Earlier today, Earth 2 users came to know via Omar's reply on Twitter that he is no longer serving as an advisor to the Earth 2 team. He revealed that his involvement in the project ceased about 2 months ago owing to 'difference of opinion'. Omar wished luck to the project and the Earth 2 community.
Omar, a former senior director at Binance was believed to be heavily involved in advising Earth2 on matters related to Essence (Earth2's crypto currency). Earth 2 had earlier announced Omar's joining as a strategic advisor.
As Earth 2 users heard the news of his departure, a mini-chaos ensued in the Earth 2 discord, prompting Shane Isaac (CEO Earth2) to jump in the chat and assure users that the plans are on track. He also went on to comment on a range of issues.
Full chat transcript from discord (it's a short chat so we wont be adding a summary):
(users were chatting about Omar's departure when Shane hopped in)
User (U): If he doesn’t get someone on the team that knows about crypto it could definitely go to 0
Shane (S): we know a lot of key people and connections in the crypto space, there is no problem here. I can also confirm this has not changed our plans, including time schedule, for Essence has not changed. Other details are confidential at this stage, but really quite irrelevant in the overall big picture.
Are details of retroactive for locked countries and impacted Nauru confidential :-3?
S- yes this is 100% in motion
There is most certainly a pattern. Not only with high profile team members departing, but with the lack of communication. This one was just far too long for him to keep silent. He doesn't owe info on everything that is going on behind the scenes, but this is a missed opportunity to get ahead of something that he certainly should know would cause a lot of concerns within the community. PR 101, which seems to be non existent here
S- it's a bit more complicated than that Drew and I can't comment further right now
Ok well, like I also said I most certainly believe in E2, and will be here to build many years into the future. This one just struck me as something that would have been appropriate to mention when it happened, rather than us finding out how we did.
S- I agree with you, that would have been ideal but again, it was more complicated than this
You can maybe give some clarification on the matter, since a few in here are ready to toss Omar under the bus like the last team members who left, maybe Omar isn't deserving of that treatment?
S- I am trying to refrain from such comments sorry Archivium. I will let others deal with the matter behind the scenes.
Shane, if I can be very blunt and honest for one second: rebel civilians are UGLY and they will never be allowed in my city.
S- I plan for them to look different in E2V1. Vastly different. We are exploring options but have other higher priorities related to Players default Avatars
I guess you have a few, right, , I was referring to the land update the one you referenced 2-3 weeks, but might take longer.
S- oh yes, we should be able to publish it soon. It also made sense to publish it after the land mechanic release to give full clarity, but if we publish the land upgrade article first we'll just need to add further details when the land mechanic update is released. You'll understand better after the fact
Who has replaced Omar?
S- he doesn't need to be replaced and as mentioned above, we have a lot of connections in the industry already to get all we need when we need it
Thanks Shane for coming in here and addressing the community, at least they have some clarity that would help calm them down
S- no problem MetaHome. The main item I wanted to clarify is that it has not changed our existing plans for Essence
Can essence be used in Lobbi? (Lobbi is a social media app under development under Shane)
S- interesting question
Skipped the wen rejections question again? Shane
S- we have higher priorities as far as the dev pipeline is concerned so I am just waiting for devs to implement the system that will allow us to process partial refunds, something it was not built to handle. Once they have time to implement we will wrap it up. We simply have too many tight schedules right now but I do want to get it wrapped up this year and certainly before any token launch
Lobbi from the mockup sneak peak the product has no usp. The gamer social media space is already crowded with discord and twitch, and the interface is very basic. Are you guys sure about not integrating the social media into the platform more?
S- interesting how you know so much from a few screenshots. My point was that it's pretty difficult to pass full judgement on an app after seeing only a few screenshots
Will EPLs be relevant in Lobbi?
S- not at this stage, they are more for E2V1 and will play a very important role in my opinion
Care to elaborate on E2 vs Google
S- that is something the lawyers are dealing with. I receive periodic briefings from them. We use top tier law firms and I would say everything is amicable so far. I believe we will be able to come to a fair resolution
Will placing EcoSim buildings and creating building blocks from our resources take place on website or E2V1 initially? Do you intend to have a large catalogue of building blocks for initial release or slowly release like resources?
