Full version with illustrations is a PDF at the following:
Abridged version for this post:
DFK Helper (DFKH)
The DFK auto-everything
Purpose: This submission is primarily a Grant Proposal Without Funding, with a dash of Co-Marketing Application.
Description
Background
The Kingdom Studios team (hereinafter referred to as “Kingdom”) have made something absolutely incredible. Even so, it is but a seedling of what it is to become. Rather than concern themselves with trivial matters such as optimizing the UI, we encourage Kingdom to focus its magics primarily on game development and expansion.
DFK is an awesome game. That awesomeness causes players to want to obtain more and more heroes and invest more throughout, and this can result in repetitive tasks that can eventually feel like a chore, and, eventually, a physical impossibility. It’s not just that the UI is intended for relatively few heroes, but also the natural limitations of mobile screen sizes, blockchain and congestion issues, multiple blockchains, and so forth, which combine to result in various frustrations. People with disabilities and common issues such as arthritis are also unfairly disadvantaged, as are those that have less free time to continually action commands on the game’s own schedule. Game tasks can become so demanding as to interfere with social lives, families, work, and so forth. Users have been known to drop the game as if it were an addiction or an unneeded frustration due to these conflicts, often at the behest of others. In one wife’s words: “Stop it with that DFK thing!” As healthy as the influx of new players has been, so has the outflux been significant for this reason. That need not be the case.
DFK Helper
We developed this tool for ourselves, then for our friends, then for DFK content-creators, and more recently we have begun sharing it with the community at large. It addresses the burden of having more and more heroes, thereby encouraging players to invest further, even infinitely, in the DFK ecosystem, as opposed to, for example, not buying or summoning any more heroes because they’ve become unmanageable or too time-consuming; or becoming overwhelmed by an ever-increasing hoard of inventory quest rewards, enhancement crystals, and more future multi-chain items; or the various LP pools spread across chains. There are also token-burning processes that are great for the health of the DFK ecosystem but which are too time-consuming for some individuals to partake in, such as stamina vialing, duels, raffles, and more, which DFK Helper can automate.
DFK Helper automates routine tasks and frees players to do strategic thinking and/or whatever else each loves best about the game, while also freeing them from the repetitive tasks that might cause them to become bored or frustrated due to being kept from socializing with other players and friends, from being their best at work, from spending quality time with family, and from producing quality content.
DFK Helper has been operating successfully since 2021 and has been trusted with Gen 0s, vast locked balances, and more. DFKH is known by Kingdom and has been used by Knights. To-Date, no user that joined has ever left. And several users have come from every other tool and now use DFKH exclusively.
Features
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Runs entirely on DFKH servers. The player does not need to install strange programs on their computer, nor try to keep such programs running all day and night.
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Full player control. The player retains full control, able to enable/disable just about any feature on demand. And the player can continue to use the UI as they would normally, too.
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Configuration is simple. DFKH starts with defaults to hit the ground running; the configuration is clean and intuitive. No strange text or code-like files to edit or CLI commands to run. It also has vast depth for customization, should the player wish to delve deeper. Yet, so simple that the user can start, stop, or change anything from their phone, on the beach.
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Beautiful yet informative, timeless logs, on both Telegram and Discord. Completing multiple quests together, or errors or other issues keeping the player from seeing their levelup results, quests rewards, etc? DFKH resolves that.
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Auto-quest. Quests all heroes 24/7. All quests: Training Quests, Fishing, Foraging, Gold Mining, Locked-Balance Mining, Gardening. Automatically optimizes group sizes to save gas. Has often been observed to use less gas than the UI.
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Auto-Sell (every day, sell all worthwhile quest rewards, including Gold). By default, this excludes all eggs and tears and runes under a set quantity, so that there’s always some available to level and summon. The user can disable/enable Auto-Sell with a click and can customize: how often it happens, add/remove items with a drop-down menu of all items, set how many items to keep, and, optionally, even set a sell limit price (only sell when above X Crystal/Jewel price).
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Auto-Buy. This is similar to the above, allowing buying selected items when they hit below a certain quantity and below a certain price. Want to ensure that there’s always a certain Enhancement Crystal available for leveling, to buy when it hits zero and it’s not costly? To ensure there are always certain runes available to level? A ready stash of Stamina Vials for those Sunday BBQs? Done, done, and done.
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Auto-LP. Looking to cash in on both the future value as well as trading fees until then, while also helping the community avoid unnecessary slippage due to lack of liquidity? Auto-LP will periodically sell half the selected items and pair them with Crystal. As you can imagine by now, it is further customizable.
