Some Suggestions (Dreams?) for Rising Star, from the Fan Club

One of the very active writers and players of my favorite Hive game, Rising Star, @rtonline, posted some of his honest views as a mega-fan of the game #RisingStar. I always appreciate when people who play and invest in games - and who fully intend to keep playing - share their views, warts and all. I wrote a comment to the post that got longer and longer and longer, so I decided to post about it myself!

Here is a link to @rtonline's original post: https://leofinance.io/@rtonline/starbits-price-analysis-and-a-few-suggestions-about-the-rising-star-game

My Own Take

Hopefully you read @rtoneline's post and saw the discussion of the Starbits asset price and the way that, in my words, playing the same game so much eventually leads to familiarity that can resemble boredom. There are hardly any games I play as much as I play blockchain games, but I get bored by all of them from time to time, so I get those concerns!

Myself, I just made Millionaire not so long ago, and was affected a lot by the collapse in Starbits prices (just after I started buying some in order to become millionaire). I think overall, I have no complaints because early on I had been selling my starbits in order to play other games so if I needed to buy some later it probably came out even. Since getting millionaire, I cannot imagine that I had any concerns, it has been a NET PLUS without a doubt (even though now I am not selling anything lol).

I am only about 18 months into my crytoworld journey, so maybe have a set of fresh eyes that also have seen a bit in terms of games. So, I am both naive and experienced. Blockchain games have huge advantages over normal games, but those advantages place unique pressures. Two of those are (1) mixed incentives between fun and profit and (2) the unique influence of whales. For this reason, I think developers are in a bit of a bind, made harder by a third element which is that (3) a lot of these games start as labors of love and overwhelm the dev crew! (You can read more about this in a proposal written by the Rising Star dev team, who are great imho: https://peakd.com/me/proposals/226)

But as someone who is about halfway through the journey, I think there are 3 tiers of players to this game. There are probably more in bigger games like Splinterlands, but these are the most important 3 for games, or so I think haha

• 1. New (who are getting all those early achievements and getting "bigger" as a star in the game with frequent rewards, exciting pack openings, and tradable currecny coming in from day 1)
• 1. Millionaire (who have played enough but have probably plateaued in some way, but there is still lots to discover for good and bad - for example I was honestly annoyed when I got to the County Tour level and found that I must buy a rehearsal space and then also buy Petrol in order to try new missions; but at the same time I am starting to play around with fan club and have never tried the record promoter stuff, so more to learn)
• 1. Big Holders (who are players who probably have played a ton on each kind of experience in the game, have tons of cards and tons of currency; from gameplay, the have done it all and are getting bored and from a financial perspective they have lots and lots in the game, as well as the influencec that comes from that)

In my view, the incentives are probably good for New players. I think it is an easy, interesting, and profitable game at this level.

I think they have declined somewhat for Millionaires over the past months according to my definition - the ROI is a lot lower now and the requirements are quite higher too (needing increasing fans, for example). But as someone who only is a Millionaire during this phase, I STILL think it is pretty well incentivized, but I am starting to fear that the incentives will keep getting lower and lower for players at this level. The worry that "the good old days" are past is something that especially plagues blockchain games relative to normal games.

And it sounds like the game is not well incentivized for big holders. To my mind, another favorite game, Splinterlands, tipped the scales too far in favor of incentivizing the rewards for big holders. That game is more complex, but despite being more advanced than a New player I could not keep up with the deck strength or skill building time required to win and advance. So I got my ass kicked all the time, won no rewards, and even as I invested a lot (by my scale) in new cards, still lots, and was doomed to bot hell. With millions of new packs and cards being dropped and changes to the reward structure, in my humble opinion, most of the cost of changes to Splinterlands were borne by middle players. You might think that is great, and that is fine. You might think I sucked as a player or trader and if I was better I would still get rewards, and that is fine too. But I think that will be the big trap for crypto games - the whales hold most of the value and influence in the game - you cannot lose them or no one's assets are worth anything - and their incentives are very different than those for new and middle players. How to balance them?

Rising Star is not there at all, in my opinion, but in facing the challenge of getting New users, retaining Millionaire middle users, and keeping Big Holders engaged, what I have seen is that devs tend to change the game for EVERYONE in order to make it more rewarding for the Big Holders. Dumb little me thinks this is depressing. They make it harder and harder to get rewards/value for New and Middle players and give more and more game assets to Big Holders who already have a ton. I think that is probably a little boring for Big Holders and creates a sense of helplessness among New and Middle holders.

What I suggest instead is to keep rulesets and incentives as stable and predictable as possible for New and Middle players while creating a totally new game experience for whales and Big Holders. It could be a tier that only can be accessed by players with 5 million Starbits held in a wallet or 500 NFT cards held in game, or focus on locked staking or whatever. But you need to have big assets in the game in order to access this cool new experience. For Rising Star, maybe it's mixing your own tracks and working toward minting them as audio NFTs, or maybe it's a guitar-hero style multitasking game. The point would be to keep whales deservedly entertained an incentivized to hold assets their assets in the game and to retain their affection and devotion to the game, while simultaneously not decreasing or too rapdily changing rules around incentives for new players to join. And it would let Middle players like me both feel good about continuing our devotion to the game and about aspiring to the cool new elite-level experience.

What do you think?

Posted Using LeoFinance ^Beta