Let’s skip all the intros and buzzwords about how we are happy to introduce our new feature and dive straight into what we’ve cooked for you—teams! We’ll explain how everything works, what stats and scores are, and briefly explain strategies for building the most performing team. Please pay double attention to the Strategies section.

General Overview

So, wtf are teams? Teams are an essential feature of the Uncuts app and its model, as we want to build a sort of Sorare for Farcaster 🙃. Additionally, teams are the only way to claim $DEGEN from a prize pool. Did you see a Prize Pool section on the Leaderboard page? Yep, you can claim some $DEGEN from that prize pool, but only if you create a team of your favorite casters (or most hated, we don’t care, it’s your choice).

Ok, how to build a team (a tiny to-do):

• buy at least 5 cards;

• go to your Profile or Teams, scroll down a bit and click on “Create a Team”;

• “stake” 5 cards. 

Profit. You’re done! But remember you should stake all 5 cards, not less. Otherwise, we won’t score your team, you won’t be on the Team Leaderboard, and as a result, you won’t be eligible to claim $DEGEN from a prize pool. Please keep in mind that if you bought multiple cards of a specific caster, you can use only one of his cards in a team.

Once 5 cards are staked, please allow up to 5 minutes for Uncuts to start collecting scores for your team. Cards won't be locked. You are free to sell any card from a team anytime w/o "unstaking" it. But keep in mind that once you sell a card, you should fill a free slot with a different card as fast as you can since scores won't come to your profile. Once you fill up all your slots, old scores will be restored, and new ones will come again.

Once an epoch, you can create a team for free. But if you want to replace a card before the end of an epoch, you have to pay a 100 $DEGEN fee. You might think that it’s not fair. Probably, but remember that we pay for all blockchain fees, not you.

Remember one simple rule: only teams are eligible to compete for a $DEGEN prize pool. If you created a team and will keep it to the end of an epoch (no matter how many times you’ll replace cards, just make sure that you place a new card if you sold something), you’ll be able to claim $DEGEN from a Prize Pool.

Once a team has formed, go to a Teams page and see a leaderboard.

Explaining Stats and Scores

There are 2 types of Uncuts stats:

• logarithmic averages for last week (what do you see on a card image itself);

• team scores (real-time data from Farcaster that you see in the Team section).

What stats do you have in the Team section:

• rank of your team (position in a leaderboard)

• rating (sum of ratings of every card)

• rewards (approx amount of $DEGEN available to claim at the end of an epoch)

• scores (what really matters - social activity of your team since you “staked” cards)

Stats that you see on a card are designed especially for you. It helps you to understand how active this guy was last week. Based on that, you can try to predict his activity for the next week.

Rank shows your current position in the Teams leaderboard. Rating is only a sum of every card rating (a number next to a nickname), your $DEGEN rewards for that moment, and the scores of your team. $DEGEN rewards are variable and depend on a total amount of $DEGEN in a prize pool & how many teams have been created. Technically, you can create a team 30 minutes before the end of an epoch, get some scores, and participate in a $DEGEN claim. But it doesn’t make any sense.

That’s why it makes sense to replace cards sometimes. We highly recommend watching cards and their owners and replacing them from time to time if needed. Maybe your team member is ill or OOO for some reason. Maybe he’s super busy and won’t be active this week. It’s a game of skill; try to decide and act fast.

Strategies or Why All Cards Matter

Go find any card and check the number near the name. This is a card rating. The higher the rating, the cooler card you see/own. By following the basic logic, you might think that only “bold” and top rating cards will make your team a superstar. It depends. Yes, technically, you are right, but also you might be fucked up by having a superstar team when someone decides to mix a team with top-rating cards and a few low-rating ones.

Why is that? We spent dozens of hours trying to build a fair model for everyone, not just dumb Pay 2 Win. But who cares how painful it was? So let’s move forward.

Remember 3 simple rules:

• numbers on a card are only logarithmic averages for last week. It doesn’t represent the current activity. These stats are designed ONLY for you to understand how “powerful” card was during the last week;

• emission of a card matters;

• once you insert a card into a team, we will start measuring all its Farcaster activity from THAT moment. We do not track activities BEFORE team creation.

A team has formed. We’ve started collecting Farcaster data for every member of your team. What do we collect? Casts, recasts, likes, mentions, replies, followers, etc.- all the public activity on Farcaster. If a team member gets a like on a two-day-old post, we count it. He’s posted something and got 100 recasts? We count it. He’s got 500 new followers? We also count it. So, we collect all these numbers, do some magic, DIVIDE intermediate results on a card emission, sum scores of every card, and display you a final score that is updated once in 5 minutes. The higher the card emission, the higher the divider will be. Here's an example of a formula (not a real formula, just to showcase the logic):

Card Score = (likes + recasts - something else * idk whatever) / a card emission

That’s why we said that a card’s emission matters, and that’s why we consider our model fair for everyone and balanced enough. We give a chance to small players for a fair game. Of course, if you buy a Wake’s or Jesse’s card, everyone will be fucked up, lol. But we balanced it as much as we could for the current stage.

Keep this in mind. If a low-rating card (a user) starts posting as sick and gets a lot of attention, he’ll outperform other cards. We advise you (but it’s NFA) to mix your team.

Conclusion

Some tips before we all go home:

• choose your strategy: trading or collecting (teams formation);

• you need to fill up all 5 card slots to create a team;

• stats on cards represent the last week activity only;

• if you sold a card staked in a team, try to fill up an empty slot ASAP;

• only "scores" matter in a team;

• you can create a team for free once per epoch;

• a card replacement costs 100 $DEGEN;

• all cards matter, low-rating card potentially can outperform a top-rating card

Just enjoy! We hope you’ll love it! Also, we always read and listen to your thoughts, so we might change some of the stuff listed above in the future!

Cheers!