Play2Earn Weekly Highlights - 3700 Satoshi from a Faucet!

about 3 years ago

This week marked a premiere in my live not only as a blockchain enthusiast but also as a gamer as I have visited a (non-work-related) convention for the first time in my life. Who would have thought, that of all times, the first time I would visit a games convention would be during a global pandemic? Well, every cloud has a silver lining, I guess. I would like to thank @carrieallen, @chrisroberts and the rest of the @splinterlands team for setting up the DYGYCON in virtual space and without any entrance fee.

Being deeply entangled in the Play2Earn industry, even if just from a consumer’s perspective, I knew most of the exhibitor’s but I also learned about a couple of new projects. Now let’s take a deep dive into what I earned and discovered over the course of the past week.

Splinterlands

Splinterlands had their 10th airdrop for the Untamed series this week. The Byzantine Kitty is the last of the legendary summoners to be added to the series via airdrop. @byzantinist did an awesome job with the card design, I just love it. As I have purchased almost 300 Untamed packs when the series was released, I was eligible to the airdrop but my chances for legendaries are quite low with such a ‘small’ amount of packs bought. Still, I was lucky enough over the past drops and after having gotten a Yodin Zaku and a Mimosa Nightshade already, I scored again and found a freshly printed Byzantine Kitty in my deck.

I can’t believe we still have four airdrops to go and I already got such expensive cards. This really made the packs I bought when the series was released (and which were/are thus eligible for all drops) a bargain.

I play max level cards, so keeping a summoner would mean having to level it up to max level. As this currently exceeds my budget, I decided to sell the Kitty for a whopping $16.60.

I used these and some of the DEC I earned from quests to buy some Owster Rotwells, which made him reach level 6 with only two more levels to go until max and swapped the most of it for another land plot increasing my total stake to three plots.

I had 22 HIVE left on Hive-Engine after the plot purchase and the lowest buy order for PLOTS was 15 HIVE, which of course is so low it’s imprudent. So I thought, why not place a buy order myself and I set up one for the 22 HIVE. Next day, I found another plot in my wallet! For a little over 8 USD. Now that’s a bargain!

Monstermarket Reward Analyzer is a great tool to find out how much you earned from playing by counting the DEC earned by battling as well as those from quest rewards. It also shows the burn value of reward cards earned as well as other rewards like packs and potions.
According to the Analyzer, this week my accounts earned:
8417 DEC
2590 DEC in burn value
4 Untamed Packs
43 Alchemy Potions
52 Legendary Potions

The DEC in burn value is usually valued too low because you can sell better cards for much higher prices. These were the best I got this week:

I can also recommend participating in the Splinterlands posting contests. The upvotes they distribute for quality content are just awesome. Just look at this week's post that earned upvotes worth 8.27 USD.

Cryptobrewmaster

In one of my last reports I mentioned that I liked the new possibility to ‘level up’ your account with permanent enhancer upgrades and so I have been collecting them, buying a new one whenever I had accumulated enough CBM.

This week marked another milestone as I managed to purchase my first enhancer of the outstanding quality.

My quests have changed recently with new brewing ingredients and recipes being added to the game and I can now get 6 row barley of the neutral quality for free from the daily quests.

Processing these with the enhancer to turn them into outstanding quality will considerably improve my chances to brew more expensive beer that can, in turn, be sold for more CBM.

Rising Star

With my current card collection and level, I can easily earn enough Starbits to swap 10k of them for a booster pack each week. Having invested nothing in the game except for 10 HIVE (when it was still 11 cents) for a fan booster, this is an unbelievable ROI. I am excited to see when this game catches on traction and believe that profitability will drop then, but atm it is still early-birds phase.

My current goal is to increase my number of fans as much as possible to unlock higher level missions, which will pay out even better. After getting a bunch of instruments from the packs of the previous weeks (which increase the luck stat but not the fans count), I was all the happier to find a Bolly Wood in this week’s booster pack which comes with 100 fans in his tow.

This increases my fan count to a total of 588 fans from cards. Permanently unlocking the Radio Studio Session mission.

This week I also got an additional bonus pack for completing 500 missions in total. What a great incentive for beginners to get their first missions completed asap and continue playing.

Gods Unchained

I have not been playing a lot of Gods Unchained recently. I am usually sitting on the couch on pins and needles, ready to run to my daughter’s room when she starts crying. Therefore, I usually stick to playing idle games. With games like Gods Unchained I would lose the match every time she starts crying (which is a lot…).

I was all the more surprised to find five packs sitting in my account when I logged in again. From these I got three Epic cards - the first two from the same pack!

As you know already I unpacked an Eldritch Demonologist a couple of weeks ago already. This is super cool because now I will be able to fuse them into a card of meteorite quality which is then mine to own in my private ETH wallet and not just an in-game virtual card anymore.

Neon District

I earned so much NEON in this game that I now had enough to buy JUICE for levelling up my 2nd character to max level. I decided to max out the Doc this time. As my Heavy already is maxed out, having a healer to support him sounds like a good idea.

Max level is level 5 and as with all characters in Neon District, they become tradeable NFTs once they reach level 4. This means that I was now able to transfer the Doc out of my in-game inventory and am now neatly storing him in my own personal Matic wallet.

Alien Worlds

Alien Worlds was upgraded from v0.2.9 to v.0.3.0 this week. So far, the only difference I could notice was that you now have to agree to their general terms and conditions on your first login after the update.

I was quite frustrated by this as it seemingly broke the mobile version of the game. Every time I tried to log in via mobile, the game would get stuck on this screen:

I now turned off my mobile Brave browser’s shields, though, and hurray, it is working again! Can’t tell you how important this is for my NFT collection as I am using the TLM I gain from mining to buy RAM for collecting free NFT drops on the WAX blockchain. And with not being able to play from mobile my TLM earnings had dropped from approx. 50 TLM per day to a mere 10 TLM.

I also dropped a new Alien Worlds NFT of the ‘common’ rarity. It’s a Grey Male avatar card.

I immediately swapped my Male Human for this badass and now have him greet me, every time I log in to the game. Not sure if this affects mining earnings (I don’t believe it does) but it’s nice for showing off with an avatar that not everybody owns.

FreeBitco.in

Not really a game, but also a way to earn crypto for free. I usually do not report on faucets, I have mocked them in the past and I am not using them myself because they are just not worth it.

However, with FreeBitco.in I read on somebody else’s Publish0x blog that they had a cool thing going on with their daily newsletters. Subscribing to them grants you a free spin at their wheel of fortune. This thing pays a lot better than their faucet (which I still believe is rigged by the higher payout numbers having significantly lower chances of being rolled). At the wheel of fortune I have gotten 44 Satoshi for a single spin several times now. I have only been using it for about two weeks and this week a spin really surprised me:

3700 Satoshi! That’s 2 USD at the time of winning them. With results like this it might (unlike with faucets) indeed be possible to reach the withdrawal threshold.

What are you waiting for?

While these games will not make you rich, they're handing out free money for doing (almost) nothing. I will grow my stake in these games by re-investing the earnings and also swap some fraction of the tokens for Satoshis to add to my stack.