Another Round of Thoughts on dCrops

This is a post about dCrops game and if you're interested in trying out a farming NFT game on Hive, check this is where the cool kids are at. Below are just snippets of thoughts I have over mobile gacha games and web3 games. I had trimmed down a lot of paragraphs because 3k words for a post aren't cool.

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If anyone noticed the changes in the NFT market, the price of items in Hive were raised but the CROP price remained relatively low. This can be attributed to the CROP token retaining a 0.0017$ to 0.0018$ as the price of Hive slumps. It's far more cheaper to build your farm buying selected NFTs with SWAP.HIVE than CROP.

The previous price of the average fertile land used to be below 1 Hive but after the collaboration with splinterlands event, new players joined the game and started accumulating NFTs at a bargain price. The starter items from ALPHA packs are still at a bargain rate but the price of fertile land went x3-x4 in a span of weeks. It just shows even a small influx of players is all it takes to raise the prices. So if we get consistent good results from promotions, the one's holding there NFTs for flipping will have something to look forward to, specifically NFTs that are needed for getting started with the game and simple quests.

CROP a relatively stable token because each time the season rewards get distributed, you don't really see a fluctuation in price. Most of the large holders aren't selling and there's an incentive to hold them due to a Hive reward pool and increasing ones potential NFTs earned from quests.

I'm expecting the next edition would be introducing mechanics that would give more incentive to holding CROP power long term than just holding for the Hive reward pool. Perhaps the amount of crop power held influencing the rewards for the event. What I'm looking forward to is a rebalance in the recipe and blueprints that made BETA edition less beginner friendly.

The game is doing well on a steady pace and hope it continues its momentum.

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I took this old roadmap from the an old update and we're on schedule:

You need to zoom in closer to see the words written "Rebalancing recipes" right in between blueprint and NPC and houses. You need to breakdown the view per pixel while zooming in. You'll also see some ninjas in the background.

This is what I love about the game. It's responsive to player feedback where the Cat actually listens.

I've had my complaints about the BETA edition content being expensive for 3 cards in a pack and players had to go through the 1% RNG to get more than half of the content BETA edition has to offer.

As a player of gacha games, 1% is free real estate but these rates are usually given to special event characters. Good characters within the game during regular days drop less than 10% which are freebies in gacha RNG. These characters are even enough to give a player access to end game content with a little more grind.

I get it, it's play to earn, where you put money into the printer called game so that in could print more money, then hope someone pumps and buys your bags during the course. I've been drafting a separate post comparing how traditional gacha games are still better at the entertainment part compared web3 games but that's for a separate shitposting time.

Since most of the crafting and cooking features are only accessible to few large accounts, it's not really a surprise if these dominate the leaderboard as cooked recipes are usually more than the sum of its ingredients. This leaves other players at a greater disadvantage because they don't want to gamble for legendary cards at 1% drop rate (and it's not even guaranteed it's the legendary card they even want if ever something drops).

Until cooking/crafting gets rebalanced, majority of the players that can't be bothered to gamble would prefer to target usable items like land, seeds, and packs compared to recipe NFTs they can't use.

Disclosure:
I'm invested in the game and still plan on playing it despite the critique. This shitpost isn't meant to spread fud but if someone wants to dump their CROP tokens on fire sale I'm scooping up some to put into the liquidity pool. The amount I spent on this game is more than what I'd usually spend on regular mobile gacha games. This isn't a paid advertisement and I'm not endorsing you to play Nikke: Goddess of Victory or convince you that Modernia is best girl cause she already is. I paid the premium to be entertained with the side idea of get some kickback so when crypto is in red, I at least expect to be entertained from the games I spent money on.

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The nice things that happened on dCrops recently:

Plans to rebalance the recipes
New content for the next edition
Christmas raffle event being a balanced RNG.
Halloween was fun.

I hope the next batch of recipes don't suffer from a choke point of requiring legendary tools for production. The 1% drop rate guarantees few players will have access to most of the edition's content. The idea that some recipes would be easier to make would probably stimulate some player interest to pursue creating cooking and crafting tools in the future.

Christmas raffle event was balanced because the pay off for giving gifts to other players was more than converting candies to gift yourself. The rewards for the raffle were as good as getting a golden ticket. At the same time, other players receiving the gifts then more chances to receive golden tickets. Though the 5000 CROP fee is a bit high for some players, an area for improvement is changing the CROP fee relative to Hive or USD price at that time. Another alternative is having a discount for the fees if the account has been consistently holding an X amount of CROP power which will further incentivize accounts to hold more CROP long term for future events.

If we want to encourage more people to get interested in building some CROP power, I think we need to add more incentives than just holding crop power to get more drops from the reward pool. The number of items once can receive from quest rewards is a good example for adding utility to CROP holding.

Halloween was a fun event because it introduced some strategy into the event like resource management. The game had been getting boring with the regular routine so implementing a mini-game was a breath of fresh air.

An area to improve is separating players into tiers based on the amount of total share they had on hand before playing the journey. Naturally, those who brought high share value crops would be held at a different mini reward pool. Or even out the playing field by having the same amount of resources and player skill and luck will decide the outcome during the run.

Thanks for your time.