Updates for Phase 2 of GoZ: Visualizers, Hub Relaunch, and Scoring

Phase 1b of Game of Zones has drawn to a close, and in this week’s live stream we covered several important updates about scoring, judging, and the overall competition. 

Phase 1b Recap

Overall, the GoZ Team was thrilled to see Phase 1b achieve our initial competition goals and to see participants thoroughly enjoying the challenge. After we have completed our review of Phase 1a and Phase 1b data, we will announce the winner in a blog post during the first half of next week. 

In addition to the Spam Reflection Attack that raised the stakes during this abbreviated phase of the competition, we have been in awe of the visibility tools and explorers being developed by the community to support the competition.  Here are a few we’ve noticed, in no particular order:

• goz.p2p.org and dash-goz  by the P2P.org team.
• Map of Zones  by Bitquasar.com & Ztake.org.
• Game of Zones Visualizer  by the All in Bits team.
• IRISnet BlockChain Explorer  by the IRIS Network team.
• VGNG  by the VGNG team.
• Bitsong  by the Bitsong team. 

Tools like these will be invaluable when IBC is mainnet-ready, and we hope to see more products like them available to help make sense of what the network is doing.

Getting Ready for Phase 2

Today, a new version of Gaia will be released that patches a bug reported by the IRIS Team. This new release requires that we relaunch the GoZ hub, and will include data validation improvements from the Interchain Berlin team that should protect the stability of the hub.  Within the next few hours, we will be updating the GoZ repo to include connection details and tagged software releases for this relaunch, and we expect that the hub will reach over 48 hours of stability before scoring for Phase 2 begins.

During Phase 2, we again expect Tendermint to be at full capacity. The Hub will likely see an explosion of packets, and will become unreliable and overloaded with traffic. Throughout this, we expect participants to adjust their tactics and overall strategy to perform well against these adverse network conditions. We also expect to see participants connecting to each other and finding other creative ways to relay packets.

Scoring + Judging for Phase 2

Phase 2 of Game of Zones will officially begin Monday, May 25th at 12am PST  7am UTC. 

The main focus of the second phase of Game of Zones is throughput, and the winning team will be the team that relays the most packets on the GoZ Hub and in the wider Game of Zones network.  All teams will be given 1 billion doubloons for Phase 2. 

In terms of scoring, 

• Packets relayed to the hub by your relayer key are the most important metric to judge winning. If we were using a point system for scoring, these packets would be worth 1 point.
• Packets relayed from the hub are the second most important metric for the week. If we were scoring these packets using a point system, they would be worth 0.5 points. 
• Packets relayed among other chains are less important to your team’s performance than the first two metrics mentioned above. If we were using a point system for scoring, these packets would be worth 0.1 points.

From a judging perspective, we will only be able to count packets relayed with the Relayer key that is included in the GoZ roster (to be updated soon). For Phase 2:

•  All teams should append -2 to their chain ID for Phase 2 of the competition.This will help us work through the immense amount of data we expect to analyze to choose a winner, and will ensure that there is no delay in announcing a winner.  An updated roster with the chain IDs we expect to see will be available soon in the GoZ Github repo.
• If your team is relaying packets with a different address than the one that is listed in the GoZ Roster, we will be unable to see or count your performance for the week. Over the weekend, we will be confirming that we can communicate with endpoints. If we cannot reach your team’s endpoint, we will contact you via email to resolve this before Phase 2 begins.
• A new scoring dashboard that will shows real-time packets being relayed will be available on Monday, May 25th a few hours after Phase 2 begins. The GoZ Team will be monitoring connections made over the websocket, and will count packets on your chain regardless of where they come from.  
• In light of previous issues with RPC, we recommend that all teams run a full node as increasing the number of operational sentry nodes will help improve overall stability.

The GoZ team is looking forward to another exciting week of competition, and will be updating the participant roster and list of software versions to relaunch the hub by the end of the day today. Be sure to keep an eye on the official GoZ repo, and to mark your calendar for next week’s Live Stream on Friday at 12am PST// 7pm UTC on Twitch!