A post about a farming NFT game on Hive called dCrops. My sad attempt at SEO right there but this post is a brief opinion about the state of the game. If NFTgames on Hive aren't your thing, move on from this post.
If you're interested about learning the game, head on to the wiki.
I'm so glad the cat hasn't rug pulled us yet. It's a half meant jest because having the awareness that this game is in the cryptoverse breaks the 4th wall. Remember Chifibots? I don't, never played it because it the product never existed. But I consider it just dumb luck that the introduction to dcrops post came in early that my extra funds went into this game than Chifibots.
But it's not to say I'd recommend anyone diving into the game with the hopes of raking in quick ROI. This isn't that type of game, developments are slow, content is severely lacking compared to competing farming NFTgames, and there's the constant threat that every player has to pray the cat has enough lives if bus-kun decides to launch it to an isekai anime. If you get the reference, great, if not, forget about it. The main point here is the project being run by 1 dev and this slows down progress.
Anyone that started during the ALPHA phase should be in profit right now. But if you doubled down during the BETA seasons or entered during the BETA season, congratulations, let's hope some more suckers join so we can dump our bags. You can think of the game as that, and this may as well apply to any NFT game out there with a different packaging. That's a reality. If the Dev decides to pull the plug on the project and ghost, that's it, keep the jpeg and strings of text as proof you own the item. Any person who doesn't understand this risk yet still pays to play the game probably deserves the tuition.
But dCrops hasn't been like that and has been running for 2 years. dCrops community has been chill when it comes to the slow updates and vague road maps but work gets done. Even when the bugs appear post patch, the community has been chill about the hiccups. I attribute this to the lack of Hype the cat does when it comes to releasing new content (though I think the new features are just actual fixes from broken parts no one else noticed yet) but it's fine as long as people get their game and daily Hive airdrops.
@scriptkittie is approachable to the playerbase. How the cat manages to be dev for the game, a discord mod, and not having a breakdown from the pressure is amazing. I should nag the cat more over DMs.
It's hard to market the game considering there are better fully fleshed out alternatives of farming games on other blockchains. There are a few parts in the game where NFTs have no specific function yet but just exist as a decoration.
Some questionable game balances exists like, how could the theme for the third season revolve around building equipment, crafting and cooking still be viable if the cards/NFTs to access most of the content by design be so damn rare that more than half of the player base isn't going to be invested in it. I looked at the recipes that require legendary equipment to make, and to acquire those blueprints, one needs to pray to the RNG gawds for a 1% success.
There's a shortage of Barrels on the market and there are a lot of recipes dependent on these. And the whales are even more incentivized to hoard the blueprints from circulation because of rarity and personal gains. It's an imbalance and the process of enjoying the 2nd season content became bottlenecked to these rare items like what the hell was the cat even smoking?
I wanted to access the new content feature but after seeing the possible routes to proceed, damn, I'm so gland I just quit ahead because it's expensive to bother and the pay off to access late game content isn't worth sinking more money into. This imbalance just blocked majority of the player base and by virtue a bad design if more than half of the season's content is accessible by a few players willing to spend more on the game. 5 cards for a 3$ per pack, even with a discount wasn't worth it if the content were flooded with recipe books most players won't even consider worthwhile to pursue.
And despite all the complaints I'm giving, I'm doing fine earning passively from the game just by keeping most of my CROP power in the form of packs than playing the actual game. I allocated half of the packs I got to be used for playing (mostly ALPHA) and the rest for hoarding and getting those daily Hive airdrops on the sidelines.
I like the game for all the possibilities it can become and it's a plus that it's built on Hive.
Reviewing everything that happened so far, I'm still at a point where I don't recommend the game unless the one I'm talking to knows how NFT games work and are exploring their options. There's just too many features missing and it's not really looking good if only 1 dev runs the entire thing. But this is the type of risk I don't mind staying long. From an investing point of view, this isn't far from what you can expect during startups. May the cat not rug pull us all.
If you made it this far reading, thank you for your time.