to release an initial complete (but limited) version of the experience in order to start garnering feedback as early as possible.

This will allow us to have an iterative development process using direct feedback from our community. More than anything, we want this project to be community-driven.

The Experience

In Domination, players are split into factions.

Each faction may contain several thousand players (more as we eventually scale up the game) and the objective for each player is simple: help your faction to achieve territorial dominance.

The experience itself will be different from traditional games, as this won’t be a real-time strategy, role-playing, or even turn-based game.

Domination will be a simultaneous game, meaning the moves players make will all be executed at the same time. This will be accomplished by dividing game-time into cycles.

A cycle will consist of a 24-hour period, during which all players are allowed to submit moves based on their Kai’s attributes.

At the end of the cycle, all moves for every faction are tallied up and executed simultaneously. The results, along with the moves themselves, are then available for all players to analyze, and can be used as information to determine the next set of moves in the following cycle.

The last remaining faction becomes the winner of the campaign.

Initially, we’ll be targeting a full campaign to take anywhere between 15–30 cycles (2–4 weeks). Once a campaign completes, rewards are distributed, with bonuses being awarded to winning faction members.

The rewards and a refined explanation of the mechanics will be released in a future post. Some of the initial reward ideas are around utility tokens, additional Kai assets, future campaign advantages, or stat boosts amongst others.

Participation

The only requirement to play Domination is to be a Kai holder.

The total player limit for any given campaign will be 9999 (the size of our first drop). Each player will be represented in the game by the Kai that they hold, and each Kai will have its own set of experience points and stats.

While the details of the experience points and stats system haven’t been developed yet, there will be an accrual mechanism, and players will be rewarded for participation in campaigns.

The Genesis Event

The Genesis Event will take place before the initial release of v.1.

Kais will receive their initial loadout of stats. We will also distribute individual Kai assets or other (non-rarity-related) attributes. Kais that do not participate in the Genesis Event will receive a standard-issue loadout before participating in any campaigns.

Players will be able to dictate the distribution of stats to affect the overall loadout similar to the way many RPG games allow players to select their own character attributes.

Gameplay

The main idea of Domination is collaborative coordination.

The only tool that players will have at their disposal for this (initially in v1.0) is faction-specific Discord channels.

This is where all the planning and strategizing will take place among faction members. Once faction members have decided on a course of action, individual players will submit their move for the cycle.

The process of move submission is simple, and the initial list of possible moves that a player will be able to make in v1.0 will be short. Currently, that list is comprised of (subject to change + will evolve):

• Attack: This move has a target, which is another faction that the player selects.
• Defend: This move serves to protect the faction from attack by any neighboring faction.
• Upgrade: This move will increase the stats of an individual kai, which will take effect upon the next cycle.
• Repair: This move will enable a disabled kai, which will then be able to participate in the next cycle.

If the attacking power of a faction against another faction outweighs the defending power, the result is that Kais in the defending faction will be disabled and will no longer be able to participate in subsequent cycles.

Once all Kais within a faction are disabled, that faction is eliminated from the campaign.

Each Kai will have its own individual power stats, which will have a bearing on the effectiveness of its move. And while it’ll be possible for an individual player to make a move irrespective of the wishes of the faction, a winning strategy will take coordination among members.

In future versions, we plan to introduce a variety of tools for social coordination. For example, tools for self-governance: being able to punish bad actors or insurgents, and reward good ones.

In addition to the Discord channels for coordination, players will have access to all the information specific to the campaign. This information will be available in the form of a dashboard.

Interface

The dashboard will be a data visualization tool. It will display relevant data such as the current status of every faction (# active vs disabled Kais) and will include a breakdown of all the past moves made by every faction in all the previous cycles.

However, it will NOT include moves made in the current cycle, as those are only revealed when the cycle ends (though it might reveal other current-cycle data such as the number of moves that have been submitted).

Central to the dashboard view will be the map, which will display the current territorial dominance of every faction. The first version of Domination will have a VERY simple dashboard and correspondingly simple map.

As the experience evolves, and many more game elements are added, so will the dashboard. These two initial interface components: the Discord channels and dashboard, will make up the UI of Domination v.1.0.

Spectators

While the dashboard will be used by players to view status and campaign information to aid in their decision-making (and to submit their moves), it will also be available for anyone to view.

This will be a real-time view for anyone to see submitted moves, and by which Kai. While we hope to make the campaigns entertaining for spectators to observe, our goal is to include spectators in the gameplay itself as another social element.

v1.0 — Basic Release (Beta)

Our ultimate vision for Domination results in the integration of all the social aspects along with gameplay and data into something that we hesitate to call a metaverse.

Version 1.0 will be a basic proof of concept. We’ll have faction-specific Discord channels for coordination, and we’ll have a basic dashboard.

The dashboard will have all the necessary campaign data, but it won’t necessarily be ‘sexy.’

Feedback from our community will help us decide where we should be focusing our efforts for improvement. The upside to releasing a proof of concept is that we get to release in months instead of years.

Roadmap | Expansion

The roadmap for Domination (subject to change + will evolve):

• 2022 Q1 — Begin closed alpha launch for a limited set of Kai holders. We’ll run simultaneous cohorts with various tweaks in the mechanics and shorter cycle times so that we can iterate quickly and nail down our gameplay mechanics and dashboard.
• 2022 Q2 — Initial beta launch. This is where we scale the game up to thousands of players and start testing the social dynamics, and coordination.
• 2022 Q3 — Full launch + feature expansion.
• 2022 Q4–2nd NFT drop to allow for player expansion.

The expansion includes adding more elements to gameplay for a greater variety of strategies and tactics. This may include:

• Game assets (faction/kai assets)
• Assets marketplace
• Geographic elements (movement, territories, land features)
• Social elements (diplomacy/insurgency)
• Attributes (faction/kai attributes)
• Social coordination tools
• Additional objectives (supply routes, asset capturing)
• Move variance (e.g. being able to “buy” additional moves or save them)

Now Let’s Get Meta

We did mention that all of this is an experiment. The purpose of that experiment is to explore the aspects of social coordination at scale.

This same experiment is currently being run throughout the crypto space in the form of DAOs. Domination is our method of fast-tracking said experiment.

Some of the questions we’d like to answer are:

• How can a large group of individuals coordinate to achieve a set of goals?
• What will this coordination look like?
• How do you deal with bad actors or non-participants?

We hope to explore the answers to these questions and our goal is to build the necessary tools and infrastructure along the way.

The learnings from this experience will aid in the construction and governance of our own DAO.

We’ve been beating the “community first” drum since the inception of Kaizen Corps. To that end, we’re looking to discover the best ways to collaborate with our community to build Kaizen Corps together.

Our plans for Kaizen Corps go way beyond the scope of NFTs or even Domination.

Our NFT drop will be the first step, and while Domination will be the next milestone, we’re just getting started. Let us know what you think in the comments and in our Discord.

We’ll see you on the field.

— Kaizen Corps Team, over & out.

Developer: @silostack

Founder: @Hiro__Yuy

Artist: @Hard_Surfaced

Marketer: @Argobolt

Twitter: @KaizenCorpsNFT

Discord: discord.gg/kaizencorps