TL;DR

• Web3 gaming faces challenges with retention due to overreliance on financial incentives (e.g. Play-to-Airdrop), leading to low player engagement after campaigns end.

• ggQuest aims to create engaging in-game experiences through gamified quests and complex structures, rewarding real players instead of bots and maximizing player retention.

• ggQuest's toolkit includes real-time tracking engines, no-code quest builders, and discovery platforms to attract and retain players

• ggQuest's future plans involve the upcoming launch of guilds and opening access to its Questmaker platform to empower UGC creators.

Problems Web3 Gaming Is Facing

Moving from play-to-earn to play-and-earn and currently, Play-to-Airdrop (P2A), games are still facing the same major challenge - an overreliance on monetary incentives for user acquisition.

Missing retention

As the main incentive is financial, once a P2A campaign ends, games struggle to retain players. Users usually complete a checklist of boring actions in anticipation of rewards, mostly a mix of social quests which boost vanity metrics, overpowered referrals, and some in-game progress. When that’s done, they leave.

The quests themselves aren’t fun.

Real players get diluted

Another problem of the quests mentioned above is that they’re easy to sybil-attack. Extractive users are able to maximize their share of airdrops while real, interested players are not adequately rewarded compared to their value.

As a whole, this results in an ineffective allocation of rewards. Games onboard low-quality value extractors, not a golden cohort.

The ggQuest Potion: Unique In-Game Experiences That Delight Players

At ggQuest, we’re taking a different approach. We want to change how you react when hearing the word “quest” - from 😒 to 👀

Fun experiences, not boring checklists of actions

We gamify game loops through in-game quests & metagame layers that deeply integrate into games. Our quests synthesize various in-game actions and combine them with additional conditions to create novel experiences that engage and retain players.

Effective reward allocation

By building more complex quest structures that are challenging to complete and cannot be gamed (in contrast to e.g. referrals), we reward engaged players instead of sybil attackers and bots. For players, that means better rewards! (If you’re bot, sorry)

Seamless integration into Go-to-Market campaigns

ggQuest turns social engagement into in-game activity. We’re working with content creators to curate quests and run PvP competitions between their communities.

Under The Hood

To make immersive quests possible, we created a vertically integrated toolkit over the last year.

• Quest Engine & SDK: The Quest Engine tracks real-time player interactions and awards onchain achievements and XP

• Quest Maker No-Code Builder: Synthesize player actions into new quests with special conditions and reward logic

• ggQuest Discovery Platform: Flagship platform showcasing the power of our engine and protocol

Through this, we create a flywheel effect where more content attracts more players, which makes the platform more interesting for games we then integrate for more content, and so on.

Proof-of-Work

Pirate Nation

We’ve created ‘Pirate School’, an interactive onboarding campaign for new users, built permissionlessly on top of Pirate Nation’s smart contracts. ‘Pirate School’ saw multiple seasons with 5.000+ players completing 15.000+ in-game quests, with a retention rate of up to 75%.

Additionally, we hosted a 128-Player PvP Tournament that garnered 16.000+ livestream views.

Redstone Mainnet Launch

ggQuest was selected as an official partner of the Redstone mainnet launch together with 8 other teams. Within a four week deadline, we shipped a new indexer for the chain, built real-time tracking of in-game actions, and spun up 71 quests across 5 games for an ecosystem-wide engagement campaign. At launch, ggQuest accounted for 50% of active players on Redstone.

Duper

As our first offchain integration, we designed a tutorial quest campaign, milestone achievements, and creator challenges with the Duper team.

Overall, 150+ in-game quests are live across 6+ games, driving 20.000+ player conversions.

What’s coming next?

6.000+ players are using their Quest ID as a cross-chain reputation profile for gaming, aggregating activity across chains, games, and multiple wallets. Next, we will populate the social graph of our Quest ID Player Network by launching Guilds.

Further game integrations will boost our flywheel of more content → more players → more content …

Our vision is to completely open access to our Questmaker, allowing anyone to create and monetize UGC on their own. The ggQuest Discovery Platform acts as a marketplace of player liquidity. Creators build novel UGC experiences to attract players and games pay them for bringing in-game activity to their game. Think of it like UEFN but as an onchain protocol, servicing a broad range of games and engines.

From August 06 - 27, complete immersive ggQuest experiences and be rewarded with extra Sparks (in-game currency) on top of the Season 1 rewards.

Get Started

🔰 Finish the tutorial playground and Duper School to learn the ropes of the game, earn your first XP, and unlock additional challenges

⚔️ Complete missions to earn XP and climb the leaderboard

🪙 Receive extra Sparks and lore card NFTs

Think you’re the best Duper player? We’ll also host a Duper esports tournament with cash prizes. More details are coming soon.

