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Okay guys, I am back and out of breath from Alien Worlds.
Been spending some time in the metaverse, mining on the planet Eyeke, but I found that the rewards were abysmally low and the tasks monotonous. Might be my coordinates were wrong. Nevertheless, for someone excitable like me, it felt like I was in the timeout corner watching water drip from a malfunctioning AC unit. So I bailed. After laboring for about a month, I've dumped my tools and jumped ship.
It's been a rough journey back, but I am here with just enough energy to share with you my experiences with blockchain gaming.
Blockchain Gaming and the Player Driven Economy
Blockchain gaming is a decentralized concept of gaming built on blockchain technology where players own the items acquired in the game, and can sell these items as NFTs for cryptocurrency which can then be converted to money via exchanges. I love this definition by Republic World.
Some experts believe that blockchain gaming and the multiverse is poised to go head to head with the console market completely restructuring the gaming industry. Ya hear that Fortnite!? Instead of sinking cash into a game with no material returns, I can dream of a world where I can actually own and sell my own skins. Cue the music as we usher in a new player driven economy!
I am guessing there are a lot of gamers who feel the same way as I do because, according to the August 2021 Blockchain Game Report, "In August, more than on average 883,000 daily unique wallets interacted with game-related smart contracts."
Axie Infinity Leads The Pack
Over the past year, Axie Infinity, a trading and battling game comparable to Pokemon, has been leading the pack. AXS, the game's governance token had a huge run-up earlier this year, going from less than $0.50 at the beginning of the year to peak at $88.71 (to date) earlier this month.
The media ran stories of gamers in the Philipines making a killing on the game. Some stories were so elaborate, they went on to tell about persons who had invested in real estate, bought brand new homes.
Man, for me, the FOMO was real. I wanted in! But I balked at the cost of entry and decided that I would dip my toes in first with another, cheaper game: Alien Worlds.
Right.
And this is where things got sticky.
Read The Fine Print
Influencers shilling the game, described Alien Worlds as a free game and promised returns of $20 a day with minimal effort. Man, I should have known.
Alien Worlds is NOT Free. It is a play to earn game still currently in beta stage where players earn the non-fungible token Trillium by mining on one of seven planets.
When you begin the game, you are given a standard human avatar and a basic shovel, free, but to be able to mine for Trillium, you have to stake the game token WAXP for CPU space.
So, I mean, this is reasonable. I went out and bought some WAXP on BINANCE Exchange, transferred to my WAX wallet, staked my WAXP tokens, and I was ready to play. Of course, as I was staking, there was this notice that said unstaking would take three days. I was cool with that. But here's where things got messy.
And before I go further, let me put this disclaimer out:
I am willing to concede that my bad experience playing Alien Worlds might simply be because I did not understand the system fully before I committed to play.
My Experience
I think Alien Worlds is waaay too boring. I mean, a game in outer space and all I do is mine? No danger?! No rare discovery? So, I leave Earth to head out to space for just THAT?!
Listen, I'm coming from spending time playing Fortnite and Apex Legends and games that get your adrenaline up, to a new concept labeled as blockchain gaming, and I'm yet to be sold on the game part of it.
In Alien Worlds, all I'm doing is clicking a button and waiting until it's time to claim a fraction of a Trillium token. And I might have been sold on this if the returns were attractive but, for perspective, a TLM token is currently trading for $0.21. Sitting around waiting for a timer to count down just so I could extract 0.0004 TLM feels like a faucet to me. No disrespect to the game or to faucets.
The Gift That Keeps on Taking
For the first week, I was in denial. I hopped around from planet to planet convincing myself, there HAS to be more. But then I ran out of CPU, bought and staked more WAXP. Ran out again, invested in more WAXP again. No worries.
In the meantime, my WAXP earnings, credited to my wallet every 24 hours, were immediately re-staked upon claiming, even though I didn't want them to.
Eventually, I got bored and decided to unstake my WAXP, wait the 72 hours and be done with it. It was then I learned that I couldn't unstake the token because my RAM was at 97%.
What in all the spaceships of the metaverse?! Those sticky fingered aliens! I felt duped.
And so this is where I am. Sulking. I have to go out again, invest in more WAXP and hopefully, hopefully, I might be able to extract what's left of my tokens.
Suffice to say, at this point, I am not a fan.
But I am going to acknowledge that this game is still in beta version, so I am hoping that the developers, Dacoco, can iron out some of these kinks in the future.
At this point, I have no problem paying a higher entry fee for a better user experience, a more exciting game and more attractive returns.
But hey, not to be negative, you can go try out the game yourself if you'd like. What do I know? Might be just the thing for you if you like watching paint dry. Yeah, I'm bitter. And I'm owning it.
Shoutout to Publish0x
On a lighter note, I'd like to close with a huge shoutout to the PUBLISH0X team. At the start of the last week, I applied to join the cadre of writers on this platform. I was pleasantly surprised by the positive response when it came and was intimidated at the same time. After all, I've been reading your articles, and while I am an enthusiast, I certainly don't count myself as a crypto-expert, not by a long shot. I wasn't sure I could hold my own.
I was super scared of being humiliated. But I decided to just be myself, to share stories about things I experienced in the crypto-world, blockchain projects that appealed to me, and crypto developments that interested me. And today, at the end of one week, I can honestly say, it's awesome here.
To my followers, thanks for the love. To everyone who has dropped by to read, encourage, critique, follow, and show support, it means a lot. I appreciate you.
It's really an honor to be here.
Until next time, folks! Arrivederci!
