Rising Star: The Whale Impact

By now most of the Rising Star community has heard the name wagginston the whale, the account that singlehandly doubled the value of STARBITS and propped it up for several days. But to what end? How can a game respond to this type of price action?

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The Game

STARBITS are a token used in the Rising Star game, players can complete time based missions to earn these. Players can then opt to withdraw STARBITS to the HIVE Engine L2, or use them in game for record staking or music promotion. Alright, but why would someone throw 30,000+ HIVE at it? There was no announcement that would prompt that type of outlay of resources on what, on the surface, appears to be a niche token for a game.

The Music Promoter section of Rising Star has users bid STARBITS to promote missions and earn shares of the missions completed daily. At the end of the day, 100 STARPRO tokens are issued to the players, based on their percentage of the total shares earned.

Sounds cool, but what is STARPRO used for? Largely exclusive cards and NFTs - some help with completing missions, but the entirety of the Festival Tour cards require it. Each week, a new mission for the Festival Tour is added - with a new location and NFT. In order to play this mission, a player must use 1 STARPRO. With blends of the Festival Tour NFTs, the ideal scenario to have a full collection of all cards, would require 3 per each tour mission, for a total of 156 STARPRO over the course of the 52 week cycle. We're at week 30, which makes the disruption more painful for players who've already invested the effort to collect the previous cards.

Surely it's not impossible to obtain the cards, right? No, it's likely not impossible, but it'll be far more difficult than it previously was. It also presents an interesting problem for the devs to defuse.

Game Economies - An Aside

Traditional game economies are largely inflationary - killing an ogre in an RPG will generally drop the same amount of gold each time (perhaps variation due to RNG, but largely never due "the kingdom's supply of gold" being reached). While it begs the question, where does it all go, it's a mechanic used to give players choice - I don't need to worry about spending this gold on this sword, because I know I can go get more. Likewise, except for some games such as Fallout and Elder Scrolls, most merchants oblige this - for example a baker will happily buy whatever dead animal skins, broken weapons, and vials of unknown liquids regardless of how much gold their in game bakery actually has - it's all in the service of allowing the player to be able to buy bread from the bakery.

When this gets changed to reflect a fixed amount of tokens in the world, the scenario where a bakery can't buy back anymore items and the ogres don't drop any gold because someone is hoarding, becomes a concern. Adding in external forces, a player/or other entity acquiring a large amount of the in game currency outside of the game loop, you get a divergence from the normal gameplay to one based on economic optimization.

The Impact

As of time of writing, wagginston the whale appears to have at least 16% of STARPRO and at least 8.5% of STARBITS based on the circulating supply. Why are those numbers qualified with "at least"? If an account moves STARBITS for use in game, including with the Music Promoter mode, those are transferred out of the player's HIVE account, and into the Rising Star game accounts. With those tokens effectively being "virtualized" (no longer under on chain custody, but allocated by the game's database), it's hard to determine the total amount controlled - only the game's operators can do that.

With this, the Music Promoter mode is effectively inaccessible for the majority of players, which has the further impact on locking out the Festival Tour due to lack of STARPRO acquisition. What largely has been described as a "free to play" blockchain experience no longer is, and presents problems for the continued development of the game.

The Endgame

If the end goal was to corner the STARPRO market, based on the generation of over 90% of the new supply the past few days, wagginston achieved it. While it's too early to tell the exact impact this has on the Festival Tour mode, the number of new Festival Cards will likely be much lower than the older cards. Any other modes or uses for STARPRO will likely be out of reach for the average player. Originally, the game was designed for a relatively symbiotic experience between STARBITS and STARPRO - a player could create an effectively self sustaining machine through careful and calculated play. That might still hold true for the larger/older players, but not the average.

The developers are placed in an unenviable position - do they adjust the system, allowing for better average player accessibility, but facing the risk of whale wrath? Or do they stick to the current implementation, effectively putting two areas of the game (and potentially more, depending on their roadmap), not in the category of "play and earn", not even in the category of "pay to win", but into "pay to play".