The writing was on the wall for me since season 5 honestly. The game is currently in between Season 20/21 currently. I started playing Dungeon Master since season 2. I missed Season 1 but I still started I think before the craze of Dungeon Master.

I am not here to bash Dungeon Master or the WOMBAT team or anything like that. However I am here to state what I see as the facts and status of the game.

1) What is it and How did we get here?

The general premise of the game is you stake up to 100 NFT's from WAX, EOS and Polygon to earn let's call it mining power. The higher the mining power the more powerful you are. You are basically performing 'runs' into your Dungeon and I would assume digging further down each run to 'find' more cool loot (usually NFT's or resources).

You can also earn the $WOMBAT token each day if you have earned enough 'contribution'. Basically your contribution takes into account your mining power from staked NFT's and also from what runs your do (5 mins runs, 15 mins runs, 6 hr runs, etc etc). There is more to it than that but that is the general idea. 

You also have a main Wombat character that you can equip well equipment to which can boosts various stats. Some stats are the previously mentioned mining power, or reduced time to complete run, or better NFT luck for the end of the day chest, or more resources gathered. When the game started this was all pretty straight forward.

Each collection of NFT (say for example Cyrptomonkey collection) they would be put into 1 of 3 categories of resources. If I am not mistaken the CryptomonKey collection was iron. So the more NFT's you had for those resources the more you would get each day/run. And then you could buy NFT's in the shop with those resources. You use those purchased NFT's for various things like boosting stats, or upgrading in game NFT packs to better qualities. Stuff like that. In the beginning of the game and first few seasons you wouldn't earn any $WOMBAT, that came later. (more on that later)

There was also Season Passes you could buy with WAX and as you progressed and completed tasks you would get further down the well and unlock stuff like NFT's, resources, NFT luck, etc. And that was totally fine and nice and well balanced.

So each season it would reset and you try to do as many runs as possible to get the most rewards. If you were in early in the game you obviously had a great head start on people who started playing seasons later then you. 

2) Midway updates and QoL changes

I will be the first to admit that the Wombat team made a lot of great changes to the game over the seasons. They added Guilds where you could be working together to unlock clan power which would let you unlock cool things and also let you help each other to reduce run times. It was amazing when it launched.

They kept adding more items to the shop which was nice. New equipment was added that had extra benefits.

One thing they added that was highly debated was the addition of $WOMBAT as the season end reward instead of $WAX. In the beginning you got paid out in WAX for basically how good you did that season compared to everyone else. Well the Wombat team decided to start paying out in their own token $WOMBAT... which honestly makes total sense. But at the time it wasn't well received but a lot of people.

However getting paid out in $WOMBAT had it's benefits because of other changes made.

In the shop now items would cost resources and a little $WOMBAT as well. Again not the end of the world because in theory you should have some $WOMBAT from the previous seasons. 

Then the WOMBAT Vault was added where you could decide to keep some of your payout from the previous season and basically stake it to earn even more rewards for the upcoming seasons. If you were in the game for the long haul this made sense.

Those are just some of the changes they made. 

3) Where did it go wrong?

In my opinion it was slowly coming for some time. The Wombat team to me started to ask to much from it's players. Sure they paid out in $Wombat so they could justify then charging some $Wombat for shop items. But like the Gold Extractor whole thing just seemed like a money grab. Super limited highly priced NFT's that you could stake to earn in game gold, which some items in the shop required gold. You could not get gold anywhere EXCEPT from those insanely priced gold NFT's. 

There was some controversy over the seasons with various collections. Basically each NFT you staked had a corresponding power to it. Collection owners would submit their collections and specific NFT's to the Wombat team to get them greenlit to be stackable in the game. BUT the Wombat team would decide what each NFT's mining power would be. So in theory if the specific template NFT had a max supply of say 5 NFT's in theory that NFT mining power would be so much higher than a NFT that had a max supply of 100,000. Supply and Demand sort of. 

That sounds all great in theory. But what we all love about blockchains is that they are decentralized and no 1 person controls them. Well this is a game controlled by a company wanting to make a profit. So if you were to go spend 400 WAX on a NFT that had a super high mining power this season you were happy. But nothing was stopping the Wombat team to change the mining power of that same NFT next season. So you could have paid 400 WAX for a NFT and then the use case value of that NFT next season was worth say 5 WAX. You would be pissed. 

Or if Wombat team decided to delist a certain collection next season... everyone who bought NFT's from that collection to stake it would now kind of be screwed over. This happened. People were pissed. Wombat seemed to not care.

The other thing to is Wombat and Dungeon Master fell victim to what is called 'power creep'. The best example I can compare it to is an anime called DragonBall. When that show started out the heroes power level (a arbitrary number that shows how strong someone is) would be max in the thousands.

But as the seasons go on and the heroes have to keep fighting stronger and stronger bad guys, well their power levels are soon in the millions, billions and then they stop even caring about power level because its pointless because everyone is so stupid strong. It's like a ponzi scheme, you have to keep getting more and more to keep it afloat.

Well Wombat did this with their equipment NFT's. New NFT packs would be out each season and new items to collect. And again if you bought a really good pair of pants in season 4 that gave you like 2% speed increase that was great. But then by Season 7 there was probably new pants that would give you like 14% $Wombat token boost. So now you gotta get the better equipment to earn the same you were before and even more. It was an endless battle to stay afloat.

4) Why did I get out?

Here is a look at my daily 'rewards' for Season 20.

I would say around Season 15 I already gave up. I stopped buying the Season Pass. I stopped buying any new NFT's. I just did my runs each day and each season and collected my $WOMBAT. I would stake some in the Vault to earn a bonus and then swap my remaining $WOMBAT for $WAX or I would put my $Wombat into a liquidity pool or something to earn passively on.

I saw that the grind was not worth it. I didn't have deep enough pockets to keep up with the big guys and it was a waste of WAX to even try. But the nail in the coffin for me was on September 24th. I decided YOLO and unstaked my $WOMBAT from the Vault (it took a few days to unstake and payout but the 24th was when it finally was removed). You can see in the screenshot above that the Wombat Tokens I earned each day in the chest went from 30's to 50's down to zero. No matter how many runs I did it was zero. I had the same equipment and same NFT's staked just that bonus for the last few seasons of staked $WOMBAT was the only thing keeping me afloat and making it worth anything.

Once I unstaked my $Wombat I was earning zero rewards. Sure I got 1 pack fragment on October 4th (which is worth less than 1 WAX. It was at that point that I started to unstaked my EOS and WAX NFT's. I wanted to get my NFT's back in my possession so I could sell them or give them away. And slowly I did just that. I now have zero NFT's staked to Dungeon Master except my guild NFT. I am looking for someone who wants to join our guild so I can pass it on but besides that I am done with Dungeon Master.

There is also talk about the Wombat team merging their $WOMBAT token with another and to be honest I never really looked into it. Dungeon Master was my real only last connection to the Wombat ecosystem and I am out. I think they spent way to much money on AtomicHub and then decided to start charging more and trying to squeeze more money from DM players to cover the cost (my own opinion with zero facts to back that claim up).

The price of $WOMBAT was going down slowly over time so to me it felt like the perfect time to get out of the game. And if you are a OQ reader of my articles you know that my biggest pet peeve of any web3 company/game/project is how they communicate. If I am playing your game from a specific URL.. do not post updates only to your discord or to your medium account. Post your updates to where your players are actually playing. If you do not you alienate so many of your players and are only hurting yourself. So I have no idea what is in store for the DM game because the Wombat discord server is a cesspool of chaos and insane amount of pings that I left it months ago and swore to never return.