Guys.

GUYS.

Rollercoin’s second Season Pass event is out, and at first glance it looks GREAT! However, the longer I interact with this update, the more I am convinced that our Rollerfriends are trying to quietly shift away from a “freemium” model where it is possible to have fun without paying them toward an environment where FTP is discouragingly deprioritized. Here’s what I’ve noticed:

The Good

Season 2 is astro-themed, which is always a win. Everybody loves SPACE:

And along with a few new miners, players can now purchase loot boxes for a chance to win better rewards than they would be otherwise able to afford:

Including a Halloween box:

And one low-cost superlotto box for us ultra low rollers:

Of especial importance to the Free-to-Player is this season’s inclusion of actual, respectable miners in the items freely earnable by climbing the levels. Level rewards for 8 and 13 are a FREE Chupacabra and El Monstro, respectively!

The Bad

While this is exciting indeed, not every new update is such positive news. There are some updates that appear to be not-so-great, especially for the Free-to-Player…

The rewards structure of this event has a clear focus on certain games over others (not in and of itself a bad thing, but also you must now win these games, not merely play them):

The weekly xp-earning quests are now impossible to fully complete without spending ~$40 (plus gas and fluctuations):

The blog post for this event says these are now daily quests and that this one and the referral one are not required to complete the whole set, but mine still says 3 days remaining in the week and these two are part of the eleven total:

Each level of the season takes 140xp to complete (vs season 1’s 100xp):

The Ugly

In what is the most effectual change for the FTP crowd since the game points rebalance, we can no longer earn any points for games that we play but do not win:

Prior to this update, if you cleared almost all the boxes in Cryptonoid, or almost all the ships in Token Blaster, or got almost all the way to the end of a round of Token Surfer, you would be rewarded with almost all the possible points for that round. Without winning the game, the level difficulty never increased and the rewards would never grow, but you could still get something for your time. This was important for two reasons:

• maintaining your hash rate, and
• gaining skills.

With the newly implemented all-or-nothing structure, the players who depend on the games to maintain their hash rate will no longer be able to keep up with their daily goals, and their power will steadily decrease. Getting no power from a loss (no matter how close you were to winning) means a lot more time will be wasted replaying a game to earn anything; at the higher game difficulties, hours might be lost chasing a handful of points.

More impactful in the long run, zero rewards for a non-win lowers the replayability of the games, and discourages the kind of practice that builds skills for those tasks. Playing a game at a high difficulty can be exciting and stressful. Dodging space bullets or garbage cans can really get your heart rate up, even if only for a moment. There is a kind of emotional investment in your ability to succeed in the Roller Games, because the increasing levels of difficulty reflects that you are getting better at the game, and that development takes practice.

But while the games can certainly be fun, our Rollerfriends would be absolutely remiss in thinking players don’t focus their energy in the direction of the more lucrative interactions— whichever game pays the best will be the most popular. When they rebalanced the rewards structure and made Cryptonoid the best bang per kb of play, I got really good at Cryptonoid, and could play it to level 10 consistently (but not without intermittently losing).

But when you’re stuck on level 5 of Token Blaster, and losing over and over, continually either getting hit or running out of time juuuuust before killing that last ship, and then getting Zero Points for 25+ minutes of play… I don’t know about the rest of you, but personally I will move on. I’ll play something else until I’m unwound enough to try again. After a few rounds of playing other games and then losing Token Blaster, I’ll stop trying. I have other things to do with my life.

Which means my hash rate is gonna tank (in 7 days).

Which means I’ll be less motivated to try to keep it up by playing.

AND those losses don’t count towards my Season Pass XP, so my level-climbing there will suffer, which means I won’t get as far this season.

45xp are available each week for winning (320) games, while 40xp are available for spending ~$40 (plus gas and fluctuations), so if you’re properly discouraged you might get only as far as someone who just shovels money into the site and never plays a single game (but those types likely have more miners than you & I do, so they’re probably also earning a bigger hash rate bonus).

I can understand how this change might have been driven by a desire to prevent cheating. Getting nothing for not winning means you can’t just start a game, half-ass it, and slowly rake in the points, right? But I can also see how it does nothing to stop the hypothetical worst cheaters (anybody who can program a bot to play can program a bot to win, and probably any bots are created to hack it and don’t even play in the first place) while hobbling the actual people who want to actually have a good time.

The Solution?

The only solution to this that I can see at the present time is if the cool down for the difficulty levels was dialed back from 10 hours (or is it 12?) to only a few. This way wins could still be possible in a way that is less restrictive.

Though on the upside, the overall network power dropped considerably at the end of Season 1 as people started to detox from grinding so hard. What was once over 63eh/s is now showing ~49.5, and each coin’s total power has been further split by the addition of the ability to mine BNB, so each precious point produces a plumper portion of the pie.

Another benefit will be that this hurdle to getting points for high-difficulty failures will make Flappy Rocket relevant again. And who among us hasn’t imagined building a tiny craft to send the family hamster into space?

No? Just me?

:3

That’s my take on it, but I’m just one person. What do you guys think?

If you’re not already getting paid in crypto for your casual gaming habits, you can grab a quick thousand sats by using my link to join RollerCoin. Adopt your own Mr. Goxx and get that wheel rolling! 

If you’d rather not play games with your crypto, check out one of my other favorites and faucets.

UPDATES

RollerCoin changed this event soon after I wrote this. Guess I wasn’t just one person. Read about the changes here.