Getting Started in the VBA
Welcome to the Virtual Basketball Association (VBA), the basketball league of the Metaverse. If you love basketball, fantasy sports, and have always dreamed of owning your own basketball team, the Virtual Basketball Association is the perfect game and community for you!
We’re happy that you’re here, and have put together this guide to make it easy for you to get started.
What is the VBA?
The VBA is the basketball league of the Metaverse. It is a new kind of basketball game where you can put together a team of fictional basketball players that compete in contests for rewards.
season0, our playable alpha, is live now, and in it, you’re able to enter weekly contests for DIMES (our in-game currency) used to earn Solana.
How can I get started?
Getting started is easy and we’re here to help. All you need to do is a few things that we’re going to walk you through in this article:
- Set up a Solana wallet
- Create an account and team
- Buy 5 VBA players
- Enter a weekly contest
- Win your first rewards
Step 1: Set up a Solana wallet
If the VBA is your first time engaging with the world of NFTs or Solana NFTs, thank you and welcome. We are honored.
The first thing is getting a Solana-friendly wallet and putting some SOL in it. There are a lot of options out there, but the safest method is using a hardware wallet, and the VBA supports ledger, a brand of hardware wallets. You can pick one up here. With a ledger you can secure, buy, and exchange crypto and manage your NFTs.
Once you have your ledger set up, in order to use it to access and manage your VBA team and SOL NFTs you will need to set up and use the Phantom browser extension. Further instructions on how to do this can be found here.
You also have the option of using a hot wallet without a ledger (such the Phantom wallet). Here’s an article on how you can easily set one up. But again, we recommend using a ledger to be the most secure.
As always, please make sure to keep yourself safe by being careful with suspicious links and never giving out your passwords, private keys or seed phrase.
Step 2: Create an account and team
After setting up your wallet, you’ll be ready to go on to our site and create a team by signing up with your wallet and/or email. You will always need a wallet connected to your account to play. By also signing up with email, you’ll also be able to use your email address to log in as well.
Once you create an account, you’ll be able to chose a team name, abbreviation, logo, and color.
Step 3: Buy at least 5 VBA players
In order to enter your first contest, you need to have at least 5 VBA Player NFTs. Each Player has a unique appearance, attributes, and skillsets, with some information on-chain and other pieces of information off-chain. Most importantly, look at a players rarity and preferred positions. This determines a player’s play style and attributes which impacts their performance on the court. There is also a salary cap in the VBA to promote fairness, so please make sure you check that out as you evaluate your first players.
You’ll also notice that in addition to Player NFTs, there are also VBA Packs available. Each pack will contain between 0 and 7 Player NFTs. This is because each pack originally starts with 7 players and people can redeem them until there are none remaining.
If you are purchasing a Pack, please PLEASE check the blockchain (the Marketplace data is often cached and incorrect) to make sure you know exactly how many Players remain in a Pack. Learn more here. The color of the pack and the float do not impact the rarity of the players inside it.
Our Player and Pack NFTs are available on marketplaces like Magic Eden, OpenSea, and Fractal.
Step 4: Enter a weekly contest
Now that you’ve created your team and picked your players, the real fun can begin.
You and the other VBA GMs will enter your team into weekly competitions by registering your team on play.vbagame.com within the registration window from Thursday — Sunday each week.
After registering, you’ll be put in a round robin tournament against other teams in your league and play games Monday to Sunday throughout the week.
Each game will be simulated live, so you can watch all the action unfold in a play-by-play format. After each game, GMs will be able to see the stats (FG%, FT%, PTS, REBS, ASTS, etc) of their team and individual players, which will help inform future strategic decisions.
To improve your team, you’ll be able to change your lineup to make adjustments between games and buy/sell/trade players from marketplaces.
Step 5: Win your first rewards
At the end of the week, rewards will distributed based on your league (there are 3 to start) and performance relative to the other teams in your group through our in-game currency: DIMES.
To start, the DIMES will be used as automatic entries into drawings for Solana rewards each week from our season0 prize pool of 2000 SOL, with more utility to come shortly.
You can read more on DIMES here.
What’re you waiting for?
It’s not too late to start your VBA dynasty!
Getting a team of 5 players on Magic Eden is easy (you can literally buy 5 at once now): https://magiceden.io/marketplace/vba_players. If you’re buying packs, please make sure check the blockchain before you do so: https://vbagame.medium.com/dont-get-fooled-out-of-a-vba-player-ef16d6fb1d06.
