Arena Golf: How to choose your golfer?

Do you like large green spaces, bunkers, competition and natural course limits? You must be a fan of golf! Whether on mini-golf or on a full green, virtually or in reality, this sport can be practiced in many different manners.

But do you know which skills are necessary to ensure victory with the least number of shots possible?

Presentation of Arena Golf

Newly launched in February 2020, Arena Golf drew our attention during their presentation at NFT.NYC 2020. The concept of the game seems relatively simple: choose your golfer, train them, and then participate in tournaments utilizing a combination of your practice and the golfer’s skill points.

For the first tournament to start, the 500 presale golfers must have found their owners. At the time of writing the article, 52.8% of the first 500 golfers were sold and we recorded 264 sales for an average of $15 on chain, fiat (off-chain) payments are also accepted. Once this stage is over, it will be time to enter the Green to face the other players!

We already know that the game will be in 3D and therefore will require some skills if you want to hit the « Hole in One » level! To achieve this goal, you will have to practice and train your golfer!

Regarding the choice of your golfers, we have spent a lot of time comparing and analyzing the skill-sets currently for sale on the marketplace. We have identified, what we believe to be, the best strategy to date to build a great team of golfers.

Golfers’ Characteristics

On the marketplace, in addition to the unique design of each golfer, you will quickly notice that each golfer is defined by 4 characteristics:

• Power: Correlates to the maximum distance a golfer can hit the ball. While you’ll hit it further and may be able to reach far off targets, increased power shots come with less control.
• Accuracy: The higher the accuracy is, the better chance you’ll succeed at your shot. 
• Composure: This skill helps when in high pressure situations, tournaments, or course conditions. This ability will also impact the golfer’s mental recovery after a poor shot or streaks of bad/good shots.
• Stamina: The golfer’s shot success becomes progressively more difficult as they play. The higher the stamina, the less tired your golfer will get and the better they will perform over time.

The dark green bar is the current skill of the golfer. The light green bar corresponds to the maximum possible for this skill, after training.

Of course, the ideal would be to be at the max everywhere but rather than creating super-golfers, the choice was made to balance these characteristics to create golfer-types. Some will be more focused on power while others will be more precise.

Features and Roadmap

The “Practice” part of the game will allow you to gain characteristic points to best customize the strategy to be implemented. 

When we look at the roadmap, we can see that the “Training” will arrive in the fall of 2020. Unlike practice mode, which allows you to train alone, “Training” will allow you to train or to be trained by other players’ “Coaches” / ”Trainers”. You can, therefore, provide an experienced golfer to train another, or train one of your own.

Be aware, however, that increasing one skill to the maximum may not work in your favor. If I know my golfer is underpowered, better accuracy and more stamina will surely compensate. And since I think it would be a shame to break at the key to success, I would always try to maintain a sufficient level of Composure. What could be more annoying than not being able to face adrenaline when you are a sportsman?

Gameplay

From what we know about the gameplay for now, the accuracy of a shot will be defined by your ability to stop the cursor in the right place on the gauge. Stop the cursor too far left or right and your shot will be deflected in the wrong direction.

(this gauge is given as an example but is not extracted from the game design)

Regarding the power of the shot, the “Power Meter” will be measured in meters. It’s up to you to balance your strength so as not to leave the field or end up in a bunker… 

The higher your power characteristics, the further the ball will go!

(this gauge is given as an example but is not extracted from the game design)

Just like the accuracy gauge, you will have to stop the cursor in the bounded area to be sure that your ball does not arrive off the target.

“Stamina” or “Composure” will affect the speed of the pendulums: “Stamina” will slow the pendulum of the “Power meter” while the Composure will slow the pendulum of the “Accuracy meter”. 

Know that later in the game, outside elements will also disrupt your swings: wind, sand, water, weather… all of which affect your stats!

Now that you understand the global game dynamics, it’s time to pick your golfers and build your team!

The Choice

As explained previously, the choice depends entirely on the style of play you adopt, however, we recommend not to limit yourself to one style. Having a powerful golfer with little accuracy or cracking under pressure will be a big disadvantage but, it might be an advantage to transform him into a coach!

It will be possible to put your golfers on a special training marketplace. This will enable them to train another golfer with lower characteristics. Given these two dimensions (Player & Coaches) having only one golfer may significantly slow your progress in the game.

Here is the strategy we recommend:

The Player: Having a great Power capacity and target Accuracy seem to be the basis to be able to confront other players on the green. The more you train, the more accurately you will perform.

The Coach: The coach does not need to have stamina nor to resist stress. He must be expert in certain skills to transmit them to your players. 

You really have to consider the Player and the Coach as a complementary duo. The Coach must be able to quickly raise the skill of the player on his weakest characteristics.

Consider only picking players with Max Characteristics above 700. It is more important to take into account the potential of your golfer than his skills at time T. Skills can improve but do have a maximum cap. So think about the future when you choose your players 😉

Conclusion

The idea of a game of golf with “cartoon” graphics is rather pleasant, we can think that the target is a large audience.

The drive seems to be one of the pillars of the game, so it is important not to neglect this aspect of gameplay! If you buy a golfer who can not move away too far it may no longer be useful for high-level tournaments. That said, you can resell it to a new player so they don’t have all the training steps to do.

While waiting to see you on the Green, we advise you to read the announcement of the tournament which will take place when the 500 golfers will have been distributed. For now, the average price for a golfer is $25 (paid in fiat or ETH), which is why it’s important to define what type of golfer you are going to be from the start.

Don’t panic if you meet CryptoKitties golfers, that’s normal, Arena Golf has partnered with them!

Disclaimer: This is a sponsored article. No content or article should be considered as financial advice. We strongly recommend you to conduct due diligence and always do your own research before investing in a project.