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Auto-Gas-TopUp. Throughout the day, checks that your gas is within a range and buys more as needed. For example, it can keep your gas between 20 and 30 JEWEL.
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Auto-Level-Up. When a hero has received enough XP to level, DFK Helper levels him up (the player may disable the feature by hero, or may simply set it to “warn” the player for specific heroes so they can photo op. level them in the beauteous glory of the official AI). Uses enhancement crystals if set. And then immediately quests the hero, maximizing stamina use. Forget to set leveling stats or just too busy? DFKH has a Leveling AI: any heroes set to Auto Level but having blank stats will have them selected by the AI based on your global selection (Highest Growth, Best for Profession, and Lowest Growth), which can be adjusted according to hero rarity.
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Auto-Send. Automatically and routinely send eggs and/or any other items the player selects (via that easy-to-use drop-down box) to whatever other wallet holds their hoard. Customizable by quantities to keep, at what level to send, and also the intervals.
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Auto-Stamina-Vialing. Simply by checking off a box, even on their phone, the player can, for example, set a Level 1 hero to stamina vial until Level 10, and meanwhile see, over the next day or two, how the hero progresses, how many vials are left in inventory, and how many vials are needed to reach the next level.
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Auto-Duel. When enabled, DFK Helper will send the selected hero or heroes on Duels indefinitely. The interval (how often) can be customized, and the user may set a Rank Exp. at which DFKH should stop. The user sets the heroes, the background, the stat, the wager, and DFK Helper takes care of the rest, indefinitely.
Berel Bunch is now famous
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Auto-Rent. When enabled and a value is set, DFK Helper will keep that hero always rented at that price. That takes care of a major hassle and wasted downtime for Gen 0s, and encourages both Gen 0 investment and their renting availability for the community. Also helps provide a vast, inexpensive pool of rental summons for the community that otherwise players may not feel worth their time to place for rent.
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Daily Status logs. In addition to quest completions, level-ups, balances, and so forth, as shown above, there is also a daily quest assignment log sent to the player’s log feed. It can also be sent on demand by sending /report on Telegram. Bought a hundred heroes in bulk and don’t have the time to look for their IDs? This report will list all new heroes by ID.
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Auto Bank Deposit. When enabled, DFK Helper will automatically bank/Jeweler deposit the player’s gains on whatever schedule and over whatever balance excess amount desired. Don’t lose that xJ/xC multiplier!
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Auto Hero Sale Management. When enabled, checked-off heroes will be set to sell at the given price when at low stamina, and unsold at high stamina and quested.
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Approvals. Players often remark that they are endlessly waiting to approve use of one type of leveling item or selling another, and that it is often at an inconvenient time. DFKH obtains approvals for all known items in advance, to level with and to sell.
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Other reports on demand. For example, wallet and gas balance. Quantity in inventory of a specific item. These responses usually occur instantly, unlike the UI.
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Other features. There are other features as well, including Auto-Raffling, Auto-Airdrop-Claiming, and more. All can be enabled/disabled and used with defaults or customized.
Yes, one user won this while auto-raffling with DFKH: -
DFK Helper is good for both the ecosystem and the environment. DFK Helper uses a fraction of the resources the DFK UI does. The DFK UI takes a heavy toll on the network, often making dozens of requests a second about current inventory, hero status, etc. This further causes issues trying to transact, such as starting quests, and players will often chain multiples of the same transaction that just won’t go through, often through more than one RPC. DFK Helper, on the other hand, only gets the minimal data it needs when it needs it, gently does one thing at a time, and intelligently avoids all blockchain congestion issues. Phones using the DFK UI often run hot and quickly out of battery: no such issue exists with DFKH interface.
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Setup is Simple and highly secure. Following our tutorial, the user encrypts one or more private keys using PGP and DFKH’s public key; provides the encrypted file(s) to our doxed admin over both HTTPS and using Multi-Factor Authentication (the DFKH server accessible only to the approved user via their Google account) – essentially triple-layer-security (developed by combining the security recommendations from several community devs); adds their heroes to their Sheet (automated methods available); provides their Telegram/Discord handle to receive the logs; and, that’s it! The user can then control everything from there. Some users provide access to their main wallet, others a secondary wallet with some floor heroes: it’s the player’s choice.
