Saturday, 4th of January 2023 [42]
At first @hashkings game seems to be easy enough. You buy a land, a water tower, a few seeds and get planting and watering. Next you harvest your BUDS after specific time, make a joint, smoke it and be happy.
Is it REALLY as easy as this?
Absolutely not!
Or rather… it could be… if you forget the numbers and just play 😉 But I do love the numbers and although sometimes I ignore them for the peace of mind, there comes the time when I sit down and calculate a thing or two.
Please bear in mind that this article is not meant as gameplay tutorial or an investment advice. I am simply looking back at the 3 months of playing HashKings game and draw some conclusions.
Before I started playing I read many articles which invited new players to pick the role they want to play in the HK ecosystem. A grower, a water tycoon, a landlord. I read those articles and thought to myself ‘Why pick a role, when I can do it all?’.
Well, doing it all might be either not affordable or too time consuming, so in the past 3 months I have been slowly testing all the waters, so I can decide which place to take in the HK ecosystem. The game has been evolving in front of my very eyes in those months too, so there is always something new to learn about the game.
BUYING LAND vs RENTING LAND
Here was my first beef. I had no spare amount of Hive to buy any Land NFTs from NFT mart. Once I had enough to buy, I actually didn’t want to buy it. Why? Firstly, because this year I am concentrating all my power on growing my HP and LP and that requires powering up all the liquid Hive I get from selling my HBD and/or buying Leo ready for LPUDs.
What did I do instead? I rented a few lands.
Last time I checked, the cheapest land NFT was around 5 Hive. Renting out the cheapest land is currently 0.05 Hive. I know, 5 Hive doesn’t seem like a lot of spending, but if you look closer at the numbers, 5 Hive is 100 times 0.05 Hive. It means that I would have to play the game for 8 years and 4 months to justify spending 5 Hive on the Land, rather than renting it.
Mind you these prices fluctuate, so at some point it might happen that buying Land NFT will make more sense than renting, but at the time of writing this it is not the case. There were also times when I paid 0.34 Hive for 1 months’ rent, so I guess if rents costed this much, I probably would buy land.
There are many mysterious things like this, that I have found out on Hive in general and especially in P2E gaming on Hive. The numbers just don’t add up, meaning that either the people who initially made the investments in these games already made profits and they don’t care how much they rent their assets for or people just don't calculate much.
On the bright side – there is plenty of money to be earned and or saved on P2E games if you know how to do some basic maths.
BUYING WATER TOWER vs BUYING HKWATER
Pretty much same story as with buying lands. Or funnier either.
Last time I checked the NFT Mart, the water tower level 1 was 8 Hive, while level 2 was 7 Hive. Who on Earth will buy Level 1 Tower if Level 2 is cheaper? If I remember well, upgrading a water tower by 1 Level costs $1. If logic and maths were applied, and with Hive price at around $0.4 (at the time of writing this) you’d expect to see:
Level 1 – Price X
Level 2 – Price Y (Price X +2.5 Hive)
Level 3 – Price Z (Price Y +2.5 Hive)
And so on...
That is obviously not the case 😉 Not only are the prices at random intervals, but also if you calculate the amount of time you’d have to play the game in order to get ROI and justify buying the Tower rather than buying HKWATER directly from the market you’d end up with a good few years as well.
Seeing that Hash Kings is still alive and kicking after 2 years is very encouraging to keep playing the game. I sure wish to still be growing my virtual weed and smoke my virtual joints in 5 years to come, but the numbers would need to make more sense for me in order to actually buy those NFTs at the current prices from NFT Mart.
Speaking of the NFTs. Did you know that HashKings have their own NFT Marketplace in their roadmap? I am sure looking forward to being able to quickly buy and sell NFTs within the game, just like in dCrops. Having multiple marketplaces within the same ecosystem is also good for economy.
BUYING SEEDS vs MINTING SEEDS
A couple months ago, when I started playing Hash Kings, the seeds distribution seemed a bit too complicated for me and not worth the hassle of getting to know how to do it. I decided to just buy the seeds from the market and be done with it. Sometimes the simplicity is the right approach for me, despite the cost. In fact, by doing so I am paying for less hassle.
However, as you might have already noticed, I am a numbers girl. Sometimes I ignore the numbers, cause I’m too lazy to calculate something. I also know myself too well. Once I start calculating one thing, then another thing comes to mind and another and I’ll spend next 3 hours creating spreadsheets or writing numbers on the piece of paper which sooner or later will end up in the recycling bin, cause it was just something I was curious about, but it really doesn’t matter at all.
