Ev.io Social Areas

We're going all-in on social areas as our biggest core feature addition in 2024!

Let's face it. Most metaverse land is absolutely useless. They are mostly empty spaces no one cares to visit. The ev.io team wants to do land right, and we have a plan to make that happen.

Right now you go to Deathmatch or Team Deathmatch when you access ev.io in your browser. Instead, you will go to a home base, a social area, which is owned by a group of players (e.g. a clan). From your home base, you can ...

• Show off your skins, chat and trade with other players. At first it will just be ev NFTs, but we may open it up to other projects on the Solana blockchain in the future. Land owners collect a 1% fee on all trades. More details on that below. 
• Play mini games. A new mini game will start every 10 minutes. If you are opted in, you will automatically be teleported to the mini game. Once the mini game ends, you are teleported back to the social area. In the center of the social area, there will be a giant billboard showing 3 choices for the next mini game, and players will stand on buttons to vote on which game they want to play next. 
• Social areas come with a default template but the look can be customized with land tokens. Pay land tokens to customize the look of your social area. See more "add-ons" you can buy with land tokens below.
• You will get foot traffic from web2 players that need to access the land in order to access ev's core game modes (deathmatch, team deathmatch, sniper/shotty, etc). This is designed as an opportunity for clans, the primary land holders, to recruit players. Imagine each clan having a personal greeter at the opening portal to welcome new players and tell them about their organization ("welcome to Costco, I love you"). 
• We plan to continually add more utility to social spaces over time e.g. a merchant which randomly appears selling discount NFTs.

Ev.io social areas (aka land) are like mini NFT marketplaces

A need for a trustless system for p2p trades is not just a need within the ev.io, but one for the entire Solana ecosystem. Currently, most p2p trades for NFTs happen in private messages on Discord. This is how 99% of NFT scams happen. This is why we want to make NFT trading, starting with ev NFTs and eventually expanding to other projects, a core feature of ev.io land.

Suppose you own an NFT for a Bored Apes project, want to sell, and found a buyer. There's virtually no way to conduct the transaction without risk (p2p via Discord private messages) or high fees (NFT marketplaces). But both parties can simply jump into an ev social area to conduct the trade in a safe and secure way. In the spirit of the metaverse, it is also a gamified experience. Just like any trade in an MMORPG game, there's a trade window, and both parties are represented with their in-game avatars (aka ev.io skins).

The land owner is also compensated. The trading fee is 1% (compared to 2% on Magic Eden), and 100% of that goes to the land owners. The transaction is trustless, and there are avatars (ev char skins) to represent both players. 

In summary, land owners will function as mini NFT marketplaces designed specifically for p2p transactions on the Solana blockchain. 

Land Tokens

Read about how to acquire land tokens here. tl;dr: you get land tokens by grinding weekly quests with a 3rd edition character skin NFT. Get a 3rd edition character skin NFT by grinding S tokens with the free non-NFT version of the 3rd edition skin. 

Like all tokens in ev.io, land tokens are seasonal. Players must equip a character skin and complete 7 daily quests, 7 days in a row, to collect a bag of tokens. That does not mean there is not some permanence aspect to owning land. If you are a land owner, you can renew your land contract, and all add-ons, for a much lower price in land tokens the next season.

In addition to buying the land itself for the season, land tokens can be used for the following add-ons.

• A custom domain e.g. eternity.ev.io or xborg.ev.io. We anticipate this will be a high-demand feature for ev.io clans. 
• Map customization - Control the look and feel of your social area. e.g. your social area can be beach or winter themed, can include a tiki bar, etc. With enough land tokens, you can buy complete customization of your land. 
• Game mode customization - By default, land environments will run the same was as ev.io's core game modes (player will walk around in their character skin without a weapon equipped). Suppose though, you want to change the gravity settings during an event. With enough land tokens, you can customize everything about the virtual environment. 
• Trading - Users can trade any kind of NFT on the Solana blockchain in your social space and the owner of the space can set the fee.
• Billboards - Advertise anything you want inside your social space with digital billboards, static image and video formats supported.
• Land will have access to the default mini games created by the ev.io team. There will also be community-made mini games, which land owners can pay for to have access to. The payments go entirely to the mini game creators. 
• Play custom music with the potential to have live concerts inside your social area
• Bulletin board - Post messages meet times, memos to the people who traffick your land
• Custom load screen i.e. the screen which appears as the social area loads
• In-browser voice chat, much like Discord's voice chat, which is built on web technologies
• Custom leaderboards - users that set your social area as their headquarters, participate in a leaderboard just for that social area. These will be useful for running internal competitions for your clan. 

How much does land cost?

The best land will cost enough land tokens, that it won't be practical for a single person to grind for them. Players must pool their tokens to buy land. Think of it like a charter. When a clan or organization wants to buy land, they list all the player accounts want to be owners. The players then send the tokens to a wallet we specify, and their % ownership is based on the number of tokens they send. e.g. if a single player is responsible for sending 10% of the tokens to buy the land, the single player is a 10% owner of the land. 

We intend for anywhere from 3-5 social spaces to be community owned. And to have a different class of land that is paid for with real money to help fund our operations. These sales would take place privately and would not dilute the value of land. The Sandbox sold land to Snoop Dog and Atari. We'd like to sell to crypto projects and organizations. Imagine a Bored Apes or DeGods social area - these blue chip projects would bring in users from outside our ecosystem and elevate the value and prestige of our land.

Land Beta

We will be conducting a public Land Beta event sometime in 2024. This will give the community an idea for what land is like, and also allow us to conduct technical tests.