I've edited this post a few times because the previous versions were harsher. If you don't play dCrops then this post isn't for you.
Note: I own a medium sized farm in-game, few ALPHA packs, and 500+ BETA packs. Pump my bags.
Here's a list of recipes that require a legendary tool for production:
Plain Rice
Bread
Roasted Turnips
Fried Rice
Deep Fryer
French Fries
Pink Salad
Apple Pie
Pumpkin Soup
Spicy and Sour Nachos
Gingerbread Cookie
Steamy Palate
Cauliflower Stake
Eggplant Burger
Pizza Marinara
Steamed Cabbage Roll
Falls Feast
Crisp Baby Corn
Pop's Linguini
Samosa
Candy Cane Cake
Sugar
Flour (Wheat, Rice, Corn)
Pickles
Sake
Wines
Cider
Vodka
Ginger Ale
Honey
Note: Wines, Pickles and Honey have subcategories but there's no need to stretch the list further to prove the point that more than half of the content of BETA edition is funneled by trying to get the RNG gods to give you that 1% chance for legendary drop.
And one still wonders why majority of the active accounts playing aren't interested cooking/crafting because by design, the system is rigged to favor those that can pay more for that 1% drop rate.
My benchmark comparison for fun will always be predatory gacha system from web2 games. If anyone knows titles like Azur Lane, Girl's Frontline, Genshin Impact, Arknights and etc., you'll know that the entire content of the game is accessible for free players just by grinding with whatever they have. The devs make money off from minor microtransactions like aesthetics, and removing minor inconveniences because people are paying to have fun rather than paying trying to maximize the kickback from putting in more money.
But those games have high level of production value and this and that which is also true but part of the fun playing these games is how content isn't barred by a pay wall and at some point, players who spend more time grinding their way to get a slice of the premium content will be rewarded. Using only base items and paying a small fine for some advantage, one could finished the end game contents and soon if they paid even more. What I'm getting here at is the lack of fun factor because every event that was introduced in the game included some form of paying more to get an advantage.
It's pretty clear that having alts and splitting CROP power stake has some advantages in circumventing quest reward limits and event gimmicks. But web2 gaming managed to fixed these problems by factoring in multi-accounting and making it impractical to do with simple fixes like account bound items where people had to pay a premium to unbound and then bounds back to the new owner when trade post trade.
Imagine multiple accounts getting X limited edition NFT that produces X shares for CROP. This advantage gets limited when the prospect of selling the limited edition becomes more costly that owning them, like paying 10k CROP to unbound an item that produces on 2-3 CROP tokens average per season.
These event items are nice flavor to own but in the grand scheme of things, they really don't fuck up the player economy even with bots owning them. If the alt account owners go inactive, all the more reason these limited edition season NFTs get taken off from circulation. Balancing issues can still follow by regulating the crops produced by these NFTs and their derivatives like recipes.
The max benefit of owning these limited edition seasonal NFTs were keeping it within the account.
Ugh, isn't this play 2 earn? clearly you don't know a how play to earn economies work and yadayada yeah.
I know how they work and it's a breathe of fresh air if the dev says out loud how this game was made for cash grab rather than fun. When you release an expansion pack with majority of the content accessible only to a few who can shove more money in past the choke point, it's either a design flaw or the majority of the player based wasn't the target demographic. This story would have been different if some of the tools required for cooking/crafting were under the rare or epic category.
I don't care about other players because I'm earning well on my portfolio attitude.
I could adapt this attitude and would be on my merry way but I just can't help but poke fun at the idea when a game's design will focus on keeping a few winners then do a surprise pikachu face when majority has left and remaining bag holders worry who's the next batch of suckers to hold their bags. The fact that systems are designed to keep a select few within the player base happy even if unintentional is concerning.
I love it when people complain about free stuff
30% of the sales goes to the player reward pool. The remaining goes to the cat to keep operations going. The reward pool makes majority happy because of the daily airdrops and hodling some CROP token but it's just players giving themselves the 30% spent back to themselves + CROP. If you bought packs and played, you paid a premium.
I've been playing with ALPHA cards for quests just spending a few CROP tokens rerolling quests proving that you don't need BETA seeds to function. It's impractical to start the game solely on BETA packs because the trinity plot which is the only land NFT drops at 1% in a pack that contains only 3 NFTs (your chances of getting a blueprint or recipe you can't use is high). There's more incentive to keep BETA packs unopened from a for profit point of view than actually playing the game.
