I've been wanting to do some articles on the underlying mechanics beneath the blockchain games I play for a while. My plan is to do an article on one game or one aspect of a game every Saturday starting today. The idea is to give some insight into how mechanics are working within the games and how to best interact with them in order to maximize your potential rewards from playing the game.
With the many recent changes to Rising Star's economy, discussing it first seems like an obvious choice. While I'm quite sure most of you reading this article will have already heard about the game or might even be playing it actively already, I'll give a short introduction on the game for those that have not heard of it before first.
Rising Star is an idle game running on the Hive blockchain. It's puts you in the shoes of a lowly busker with the aspiration to reach stardom some day. You start out by performing illegally in the streets or giving it your best on karaoke night. Eventually, you'll start to perform in bigger venues, form your own band and start touring the country.
All your band members, your instruments, but even your touring coach and your rehearsal room are represented by NFTs that can be traded freely with other players. Doing missions in the game awards you with Rising Star's very own token - Starbits. Starbits can be used to buy either booster packs containing random cards or to buy specific cards from the market. Staribts are also traded at Hive-Enginge and if you check the history, there are quite some trades going on every day.
Today I want to focus on the topic of how to best use these Starbits in order to grow your account and thus continuously increase the amount of Starbits you'll be able to gain from doing missions.
As stated above, you can either use Starbits to buy booster packs or to buy specific cards of the market. To be perfectly clear here - there's nothing wrong with just buying packs for 10,000 Starbits each and working with the random cards you find there. Doing so is actually giving you the chance to find legendary cards which you are very likely not going to buy off the market unless you invest a large chunk of Hive from outside the game. Also, in order for cards to be listed on the market, they have to come from boosters first, obviously. So if you enjoy opening boosters, go ahead and just do that, you can't go wrong with that option.
To me personally, a lot of the fun comes from interaction with the games market, though. What we want to do is invest our Starbits wisely in order to grow our account as cost effective as possible. In order to do so, we need to analyze what cards we want to buy and what we are willing to pay for them. To do so, we need to first understand the different stats used in the game:
The number of Fans you have dictates the amount of Starbits you gain per mission. The more fans you have, the more Starbits will be given to you. This stat is the deciding factor for your account and your target should be to grow that number whenever you can. There are two kinds of Fans. Permanent ones coming from cards and temporary ones found during missions. These only stick with you for 12 hours and are lost afterwards.
Your Skill showcases how good you are at what you do and generally speaking, this value needs to always be slightly higher than the amount of fans plus the amount of Ego you have. If it's lower than that number, your Starbits gained per mission will be reduced by the percentage you are missing. Skill is coming from cards as well as from doing music lessons. Contrary to Fans, the Skill gained from missions is permanent.
The Luck you have will dictate the number of temporary Fans gained from doing missions as well as the amount of Skill gained from doing lessons. I'll get into the workings of that in a second.
Finally, there's Income Modifier but since that stat is not doing anything right now, we'll just ignore it in this article.
As you can see from the list above, you need to focus on increasing your Fans, your Skill and your Luck, ideally keeping all three stats in balance. Having more Skill than Fans is not going to do anything for you, so naturally you'd focus on increasing your Fans first and only build up as much Skill as needed to stay slightly above your Fans. As you gain more Fans, you'll also gain more Ego per mission you do, so over time you'll need to gain more and more skill to break even.
This means you'll either have to buy more Skill cards, do more lessons or increase the amount of Skill you gain from these lessons. This is where Luck takes effect. There are several lessons, all focusing on one group of instruments or on vehicles. The total amount of luck you have from this group of cards dictates the amount of Skill you can get from doing a lesson. So what you want to do is pick one of these lessons and concentrate on improving the luck for that type of mission.
Now that you know all the basics, let's talk actual strategy. What you want to do is decide on what missions to do and what cards to buy off the market. Keep in mind that there are several strategies that potentially all could work, so I'll only give you one example here. Our goal is to grow our fanbase but have enough skill to keep them happy and minimize the amount of time and Starbits needed to gain new skill.
Permanent Fans are only coming from cards while permanent skill can be gained doing missions as well. That's why I'd strongly advise on spending Starbits to increase your Fans but only spending time to increase your Skill. In order to reduce the number of skill lessons we have to do, we also want to focus on one group of instruments (or on vehicles) and buy more cards of that category whenever possible.
This way our circle of growth looks like that:
- Do "normal" Missions to gain Starbits
- Invest Starbits to increase your Fans and Luck
- Do Lessons to match your new Fans and Ego
By repeating these three steps, our account is going to organically grow indefinitely and we really only need to decide what card we want to buy next.
So - what are we going to spend our Starbits on? There's no single card I'd advise you to buy because the market is changing constantly. A better course of action is to look at what's available to you and decide what is the best deal for you right now. As a rule of thumb, it's always better to buy rare cards instead of going for Epic and Legendary ones. That's simply for the fact that rare cards are rather abundant and you are only paying for the stats they offer. Epic and Legendary cards have an additional fee added for their scarcity, so you are paying for more than what you get. Keep in mind that these rarer cards are obviously more likely to increase in value over time, so only take this advise if you are only looking to increase your accounts stats as cost efficient as possible.
So how to decide what card to buy? What I do here is calculate the cost per stat for any given card. I often see people buy Fan boost cards for way too much instead of going for cheaper alternatives. What you want to do is look at the Starbits price for the card and divide it by the amount of points you'd gain for the stat you are looking for.
So looking at this Fan Boost 10 card, we could buy one for 500 Starbits and we'd gain 10 Fans from it.
500/10 = 50, so we'd pay 50 Starbits per Fan gained this way.
I see deals like this in the market stream all the time and let me tell you, they are horrible.
Now have a look at that Touring Coach! The cheapest one is 8,700 Starbits!
8700/500 = 17.4, so we'd only pay 17.4 Starbits per Fan gained.
In other words, we are gaining thrice the fans from buying the Touring Coach compared to buying the Fan Boost! And that's not even factoring in the +2 Luck we get on top.
As you can see, comparing different cards can net you a lot more bang for your buck. Personally, I consider anything below 20 Starbits per Fan to be a good deal so I usually don't invest into any cards that would net me less fans. The same can and should be done for buying instruments: Always look for the amount of Starbits per Luck gained and buy the ones that offer the most Luck for the least amount of Starbits.
You now have all the information needed to do your own research and decide yourself what cards you want to buy. Another option would be focusing on Musician cards as they would net you both Fans and Skill at the same time. As I said above, there are several viable strategies to playing Rising Star, so the most important takeaway should be to always compare the options available to you and calculate what the best deal is in any given situation.
And that's all from me today, I hope you enjoyed the article and if you are not already playing it, give Rising Star a shot, it's an amazing game!
Thank you all for reading and see you next time!