Duper School

Duper’s genre mix is unique and can therefore feel intimidating to new players. That’s why we’re launching “Duper School”, an interactive tutorial to familiarize yourself with the different gameplay layers: Battles, resource management, and the social metagame.

First, finish the tutorial playground, a PvE environment to teach you the basics.

Then, take your learnings to the PvP matches in Duper School.

Upon completion of Duper School, you receive the “Duper School” Lore Card NFT as a graduation gift. But be fast, it’s limited to the first 100 players.The Lore Card gives you a chance of a Sparks Airdrop and an exclusive chance to enter the Duper esports tournament with cash prizes.

Duper Challenges

Adventure 3 provides additional challenges for you to take on and increase your XP.

Within the campaign’s three weeks, we’ll regularly publish new in-game experiences for you to explore, ranging from easy to hard challenges. Complete the missions and earn XP to climb the campaign leaderboard.

Leaderboard Rewards

At the end of the three-week campaign, players will share the Sparks prize pool based on their earned XP. All players with at least 115 XP are eligible.

How To Get Started

➡️ Head over to the Duper Quests

1. Mint your Quest ID (on Arbitrum Sepolia) for free if you don’t have one yet

2. In your Duper profile settings, link ggQuest

3. Complete the Tutorial Playground and Duper School

4. Beat Duper challenges to increase your XP and maximize your Spark rewards

Check out our wiki for more info.

🔰 Finish Pirate School to learn the ropes of the game and unlock daily gauntlet quests

⚔️ Complete daily gauntlets to accumulate XP and climb the leaderboard

🪙 Receive PGLD based on your XP. Total prize pool: Up to 1,000,000 PGLD

Quests are live May 29th until the end of Booty Season 1 (June 10th)

Get started

More info on how to get started below

Prizes

Earn your share of the 1,000,000 PGLD prize pool by completing quests. Invite your friends to unlock community bonuses for the prize pool.

The more total XP all players together earn, the higher the rewards.

As a special reward, the first 500 players get the Pirate School Lore Card NFT

• Entry ticket to our upcoming Pirate Nation Tournament

• Access to a special Discord channel

• Future utility

How To Get Started

➡️ Get started on testnet.gg.quest

1. If you didn’t join Pirate Nation yet, use code P-fast-helm-8769 to get early access

2. Mint your Quest ID (on Arbitrum Sepolia) for free if you don’t have one yet

   1. Make sure to link the wallet you’re using for Pirate Nation

3. Complete Pirate School (Quests 1-5) to earn your first XP and unlock the daily gauntlet quests.

   

4. Beat the normal and hard gauntlets to earn XP. Come back daily to maximize your PGLD reward

   

About Pirate Nation

Pirate Nation is a fully onchain RPG built by the scallywags at Proof of Play, a team consisting of game industry veterans from Epic Games, Blizzard, Riot Games, Zynga, Disney, and Scopely, who raised $33m for their treasure chest.

Players collect and send pirates on adventures where they collect materials for crafting, treasures, and pirate gold! Pirates gain experience and can level up from their many adventures.

We have big news! We’re bringing our onchain progression system to Redstone and are adding full support for the MUD framework for onchain apps. Game studios, the modding community, and everyday players will be able to create custom game experiences by accessing onchain player actions and game state, setting up their own game loops, and programmatically awarding rewards to players upon completion.

Game experiences for the first MUD games are going live when Redstone mainnet launches on May 1st as part of Lattice’ Race to Mainnet event. Players will be able to explore Redstone’s game ecosystem and earn achievements by completing in-game challenges.

• Collect NFT achievements by finishing in-game missions

• Climb game-specific leaderboards

• Earn your place on the Redstone leaderboard and claim a Redstone lore card NFT by playing ecosystem games

We’re excited to integrate MUD and can’t wait to see what everyone will be building with it. MUD is the go-to framework for many teams building fully onchain games, such as CCP Games, Primodium, Small Brain Games, Downstream, and Biomes.

ggQuest’s Race to Mainnet Campaign for Redstone

Launch date

May 1st

Details

Each mission will offer players a new type of experience, from interactive tutorials for beginners, to hard challenges for pros, PVP tournaments, and quests to explore the full content of each game.

For completing missions, players are awarded XP, soulbound achievement NFTs, and tradable lore card NFTs. Game leaderboards provide players with an overview of how they fare against others and an ecosystem-level progression system brings it all together. Only the best and most committed players will be able to claim the Redstone Lore Card NFT.

