With the Metis Champs event now over (rewards pending); I thought it would be a good idea to reflect on the event and its place within the wider landscape of the Metis ecosystem.
This article marks the first of a series we’re calling “Kehmor’s unpopular opinions”; and what better way to kick it off than to #FUD# the very network I plan on asking for funding?
Let’s start with the positives however.
Metis Champs; what it was and what it could have been:
Metis Champs marks what I (and others) view as an incredibly welcome move from the Metis ecosystem. The Olympics is a world wide event; designed to bring nations together in the name of good natured competition. What better opportunity for Metis to also look to bring people together from all over the world and work towards that all important and ever illusive metric: “community”.
Community is important; it’s what is making the current #memecoin# meta on Solana the “place to be” in #web3#.
I commented on a recent Metis EDF article that I felt Metis had learned the wrong lesson from the Solana memecoin craze. It’s not a case of making memecoins and that will attract community and fun. Memecoins are surging on Solana because it’s easy to use(fun); which leads to lots of people; which leads to people wanting to make high effort memes.
The formula is not:
Memecoins -> people -> fun.
Its:
Fun -> people -> memecoins.
Metis Champs offered a perfect opportunity to create something “fun” on Metis; and we even got a glimpse of what it could be. Right near the end the Metis Champs telegram actually had some; albeit only from the four people competing for the top spots, myself included. We swapped tips, had some good natured banter, and talked about the event.
This could (and should) have been the entire event, on a much larger scale. Metis users should have been telling their normie friends about it; “hey, set up a wallet, I’ll give you some gas money, the rest is free; this is what crypto is all about”. Project telegrams should have been competing to have their members at the top of the leaderboard (we crushed you all by the way). It should have been fun.
Why wasn’t it? Because, for whatever reason, a community building event was viewed as low priority.
Metis Champs: Why it sucked, and why that matters:
So I don’t want to dive into everything wrong from a technical standpoint on the Metis Champs page; anyone who used it knows. If you want a more full run down just check some of the bug workarounds included on my Metis Champs User Guide.
What I want to do is mention a few specific examples and why they stopped this event reaching its huge potential.
Buggy AF sign-up process:
I mean, come on guys. As I said above; this was an opportunity for your loyal community members to proudly show off the ecosystem. Literally zero people can ask their normie friend to join an event where even the wallet sign-in is garbage, where the tokens you get for completing tasks appear after a totally arbitrary time, and where most users didn’t even fully understand what $CHAMPS were.
Broken Leaderboard:
For multiple days of the event the leaderboard didn’t update; killing any possibility for friendly competition or discussion.
Generally horrible to use:
I had to write a 3,000 word essay on how to make this thing even remotely usable. From not being able to claim stuff, to event results being decided differently from every web2 gambling site, to having to wait 50 years for the profile page to load…
Your fun event should be easy to use; trading memes on Solana is…signing up to IMX games is…
Discouraged interacting with the Olympics:
This to me is the big one. The event didn’t, in any way, encourage you to take part alongside actually watching the Olympics. There was no way to search for certain sports for a start, but more tragically, there was no reason to make any bet you didn’t think would win.
In traditional gambling the goal is to make money (or have fun, but we’ve already ruled that out for Champs). In Metis Champs; there was no real incentive to increase your stack size with your bets.
Your leaderboard placement was based on how much you cashed out from an event; NOT how much “profit” you made. Looking for an edge or finding “good odds” was basically irrelevant.
My strategy, which saw me come in 4th (despite only participating for less than half the event), was to look on a gambling odds site for the biggest mismatches; Oh, the USA basketball team is playing a country that doesn’t own a basketball? Great bet.
The odds were irrelevant; if I bet 1,000 $CHAMPS and got 1,001 $CHAMPS back, my score went up by 1,001.
This basically meant that having any knowledge of the sports or watching games made zero difference; it made it a grind rather than a joy.
Conclusion (TL;DR):
It is obvious that some people at Metis are finally coming around to the idea that building and engaging with a community is incredibly important. This is a good thing; and I know I speak for Cobi as well when I say VestaDAO will help with this goal wherever we can.
That said;
Metis Champs highlights the consequences of only prioritizing on-chain metrics. I’m sure the Champs event saw an increase in “traffic” on the network; you probably could have achieved the same by just saying “click this transaction button 75 times and we’ll give you an airdrop”.
My hope is that Metis strives for more than that. To be a great network we need to build a community that doesn’t disappear when the airdrops dry up. This means worrying less about #TVL# and more about people actually wanting to use your network. It starts with fun, which starts with ease of use, which starts with VestaDAO.
