Avalore Dump Week 34
"Build Games Postmortem" Edition
Hello hello! What a week we’ve had! Build Games had quite an eventful finish as the top 3 winners were revealed shortly before my April Fools Avalore Edition. Yes that was a joke about funding. For those who were unaware:
I would never sell out that hard!
The community seems to like this article so it would never get funding! (joking! kinda!)
I know I can be a bit inflammatory and crashout on the timeline to farm engagement, but I will try to keep things constructive in here. Maybe we can start a healthy dialogue!
Anyway, let’s dive in. THE Build Games article!
The Good
Let’s start out with some positives because it will get critical later. One undeniable success of the program is that it got people building. People with no experience developing or running projects threw their hats into the ring and went heads-down on some cool shit.
I saw some first-time game devs, some online claw machines, and cool ponzi apps. This is great! That was definitely one of the goals of the program, so on that level we have some positive.
Ok I will probably rip into them and go into more detail about this later, but I just want to say that I think a lot of the good parts of Build Games were probably brought about by Voh and Avery. At the end of the day, I do still believe they are trying to reward community members, and any grant that goes to a recognizable name was probably pushed by them.
I understand why people are frustrated, and believe me I am incredibly frustrated too, but I think the public-facing employees are not really the issue. The source of the problem is that they are two of maybe 5 employees at Labs that care about the average chain users. For everyone else, we are an afterthought.
You can see it all the time in the posts the emploids will make that all have some variation of “We really want to make this the chain for business, and then of course the users will benefit as well.”
I think some of the rage directed towards these public Labs members is warranted, but honestly a lot of it is not. As horrible as it sounds, I do agree that we’re better off with them here. Ok but that’s enough positives! Let’s get to the negatives! We will start small and ramp up.
The Bad
As someone who was in the competition, it was horrible that you didn’t find out if you passed the last stage until 3-5 days before the next stage was due.
By my count, there were 19 days spent in “limbo” waiting to see if you moved on to the next round, while only 16 days of actually prepping for the round. That’s insane! More time in Build Games was spent waiting to be judged than actually working!
You can make all kinds of excuses here, from “you should be wanting to build regardless” to “it’s hard to judge a lot of applicants” but that’s just covering up the unprofessionalism.
Expecting people to be grinding hard on something even if they were eliminated in the last round shows a complete lack of respect for their time. And “it was hard to get through everyone” is a bullshit excuse too. You were optimizing for signups, and then once you got too many of them you had no plan to deal with them in a reasonable time frame? Not great!
The Ugly
Ok buckle up! We’re in the weeds now!
The absolute #1 issue with Build Games and the cause of all the problems is that it was clearly pulled in too many different ways by too many people, and there seemed to be no alignment whatsoever on the goals of the competition.
Even from the beginning, the question was asked, “What kinds of projects should be in Build Games?” And the answer was always, “Everyone!” Ponzis, one man teams, new projects, old projects, large businesses, DeFi, institutional, everyone was eligible. This lack of focus was probably representative of different team members wanting different things.
For example, I have a strong memory of listening to Voh on a space right after Build Games was announced saying something like “Oh yeah, I love a good ponzi we will for sure be looking for those.”
Then, after reassuring and pushing Kieks to submit a ponzi for the competition, I ask about ponzi flywheels in the telegram and get the above message laughing at me from one of the admins.
The reality is that there was never much space for ponzis in Build Games, and as a result I have a ton of egg on my face now for trying to convince people that there was.
Maybe they shouldn’t have publicly bent over backwards to say this hackathon is different than the others and more community focused, then make the winner a project that the community is not even eligible to use? I mean it’s not rocket science.
This notion of bringing in businesses that bring in users was a common theme from the public-facing members of Ava Labs, but was completely turned on its head when most of the winners are products that 99% of the people on chain won’t be using.
And they didn’t even really try to hide this! In the very post they made asking people to support the projects on socials, they didn’t even tag the projects twitters!! Then when asked why not, they said they didn’t want people to harass the projects???
Avery likened AVAX to a city, saying they were going to bring businesses to revitalize the downtown area and get traffic flowing again. Then what they’ve done is bring in some 9-5 office spaces while scaring away all the bars and restaurants.
That’s a bit of a hyperbole, as there are some predictionslop and TCG products in there, but those are kind of a dime a dozen these days and it’s hard for them to really standout.