Why Redstone

We’re happy to continue our journey with Lattice which started with our joint Sky Strife Tournament at AW Assembly Istanbul. Lattice is the team behind Redstone, the RTS game Sky Strife, and the development framework MUD which is used by industry leaders such as CCP Games, Primodium, Small Brain Games, Downstream, and Biomes.

By integrating MUD, we’re making ggQuest available to a broad game developer audience and their respective communities. We believe fully onchain gaming will bring the next generation of UGC and are building tools to make modding more accessible, easier to distribute, and better monetizable. Redstone is well-positioned to capture a share of this upcoming market. Therefore, expanding to MUD was a no-brainer for us.

This blog post has previously been published as a series of Twitter threads.

In this guide, you’ll learn:

• What is Play-to-Airdrop

• How to evaluate the different opportunities

• How to identify red flags

• What the challenges of the current meta are

• What the future of Play-to-Airdrop will look like

What is Play-to-Airdrop (P2A)

Play-to-Airdrop campaigns promise players future token rewards for playing a game. If that sounds a bit like Play-to-Earn (P2E) to you, you’re on the right track. We are getting back to that later.

Evaluating Play-to-Airdrop Opportunities

Airdrop details are often sparse. For players, the more details, the better.

Estimate the potential value of the airdrop

• Airdrop size: How many tokens will be airdropped? Will NFT holders get an airdrop (without playing)? This dilutes the value players receive but can create more hype

• Token utility: What’s the token’s use-case? Do you expect it to have demand based on its utility? For example, exclusive in-game utility or revenue sharing are good signs.

• Tokenomics How much supply is circulating at the start? What does the emission schedule look like? High inflation tokens have to find high demand to even just keep their value. Are the airdropped tokens all unlocked at Day 1 or is there vesting?

• Hype The highest-potential P2A campaigns are the ones with little hype right now (allowing you to farm in peace without much competition) but high expected hype near token launch. What does the team have planned to create hype? For example, the release of new features, marketing campaigns, token listings on big exchanges.

• Market cap Based on token utility, tokenomics and (expected) hype, what market cap is realistic for the launch? Are there any alternative assets in the ecosystem (e.g. NFTs) that compete with the token on attention/value accrual?

• Liquidity How big will be the liquidity in relation to the market cap to provide capacity for cashing out? Will there be demand pressure at TGE? Demand pressure is created if not everyone is able to farm the play-to-airdrop which makes them buy on secondary and if existing holders want to get a bigger bag (e.g. because of strong token utility or hype)

• Bonus Am I farming an airdrop for a new shiny L1/L2/L3 on top?

Understand what to do

• Rewarded actions What do I have to do to receive the airdrop? If it’s too easy (limited time and skill needed), farming will be really competitive (dilution). Worst case is actions being easy to bot/sybil attack. If it’s too hard it may not be worth your time if you don’t enjoy the game

• Token distribution How will tokens be distributed? Is distribution pro rata to everyone finishing the required actions or only the top player based on a leaderboard? How realistic is it for me to reach an airdrop share I’m happy with considering the effort I’d have to put in?

• Is there are P2W mechanic? How much would i need to spend to have a chance at the airdrop? (especially if it’s leaderboard rewards)

• Scalability Does putting in more effort equal a bigger airdrop? That’s important to plan how much time to put into the campaign

Forecast your airdrop share

• How realistic is it for me to reach the requirements (e.g. top 100 on the leaderboard)? How easy is it for others to do the same and dilute my airdrop?

• Points are a good indicator which actions are rewarded. If the total points outstanding are also publicly communicated, one can make a good guess about their expected airdrop share

Red Flags

• Little details about the airdrop that make it hard to evaluate (e.g. no points, no airdrop size, unclear tokenomics)

• The game had no players before the P2A announcement but a lot of them afterwards. Means that there’s limited actual demand for the game which isn’t a good sign for the token. Could also mean that there are a lot of bots/sybil attackers

• Team boasts about high player numbers but you don’t encounter them in-game. Players then usually means downloads, not DAU

• Strong monetization: players need to invest a lot for the chance at an airdrop

Tips

• Create a scoring system based on our guide on ‘How to evaluate P2A campaigns’. Compare P2A campaigns and allocate your time to the most promising ones

• Go deep enough into each game rather than too broad. Focus on game you like and have high conviction in to make sure you reach a good amount of activity there vs trying each game a couple of minutes and not qualifying for any airdrop

• Create a Google Sheet to keep overview of all your wallets and associated games to not miss any airdrop

• Make a new wallet for each new game for security. You’ll later be able to aggregate them all in your Quest ID

Benefits and Challenges of Play-to-Airdrop

Benefits

• It’s a new form of user acquisition where games reward players directly to try out a game instead of paying ad networks. More money stays in the gaming ecosystem rather than getting sucked out of it.

