Speculating BETA Season Gameplay for dCrops

dCrops has announced its BETA launch and this post is just a rundown of my thoughts on the game. At the time of this writing, I’m just basing my inputs from what announcements have been made previously adding a little imagination on the changes in gameplay. None of the stuff I share here may reflect the actual gameplay changes in the future as we only get bits of info about BETA launch for now. I need to reiterate that in case someone bites me for getting my predictions about the game wrong.

A quick refresher what dCrops is taken from their main page:

Built on the HIVE blockchain, dCrops is a cryptocollectible game where you are put in the shoes of a farmer. You have complete control of your farm where you can grow various crops. Will you be upto the task? Climb the leaderboard and get rewarded with CROP tokens. Hodl your assets and increase your CROP power to get daily hive rewards. Complete quests to earn mystery seeds and other items!

Every 15 days in the game, a season ends and a finite pool of CROP tokens are released into circulation to players that sold their crops (in game) for shares (a claim to the CROP token reward pool). Each season the total max reward pool decreases around 0.5% from the base 500,000 CROP reward pool. Players that have accumulated at least 20,000 CROP power (computed with a 15 day holding period) are eligible to receive a portion of the daily Hive reward pool which is 0.25% of the total reward pool set aside from the ALPHA pack sales (30% of the sales went to the player reward pool).

Depending on how you would look the market for CROP, this 15-day release of new tokens in circulation favored a stable to stagnant price activity especially when majority of the player base opted to hold their CROP tokens than sell. This made the tokens supposed pegged price of 0.001$ per CROP rise higher than intended due to the lack of liquidity.

Now going back to how BETA launch will fuel the reward pool again, if we follow the same amount of 30% of total sales will be used to fund the player reward pool, we can expect existing holders to have more Hive received daily as this is still in proportion to their existing CROP power. The losers in this event are those that don’t want to stack up more CROP tokens on their holdings because there will be more CROP power available to other players increasing their tug on the daily Hive reward pool.

There will be 300,000 BETA packs in existence and each has a 2,000 CROP power value unopened. 100,000 packs from presale introduces around 200,000,000 CROP power into circulation, the equivalent of 400 seasons (6000 days) if 500,000 seasonal CROP rewards didn’t have that 0.5% diminishing value. Sounds like complicated math, I’m not sure if I got it down. Anyway, the reality isn’t exactly going to be like this as players will start opening packs and depending on the rarity of the card will the total CROP power from the event diminish.

The significant part about minding this detail is that if you’re prioritizing your daily Hive rewards over playing the actual game, you’ll get a better pull from the reward pool just by not opening and holding that 2,000 CROP power per pack. Your payoff will be influencing possible use of CROP power for governance, capital appreciation from just holding BETA packs in the future, and more daily Hive rewards in the short to midterm.

The downside to this strategy is that the cumulative efforts of players that bother to play for more CROP rewards and take advantage of the updates get a competitive and progressive advantage at tugging over the Hive reward pool away from you as a pack holder. You already settled for a finite amount of CROP power to hold while opening packs meant sacrificing some potential gains in the short term to acquire more CROP holdings in the long term.

There was a mention of blueprints for crafting, and other side quests from NPCS but the thing that caught my attention was the finite amount of recipes available for crafting. You craft and level up to increase your proficiency at something then rinse and repeat until you get more bonuses from mastery. I would assume this has something to do with acquiring more CROP tokens as what you craft may be sold for shares just like regular crops planted?

Depending on how much shares one can get from crafting, the game may start to have more gameplay diversity when it comes to acquiring shares for CROP tokens. The generic playstyle of plant crops and sell for shares can be challenged by a playstyle reliant on crafting if the products crafted can be sold for shares in the game.

Because recipe NFTs are finite, some rare recipes may be permanently out of reach to players who didn’t opt to buy their way to the game early. Now if I was a starting player and just want to be the best chef specialized in multiple cuisine in the game I can’t fulfill that dream due to the limited edition part of the game. Some accounts will just get that permanent advantage over others due to RNG or just grinded faster than the rest to get those advantage.

The finite recipes just seal away some opportunities from the rest of the player base that can’t get lucky due to RNG. I would prefer a mechanism where there is only a fixed amount available in circulation at a time and when some numbers are consumed, the system can randomly drop a player the recipe as a quest reward. This system just functions as a soft limit where everyone can still have a chance to pursue a goal to master multiple recipes even when they started late in the game. This is just a speculation and shouldn’t be taken as if it’s what will likely happen in the game. I mean, there are plenty of stuff the cat hasn’t revealed in the BETA launch yet.

For players that opt out from the BETA pack launch and are still holding above 20,000 CROP power, it is reasonable to expect a small bonus Hive amount received from the usual daily drop and then a progressive diminishing return as other players have more access to NFTs that improve their chances on the leaderboard long term.

The pack contains around 3 cards 50 different types of cards. It’s 4 if you buy into the promo card only available during BETA presale which means around 0.75$ random roll for each card but it’s actually 0.675$ each due to the 10% discount during presale. I suppose it’s fair deal only if you take advantage of the presale discount and promo card.

I’m putting in some more money into the game given the good record @scriptkittie has kept while running the game for more than a year. This isn’t an endorsement to sink your money in the game. Having the game operate this far surprises me as I’ve mentally prepared myself for some rug-pulling. It’s not that I don’t have faith in the cat dev, it’s more along the lines of we’ve been in the crypto game scene and should have learned our lesson with crypto rug pulls.

The additional features like crafting and blueprints, I think this could have been present during the ALPHA stages. BETA just feels like adding more condiments to the burger rather than fries to complement an already complete burger?

I really hoped the cat would prioritize putting some more stats on the page like how many seeds of this variety were minted from opened packs as this gives a better gauge on an NFT’s rarity. The BETA updates will increase the value of lands in the game given how adding trees would mean the lands free from trees will have their own niche demand.

A free land presents more opportunities for planting different seeds for different seasons while an occupied land becomes an inflexible asset functional on one season dictated by the nature of the tree planted. Because lands can be active throughout any season as long as they are in use, they are far more valuable in terms of keeping your CROP power higher than seasonal seeds which decrease in CROP power when it’s not their active season.

The BETA updates also hint that players that put value into completing quests have more access to rare NFTs due to quest rewards. Quests right now were something that I really paid little attention to given the rewards for minding them weren’t that great to convince me I should rerolling and pay attention to this and that when planting. But the advent of crafting materials, blueprints, and more recipes means those quest reward NFTs become rare resource that can boost player advantage.

One of the broken parts of the quest system is how it can favor users who use multiple accounts because of how finite the cap per account can have with quest rewards. So if you have multiple accounts that have substantial seeds and lands to complete the seasonal quest rewards, your chances of gathering more ingredients are far better than players who don’t.

I don’t think botting or having alts is something that can be totally avoided but rather the workaround is just having proportional quest rewards received to the CROP power held so everyone gets a proportional value of quest rewards relative to their invested stake.

I’m guessing CROP power’s future utility will be something along the lines of governance too. Similar to how dCity game operates when it comes to how reward distribution is decided by SIM holders, CROP holders can influence how much daily Hive rewards can be distributed or other bonuses in game for the community.

I also think the site needs a landing page for users who never knew about Hive for the first time. Like account creation functionalities instead of going through different hoops just to get an account creation done. This is one of the key areas where the game fails to onboard more players into it.

None of the ramblings above may come to reality for the game. I just like to theory craft.

If you made it this far reading, thank you for your time.

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