Team Quests: Why a Bigger Team Pays More per Seat
How team quests in DENSHIN pay: seats by order of joining, a shared pool paid only when the last seat fills, and why the last of seven earns more than the first of five.
Most quests in our city are a deal between you and the chain: you do the task, the check reads it, the points land. Team quests are the exception. You can't finish one alone, and that changes how they pay.
Genesis has three of them, teams of 3, 5 and 7. The first question everyone asks is which one to join, and the answer surprises people: the biggest. Here's why we set it up that way, with the numbers.
What a team quest asks#
Each team quest is a fixed number of seats, taken first come, first served. Every member does the same small task from their own wallet. In Genesis that's a swap of 0.10 USDC or more on Base (your first swap for under ten cents walks through one):
- Night Shift, 7 seats, open since the first day of the season.
- Dock Detail, 5 seats, a swap on Aerodrome.
- Last Run, 3 seats, the latest of the three.
One transaction can't fill two seats, and one player can't sit twice. Every seat is a different person making their own move.
The bigger the team, the more every seat pays#
This is the rule that decides which team to join:
| Team | Seats by order of joining |
|---|---|
| Night Shift · 7 seats | 160 · 147 · 141 · 138 · 136 · 135 · 133 |
| Dock Detail · 5 seats | 108 · 100 · 96 · 94 · 92 |
| Last Run · 3 seats | 78 · 72 · 70 |
Look at the last seat of the seven: 133. Now the first seat of the five: 108. The player who closes Night Shift earns more than the player who opened Dock Detail.
That's deliberate. Waiting for six other people is harder than waiting for two, and the points should say so. If a small team paid the same per seat, nobody would ever sit at the big table.
Every one of those seats also beats the 60 points an ordinary swap quest pays for the same swap. The difference is the price of the risk below.
Nothing is paid until the last seat fills#
An ordinary quest pays each task the moment it verifies. A team quest pays nothing for its tasks. Instead the whole quest holds one pool:
pool = seat base × team size + risk premium
| Team | Seat base | Risk premium | Pool |
|---|---|---|---|
| 7 seats | 120 | 150 | 990 |
| 5 seats | 80 | 90 | 490 |
| 3 seats | 60 | 40 | 220 |
The pool waits until the final seat closes, then everyone on the team is paid at once.
If the team never fills before its deadline, and in Genesis that's the end of the season on 31 October, the whole pool burns. That includes the people who finished their swaps on day one. There's no partial payment, because there were never partial payments to begin with. We say this on the quest before you take a seat, and again on the button.
It sounds harsh. It's also what makes the reward honest: the extra points over a plain swap are paid for one thing only, the chance that the team doesn't come together.
How the seats are priced#
The pool splits in two, and the two parts answer different questions.
The seat base is the same for everyone. The seventh player's swap is the same swap the first player made, so it's paid the same: 120 points on Night Shift, 80 on Dock Detail, 60 on Last Run.
The risk premium goes by order of joining. Whoever sits first commits without knowing whether the team will fill at all, so the first seat carries the most risk and gets the biggest share. The split uses the same gentle curve as our season prize pool:
weight(p) = 1 / p^0.55
share(p) = premium × weight(p) / Σ weight
The slope is gentle on purpose. On Night Shift the first seat earns 160 and the last 133, not 160 and 5. The last player in did the same work and closed the team for everyone; leave them a token share and nobody would bother closing a team at all. Rounding leftovers go to seat 1, so the seats always add up to exactly the pool.
Seats don't sit idle#
Taking a team quest holds a seat for one hour. The task is minutes of work (open a venue, connect, swap), so an hour is generous, and it means one seat can pass through many hands in a day instead of being locked by someone who walked away.
You get a warning about 15 minutes before your hold ends, and the countdown on the quest turns amber at the same moment. If the hold lapses, you lose nothing: take the quest again while a seat is free and you're back, with your original place in the joining order. Once your swap is verified, the seat is yours whatever the clock says.
The quest panel shows every seat: who holds it, in what order they joined, who has finished. Empty seats are drawn too. It updates while you watch, so "two still open" is something you see, not something you calculate.
Why your friends can't fill it for you#
Seats are checked against the referral tree. Anyone who shares a referral link with a player already on the team is refused: the person who invited you, anyone you invited, and anyone invited by the same person as you.
That rule is there so a chain of accounts under one hand can't quietly occupy a team. It also means a team is what the name says, people who didn't know each other until the quest put them at one table.
Which team to pick#
If you're deciding with a few days of Genesis left, here's how our team thinks about it:
- Seven pays the most per seat and needs the most strangers. Join early if you're happy to wait; join late if you'd rather close it and still take 133.
- Five is the middle ground. It can fill in one evening when people are around.
- Three is the fastest and pays the least. Lowest risk, lowest premium.
The full mechanics, including the warnings about holds and the referral check, live in the team quests reference. The rule that one transaction pays once, ever, is explained in how verification works.
See you at the table.