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Disclaimer: We suggest that players keep their non-DFK holdings in other wallets, and even their vast DFK locked balances, ungodly heroes and such, elsewhere, potentially offline and in a hardware-encrypted keys, for our own peace of mind. Hackers: look elsewhere: there is nothing of value for you here.
Alternatives
There a variety of “auto-questing” programs out there and custom UIs that could be considered partial alternatives to DFKH. Each has its pros and cons and focuses on a different set of features. From our perspective, DFK Helper is vastly different in the following aspects:
- It’s Alive. We run DFKH for the player on our servers (which are not public-facing): there is nothing that the user needs to install on their computer to operate DFKH. In contrast, the bots out there require the user to install their closed-source software on their computer, and that software is what does everything at all times. For us, there are several concerns with that:
o Uptime: If the player’s computer isn’t running 24/7, and/or updates and reboots itself, or loses internet connection, the bot is dead in the water. In contrast, DFK Helper doesn’t require the player to install or run anything: it runs entirely on our end, 24/7/365, even when your cat knowingly turns off your computer while you’re on vacation.
o Power & Hardware: Since the player’s computer is running 24/7/365 to operate those other bots, it’s probably using a significant amount of electricity, as well as aging all of the hardware. There’s quite a hidden cost there. How many hundreds or thousands of computers are unnecessarily on all the time to run those bots, and is that sustainable? DFKH runs with less than 1% of those known resources, and out of our pocket.
o Private Key: Those programs/bots claim that the private key the player must put into their software isn’t sent anywhere or available to the dev. But who knows? DFKH double-encrypts the key and deletes all other record of it, and, we’d like to think that our systems are more secure than the average user’s all-purpose, potentially-shared computer. DFKH has access to nothing else.
o Security: With DFK Helper, the player does not install anything on their computer. What is that other software actually doing? Only the dev can know. Who’s to say that it’s not keylogging, taking other private keys on that computer, installing ransomware, gathering information for future use or selling it, and so forth? None, as far as we know, are truly audited. And, even if someone reputable did audit them, and we entrusted them with the entirety of our computer, which is what one does when install that software… that bot updates itself all the time: who’s to say it doesn’t update itself with something malicious that wasn’t there when it was last audited, or that someone else doesn’t hijack the update stream and put in their own code? Some may say the user can check the hash of the update to verify it’s an original, but who’s going to do that every time, and who’s to say a hacker didn’t overwrite that hash on the website or other source? Even in the case that the program and dev are perfect and nothing goes wrong, how well does every player understand and continually respect the security of their computer? What are the chances users will never run any malware, connect to a network that’s infected, and so forth, meanwhile this running bot/program is continually decrypting and using private keys given to it, and all of these are capable of accessing it and pretty much everything else on that computer. Even if things go well for a few months or years, there’s always that common crypto risk of the exit scam.
We’d personally rather not take those risks. DFK Helper has access only to the given encrypted private key(s), and nothing else.
That is not to say that we may not, at some point, provide a user-runnable option, or provide custom solutions (all of which are possible at present); nor that we wouldn’t enjoy teaming up with someone that already does, with code-auditing: there are many gifted and trustworthy devs in the DFK space. This is merely our present focus.
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Other Tools. There are other tools out there, such as what are essentially replacement UIs for the official UI, as well as those using external contracts. These tools, due to contract limitations, have an extremely limited feature set, and, often, the player must be actively there, using them, or essentially give up their heroes (staking), unable to immediately level them and such. Out of all the features DFKH has, such tools can only handle simpler actions, such as just auto-questing, and, even then, with various limitations. However, we are big fans of other DFK tools, and hope to join forces to make something greater than the sum of the parts.
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Feature Set. We know of no other tool that has such a vast and advanced set of features. Most tools are mainly simple auto-questers, with limited functionality and requiring a lot of player input and attention. The most advanced of those requires being installed and run from the player’s own computer, periodically obtaining software updates.
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Different look and feel: For example, we prefer to provide logs through Telegram (though do also provide Discord), and the look and feel of our logs is particular to our style and others theirs.
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Quick implementations. DFK Helper had SD Auto-Dueling in place within 3 days of DFK release. CV Auto-Dueling was available the same day as release. The case has been similar with new features since the beginning of 2022. The main reason is for this is that we care only about DFK and have no other projects.
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DFKH is made and operated in the USA by Americans. Registered in the State of Illinois. Veteran-owned. Ethical and respectful of government.
