Look, I have been around the block when it comes to Alien Worlds. I wrote my first article about it on Jan 18th 2021. I was there in the beginning when it was all hype and mass hysteria. I made more WAX then I can remember from mining and either getting Tools and selling them or from swapping the TLM to WAX. There were so many good memories of Alien Worlds in 2021 and 2022.

It started to go downhill once Alien Worlds announced their 'partnership' with Binance. I am not going to rehash that again but that is where it all started.

This was my account. Oh the memories. If I remember correctly I mined that 36.9 TLM on my first day with only 1 shovel.. yeah back then it was great.

I am not going to sugar coat anything about Alien Worlds and my time playing it. This is going to be RAW opinion and observation of the game, ecosystem, staff/devs, mods, even players. I have nothing to hide so let me take you down with windy road.

Alien Worlds launched on December 22nd, 2020. I started playing in January 2021. I LOVED it. You could mine so much TLM and guess what... you could even mine NFT's when you were mining TLM. That is how all those tools and Weapons and what not came from originally. It was the wild west and I was along for that Gold Rush.

Also way back then the CryptoMonkeys team had a few lands and if you mined on their land you had chances to win their NFT's too which was a double win. I do not want to sound bitter and pretend like Alien Worlds has been evil and terrible this whole time. No, it started out great and with so much promise.

I mean shoot look at this chart.

In April of 2021, 1 TLM was worth $0.72... INSANE guys.

Let's fast forward a bit though. May 9th, 2021 I wrote THIS article in which I talk about if Alien Worlds is selling out by partnering with Binance. At the time is was a HUGE deal. 

Remember the timeline people

December 22nd, 2020 : Game Launches

March 24th, 2021 : After 3 months there are more than 55,000 players

March ?? 2021 : Alien Worlds raises 2 million dollars in funding (hmm I wonder from who)

April 11th, 2021 : Alien Worlds becomes the largest decentralized app. More than 152,000 players.

April 13th, 2021 : You could "teleport" your TLM to Binance

Why is that important? Because up until that point it was growth and the game and economy kept growing. A new player could start with just a Male Human avatar and a Standard Shovel and they could mine up some TLM, sell it or stake it. That same player could also mine up other NFT's and maybe even better tools so they could mine more TLM. The economy was amazing and great for new and old players.

Around this time though Priorities started to shift. Thunderdome was pushed back and pushed back and yeah its been 4 years and where is Thunderdome? The team changed the way the luck worked in the worst possible way. Binance and Binance missions seems to be the sole focus of the team. There was a lot and yeah you could feel the shift.

Let's fast forward some more to 2023 and 2024. And look this is where the rubber meets the road for me. My OG WAX account was/is pzyas.wam. Never hid that, I mined so many times with that account for YEARS. I played 100% legit. But there was a time where I got tempted and broke the Terms of Service. I tried out a browser automation tool that would automate the clicks for me so I didn't have to click on "mine" every like 45 minutes or whatever it was back then.

It worked great. I would only use it when I was sitting at my desk (I work from home doing IT 'stuff'). So yeah I justified it but I broke the rules. AW flagged my account, I reached out to support and had a text conversation with them and they unflagged me. Ironically the first time I got flagged was because I was pulling an all-nighter for work and well I was at my desk to I was using the automation tool. Stupid TrocProcLock. I stopped using that automation bot/tool thing because I didn't want to ruin my cash cow.

I got flagged again, they wouldn't tell me what I did but after some talking they unflagged me. 

I got flagged again, they wouldn't tell me what I did but after some talking they unflagged me. 

I got flagged again, they wouldn't tell me what I did but after some talking they unflagged me. 

Look let's just round down and say I was flagged 5 times on my pzyas.wam account until they finally banned me from Alien Worlds.

I accepted that (I was still pissed) because I knew I broke a rule, even if it was months earlier and not when they actually banned me.

If I remember correctly it was at that point I was bitter and so I sold my good Alien Worlds tools and all my TLM and what not. But a few months went by and I wanted to a web3 browser game to play so I created a new WAX account and started to play Alien Worlds again. That new account didn't have anything so I bought tools and sent them to the new account. 

