The Aftermath
================
If you've been following along, it looks like my initial discovery of Alien Worlds and the WAX blockchain came at a particularly lucky time. A week or two into the game, factors in the world outside of the player interface resulted in my apparent creation of around $200 from nothing, other than my time, electricity and internet access charges. I was stunned to be honest, although the main thing missing from this system (like others) is a button to 'withdraw'. Sure there's always a button you can click where you can easily buy more (be it tokens, shares, coins or any other asset) but the lack of an equally prominent and effortless way to return value to the end user is what typically turns me away from ever transferring money into these systems. I am working on my crypto-knowledge but so far this piece of the puzzle evades me.
I can see why this difficulty exists as who wants to end up behind bars for money laundering when that obviously is not the reason they built their games and systems. My response was to re-invest my gains into art NFT's to support the independent artists being drawn into the WAX eco-system. I am now however somewhat perplexed by what seems to be some sort of hidden penalty on my account. Since my other half has also been playing, we have both acquired the same set of tools for trillium mining (and despite the game not telling you this, my increased CPU usage while playing this minimal animation game suggests it really is crypto mining in the background).
We have both been using a standard shovel, standard capacitor and standard drill on the exact same plot of land, but while my other half has been receiving around 0.1-0.2 TLM per mine, my own rewards have dropped to 0.0001 to 0.0002 TLM or I get a 'nothing to mine' message. I've also noticed its been a very long time since I had an NFT drop. Is there something hidden going on behind the scenes and a lack of transparency for the players I wonder? There is no visible sign of my account being blacklisted for any reason, nor have I received any email to suggest I have somehow broken any terms of service. I can only presume that either there is some sort of bug affecting my account or some sort of hidden account age limit after which players are expected to become payers to further benefit from their interaction with the game.
Sadly this is where my timing is not so lucky as those mining tools are still very expensive on the marketplace. I am also reluctant to invest while mining yields seem so much lower. I would guess this is because people un-staked the TLM they had in planetary pots to sell off during the gold rush.
My other half was not far behind me in signing up so it will be interesting to see how her mining yields are affected in the next couple of weeks. In fact at one point I had most of the family playing along which I suspect is what caused the reCaptcha issues. Since there appears to be no rule against having multiple accounts, I might set up a new one to see if it eventually suffers the same fate. This YouTube video by Cryptostache suggests setting up another account to get a custom username is acceptable and I cannot find anything in the T's & C's to suggest having multiple accounts is disallowed.
I'm also curious if a new account might benefit from better NFT drops. As I mentioned earlier, I had not got any for a few days and so far the best any of the family have had is the common level (the rareness of NFT's can be 1 of 6 levels: Abundant, Common, Rare, Epic, Legendary or Mythical). Good luck with your own planetary exploration if you are currently playing or have been inspired to have a go.
Usual Disclaimers
=================
This article is purely for entertainment. My opinions are my own and do not constitute any sort of financial, medical or legal advice. I post about things that affect me while I'm learning. As mentioned in this article there can be external factors which means your experience could be very different to mine.
