I can't believe it's Friday again already. This week has passed in record time for me. With a lot of stuff going on at work and the once in a decade winter wonder land outside, I didn't have all that much time to engage in the crypto world. I've missed publishing an article on two different days and overall was a bit less active than what I had hoped for. I had already made the decision to cut back on some of the games I play during my last hiking trip, but it really only was during this week that I've finally seen through with it. That's not to say that I'll play less, but I want to focus more on the games I really enjoy/I really see as profitable. I'll keep trying new games as I always have, so the list is going to grow again over time.
First things first, though, here's a look at the tokens I track:
| Token | Amount | Increase |
|---|---|---|
| Hive | 6,525 | 52 |
| LEO | 7,108 | 44 |
| CTP | 9,295 | 446 |
| SPT | 58,614 | 1,496 |
| XTM | 5,095 | 322 |
Mostly organic growth this week coming from curation and author rewards. I've bought some additional CTP, but with the current price spike, I didn't manage to snag any larger quantities. Whenever I tried posting a buy order it immediately got beaten by a slightly higher one and people are not too keen on selling their CTP in the first place. Hive and LEO are looking good as well, considering the appreciating token prices, these are nice increases and I have a feeling we'll see a lot more of that in 2021.
Next, we'll take a look at the games I still play, followed by some words on the games I've devided to quit for now:
Splinterlands
I'm having a great time with Splinterlands recently. My seasons progress has been pretty steady so far. I've already made it to Champion II with plenty of time left to do the push for Champion I. I'll be hiking again this weekend so it might get a little stressful on Sunday/Monday but that's on me. I've had good win rates at about 60% so far and I really feel like I'm slowly improving my game, becoming better and better at predicting what the big guys are going to go with.
I've found a lot of new referrals this week that bought a spellbook and also some that bought additional booster packs and even a land plot claim. I'm pretty pleased with progress in that regard. Just this week, I've earned almost 13$ in ingame credits. That's a lot of free money to spend. And I did spend a bit again. My plan is to acquire 1-3 cards per week that I feel should really help my game. This week, I've gone with improving my Death Splinter:
I'm struggling against the Water magic attack builds quite often, so the Phantom Soldier seemed like a logical pickup. I've often felt like I lacked in offensive power in high mana caps and he serves as a great counter against magic and a threat on his own. At the same time, I've only had Owster Rotwell as max level summoner in Death and while he's obviously great against magic, he often felt like he's not doing anything if my opponent didn't go for magic. Zintar should really help with that a lot. The -1 attack at 3 mana is great and should be a game changer in many battles that I've lost before. Now I only need to learn when to go with what summoner and things should greatly improve in Death for me.
Alien Worlds
For this week, I'll treat R-Planet and Alien Worlds as one entity, but since R-Planet will launch their own gamification model next week, I'll probably have to split them up into two categories. In Alien Worlds, I've upped my mining gear a bit by investing into a rare Artunian Shovel. This way, I've brought my chance to find NFTs up quite a bit. At the same time, my mining time is now 15 minutes which incidentally is the same time most of my Rising Star missions take - this way I just start a mining mission, start a mission in Rising Star, claim my haul, and move on. This has made operating both games efficiently a lot easier for me.
R-Planet is going to launch into their first gameplay phase on February 16th. I've already made an article discussing the information available so far. They released some more information and a road map and to tell the truth, I'm pretty underwhelmed by everything they've put in there. This whole thing will just come down to staking, earning, and staking the earnings. But just because it's not a fun game doesn't mean it couldn't be an interesting earning opportunity. Considering the fact that I haven't spend anything on the whole thing, the opportunity of building permanent passive income seems pretty tempting. We'll have to wait and see how things play out in the end, but if enough people do enjoy it, I should be in for some nice daily dividend.
eXode
As anticipated, eXode released a first demo version for the scanning gameplay. While it's really short and finished in a couple of minutes, I was really impressed with the production quality of the whole thing. It has an amazing level of polish already and the interface seems very streamlined. The sheer number of options and stats to track was a slightly worrying issue to me in Evacuation but with the way more clean interface in scanning, I'm pretty sure that @elindos is already aware of the issue and will do his best to keep all stages of the game as clear as possible.
In the coming weeks, we'll see several iterations of the scanning experience with more and more features added to the Alpha. I really like the new approach to the release schedule. Instead of pushing the whole thing still riddled with bugs, the iterated approach allows for a more stable and polished experience right away. There were also some hints in the Discord that Colonization is actually a lot closer than what I anticipated. eXode is going to be such an amazing game, I really can't wait for the next steps to become available!
Rabona
My trip to league 2 is going to be pretty short lived. The Durlacher Deiwel managed to win exactly one game the whole season and with only 3 matches left to play, I'll obviously go back down to league 3 after the season. Well, it was a fun little trip, but obviously I'd need to invest a lot more RBN to get a competitive team going for the league. I'll see where I end up next season and decide what to do from there.
Rising Star
It was a bad week for me in Rising Star. I had saved up 100,000 Starbits and bought another 12-pack last weekend. I found exactly 1 epic card in all of these 12 packs and that was just a mediocre instrument that I didn't really care for. Getting to 100,000 Starbits takes me about a week so if I don't find anything in these packs, it really gives me a bad feeling. I was pretty disheartened afterwards and missed out on a lot of mission minutes. At the same time, the Starbits price is under heavy pressure again. Probably because of the rising value of Hive, but it seems there aren't many buyers at the moment.
I'm sure I'll get back into the rhythm eventually, but I'm probably done buying packs for now. I really should have listened to myself and just buy singles instead of packs. I know it's pretty hard to get the drop rates right and in order for good cards to exist there need to be bad cards (and drops) as well. Nevertheless, I feel like the instruments probably should do more than what they do at the moment. The epic instrument I found just adds some luck (which I don't care for) in an instrument slot that I don't use for my lessons. That basically means that even though it's an epic card, it's not doing anything for me.
Ah well, enough salt, next week I'll be back to climbing the ladder. This week I've lost some spots. I'm sitting at #41 right now and I don't intend to stay there for long!
The Culling
I've left some games behind for good while others are only on a temporary hold. In the latter category are Cryptobrewmaster and Ocean Planet for example. I really like these games but at the moment, they felt too much like a chore for me. Down the road, I'm pretty sure I'll pick both back up, but right now, I need some more time to focus on stuff that feels more rewarding to me.
Other games, like dCity, I've quit for good. The whole SIM value and 75% taxes disaster really proved to me that it's not a game I want to be heavily invested in. I'll do a more in depth article on that matter some time next week probably and I know there are still a lot of people that really like dCity. I'm not saying it's bad per ce. Actually, it has been providing amazing returns for months. Nevertheless, I've realized it's not for me, so I'll focus elsewhere.
All things considered, I'm not leaving any of the games with much regret. I've had a good time in all of them and I just might get back to a couple of them.
Conclusion
And that's all from me for today. I'll be hiking again this weekend, the winter wonder land is just way too amazing not to go hiking. So depending on how spent I'll be on Sunday (and my guess is on pretty spent), it might take until Monday before I'll get back to you with another article. Thank you all for reading and see you next week!