I was able to play for maybe a few months until that account was flagged. I was told it it was because sending over stuff from a banned account was illegal and blah blah blah. Now remember... I didn't do anything illegal. I read their Terms of Use. You can read it yourself here: Terms of Use

So I was pissed yet again. I would see other people get flagged pretty regularly and sure I didn't know if they were breaking the rules or not but it sure did seem like a LOT of people getting flagged.

Let's skip forward but during this time skip.. I had a few more accounts I opened up because previous accounts were getting banned. I want to make something perfectly clear. I NEVER used 2 accounts at the same time to mine, which according to their own Terms of Use: you can have multiple AW accounts so long as you do NOT mine with more than 1. 

2 accounts ago I found out about Mission Control and Miners Union. Without getting way too much into them I got banned NOT from Alien Worlds but from Mission Control because they said I was breaking their Terms of Service blah blah blah. Again.. I was wasn't. I own when I broke the rules and it was that 1 time with the automation tool years ago.

So rinse and repeat I had to create a new new new account. Without getting too much into the new account was xjjow.c.wam. I applied for Mission Control and was accepted and was mining with their Tool Loaning program. It was absolute bananas. You could basically borrow other people's tools and mine with them and be able to mine a lot of TLM without owning the tools yourself. And let me make something very clear.... Based on Alien Worlds own website they make it seem as if Mission Control is a 100% sanctioned 3rd party app.

That is from https://play.alienworlds.io/arena

You see that Mission Control icon in the middle? So Alien Worlds is promoting this 3rd party program/website on their own and yet from what I can gather it is what got my account blocked. 

How do I know that?

Well I didn't at first. But the day I got flagged I noticed soo many other people got flagged at the same time and we all were stating that the only thing we were doing was using the Tool Loaning feature on Mission Control.

Is it a coincidence? I thought so at first, but now I know it's not a coincidence. That screenshot directly above is the error message you will get TODAY if you get flagged. If you go to that website listed... you wanna know what you see?

Yeah its down. It's been down for at least 2 months but I am willing to bet longer. But what is YEOMAN you ask? They are a 3rd party company that basically sell themselves as the wardens or police to protect website games from bots, and illegal players and such. They state they use AI to track and analyze accounts and flag suspected accounts that deem may be breaking the websites Terms of Service.

I am NOT going to go through the Terms of Use again as I already did in this article: The Alien Worlds current Ecosystem and Economy as I see it today 

But what I will recount are these exchanges. So since this newest account of mine wasn't tied to my other accounts I didn't want to go appeal my flagging/banning with MY discord account. So I created a new discord account and tied it to my WAX account: xjjow.c.wam.

I thought I was so sneaky. (I wasn't more on that later). The only way to appeal a ban/flag is to submit a ticket in the official Alien Worlds Discord server.

And once you submit the request you just have to wait. You will NEVER be notified if you were unflagged. You will NEVER be notified if the team at YEOMAN say your appeal and denied it. According to the Discord Mods, the only way to know if you are unflagged is to keep trying to mine.... And if after 2 days you still can't mine then that means you broke the Terms of Use... Excuse me?

Now XanderC.. I have no idea who this person is and if they are a a-hole in real life or a nice person. But I will say given what I have read them say and my interactions with them I am leaning to the former. But they are just tone-death to the situation.

I am going to assume that if you got flagged then it is possible you did something wrong, or not. But if you appeal and don't hear back then you are 100% guilty of breaking the rules? I get that being a mod must be hard when people are pissed they are getting flagged and you have no insight into the appeal process and you purely have zero power for that. But say that. It's like a secretary taking the stance of their boss even when their boss was accused of assault on other people. Like you have no idea, so say that. Don't pretend and assume.. Assuming makes a @$$ out of you and you.

But this is still my all time favorite message from XanderC. Noodle Farm is/was my other Discord account. Xander told me that the Yeomen team will not reveal why I got flagged "due to security"...

