Hello Gamers!
If you visit my post daily or even occasionally, you know that m,ost of my posts are based on splinterlands. But recently, I joined another game Axie Infinity which belongs to the Etherium chain. In our neoxian server, We often talk about all the new projects or games launching and when 2 of my friends @xawi and @burlarj joined this Axie Infinity hype, I could not resist to join with them. Thou I was already already paying a loan to neoxian sir which I took to start my mining rig and was tight on budget but this Axie fever had caught me hard and i was looking for some quick money to buy the initial 3 axies which is needed in order to start playing an earning.
After thinking a bit, I thought to sell my all single bcx splinterlands cards and also add my mining income with that to have enough funds to buy 3 decent axies. On 14th July, I finally collected some ETH and moved it to ronin wallet. But by then, among the 3 axies that I have chosen in market, 2 got sold and the current ones was much higher in price. I bought 1 good aqua axie and for 0.4 ETH and almost lost all of my funds on it. I even started re-listing the axie for sale as I realized I really bought it overpriced but then changed my mind later.
You need 2 more to start playing so I again shuffled all my little savings and investments here and there and again move some funds. This time I bought the cheapest 2 available at the market that time, ignoring their class, cards, stats or even breed count as my poor wallet wasn't permitting the luxury. After 4 days since I bought my first axie, I bought 2 plant axies pricing 0.132 ETH and 0.133 ETH on 18th July and was finally able to start playing. I knew I was doing a bad move here buying cheap and probably pure shit axies which will perform miserably bad in arena but at least I could collect the daily guaranteed 150 slp (the slp halving wasn't there yet) and with slp money I can hopefully buy better axies later.
The journey begins and I routinely started collecting SLP by playing adventure and arena mode. As exactly as I thought, I used to lose more arena than I win but for the daily 100 slp from adventure mode and 50 slp on quest completion reward was coming in and increasing balance so I was somewhere satisfied. SLP just hit ATH in july and the price of slp was around 0.27-0.3$ so I was earning daily 170-180 slp approx so it was sweet money I was printing just by playing a game. But, the problem started from all direction later on.
First of all, Axie Infinity is a time consuming game, especially for new players. When you start playing, by default your axies will be at level 1 and will increase its level based on how much energy you are using on adventure mode. At initial levels, axies can only fight and win in initial levels so most probably you will only earn 1 or 2 slp per adventure match win unless you have a leveled up axie (let's say level 15-20). If you get 2 slp per win, to collect 100 slp you have to win 50 matches! To win 50 matches with very low level axies, you have to actually play a bit more than 50 as you will also lose some until you have bought God axies. Lastly, add minimum 5 arena match wins to it so that you can collect the daily quest reward as well. So, to collect the 100% of the daily rewards, I had to play over 2 - 2.5 hours daily which scattered away my daily life routine and other works as well. I used to post daily before I joined in axie, but after started playing it, I could only post 3 or 4 times a week and with degraded quality.
The SLP price also getting low every day by a little bit. I started thinking that it will rise back at some point and decided not to sell SLP. Well, that decision costed me a lot as SLP from 0.3$ came down to 0.13$ now and i dont know at the moment that when it will stop dipping and start going upwards again as the 0$ mark is near that it's ATH price now. I have a total of 5914 SLP is my wallet and my next RONIN claim is on 1st Sept so by then I will have total 6000+ slp. At the current rate, 6000 slp is only 833$ and if I cash out now, I think after paying all the ETH gas fees, I'll get around 770$.
Axie is a good game no doubt but I joined in a bad time and with high hopes. If you compare the current market, axies are pretty cheap than it used to be and if you dont wanna spend much, 700-800$ would be enough to buy 3 axies and start earning. The ROI in that case will be very lucrative and probably within 2 or 3 months you'll get your investment back. after around 45 days, I can also get my ROI even if SLP price remains same. So, it's not too bad still to get in. The effects of SLP reward halving (from daily 150 slp to currently 75 slp) haven't kicking in thou and at some point it will increase the SLP value. I am just confused weather to pull money in this down market or wait for the good days.