There's always the option to just pay more get those items you need to progress further.
I hear you, it's the same tune with any pay to play web3 game except there's not much content to get me inspired putting in more money. It's a numbers game for the most part, have more of this to produce more of that so that you can profit more mechanics. There's no skill involve in setting up your farm, just plant and go. If the selling point was having fun while earning, I'm having more fun paying to roll for tiddies from mobile waifus with zero kickback than click plant here. If the selling point was we're playing for profit and hope more suckers buy our bags, the game is doing a bang up job convincing more people to spend more because the expansion pack screams you need to pay more to get anywhere in the crafting/cooking features.
The playtoearn game did something right by existing as a game that people could earn except it forgot the fun part of how games were supposed to be made. There's no improvement milestones where the game says you're account has grown in someway, only the deteriorating amount of CROP you get post season as more players enter and the decrease in maximum reward pool available.
Congratulations, you've reached level blank, planted x amount of cauliflowers, sold x amount of crops, here's a cabbage farmer title for planting x cabbage, here's a wine seller badge/license for producing 3 varieties of wine only 3 players own this badge, it's missing fun elements to convey player progression but I'm sort of expecting this considering the demographic audience is geared toward profit, so as long as those Hive Airdrops and CROP prices are rising, people are happy for less expectations.
My playing strategy is just reusing the CROP I earn from the season rewards and use it to buy more cards on the market, or use the Hive airdrops for special purchases such as access to events and special bargain sales on the NFT market. There's no need to rush accessing all BETA content (it's not that important to core gameplay from the original plant, harvest and earn.)
Xmas Event
It's probably the most balanced event for everyone considering landlords are incentivized to share gifts in exchange for better potential raffle returns. One could just play the selfish route and buy gifts for themselves for those golden tickets and the game will reward them for it but if you luck out on the raffle, instead of collecting 4 golden tickets in exchange for a pack, you can potentially get one for paying less if lucky.
The Halloween Trick or Treat Event came close since it had elements of risk and resource management as part of the gameplay. If we had more gimmicks that reward players for active decision making in playing these mini-games, that'd be great than resorting to producing more resources to muscle their way into the leaderboard. It's not a contest of who can play better by skill but who has the most resources beforehand by paying more to win.
All I hear is complaints and no solutions
Some solutions are born from existing complaints because you won't discover them without acknowledging there's a problem. One of the reasons why event leaderboards are unengaging is the fact that there's nothing in it for the majority of the player base who can't compete as the deciding factor will be who has the more resources. Let's set aside the truth where paying more to win more is the solution. What other inspiring bullshit can you possibly get players to buy into to get them paying more for the game?
Hive airdrops? in-game milestones rewards? hodl and hope capital appreciation for those NFTs will eventually pay off?
I say it's incorporating mechanics where players can have more control over the event outcomes (where most web2 wins at) and incentivizing active community coop (where most Web2 fails at). The approach to the trick or treating event could have been each run everyone pays a CROP fee, then they get an assortment of CROPS to pick from before venturing out instead of relying what they had on their own inventory.
Categorize the runs between easy, medium and harder daddy with potential candies per category so that everyone puts in a little more thought into how much are they willing to risk with the CROPs that they have been dealt with and the options to maximize those potential rewards per run. Everyone starts out with a fair numbers paying for the same premium and the rest is left to luck and risk control.
Community quests
Something that will get more players involved outside their own farms and be incentivized to participate. Instead of having an individual quota of harvesting 4 watermelons, the community quest can just ask for 500 2 star watermelon harvests counted from the total player activity for the x season festival then get rewarded with buffs for next season or something.
This game isn't ready to accommodate a surge of new players
Given that most of the playable cards are in ALPHA that got sold out, expecting BETA packs to fill in the void is a joke. The current NFT market still lists ALPHA cards relatively cheap but this isn't enough to accommodate a surge of new players (if we have one). The solution is creating beginner player bound packs that either prints ALPHA cards again but bounded or a new set of NFTs past the BETA edition.
The account bounded NFTs can still be traded but there's large premium paid in CROP to disable the restriction and be trade ready making it not worthwhile to do. Getting it account bound gives some assurance that even if everything else in the account is sold and the user quits, they still got stuff in there to enable them to participate in the game should they have a change of heart.
I wouldn't recommend this game if fun and income is what people are looking at the same time. There's just income. Maybe people have fun looking at those NFT grow on screen.
Thank you for your time.
