GFM-001: Parameters and Coaching

Funding Mandate
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1

Contributor(s)

Mitch (Gaming SubDAO subcommittee member)

Lien (Gaming SubDAO subcommittee member)

Amos (Gaming SubDAO subcommittee member)

Jett (Perion contributor)

Background

First off - Welcome to the Perion governance module! The launch of governance represents an important milestone as we advance our journey toward decentralisation, building a DAO that solves for functionality, participation and effective momentum for Perion and all DAO members / contributors.

To give a short preface, this first funding mandate will be a little different than those to come. In launching the governance module, one key parameter is very important to set correctly: The minimum participation threshold for community voting. Perion employs a tri-party consensus model involving the community, an independent validator, and subcommittees. Community voting is based on staked PERC (1 staked PERC = 1 vote). At present the minimum participation threshold of 10% of liquid PERC supply. If the threshold is unmet, an automatic abstain vote occurs.

We’d like to take the time to make sure this threshold is set correctly before proceeding to larger, more meaningful votes. The community should be actively involved in the governance process and this is an important parameter to set correctly, achieving balancing between security and participation.

As the main function of this proposal is to measure the threshold for the community vote and test platform functionality, we’ll forego the usual voting timeline of feedback, integration and voting. Moving straight to the voting component.

  • Further details surrounding abstain votes can be found in the the documentation (here)
  • Further details surrounding the voting process for funding mandates can be found in the documentation (here)

Once the vote is complete we will discuss parameters within the Feedback section of the forum.

Diving into the the proposal, we’ll be focusing on a key area of opportunity: Contracting a coach for our eSports team. Explore the details below in the complete proposal.

Proposal

Summary

As Axie Infinity eSports tournaments offer significant value capture opportunities for Perion’s treasury (approx. $350,000 in prize pools over the next 3 months, with the potential for far more should AxieCon 2023 go ahead), we propose hiring a professional eSports coach for our Axie infinity gaming team to maximise our chance of success. Please refer to the attached table for upcoming tournament prize-pools and details (link)

Motivation / thesis:

Several factors are built into our motivation for proposing and eSports coach:

i) To significantly improve our team’s chances of winning tournaments
ii) To increase the value of Perion’s treasury through said wins
iii) To continue establishing Perion as a dominant early force in the Web3.0 eSports sector

Additional information:

  • Perion is in early talks with Hearthstone coaches, the most competitive Axie Infinity analog

Budget

  • Contractor salary/month: $500 - $4,000 USD
  • Monthly contract with potential for 12-month renewal

Notes:

  • Unused budget will not carry over
  • Additional funding requires amending this mandate
  • Candidates salary will be determined as a function of merit and skill

Reporting requirements & Guardrails:

Monthly updates with regard to the gaming team are to be provided via 2 channels:

  • Monthly Treasury snapshot will provide details of value generated by the Perion gaming team
  • Ongoing updates will be provided via Perion media channels: Discord, Twitter, etc

Community feedback amendments:

  • None at this time

Timeline

Stage I vote:

  • 9th May ‘23, 10:00 UTC

Stage II vote:

  • 12th May ‘23, 10:00 UTC

Voting closes:

  • 15th May ‘23, 10:00 UTC

If approved:

  • Coach will be onboarded within 1 month of proposal execution

Notes:

  • For details on consensus mechanisms and voting see the Perion documentation (link)
  • Timeline assumes passing of all vote phases, which is not guaranteed

Conflicts of interest

None currently identified

License

Copyright and related rights waived via Creative Commons CC0

Updates: Reports and transactions

15th May '23: Proposal GFM-001 unanimously approved
23rd May '23: Samuel Chan joins as eSports coach

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Hi all, just wanted to get some more colour on what exactly an Axie/eSports coach does to increase performance? Is the prospective hire an expert in Axie infinity or in eSports generally? Thanks

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Hey Matt, welcome!

Great question -

As of today our team operates with one captain and five team members. While our captain excels as a player, they lack experience in a coaching capacity. They currently find themselves in dual role of being both a player and a “coach” - This holds the team back somewhat, in that the captain has less time to focus on the other members of the team, while being engaged in their own training.

On top of these points Axie Infinity is a rather complex game offering, quite literally, millions of skill combinations based on their genetic makeup. As players concentrate on training, they have limited time to perform important peripheral tasks such as scouting the opposition, constructing balanced team compositions, etc. This hurts output. In most competitive sports, a coach is instrumental in unifying a group of skilled individuals, optimising their performance and setting overall strategy. Additionally we foresee a coach greatly improving efficiency for the DAO. We currently have a group of players with their own wants / needs and without proper guidance the process of balancing team assets and implementing strategy becomes disjointed.

To really get to the base of the matter we believe that through an initiative to find a coach we can greatly increase our teams output, beyond the costs involved. As a safeguard, we’ve proposed a short-term contract to evaluate the coach’s effectiveness, and subsequently providing regular reports to the DAO for transparency and informed decision-making.

Touching on the coach themselves we’re proposing either a Hearthstone or competitive Axie coach. Hearthstone is appealing in that it shares many parallels to Axie Infinity from a gameplay perspective, yet has a much larger competitive scene, hence we believe a higher caliber of coaches. Typically card battlers share many common move sets, so we make the assumption this will not be a challenge to make a crossover, though we will of course stress-test this assumption in the field should the proposal move ahead!

Hope that offers some clarity on direction and thought process

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Thanks Mitch, that response is very useful in helping my understanding of the decision to find a coach for the Perion competitive team. As long as there are big prize pool tournaments for Axie, it is easy to see the value of a coach from both a monetary and reputation perspective.

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100%, glad you agree!

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Great proposal. Do you have any ideas around metrics that can be used to ascertain the effectiveness of the coach?

Given that the team is looking to make financial returns it should be easy to tie the performance of the coach to these returns. You could go as far as having compensation tied to performance- if the team performs exceptionally well then the coach should be rewarded above the base salary. But on the flip side, a non performer should be terminated swiftly.

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Hey @chtmorris,

Agree we can incentivise a coach using a standard split on winnings. Still, I think an option should be between a regular salary and a split + a salary (lower than the standard salary), as some coaches might want a less volatile income.

As for the metrics of the coach, the team will set clear goals that align with Perion’s objective for the Gaming vertical.

These are also the coach’s goals, and their success is determined by their ability to hit them. Some rough Goals are:

  • Place Top 8 in all Axie tournaments within the season.

  • Increase the players’ positions on the leaderboard by 50% from the previous season’s ranking.

  • Place Top 3 at the Axie Thailand Tournament (Largest tournament on the roster)

Let me know what you think of these goals, love the feedback! :100:

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Hi everyone!

Posting an update here:

eSports coach
We are happy to announce Samuel Chan joining the DAO as a contributor in an eSports coaching capacity. Samuel comes with a highly qualified background across 5 years as someone who has:

  • Been a founding member of Abyssus, Singapore’s first professional Hearthstone eSports team
  • Lead the Hearthsone division within Resurgence eSports, scouting and managing the players and helping them rise to be the Rank 1 Hearthstone team in Southeast Asia .

In the days since joining we’ve already seen a marked improvement in player performance, of note one player Corongman has risen from rank 200, to peak at a rank 5 on the Axie infinity leaderboard. We’ll post more updates as the players results continue to improve.

Sam will be contributing for a stipend of $800 USDC per month.

Voting thresholds
The primary reason for holding a simple first iteration of the voting process was to measure community participation. A post has been created in the feedback section here to discuss iterations to the voting thresholds, as well as a suggestion for future iterations.

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Awesome update! Keen to see the progress in the coming months!

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