S- I think those make more sense to take place inside E2V1. It is actually difficult to break away from progression on the website side and draw a line to when we're going to 100% focus on E2V1, harder than expected as it will slow down releases and development but will be better long term. For clarity, I would say we'll have OUs, maybe OU generation on the website with the plan for raw materials (Weaver)buildings, factories and the like to be represented inside E2V1. I have mentioned before that the initial version of E2V1 will be focused on exploration first, more in depth than just flying around with a camera view. That will be our initial focus for E2V1 and the EcoSim elements will follow.
That sounds like months and months before major progress can be released at scale ... So really no Occurrence Units until mid 2024 ??
S- I didn't provide any time frame guidelines here, so you're stabbing in the dark here. What I will say is that we're dealing with big data on all of these features, so when something sounds simple, multiply that difficulty by 100 then more when you need it to work at scale. Even the determination of exact resource occurrence is complicated on a global scale. We have very smart people focused on these systems and I receive reports on progress as well as sit in from time to time, it's not straight forward
Good answer, thanks. Does sound like if you are waiting for E2v1 before you begin generating resources into player accounts ? Or will you use the current website to house the player resource occurrence units ??
S- no I didn't say that, or didn't mean it. I mean we may use the current website to detect, confirm and once that is looking stable, start OU generation. But it makes more sense to have Raw Material, Building blocks, factories etc inside E2V1
If I can fly around and walk around with an avatar ill be fine
S- then you should be more than fine
When the pre-alpha is ready for people to try out, will it be an online experience or will they be testing out their own localized versions for this first iteration?
S- there will 100% be many parts linked back to our servers given the activities we want to include for the pre-alpha, so it will be online. I know your next question will be about multiplayer, and the answer is we're aiming for a light version (but no promises for pre-alpha) so people can run around with a few friends. The multiplayer aspect may come a little later. You should have a better idea of what this pre-alpha will look like and involve Nov/Dec
Shane E2 is providing a service swapping crypto tokens to E-Dollar through rocket fuel. When $ESS is launched, we may need a function to swap $ESS to stablecoins. In this sense, will you add an update swapping E-Dollar for stablecoins too? or any other solution you are thinking of?
S- we do not have plans for this in the near future. We'd just like to get the token trading on an external platform first and then take it in steps from there
Hi Shane. Just wondering if will Lobbi be for everyone or mostly gamers?
S- I think there will be a focus there for gamers, but everyone can use it for various purposes.
In my opinion it is a great idea to have a social network for all gamers and inside to push earth2. It would be like ads forever and free and for an infinite user base. Creating just an internal messaging app for earth2 would have been a waste of time. Congratulations (obviously my speculations)
S- thank you. I think the social media app will be a good start to something bigger
I would like to see the egg hunt here. Also, I can see the collection of resources, jewels, and simple manual raiding mechanics being low hanging fruit perhaps. I think it would be amazing if you could also gamify terrain validation or something that will allow the community provide value to the E2V1 dev team and provides us some fun while doing it! Any hints on what we might see?
S- there are a lot of things we have in the pipeline. I want E2V1 to lead into the EcoSim and for Players to 'discover' key items they need to improve / advance their experience inside E2V1. I feel very strongly about this so the first version will be heavily focused on these type of things, promoting exploration and other things. I think some will be pleasantly surprised and it will be a good foundation for us to continue building on over time
Maybe you talked about it before... will non-earth2 users be able to visit e2v1? as visitors, without interacting. It would be a nice advertisement....what do u think ?
S- they will in the future, but initially you'll need a Mentar to spawn your Avatar into E2V1 and E-ther to synthesize
Will we need a PC to play or can we on the phone?
S- you'll need a PC. We're spending quite a lot of time on optimizations and it's looking promising so far you'll probably still need a fairly decent GPU to get the best experience
Could we see any sneak peeks of E2V1 or Avatar? and some contents that we can enjoy and build internal ecosystems
S- update videos coming in Nov / Dec
Will a 12 Core I9 with a 128gigs of RAM be good enough to play it?
S- umm yes that would be killing it, but GPU is probably the most important part and you've not listed that
RTX 3080TI?
S- you'll have a good experience on E2V1
(end of chat)