Designing Sustainable Rewards

One of the main goals of VBA is to create a fair, fun, and sustainable rewards system. While we’ve started off with an initial rewards system for season0 specifically, we wanted to share a deeper dive into how we’re thinking about evolving our rewards system and start experimenting more with rewards.

season0 Rewards Expectations

To start, we want to make sure we set expectations for how the VBA team is distributing season0 rewards. Here are a few of our key principles:

1. Fairly reward our early community. season0 is a time for us to build and improve the VBA together, and in order to reward our early community, we are paying out our entire primary sales revenue of 2000 SOL from our first mint back to our GMs throughout season0. This will not always be the case in future seasons. Our goal for season0 is to build an experience that our community loves to play for fun and share with their friends, regardless of the short-term monetary rewards. Please note that this means season0 may last longer than 20 weeks.
2. Rewards should be about building and growing the ecosystem. Our ideal rewards model encourages users to use rewards to improve their teams so that they can perform better in contests. Towards that goal, we’re actively working on creating in-game utility for DIMES and opportunities for you to use them to improve your team.

Building a Sustainable Rewards Economy

How do we plan to evolve so that we can sustain rewards beyond season0?

We want GMs to play in the VBA for rewards that improve their teams and use those teams to compete against other GMs for monetary prizes. Here’s how we plan to do that:

1. Create value for DIMES. We’re building a variety of use cases for DIMES that might include player training, scouting, and minting. By playing each week in the VBA, GMs will continue to earn DIMES according to their performance, with more DIMES going to those who play well.
2. Create a large variety contests for GMs to compete against each other. For competitive players, we plan to add Daily Fantasy Sports style skill-based contests (ranging from all underdog to all legendary modes) where GMs pay entry to win real money. There will be a fee from these contests that goes towards supporting the VBA builders and value for the DIMES ecosystem.

What’s Next?

To help inform and improve our design, we’re going to be trialing a number of different rewards systems during season0 as we continue to build the VBA and the future of the league together.

To help you plan ahead, here are some ideas that we might try starting week 5:

1. Reward smaller SOL rewards to more people. There’s been a lot of requests from the community to change it up and so we’re going to try this.
2. Issue packs or new player NFTs as rewards. There’s been a lot of questions of how the female players will be distributed as well as a lack of liquidity for more desirable play styles. This will allow a lot of GMs to improve their teams while allowing us to support more GMs.
3. Increased uses for DIMES. Once you can bank your DIMES, there will be weeks with no SOL drawing and instead options for you to use your DIMES in a variety of ways.