The irony is 2 fold.

A) Telling someone "hey you got flagged because you were mining for 72 hours straight without any breaks" does not hurt security. It shows people that you are watching them and that they can't do that anymore. Or even "you were sending tools back and forth to another account that was also mining" doesn't hurt security.. It is honestly idiotic.

B) The Yeomen team USED TO TELL YOU. I had conversations with their support staff years ago when I got flagged. I remember the conversation when they told me "hey you were playing yesterday at 8am all the way until 10am the next day". I explained to them I was working all day and had to pull an allnighter... They unflagged me and I learned to not mine past 6pm.

Let me start to wrap this up together and get to the point though.

Alien Worlds started as a great game that seemed to be player focused and had a thriving ecosystem. 

Alien Worlds started to get a LOT of money and notoriety in the web3 space and things started to shift.

Yeomen was brought in to police it's players, which isn't a bad thing per say.

But Alien Worlds decided to have a complete hand off approach to their own game. Do you ever see any AW team members talk on their Discord? Do you ever hear from anyone at AW?

The Yeomen website to submit appeals is down and has been down for a while but when you are flagged the message still tells you to go to a website that doesn't work. You can find support if you search enough. On the AW site if you go to support, then go to Submit Issue it will direct you to their Discord.

But this brings back one of my biggest pet peeves in web3. You are now requiring your players to use Discord. That is insane to me and it is NOT okay. Just because you are a web3/blockchain/crypto game does not mean you can force your players to use a Social Media account. What if instead of Discord you could only submit a support ticket on Facebook, or Telegram, or Myspace, or WhatsApp. When did we as players accept this and be okay with this lunacy.

And then there is the fact that you can submit a appeal and you will NEVER hear back from the support team about the status of your appeal. Like NEVER. Could you imagine if your Google account got suspended and you had to submit a ticket explaining why you didn't break any of Googles Terms of Service and you never heard back from them and you are just left wondering why your account got flagged and is useless now?

People can invest into this game and buy tools and TLM and then get banned for no reason and they are out of all that money they invested. It truly in insane to me and what is even more is that nobody is talking about this or raising this up. We all accept shady business practices in the web3 space because we are just used to it now with so many rugpulls and such. Guys, if we don't stand up for what is right and fair then this crap will keep happening. It's one thing when it happens to other people, you can brush it off. But when it eventually happens to you then years down the road, then will you see how bad it is?

In my 3-4 days of mining on this new account I have 145 TLM earned that I can NOT withdraw from Alien Worlds because my account is flagged. So effectively AW can now say that the 145 is burned. Because it truly is. AW should not have the ability to stop WAX contracts from working. I want to withdraw my earnings but they will not let me. If they want to stop me from mining on their website to earn more because of whatever reason that is 1 thing but to stop me from using smart contracts that are on the blockchain is crazy.

What proof do I have? Since my last flagging and never getting a response to my appeal I made it my mission to stick it to the man. I decided I was going to get as much TLM as I could out of Alien Worlds. It would be my form of justice. How? Well let's see :)

I knew I had to create a new WAX account. But in order to do that you need to basically send over a few WAX from another account to create a new one. This was my first hurdle because I didn't want this new account tied to any of my previous accounts in anyway. I was finally able to supply this new account with a couple WAX from a 3rd party account that had zero interactions with my accounts or anything Alien Worlds.

It truly was a 100% clean new WAX account.

Then my issue came where I needed to stake WAX to perform transactions and I needed TLM to send to Mission Control to use their service. How would I send over WAX and TLM to this account from a account NOT related to any of my previous accounts. I knew if I sent it to an exchange and then swapped it and withdrew it to this new account there would be a paper trail so to speak.

What did I figure out? The Tip.cc bot on Discord. After doing some testing I figured out I could withdraw my tip.cc balance to this new account and there was zero connection to where it came from so to speak. But I had to be careful because in theory if I sent 123.45 WAX from my pzyas.wam account to the tip.cc bot then 10 minutes later you see the tip.cc bot sent 123.45 WAX to this new account, you could very easily make the connection that these 2 accounts were tied together. Granted it would be an assumption but a very good assumption.