Overall, it feels like there were two teams of people communicating about Build Games with completely different goals.
Nothing highlights this dichotomy more than my personal experience with getting a grant from Build Games.
On April 1st, I got this message from someone at AvaLabs about getting a grant for Build Games. Exciting!
About 10 minutes later, I was added to a group chat with Labs people to discuss the grant.
10 minutes after THAT, I received a Twitter DM from someone else at AvaLabs telling me “Sorry, after due diligence your project was flagged by the larger review team as ineligible for a grant.”
????
Honestly I thought it must be an April Fools joke, but no, this is really the flow that happened! I was a grant recipient for all of 20 minutes.
This is the core of the issue. My Build Games project was a small utility add to Avalore (will launch next month), and some Labs employees probably just wanted to use this opportunity to get Avalore in general some funding. Cool!
However, as mentioned above, not many people at Labs actually care about this kind of thing, so likely it was shot down by someone else after review.
I’m upset with how they handled it as that’s clearly a VERY unserious chain of events, but I can’t be mad at them for trying.
In the end, the main mistake was believing this would be something other than just Codebase-lite (it wasn’t). They should have continued to shovel funding to AI unlearning software and institutional credit infrastructure behind the scenes like they always do. Editor’s note: Hilarious that I tried to pick the most ridiculous projects for my April Fools article and one of them got second place!
So What Now?
I think the summary is that this Build Games program played out mostly how everyone thought it would. Wrath outperformed expectations a bit, but it was easy to predict that they would try to lift him up and show that this competition was different.
And in the end maybe it was! More community people got funding than usual for a Codebase-style program. Maybe 10% of the money is going to community goods vs 0%. Improvement!
I do feel a bit demoralized. I was willing to drink the Koolaid about how this time would be different, but now I just look stupid for fighting fud from my friends as the winner is a project we can’t even use.
By the way, there’s too much hate going to the winning project—the second place one makes just as little sense, if not even less. And ESPECIALLY the third place project!
Not all grants are finalized yet (LOL, see above) so maybe my experience is the exception not the norm and we will find out more community projects got funded than it seems. Possibly even more community grants will come out in the next few days and the narrative will switch. Awesome!
For now, I think public facing employees will probably get more hate than they deserve for this outcome from the community. However, the fact remains that they tried their best to make it community-inclusive and this is the result we got. It does not give me much hope for the future for Avalore readers on this chain.
Everyone is making sure we know that Voh is basically the only one in our corner. Pretty dire. I don’t agree with her tone a lot of the time (don’t want to gas her up too much!) or the attempts to police what people tweet, but the fact remains that this is really all we’ve got.
What Can Happen
I want to end with this tweet from willdev to show the strength of supporting the community.
It’s funny, if you talk to any AvaLabs employee about the memecoin program, they’ll talk about what a massive waste of money it was and how it’s just punting millions away until the music stops.
If it weren’t for this program, there is zero chance Avalore would exist as I would have left the chain long ago, and I’m guessing a lot of you readers would have as well.
Instead, people have stuck around and reinvested a lot of their money and time here. You can say the program was inefficient or shortsighted or whatever, but I think the ecosystem today would be even more of a ghost town without the presale/arena launcher era.
And no, I’m not trying to say that people are only happy if they’re buying our meme coins. Don’t strawman me! All I’m saying is that any sort of incentives program is judged against that bar.
Is Build Games better for the community than spending $1M on community tokens?
As it stands, I’m feeling bad for the people that took the “Avalore every week” square on AvaxBingo because I’m not sure how much longer I can do this. (Btw, you have 24 hours left to mint your Bingo cards! Go mint some!)
You think I want to be writing these longform articles on the latest reason why the community is upset? No! I hate this serious bullshit. I just want people in charge to use common sense so that I can meme with the crew about Brando or Fish or whoever.
Throw us a bone every once in a while! Give the lads something to be bullish about! There’s not even grifters here anymore cause there’s nothing to grift!
I’m tired of trying to walk the lines between constructive criticism and peacekeeping and crashing out. It took a lot of effort not to full crashout this week!
In the end, the community will think this article was too nice (it was), and Labs will think it was too mean (definitely not). This shit is exhausting and no fun! Let’s all just agree to make good decisions moving forward. Ok? Ok.
Tweet of the Week
Tldr: you didn't sell out, still waiting for a special on the vq rage