After I've broken my hand last Sunday, this last week has been a rather sobering experience. It's going to take 4-6 weeks before I'm allowed to use my left hand again. While my single handed typing speed improved considerably over the week, writing anything longer than a few sentences is still highly annoying and I've all but refrained from writing any articles other than my weekly report and I'll probably keep doing so until my left hand is fully functional again.
I've tried some different pieces of dictation software (thanks to @agr8buzz and @palasatenea for the idea!) but ultimately they did not really work for me. While I consider my written English to be somewhat good for a non-native, my spoken English is a mess and with my strong German accent the results have been utter rubbish.
That said, my blockchain week has been a rather pleasant one with some nice surprises along the way.
Rising Star
Rising Star has been the undeniable star of my Play2Earn week. As planned, I changed my investment strategy a bit. I concentrated on buying cheap vehicles off the market, considerably increasing the amount of permanent fans I had. For some reason, especially the Touring Coach was severely under-priced, allowing me to buy 500 permanent fans for a mere 7000-9000 Starbits.
My skill is now close to 32,000 and I easily reach (and cross) that number with drunken fans daily. For now, I'm doing drum lessons every night and will resume buying more fans as my skill allows it.
What I did not invest I converted to Hive again. The Starbits price has been very stable this last week, so I managed to make all sales for 5 - 5.2 Hive per 10,000 Starbits. My total earnings from that accumulated to about 120 Hive. While I'm really happy with these results, I don't think these numbers are sustainable.
As you can see, I'm earning about 350 Starbits every 5 minutes and the top player out there probably earn 4 to 5 times as much. Starbits inflation has been a looming threat for quite some while now and I think it's becoming apparent that some changes are needed to make reinvesting Starbits more interesting. One idea I saw floating around was to make the skill missions cost Starbits. I'm not sure if that would be sufficient, but in my opinion it would be another step in the right direction.
In other news, I've found another 5 referrals this week and all of them are active so far. The player retention rate in Rising Star is plain impressive and I'll focus on bringing more players to the game whenever I can!
Splinterlands
I had some lucky findings in my daily rewards and so I managed to increase my collection power quite a bit and am now only 9,500 points away from being able to play in Gold I once the update hits. I'll see how that works out for me. If I don't have any problems winning there, I'll probably start investing a bit to push towards the Diamond collection power as fast as possible.
This season I'm already close to Champion II and will probably make the push to Champion I within the next week. Getting there is a little frustrating in times as my nature deck is the only really competitive splinter at that level with Fire and Life being okayish. So whenever I have to play Water or Death, it gets pretty awkward.
I still consider the solution to be a little lazy and would have preferred a more elegant one, but in the end I have to admit that it was and is a clever and much needed change. Only two weeks ago, I would have started to withdraw parts of my earnings as long as I finished in Champion I every time. Obviously, this would not have been sustainable. Instead, I'm now probably going to reinvest everything earned (and then some maybe) for several months to come.
I managed to find another two referrals but again, nobody bought the spellbook. Once the bot-situation is (hopefully) fixed, onboarding and player retention has to be the number one priority for the game.
eXode
It's been a slow week for eXode with none of my cards sold on the Starbase Market this week. I'm not really worried about that, though. @elindos has been making some amazing progress and we are getting ever closer to the release of version E. This should help to build a lot of momentum and while I obviously hope to make some deals along the way, I'm mostly just looking forward to play the game.
On a related note, I think Battle Games is doing an awesome job with their Battle Raffles! The idea is pretty simple: Whoever offers the most Battle gets all cards from a single contract drop. In my opinion, this could be an cool and innovative part of eXode's economy moving forward. Instead of buying individual cards, you could rent the whole contract and collect some drops youself.
Ideally, this would be an integrated function for the Starbase Market but I don't want to wait that long to test it. So, if you interested in buying a contact drop, just let me know in the comments or in eXode's Discord! For now, I offer Tom Settler and Rekatron contract drops at a limit of 1 of each contract per person and I only sell the drops to Captains that don't own the corresponding contract.
We'll see what the right price for a drop is but since I'm eager to test it I'll start of cheap:
The price for a contract drop is 5 Hive OR 5 EXOFUEL OR 5 Dark Army Tokens
The obvious downside is that you'll have to trust me on this and I have nothing but my good name in the eXode universe to offer. A promise is a promise though: If I open an Elite Happy Five in your contract it will totally be yours. Also, considering any single Epic from both contracts sells for considerably more, this price is probably a steal...
Cryptobrewmaster
I'm still pretty hyped for Cryptobrewmaster. I've found some more referrals for the game and now have an unbelievable total of 88 referrals in the game. It took me only 5 days to earn all rewards currently available in the referral rewards program. Luckily, @rollie1212 set the system up in a way that you keep earning reward levels even after you claimed everything available right now. This means that I'll be able to basically claim everything added to the program in the foreseeable future.
A you can see in the above screenshot, we still have the issue of not enough beer being drunk so right now the pub is fully stuffed. I think some changes to the energy and CBM costs are needed to fix this. Then again, this is early Alpha and there's no selling pressure at all so I'll just hold on to my beers for now and wait for the next updates.
Rollercoin
With my broken hand, I'm severely limited in the things I can do and so I ended up checking up on some sites I had tried over the last months but stopped using. Back in May, I did an article on the site where I basically concluded, that it's not worth your time and the site is not very interesting.
Fun enough, it seems I have not been very convincing in that conclusion. Not only did I get a lot of refs from the article, some of them even spent fiat or crypto money on the game! That allowed me to buy the mining gear you are seeing above. Together with my daily referral earnings I now make about 200 Satoshi daily without doing anything - fun times! While this is obviously great for me, I'd still advise everybody else to not invest anything into the game, it would take forever and then some to make it back!
Conclusion
In terms of Play2Earn, it's been another great week for me. I now have 1,764 Hive powered up and I'm right on track to meet my goal of having 2,000 Hive powered up by the end of the month. Once eXode takes off, things should accelerate even more. My plan has always been to use my contracts to help onboard new players but I'm still going to earn more Hive along the way so the future is looking really bright right now.
Don't forget about the contract drop sale and thank you all for reading and commenting!