So then came the game of sending a bunch of smaller transactions to deposit into tip.cc and then days later withdrawing random amounts to this new account in TLM and WAX and maybe other currencies as well to really diversify the transaction. For example I could deposit 5 WAX, then deposit 15 WAX and then deposit 24 WAX into tip.cc. Then say 3 days later I could withdraw 18.54 WAX to my new account. and a few days later withdraw 14.445 WAX to my new account. You get the idea. Rinse and Repeat that process over and over until I had enough to play with this new account.

What other steps did I take?

I have T-Mobile Home Internet and T-Mobile for my personal cellphone. I know the ways these IP's work and interact so I ONLY ever logged into this account from my work cellphone with is on AT&T and never connected to my home WiFi. So I know for a fact there is no IP logs that can tie this new account to my old accounts in ANYWAY.

Shoot I even told the Appeal team/Yeomen this.

I wanted to appeal this flagging and I did not want to create a whole new Discord account to do it. So I said F it and just went on my normal account and submitted an appeal.

Remember guys, having multiple accounts that have logged into Alien Worlds is NOT against their Terms of Use. It is 100% legal and they even state that as long as you only mine with 1 account it is 100% okay.

What you can't do is move tools around and try to game the system and such between accounts. Which isn't a problem because this account was 100% isolated from all other accounts.

It has been a day already and I still cannot mine. It's not looking good for this account.

How could this account get flagged then?

My ONLY thought is that it is because I was using the Tool Loaning feature on Mission Control

Here is their article explaining it: Feature Spotlight: Tool Loaning. This article is part of a series of… | by MC Author 64 | Mission Control | Medium

Remember guys, Mission Control is linked to directly on AW's own website. So to any normal person playing this is a 100% sanctioned 3rd party tool and with it means the Tool Loaning feature is okay to use as well.

But I keep seeing so many people complaining about getting flagged and Mission Control is where they were mining from.

Those 2 screenshots pretty much sum of the Support channel in AW's discord. People come to complain and get answers and other players chime in with help or also complain. Sure the mods will chime in from time to time stating things like "do the /appeal to submit an appeal" and "if you don't get unflagged in 2 days that's because your broke the Terms of Use".

How idiotic can they be? Apparently a lot.

This is how I know now without a shadow of a doubt that Yeomen are using certain criteria to flag people at 'random'. There are only 2 possible reasons for this.

1) It truly is random and they just flag accounts that are newer to see if people appeal and then maybe that means they are not bots? but I never get unflagged so that can't be it.

2) They are flagging accounts that use the Mission Control Tool Loaning feature since you are technically sharing tools to mine even if it is from a sanctioned AW program.

But to make things more fun and complicated. I have a friend who uses Mission Control Tool Loaning and has for a LONG LONG time and is not getting flagged. I know that their account used to get flagged a lot back in the day and would get unflagged just like me but now they are not getting flagged anymore and are free to keep playing and earning a shit ton of TLM. 

So is AW/Yeomen really just punishing the newer players and selectively targeting them? 

I know WHAT Alien Worlds and Yeomen are doing but WHY are they doing it I can only guess. I have very good guesses but nothing I can prove and not anything I think I will ever be able prove.

The point of this article it to warn everyone else that Alien Worlds is a bad company run by some either incompetent people or people who just don't give a crap about it's players.

Here is their CEO:

And their CMO:

And their CPO:

CTO:

I am not putting these people on blast and 'outing' them. Those screenshots are from Alien Worlds own documentation. https://alienworlds-media-bucket.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/AW_Media_Kit.pdf 

Also interesting that that PDF is hosted on AWS in the EU-Central. I mean guys.... you got 2 million dollars in funding and you couldn't hire an IT team to edit your default URL for images and PDF's? Do the issues run even deeper with Alien Worlds?

...TO BE CONTINUED