2 months went by, seed distribution method has changed and one of those days I had some spare time, so I clicked around the HK interface and I found and tested the new way. As some say, it’s a bit of a lottery. You never know exactly how many #BUDS or #MOTA you will pay for each seed, as it depends on how many players also want to buy seeds for the same region. So far I have tested it twice for 2 different regions and with 2 different results and it really is a very easy process.
You simply pick up whether you want to bet your BUDS or MOTA and then decide on the region you wan your seeds for.
This week in Mexico, the ration of BUDS to 1 seed is 56.134 BUDS to 1 SEED. Mind you this ratio will still change as it's only Saturday and seeds distribution happens on Mondays. If you're happy with the ration, you simply type the amount of BUDS you want to burn and confirm transaction. A few minutes later (it is not instant) your estimated amount of seeds will show in the bottom window.
I quite like this new system of seeds distribution. It's pretty straight forward.
This time I decided to go that extra mile and create the spreadsheet. It will be an ongoing one, so I can track how much I am paying for my seeds and to know when it’s a good time to bet my BUDS on each seed. The results are bound to vary from one week to another for sure. I am sure there will be many other people who will do the same calculations to decide when/which seeds to bet on.
Right now, my funds are not big enough to do this with all the seeds for all the regions, but with time I am hoping to have some usable data for most if not all of them.
One thing I have noticed when I looked at the prices of seeds on NFT Mart is that they dropped significantly since the last time I was buying them myself. I am not sure whether this has something to do with the new system of seeds distribution or the usual fluctuation in prices. In the past I’d buy a few seeds whenever I run out of them and forgot about NFT Mart for as long as I had some in my inventory.
With my new approach I will be checking the prices on a bit more regular basis. I want to see if I can notice any patterns that I can take advantage of 😉
Another thing to consider when buying vs minting new seeds is the amount of BUDS I can harvest per seed planted. In the past I chose to ignore this part for the peace of mind too. Since I started tracking the numbers more closely, I started to also pay more attention to these numbers. There are many different seeds in HashKings game and each one takes different number of days to ripe as well as different amount of HKWATER required to make it grow.
Limited funds have their perks as I can only take a few different seeds under the microscope at the time. With bigger funds I’ll be able to expand the area of my little research, while the spreadsheets are all ready to add new numbers.
Even taking just a few seeds under the Excel microscope can give you some limited understanding of what numbers are desired for each seed. Although this is of course not enough to calculate which seeds are best overall. Seeds mature within 1-7 days, which could be the deciding factor depending on whether you’re renting or buying your Lands.
Another thing to consider is whether to mint the seeds with buds or with mota. How much you end up paying for your seeds is a pure lottery nonetheless. Let’s say 2 hours before seeds distribution you noticed that a particular seed looks very cheap this week. You decide to put a considerate amount of BUDS/MOTA on that seed and the next minute 5 more people do exactly the same. Once the game refreshes to reflect your added BUDS (which takes a few minutes) and then those other people’s BUDS couple minutes later, it might no longer be so cheap.
Even if only you had an idea to mint a huge number of seeds, the BUDS you’re adding to the pool automatically raise the price of those seeds. So, it’s a gentle balance really.
Before deciding whether it is better to:
buy a lottery ticket in the seed store, where neither the number of seeds nor the assigned BUDS per seed are unknown or
buy a seed directly from the market, where you can see the price and the resulting BUDS
more data is needed. Good few weeks of trying both methods to draw viable conclusions. In the past I have chosen to close one eye on the numbers and just buy and plant my weed, so I can roll my joint. Truth be told I haven’t rolled nor smoked even 1 virtual joint in those 3 months. All I do is grow it. I simply haven’t explored that section of the game yet.
#HashKings ecosystem is huge and I haven't even tried all there is to it. Only after playing the game for a few months it starts to make sense why specialising in 1 or 2 roles makes more sense than trying to do it all.
Maybe if I had all days to just learn and play, it would make sense, but with full time job, I have very little time to play and write. Best to pick and choose the most interesting/profitable parts of the game, but for that I need to first explore them all, right?
Oh… and another thing… to grow your own BUDS to be able to mint seeds or simply buy them from the market? Well, that’s another story with a lot of calculations which I am not prepared to do today 😉
And there is more! So much more to discover in the HK ecosystem
In case you've missed it, HashKings have announced the Love Month in game! They're planning many fun activities, including daily interactions in #Threads, so go check out their post.
Also since the beginning of this week, the new commands:
!KING
!QUEEN
are working! You need a minimum of 25k staked BUDS in order to be able to use them 10 times a day. I still have a few more BUDS to stake. Read more about tipping here.
Until next time 💙