Team Information
Zelys/Gabriel is the Lead Developer (Discord: zelys#9842) and main contact for this proposal. Coding is a relatively new passion, awakened by DFK. Years of experience managing businesses and international, multi-cultural workforces. Zelys’ coding was mentored by a Fortune 20 Company senior dev. Coolio is our non-coding dev., helping with much of everything else (Discord: Coolio#9272). We have a couple of other collaborations in progress with well-known community devs. We’re both veterans, and true believers in the joint DFK and DeFi vision.
Requests from DFK Team & Long-Term Plan
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Kingdom’s Blessing: We request public acknowledgment from the Kingdom to symbolize our meeting of the minds on DFK Helper: a shared understanding that tools like this, when ethically-developed and bound to the Kingdom’s vision, are a substantial boon to the community. Via informal communications, this is already the case.
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Comms: We are committed to limiting DFK Helper’s capabilities according to the DFK Devs’ vision, now and in the future. Historically, we have kept the DFK Team informed of DFKH’s capabilities since early 2022 and to-date, and we have prevented any misuse of game mechanics, since inception. We request that the Kingdom maintain that open channel of communication to ensure DFKH is always in line with the official vision.
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Co-Marketing: By its very existence, DFKH markets DFK and only DFK. It also leads to DFK content creation by various users: several DFK influencers/content-producers exclusively utilize DFKH. We respectfully request that Kingdom reciprocate with Co-Marketing mentions of DFKH, at its prerogative.
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Long-Term: Integration: We aim to integrate DFKH’s automation and other features into the official experience, rather than as an external project, wherever and however in line with the Kingdom’s vision. This is a commitment, more than a request: we request only an open mind that DFKH be considered for this purpose. In the same way that DFKH has freed players to focus on more creative tasks, we offer the same to the Kingdom: let us help you focus on building.
Synergy with DFK Game and DFK Blockchains
DFK Helper aims to improve the entire ecosystem:
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Easing the Load: DFKH uses a fraction of the resources the DFK UI does. The DFK UI takes a heavy toll on the blockchain RPCs, often making dozens of requests a second about current inventory, hero status and data, etc. This further causes issues trying to make transactions, such as starting quests, and players will often chain multiples of the same transaction that just won’t go through, often through more than one RPC. DFK Helper, on the other hand, only gets the minimal data it needs when it needs it, gently does one thing at a time at the normal pace of a person, and intelligently seeks to avoid and, when needed, clear blockchain congestion issues. The more people that use DFK Helper, the smoother the official UI will run, and the fewer the Kingdoms’ resources that will be used unnecessarily.
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Load Balancing and Quest Funding: Most players interact with DFK during certain peak hours, often when most wake up, go to bed, and so forth. During those hours, it’s a traffic jam, which the arb bots also join to capitulate on, bringing forth major delays, errors, and high gas prices. DFKH does not have peak times, and divides up all workloads evenly throughout the entire day/night, thereby providing substantial load balancing, lowering average gas prices and delays for everyone. The quest fund is likewise affected, with wasted hero stamina and potential quest fund injections that do not take place out of those peak times. DFKH similarly evens out those quest fund injections, allowing players to utilize their DFK assets even while they work, sleep, play.
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Continuing Investment: Players often join DFKH feeling overwhelmed by their holdings, looking to leave / sell / downsize / take a break, but weeks later find themselves doubling, tripling, and continuing to grow those holdings because DFKH turned it from chore to fun.
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Liquidity: Selling (Trader) and LPing (Druid) items can be such a chore that many players choose to bundle them and sell them all at once (causing liquidity shocks), or try to ignore their existence (posing future liquidity shocks and present market inefficiencies). DFKH’s Auto-Sell, Auto-Buy, and Auto-LP options make every user, and their holdings, a fully active member of the community, normalizing liquidity, preventing slippage, and discouraging arb bots.
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Token Burning Mechanics: Many players don’t have the time it takes to use token-burning mechanics that are extremely for the whole DFK ecosystem, including stamina vialing, dueling, raffling, enhancement-crystal usage, and more. DFKH allows automation of all of these. Millions of vials and their components have been burned by DFKH. Millions of tickets: used. This has helped all players to sell their quest rewards at higher prices, those making a living from the quest fund, improved rewards themselves, benefited the Kingdom and validators via transaction fees, and more. Even those folks that could not find a dueling match in a time zone with presently few awake users: matched!
Co-Marketing How and Where
We would ask for the DFK side of the co-marketing to involve both a link in-game and on the DFK website. If possible, Discord linking on the DFK server would be helpful.
Project Links
Official
Discord: DFK Helper
Others in the PDF, due to restrictions here.