Earlier this week over on rplanet.io I noticed they were having a pack drop on Atomic Assets for their miner cards. Having seen the v.1 packs and miner cards on the market this drop caught my interest so I loaded up on some WAX and waited for Sunday morning.
In the days between, while learning more about rPlanet in general, I noticed a few posts with some negative sentiment towards this pack drop and issues with their other pack drops. Fairly standard issues with bots, etc on the first pack drops with them selling out in seconds only to be resold minutes later for high multipliers over cost. The current pack drop has early investors upset over devaluation of their miner cards, held packs, and AETHER, standard complaints in the DeFi/GameFi space.
Even after reading all of this I was still ready and excited to participate in the Miner Pack v.2 drop and wanted to write up my experience as a new player coming in to the game.
The drop was done in two stages, one hour apart, the first for the Mini Pack, containing 6 cards was priced at $30, which was limited to 3000 minted and had a two per person limit with that limit reseting every one minute. The Mega Pack, containing 27 cards was priced at $120, was limited to 750 minted and one per person with no reset.
I woke up early to get some coffee made and prep for the drop as knowing the others had likely been botted I felt my chances were very slim so I wanted to be ready. After making sure the price of WAX hadn’t changed too much overnight and off-balanced my wallet holdings I decided to check and see if any of the the other computers in the house were front-running my laptop. It looked like all three were synced perfectly and I had some time left so I jumped onto a couple of open wi-fi networks around me, the countdown clock was syncing to my own network so I felt good that I had a chance at a pack.
T-Minus 60 seconds to first drop time: I have set it to purchase two Mini Packs and wait, at about 15 seconds til 0 I start just spamming my mouse button, counter ends and button changes to Buy, I click and the transaction begins to process! a few moments later it is executed on the chain and I see that packs are not selling out immediately. I actually had the opportunity before the packs sold out for my reset timer to go off twice, I could have gotten 6 Mini packs before they sold out. I hadn’t expected this and only loaded enough in my wallet for two mini and one mega and while I had an hour to load more WAX I didn’t want to be greedy so I stuck with getting just the two Mini packs.
The Mega Pack drop was basically the same though packs went faster and there were a lot less to go around. I was spamming the Buy button from a few seconds before and got a transaction pop-up, then it hung, I was stressing because I could see the number dropping fast in the background but luckily it went through and I got 672/750. Close!
I decided to spend a few minutes watching the secondary market while waiting for the timer (another hour timer! ugh) to be able to open the packs in the rPlanet dAPP. Mini packs had been selling about $10 over cost since they dropped and Mega hit the market about $80 over cost. Over the course of the day prices crept up to about $50 for a Mini and $230 for a Mega and seem to be holding there. While my orignal intention was to flip them, after researching the game more I decided I was opening mine.
Being excited I did forget to record or screenshot the opening of the packs but I got pretty lucky getting TWO LEGENDARIES! There was also one Epic, a couple of Rare, and lots of Common and Uncommon miner cards. All told I ended up with 18103.2 AETHER/hr mining power, the max guaranteed mining power for Mini packs was 1k/hr and 4k/hr for Mega packs. The legendaries do 5k/hr each, so I am super pleased with how much I ended up getting over what I expected.
Seeing as how I started with 3.2/hr from my small collection of Alien Worlds NFTs you can see these packs were a huge upgrade. I am currently sitting at #168 on the mining power leaderboard and hoping to add more miner cards soon to get up to at least 20k/hr.
Now I will be able to get almost two base Elements for use in the game per hour so I can try to mint some of the NFTs given out for being one of the first to discover a new element. I plan to write more on how to play rPlanet in another article, as well as articles on more dAPPs and blockchain games I am playing.
Despite the negativity towards the pack sale, as a new player who isn’t a whale with a ton of NFTS to stake, I was very happy for it and even happier to be able to get some packs. Perhaps Atomic Assets is getting better with bots, multiple accounts, etc or perhaps it was the sentiment towards the drop, either way it worked out for me. Looking forward to where the game goes past Phase 1!
