I'm still pretty much preoccupied with my real world job but things have started to get a little better already and should return to normal in the coming days. Hopefully I'll have more time for the Crypto world again once that is the case.

I nevertheless had some time to put into my blockchain games and even tried a new game that I think might have great potential.

Most of my activity is currently focused on amassing more DEC for the upcoming Splinterlands land presale, so my Hive Power has remained pretty stagnant for yet another week. Compared to last week, I powered up a total of 64 Hive so I now have 5,455 Hive powered up. I'm still holding on to my goal of reaching 10,000 Hive Power by the end of the year, but it seems I will need to use some of my other crypto holdings to do so in the end.

Let's have a look at the games I'm playing:

Splinterlands

Splinterlands is certainly the game that has the most going for it right now. Between the new collection power system, the coming land presale, and many more amazing things to come pretty soon, the listing of DEC on Uniswap took me completely by surprise.

I was already holding quite a lot of DEC and I really saw no reason at all to not put it into the liquidity pool.

I never cared much for liquidity pools and the above numbers show why - the gains are marginal and you have to pay fees both to provide and remove liquidity. The incentives provided by Splinterlands for doing so are amazing, though, and if my numbers add up, I should receive 6 or 7 plots of land for providing liquidity for 30 days. Even if you look at it at the discounted rate of 10$ per plot, that's at least 60$ gained within a month - that's a pretty huge return.

I'm not sure if I want to provide liquidity for the whole 90 days yet or if I want to remove the DEC once the presale starts, this will mostly depend on whether land is going to sell out quickly or not.

In other news, I'm competing for the diamond leaderboard again but I also managed to get enough collection power to get to Diamond II now. This provides me with some additional loot chests each day and is probably worth more than renting out these cards.

Rabona

As I had hoped, my second season in Rabona is going a lot better than the first one. Last time around, I barely managed to place above the relegation ranks. This time I'm ranking solidly in midfield.

What increased my winnings a lot was focusing on training the 4-4-3 formation each day every day. Thanks to @jelly13 for pointing that out to me!

I still feel like going up a league will be really hard with only the top spot advancing. For now, I'll focus on upgrading my stadium and thus increasing the amount of RBN I earn every match. It'll be interesting to see what happens after season three when the first contracts are going to end.

If I'm lucky, I might be able to snag some players cheap or even for free and try to push for that top place. If not, I'll probably play it low for some more seasons and wait until the top teams have moved up a league.

I can only recommend picking up Rabona as the game is a lot of fun and doesn't need much time to play once you picked it up. It certainly is worth the 5$ they are asking for it and things are only going to become even better moving forward.

Rising Star

I've settled in quite nicely with Rising Star's new reality. I made an article about how to grow your account with the Ego system in place last weekend and I've been following the advise I've given there as good as I can.

I got some more cheap vehicles off the market and now have about 52,000 permanent fans. This put me into the next tier of Ego gain, so I currently need to do one more lesson each day to gain enough skill to counteract my Ego. Nevertheless, I'm making about 30,000 - 40,000 Starbits each day without my Ego ever getting higher than 5%.

For the moment, I decided to split the earnings. 50% of my Starbits are going back into the game, while 50% are spent on buying more DEC for the Splinterlands land presale.

The Rising Star Beta release is going to be on November 1st and will introduce a lot of new cards. So once the presale for land is done, I'll probably start to reinvest most if not all Starbits I earn back into Rising Star.

Cryptobrewmaster

There was a lot of discussion regarding Cryptobrewmaster both on Hive and in several Discords I'm active in. A lot of people were rather unhappy with the changes that were made to the game's economy, effectively reducing the amount of CBM you can earn from selling low quality beer.

While it's perfectly understandable that nobody likes loosing potential gains, I found these reactions to be rather irritating and I'm really not sure what these people were expecting.

Some simple facts on that topic - Cryptobrewmaster is still in a very early Alpha. There's almost nothing you can to with CBM yet and still people could sell CBM for Hive. So, what do you think where that Hive was coming from? Somebody had to pay for the CBM and if there is an easy way to generate CBM and nothing to spend it on, people will eventually stop buying CBM and the whole market crashes.

This had to be stopped eventually and it was. Ultimately, the game needs more features and more stuff to use CBM on before the economy is going to get interesting. For now, I'll simply collect ingredients, brew beer, and enjoy myself while doing so. There's no rush for me here, I trust @rollie1212 and I'm sure he'll build a great game so I'm just going to give him the time he needs and everybody else would do great doing the same.

Anyway, I still managed to bring another 8 players to the game and now have a total of 222 referrals for the game.

eXode

eXode is still running its first test build with the second iteration to hit the servers this weekend or early next week. This next version will feature the actual new Evacuation gameplay and while it won't have rewards yet, it should be pretty close to what the first version we play for actual rewards should look like.

This is what I've been waiting for all these months and I'm really excited for it to finally happen. Once this next version is released and running somewhat stable, I'm going to start blogging about eXode again and with the many contract cards I have stored I'll try to onboard as many new players as possible to the game.

I know it has taken a lot longer than everybody had hoped for, but I think eXode's potential is huge. It's scope is way beyond anything we've seen in other blockchain games so far and I'm absolutely convinced that it could end up becoming one of the top games in blockchain gaming pretty soon!

Holybread

Not much new to report on Holybread. I've gotten somewhat used to the graphic style and while I'm still not a huge fan of the look and feel, I've managed to integrate the quests into my blockchain gaming cycle.

I have not acquired a second champion yet but since I'm not sure how the future is going to look exactly, I don't want to spend anything from outside the game to buy one so I'll just sit back and wait for now.

Townstar

And here it is, the new game I've been trying this week. Gala Games teamed up with Splinterlands so I did what everybody did and checked out their game. The first impression is decent, the game is actually quite fun and enjoyable.

Playing Townstar takes a lot more time than your usual blockchain game and since I didn't have much time I didn't get very far this week but I plan to spend more time playing it next week. Once I have a better understanding of the game, I'll do an Is it worth your time style article introducing the game's mechanics.

Gala Games really looks quite ambitious and they might end up being one of the big players in the blockchain gaming future. That said, I'm not a huge fan of what they are doing marketwise. The amount of money they ask for most things is absurd and while I'm used to blockchain projects asking for a huge investment without giving much information, the presale they are doing for their second game is just ludicrous.

462,500$ for a single NFT in a game we basically have zero information on that might or might not get released some day? I'm sorry, but that's not how you instill confidence in me.

All things considered, Gala Games feels like one of these mobile game developers trying to leech as much money as possible from people.

I might be a bit too harsh here and the guys from Splinterlands seem to trust them so I'm giving them some credit. I'll watch the development of Gala Games closely but I probably won't spend any money on their projects any time soon.

Conclusion

And that's all from me today. I hope to able to do some more blogging during the week and if things get back to normal next week the next Pay2Earn report should be more beefy again as well.

Thank you all for reading and see you next time!