• Creates speculation & attention. This attention can be captured in higher NFT floors or revenue generation (IAPs, NFT sales)

• Compared to P2E, game developers have more flexibility. Player incentives can be separated in time from the token going live. That gives teams time to build network effects and token utility so once the token launches, demand is stronger.

Challenges

• Speculation can get people rekt. Keeping details low can drum up players’ expectations and increases the risk of a dissatisfied user base afterwards.

• Similarly to P2E, financial incentives are the main driver for players. It’s unclear how many will keep players without rewards and whether they are willing to spend money in-game. Having a good game or at least vertical slice is key here.

• P2A campaigns are too broad and take in-game action of players as the only data point. That means games spend a lot of incentives on players that don’t bring a return on investment. The rewards for valuable players get diluted, decreasing the chances of onboarding them.

The Future of Play-to-Airdrop

While some of the challenges can be addressed right now, others require better tooling to be in place.

Low-hanging fruits

• Game studios should provide enough info for players to form realistic expectations but also keep some secrets to foster speculation

• Short seasons keep player expectations in range, allow to change the farming meta to have users explore different game features and maintain attention, and allow newcomers to join the P2A campaign without feeling that it’s too late

• Don’t reward easy-to-manipulate actions

Smart Play-to-Airdrop

The next unlock is what we call smart P2A. As with all user acquisition methods, more data points and user segmentation are crucial to run effective campaigns.

Holding a specific token/NFT or being a user of a protocol are all just singular data points. The real magic happens when combining multiple data points to determine how similar a user is to the ideal user profile/golden cohort.

We’ve been building our infrastructure for over 1 year, which enables game studios to run more effective P2A campaigns & other forms of innovative user acquisition. On the other side of the market for attention are players, who can now monetize their reputation better.

• Historical (onchain) data (in-game activity, trading volumes, assets etc) provides additional data points to evaluate players. Quest ID, the proof-of-play passport for web3 gaming, analyzes all of a player’s activity across chains, games, and wallets. Player can easily track their achievements across wallets and monitor their reputation.

• Games can segment P2A rewards based on player actions AND player value to achieve higher efferctiveness. For example, players with a high interest in the genre and large holdings of game assets have a higher estiamted lifetime value and are therefore worth more to games studios. As a result, it makes sense to incentivize them with bigger rewards.

• For players, targeted P2A campaigns mean less noise and less dilution of rewards. Games can use the additional data to reduce sybils, leaving more rewards for real players. High-value players will receive a larger share of incentives.

• The ggQuest platform serves as a central channel to host P2A campaigns. Games get more eyes on their airdrop quests, players never miss an opportunity. Quests on ggQuest are in-game missions. They guide users along the player journey and provide better signals whether players will retain after rewards run out. For example, quests can be used to provide users with an onboarding tutorial.

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The journey starts in your basement as an anon and leads you into space (hopefully to the moon). Quests serve as in-game missions on your path to mastery. Each game is a storyline that adds to the hero’s reputation. Your Quest ID becomes your meta progression layer for web3 gaming.

Along the way, you build your own story. Sometimes, your path crosses with other heroes and historic events are created. We remember these stories together, captured by their onchain footprint forever.

A hero’s journey is also a tale of setbacks, such as rugs or bad trades which you have to overcome. Eventually, they make you stronger. As a protocol, ggQuest enables other teams to build new apps on top of Quest ID. This opens up new paths for heroes with opportunities to grow their skills and reputation further The paths you choose, the missions you engage in, the hurdles you overcome - all this creates a unique story. We encapsulate this story onchain with Quest ID. You become the star of your own IP - a meta IP capturing your journey across web3 gaming. While this has commemorative value, it also showcases your value to games. ggQuest allows you to capture that value.

Quest ID acts as your proof-of-play passport for web3 gaming, allowing you to build, showcase, and monetize your reputation and skills

“Questing” has become a hated term in crypto as it’s mostly associated with mundane social quests such as liking, following, (re)posting, and other boring tasks which create low-quality engagement and lead to spam in social networks as botting is easy and prevalent.

These types of social farming are detrimental for both users (who have slim chances of succeeding due to sybil attackers) and games (who can only push vanity metrics but fail to engage genuine players). Moreover, these practices might backfire as numerous valuable players and investors developed a negative perception of these tactics.

