Rising Star has been the very first game that I've actually played on Hive. Back in spring, I've came to this blockchain because of eXode which was still far away from a playable state. I've already been playing Splinterlands but they hadn't departed from Steem back then. Rising Star though was playable from the get go and while it took me some weeks to really fall in love with it, it soon became one of my absolute favorites.
What really set it apart from a lot of other blockchain games was the way its developer approached the whole project. A lot (if not most developers) care about building an economy first and only then will they look into how their actual game is fitting into that economy. Rising Star did it the other way around. They focused on building a fun and engaging game first, letting the economy just build itself in the beginning. I applaud this approach as it allowed us to play an actually fun game right away. The approach wasn't without risk, though.
The economy grew more and more unsustainable and for a while it seemed like they would not be able to turn things around. Luckily, this is a thing of the past. The introduction of the Ego-meter and diminishing returns on doing the same mission already helped a lot to control the influx of Starbits into the system. But reducing the distributed amount alone would not have sufficed, there had to be a way to encourage players to actually keep their Starbits in the ecosystem.
Consequentially, Rising Star introduced a rewards pool to the game. Ever since January 1st, 30 Hive are payed out to the top 98 players active in the game every day. The developer already announced that the payout is going to increase over time and so should the number of ranks receiving something from the pool.
Personally, I believe that this addition would have sufficed to stabilize the economy for a long time to come. At least it was enough to make me hellbent on reaching the top 10 before ever going to cash anything out from the game again. Looking around LeoFinance, I'm certainly not the only one that feels that way, as there are dozens of articles with the risingstar tag published each week.
It seems Rising Star isn't thinking of slowing down at all, though. Just a few days ago, they released their newest feature coming to the game - Instrument Crafting. I've already touched upon it shortly in my recent Play2Earn Report and personally, I believe this to be the most clever move they've made as of yet!
So how is Instrument Crafting going to work exactly? So far, there are basically four different kinds of missions available in Rising Star:
- Regular Missions
- Skill Missions
- Special Missions
- Seasonal Missions
Regular Missions are the bread and butter missions - you go out, perform somewhere and earn Starbits in return. This is going to attract fans which in turn will make your ego grow. To combat that, you have to do the occasional Skill Mission. Special Missions pay out in different tokens from around the Hive ecosystem. Seasonal missions finally are only available during special occasions. They neither pay out any tokens nor do they grant you skill. Instead, you have a chance to find special seasonal NFTs while doing them.
Basically, that's the same concept these new Instrument Crafting Missions will follow. You choose what kind of instrument you want to work towards and go on a mission to acquire some additional parts for the instrument. These parts come in different quality (= rarity) levels and the better your parts are, the better your version of the instrument you will be able to craft with them. While these parts will not be tradable NFTs themselves, these mission won't pay out any Startbits, either. Not only that, though. They will actually require Starbits to start!
This is where things get really clever. Want a higher chance at gold (= foil) parts? Well, you'll have to spend more Starbits for the chance. This more or less completes the cycle of building a sustainable economy for Rising Star. The amount of Starbits got limited, there's an incentive to keep your money inside the game, and now there's also an effective Starbit sink besides buying packs or trading on the market.
A sink like that was much needed. Without it, the total amount of Starbits in the system was bound to be ever increasing. Now, it should somewhat stabilize at an equilibrium point. Whenever there are too many Starbits in the system, the price is going to decrease, so getting more Starbits to do more of these missions is going to be cheaper and the total supply will go down again. Keep in mind that the numbers shown above are just for testing purpose and will probably be changed before release. It might take some tweaking initially, but long term this will provide the game with another great tool to regulate its economy.
The question remains, though, why people would be interested to acquire these instruments in the first place. Well, for one, a lot of people seem to be oddly attracted to NFTs these days. Also, these new instruments are likely to come with new stems allowing you to compose new songs - another awesome feature Rising Star has to offer. But even if you don't care about any of that, there are very mundane, financial incentives to acquire them. 40% of your total rating for the rewards pool is coming from the total number of unique cards you hold in your account.
If you want to know how many unique cards are out there, it's usually enough to look at @foxon's account - he has them all. So right now, there are 141 unique cards in existence in the game. With different instruments, each having different quality levels, coming to the game through Instrument Crafting, I expect to see at least several dozen new cards to be introduced to the game mid term. So even if you don't care for the collectible part, if you want to rank anywhere near the top spots, you simply can't afford to ignore these new missions and their new NFTs coming to the game.
All things considered, I'm really impressed by the progress the game is making. One update at a time, things are improving more and more. I've been playing this game for almost 8 months now and ever since, there probably hasn't been a single day where I didn't do at least some missions. Certainly tells a story about how good the game is... well or how addicted I am. You be the judge of that.
Anyway, that's all from me for today. If you still haven't picked up Rising Star, give the game a shot, it's totally free after all! Thank you all for reading and see you next time!