Four weeks and 4,000 races later, the MixMob: Racer 1 Alpha V2 came to a spectacular close with the launch of our first-ever tournament with Avocado Guild! We are still riding a high from the wave of positive feedback and support that we received from our community and investors during our 4-week Alpha run. The thrill of opening up Multiplayer and watching our community (and Crew) battle it out to the finish line has been a major highlight in MixMob history.
Aside from experiencing the game firsthand, perhaps one of the best ways to convey the difference between Alpha V1 and V2 is this: in Alpha V1, players averaged 14 minutes of gameplay per session. This time around, that number doubled for an average of 28 minutes per session. We can’t wait to see what this number looks like after the next phase of MixMob: Racer 1.
Game upgrades & adjustments
Each week, we took the feedback from our players and integrated it into a new upgraded build. Here are some of the tweaks and adjustments that resulted from our findings throughout Alpha V2:
New mini-map
At the end of Week 1, we updated the mini-map from a linear version to a more agile circular map that better represents the bots’ movement around the track.
A more competitive Phantom Bot
In order to address the feedback that the Phantom Bot was too easy to beat, we upgraded its card battle decision-making to make it a more challenging opponent.
Deck and card adjustments
During Alpha V2, we noticed that some cards could be rebalanced to better reflect their probability of hitting an opponent. To do this, we adjusted the Pulse Value of some Damage cards. For example, Flash Bang is a directional attack that received Pulse reductions.
The other apparent issue was how dominant the “Styler” Deck was when it was in the lead of a race. To avoid snowballing, we rebalanced the Deploy cards as a whole, with Cluster Mines being moved into the Alpha Deck and traded for Data Blast. We also added some Pulse increases to Deploy cards.
Finally, we noticed Speed Boosting Collision cards were more expensive than we felt was justified. To mediate this, we reduced the Pulse cost on the cards to still allow the cards used for normal boosting without being prohibitively expensive.
Camera angle tweaks
Camera angles in Neolympus were brought back slightly to create a more competitive experience. The update was designed to include a smoother transition between lanes and going up/down the Track for better visibility after firing projectiles.
Challenges
Aside from a couple of minor road bumps, Alpha V2 went smoothly. After experiencing difficulties with Solana congestion in Alpha V1, we didn’t know how the platform would hold up when we opened up MixMob: Racer 1 to Multiplayer. Everything went well until the end of Week 3. When the Multiplayer window opened, there was such an influx of players trying to play at once that Solana’s A.I. flagged the game believing that we were launching an attack on the network. Despite having to shut down Alpha for a couple of hours until the issue was resolved, we took this as a win for two reasons:
- Enough people were trying to play the game at the exact same moment that it overwhelmed the RPC node.
- It gave us the opportunity to bolster the code of our game and fix this issue for the future.
Community feedback
There’s no Alpha without community, and wow did our community ever deliver. From talking about the game on social media to leaving paragraphs of feedback in Discord and inviting friends to play through our Referral Program, there’s no question that Alpha V2 was a great success because of our players.
“I was very pleased to see that the most important points that we have all discussed in the very first Alpha test have been implemented in the game; speed, visual effects, race track designs, animations etc… it is very satisfying to see and the game has become much more fun and entertaining but let’s keep going.” — Ricky Mob, Discord
Thanks to everyone who participated, our team logged over 400 bugs throughout the four weeks. So far we have closed 93% of them as well as almost half of the Polishing tickets that were logged during Alpha.
We also kicked off Questing during this period and included a star rating feature so the community could rate their gaming experience out of 5. Here’s what we found:
- Overall Game Experience — 4.29 Stars
- Card Play Experience — 4.29 Stars
- Racing Experience — 4.18 Stars
What’s next for MixMob: Racer 1
The feedback that we received during Alpha V2 further confirmed that MixMob: Racer 1 is fun to play and different from other Web3 games in the space.
In the future, we’d like to find a way to ensure that players can still access the game even if Solana goes down. We’d also like to make the game more accessible by including a Freemium component where players don’t have to register a wallet to test the game.
Like you, we can’t wait to introduce our in-game currency, which will serve as an intermediate step before launching our value token. This will give our team the chance to test our tokenomics and give our players the chance to use in-game tokens in MixMob: Racer 1 before then.
This will be the last you see of MixMob: Racer 1 Alpha until 2023, but stay tuned for more tournaments and news on our upcoming MixBots drop! For all the latest, follow us on Twitter and join our Discord.