That’s why we recently showcased what our in-game questing system can achieve. “Pirate School Season 1” offered players various in-game missions, rewarding them with the “Golden Compass” NFT after successful completion. The NFT grants access to and ownership of our Pirate Nation DAO known as “The Golden Company”. Let’s look at the number and feedback from users and builders.

tl;dr

Pirate School as a High-Impact Player Engagement Tool

75% Retention Rate

Pirate School Season 1 consisted of 5 chapters. While only 50 NFTs were available as rewards, 96 players completed Chapter 1, with 72 making their way until Chapter 5 - a 75% retention rate.

Engaging real players

Our quests are designed to reach and engage real players, not bots.

• In-game quests: ggQuest features in-game quests with complex logic which allows game studios to build bounties that are difficult to automate and fun for players to complete.

• Data-driven segmentation: Game studios can gate quests based on users’ onchain data. This prevents sybil attackers from crowding out real players and diluting their rewards, which increases the quests’ effectiveness.

• Progression system: Through quests, players can build up their onchain history and unlock new gated quests and achievements. As a result, users gain long-term, intrinsic motivation. This creates healthier incentives than the current short-sighted nature of social questing platforms.

That’s how we ensured that our DAO “The Golden Company” is filled with quality Pirate Nation players.

Quests for every goal

Pirate School Season 1 was geared towards educating novices at the game, serving as an interactive tutorial crafted by the community instead of the developer.

Quests are versatile and can be designed around the game’s goals. For example, we later launched advanced Pirate School quests which featured hard gauntlets that are tough to beat, providing a challenge to veterans.

Other goals game studios can boost through quests might include:

• increasing the engagement of whales

• incentivizing the vertical exploration of features

• fostering social interaction through cooperative or competitive quests

ggQuest supports these different quest goals via its advanced quest framework.

Why We Picked Pirate Nation

• Pirate Nation is a fully onchain game, allowing us to permissionlessly build in-game quests on top to extend the game.

• The team has proven to execute, pushing a new update every week for over a year. The product roadmap is full of new gameplay elements we will be able to tap into with our existing infrastructure, such as PVP battles.

• Proof of Play, the company behind Pirate Nation raised $33m, giving us confidence in the longevity of the game.

What’s next for ggQuest?

Quests

Pirate School was just a test run. In-game quests represent the engagement layer for players to grow their reputation and collect rewards. For game studios, ggQuest is a discovery and activation platform to attract real players.

Game studios can leverage Quest ID data to segment players and tailor quests towards them. For example, games can run more effective play-to-airdrop campaigns where the rewards each player receives is not only based on their activity in-game but also on additional onchain data points that measure their value for the game.

After an initial permissioned rollout, games studios as well as content creators and normal players will be able to create in-game quests in 2 minutes with our questmaker. All quests are onchain, allowing for transparent and permissionless data access, making them easily composable and seamless to integrate.

Quests are like a web3-native version of offerwalls with real value rewards (game NFTs/tokens or third-party assets like ETH). Game studios can use quest rewards as incentives to onboard high-value players. Due to their flexibility, quests can also be deployed as a liveops tool to retain existing players. And once the questmaker is permissionless, it opens up the potential for UGC liveops as players, guilds, influencers, or token holders create quests to drive adoption metrics and provide their audience with special content. Imagine creators curating quests alongside their content, providing players with interactive master classes, community-exclusive tournaments/leaderboards, or custom battle passes.

Quest ID

Onchain player account (ERC-6551) that aggregates player assets and data across wallets and chains, enriched with off-chain data points.

We are also excited about Frames and the Farcaster ecosystem. So look forward to some experiments from us there.

Clans

Our Pirate Nation DAO will serve as a testing ground for our upcoming clans feature which will be a productized version of the guild system. Clans enable players to create collectives that share and bundle resources, take on quests together, and generate their own revenue using other ggQuest primitives such as quests.

Clans can also use ggQuest’s reputational data to gatekeep access and ensure aligned interests.

Vision for the ggQuest Ecosystem

Quest ID stands at the center of the ggQuest ecosystem. It’s the so-called “Proof-of-Play Passport to Web3 Gaming” which makes up the identity layer, holding a player’s reputation.

Quests, achievements, and badges, and upcoming features like clans or tournaments, constitute the primitives ggQuest is building.

Quests are the first app built on top of the ggQuest protocol. Our ecosystem is open to any 3rd-party developer to permissionlessly built apps using ggQuest’s identity layer and primitives. For example, teams might create an alternative questing client, a matchmaking engine, reputation-based NFT lending markets, and more.

Want to have quests for your game or ecosystem? Reach out to us on X.