I have been playing Alien Worlds on the Wax Blockchain since early 2021.  When I first started I was very consistent 5 days per week and earned a nice amount of TLM and NFTs.  On a few occasions I sold some of my NFTs, swapped TLM for WAX, and bought resources or other NFTs.  It started as a lucrative play-to-earn game as I have amassed a decent pile of "free" crypto from projects that I otherwise would not have invested.  As the game expanded to TLM staking on BSC and over 300K daily users, the functionality and backend has not improved.  Mining reward reduction, hash error/time-outs, and NFT nerfing have made a once-tolerable, feature-less game unworthy of my scarce time, so I have decided to stop selling my attention to Alien Worlds. 

Following TLM's Binance launch in late April my game play started to dwindle as wallet connectivity issues and general errors began plaguing the network.  As of today I am earning around .09 TLM per mining interval and am only able to mine a few times each day due to time-outs and other platform errors.  In the past week I was only able to successfully mine 15 times and earned 1.1016 TLM... PATHETIC!  My number of attempts, however, was probably 10X that.  If I was using a starter set of NFTs I could forgive the low rewards, but I am not; my miner deck is worth over 500 WAX.  Additionally, I have the same issues on different machines.  I have tried my everyday Linux box, my M1-chipped Macbook, and my Windows box all of which experience consistently poor behavior with Alien Worlds.  

If the issue was ONLY low rewards I probably wouldn't care and would continue to click-waste my time.  I never expected to make anything from the game- it was only ever a diversion.  I also never paid a dime for my NFTs, so I appreciate the fact that they are worth a nice amount of WAX.  And I do realize that the only reason they are worth anything is the success and large adoption of the game and TLM token, so that isn't lost on me. Speaking of NFTs, I have not mined any new ones in about two months- which kind of sucks.

The issue I have is the unnecessary frustration of receiving a never ending spinwheel followed by a hash error.  Before you wonder about my WAX resources I have the following:

So as result of my frustration I have decided to move on from Alien Worlds and start looking for another game (Let me know your thoughts on Castle Defense).  I just sold one of my good Alien Worlds NFTs earlier today and placed the most expensive on the sale block.  All of the smaller ones I will just sell as a group as they won't fetch much WAX individually.  I also unstaked all of my TLM from within the game and will swap it for WAX later this week.

If You Are Having Issues

On August 2nd the Alien Worlds Team posted an article to Medium concerning automated/bot mining.  Buried down in the post it discusses pausing NFT distribution until they can remediate and flag offending accounts.

• Pause — NFT game card mining has been paused. As some NFTs are nearing their maximum supply, Explorers requested that the Federation pause NFT mining until automated mining levels have been studied and reduced.

There is always a possibility that my account was falsely flagged as a bot because of my activity.  If you have experienced a similar issue here is their statement:

"Unflagging Requests — Explorers who find they are mining very low amounts are encouraged to submit a ticket at the Support Station in the lower right corner of alienworlds.io to have their account reviewed to ensure that it was not falsely flagged. It is possible that unflagging requests may be needed a few times during this time of study".  

At this point for me though I'm gonna make a clean break from Alien Worlds as its current build doesn't support the amount of traffic it receives.  I appreciate the NFTs, WAX, & TLM but I foresee more headaches in the near term until the infrastructure is upgraded.  I also don't see the long term value in TLM or the game itself and my attention is worth much more than what they are offering in return. 

Peace Out and Deuces Alien Worlds

Thanks for reading and let me know what blockchain game I need to be looking at next (outside of Axie or Splinterlands, because I've tried both and they aren't for me) Follow me on Twitter.