YGG Play Summit: Crafting Collaborative Questing Experiences

At the YGG Play Summit, YGG’s Marielle Noble joined Giulio Xiloyannis of MON Protocol, Corey Wilton of Mirai Labs, and moderator Gillian Pua of Sovrun to discuss how questing can make or break a game.

Season 9 of the Guild Advancement Program (GAP) is now live and moving into high gear as questers sign up to join an Onchain Guild. With more guild quests coming soon and more specialized communities onboarding to the Onchain Guilds platform, GAP questers will have another opportunity to work together and contribute their collective skills to their favorite Web3 projects.

This theme of collaborating and helping shape ecosystems as a community was central to YGG’s efforts throughout 2024. At the YGG Play Summit in November, YGG Head of Programs Marielle Noble joined MON Protocol co-founder Giulio Xiloyannis and Mirai Labs CEO and co-founder Corey Wilton, with Sovrun Chief of Staff Gillian Pua as moderator, to discuss takeaways from experimenting with different community-building strategies. Among them were designing quests that engage players on a deeper level and the need for Web3 games to embrace the financial incentives that set them apart in the broader industry.

The following is an excerpt from the panel, where Gillian asks the group to describe which approaches to community growth they would leave behind in 2024. Giulio candidly cites questing, highlighting the importance of questing campaigns incentivizing positive player behavior. Marielle emphasizes designing quests that push players to collaborate and form a genuine connection with the games they’re playing.

Listen to the full recording on YouTube.

YGG Play Summit: Harnessing Community Protocols to Launch New Games

Gillian (9:02): I'm going to ask a semi-controversial question. What are some of the community growth strategies you're seeing in 2024 that you feel should be put to rest?

Giulio (9:45): Nothing against questers, but what you end up doing — and this is our experience, having over-utilized that lever in 2024 — no users are intrinsically bad users, but the behaviors you incentivize can create negative user bases.

Pure social questing creates a community that is mercenary, but at a very superficial level. That doesn't allow them to metabolize your product while questing, which is what guilds do at a deeper level. Jumping into that meta has hurt a lot of projects, including ourselves. It has created — for a couple of them that were there very early on — a pathway to TGE, but then closed it to everybody else. I'd say social questing or superficial questing — I don't know how you would call it compared to your type — is something that I hope we've all learned from and can step away from.

Marielle (11:13): I would agree with you. I think that superficial, transactional questing can give you a great surge, but the users don't engage the way that you want them to. It's more about designing quests that push the user to engage in a way that they will enjoy and form a connection with the product itself.

Corey (11:38): I echo those sentiments for sure. However, from our side, we don't pay too much attention to what's not working or what we should stop unless the metrics are just very bad. We're always just trying to look at what potentially can happen next, where we can stand out.

The one thing that I just don't like is doing stuff for pre-product or very early when the product is going to launch in 12 months. It’s always going to set an unfortunate expectation for the community. It might feel good as a founder, and sometimes VCs will push you in this direction or ask why you don't have a community yet. But unfortunately, I think this just sets up founders to have a lot of pain. I think this is what Giulio was speaking about earlier — superficial expectations. Everything goes wrong in those situations.

Marielle (12:41): I think focusing more on creating opportunity and the opportunity to collaborate and contribute as a community is really powerful and takes you away from that kind of transactional signup.

You can listen to the full recording on YouTube.

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