Just before the holiday weekend started, I got an alert in one of my social media channels that the team behind Alien Worlds were going to be making some changes to "The Landowner Experience".
As a long time landowner in the Alien Worlds game, I was a bit nervous to see this announcement. As I continued to read further and hear feedback from some of my fellow AW players, I soon started to realize this may have been one of the stupidest moves ever by the team.
Like I said, I've been a landowner for some time. I have been getting a steady drop of TLM to my account every day or so simply for being a landowner. I think on some level we all knew this couldn't last forever, but I don't think any of us realized they would go the route they did to change things up.
Basically, the way I understand it, you now have to "upgrade" and "boost" your land if you want to continue to get the landowner rewards. While this might not be a big deal for someone like me who only owns three lands. I know quite a few people who own a ton of land. In fact, I have daily contact with the largest land owner in the Alien Worlds game. For players like them, this is a really bad thing.
Again, the way I understand it, the land will now work similar to the land in Dark Country. You will earn reputation for boosting your land. That reputation deprecates each day/hour/minute until you boost your land again. The good news is, this could be a great way to reduce the amount of TLM out there. The bad news like I said is this can be a big problem for large landowners.
These large landowers are basically the ones who funded the companies ability to build the game. Of course, those owners aren't obligated to upgrade their lands, but it takes away some of the incentive to just hold land.
I haven't heard a single person that thinks this is a good idea.
I think what bugs me the most about all of this is the team behind Alien Worlds finally launched the planetary DAO's that they have been talking about for so long.
In addition to that, the team has been notorious for their weekly surveys they put out asking basically the same questions over and over again. The fact that they would unilaterally implement this change without a survey or allowing the planetary DAO's to have a say is kind of annoying.
Either they want us to have control or they want to be in control. If they try to have it both ways, they are going to "alienate" their user base.
I've already been on the fence about the game. At the height of the last bull market, my lands were worth something like $10,000 USD a piece. I have since seen them drop 10x or more in this bear market. There is lots of speculation now that they could drop another 10x with this change to landowner rewards.
I had already been considering liquidating a lot of my holdings when the next bull market comes. Even if it is at a significant loss. I just haven't been happy with the slow pace of development. In addition to that, I feel the team kind of copped out by saying they were no longer going to develop the portions of the game they had promised and they were going to leave that to the planetary DAO's to develop previously promised aspects of the game like "Thunderdome".
At this point, I'm feeling like I should have got out when I could at the height of the last bull market. Even without these changes, I am not sure AW would have made it back to those heights. The NFT markets have cooled across the board and people are looking for "use case" items now, not just something that lets you mine a token.
I have already more than recovered what I invested into AW, but my hope was to at least pull out a decent amount more. I'm not sure that is going to be a possibility anymore.
I've been thinking about maybe holding and upgrading one of my lands, but I am still not sure if I want to invest the time and TLM into it at this point.
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