This isn't going to be a fun post. This isn't going to be a nice post. Alien Worlds is on my shit list and now it's my personal mission to show the world (well you all at least) the truth. Everything I write is my personal opinion which is based on my years of playing Alien Worlds and watching the community and their Discord.

This article is LONG and if you don't want all the backstory feel free to jump down to the last Heading "So what about the economy then?" to get the meat and potatoes of this post ;)

Do you all remember R-Planet? Yay, you remember when that got released and it was crazy? You could stake all your crappy NFT's that never had any value and they would give you value in this new game? That was fun for what like 2 months until they exploded in popularity and got greedy and started to release paid miners and crap to boost your scores and it went downhill faster then a missile being fired directly at the ground.\

I give that reminder so that I can bring it back to Alien Worlds. I LOVED playing Alien Worlds. I will never knock the game when it was first released. I have written plenty of articles about how I made serious WAX from playing Alien Worlds. Those were good days. Then slowly and slowly Alien Worlds started to show their true colors. I believe it was pure greed that caused Alien Worlds to go downhill.

I think it is only fair if I give some backstory to my and Alien Worlds. The first article I wrote about Alien Worlds was on January 18th, 2021: here.

Any of you who still play Alien Worlds... Do you remember playing when it looked like this?

Yeah that was my account within the first week of playing back in January 2021. Oh man how I miss those times. I have written over 20 articles about Alien Worlds and honestly most of them have been positive until now.

I used to play with my main account pzyas.wam. I made a killing. Then the flagging and banning started. This is where my sore spot started to grow and what we are going to get into here shortly.

I will never say Alien Worlds was always bad, always a cash grab, always idiotic. But I will say they are those things now.

The Banning

Alien Worlds from time to time checks the accounts using its service/game to make sure they are real people and not bots, or people using illegal software or people gaming the system that breaks their Terms of Use. I have zero problem with this and actually I am glad they do it. But I do have major major major issues with how they do it.

From what I have been able to gather, they have outsourced this responsibility to a company called "Yeoman". Their website is https://yeomen.ai

You can see that there are in essence a consultant company brought in to do a managed service type things for the company. In this instance they are paid by Alien Worlds to "Mitigate bots with AI"

And I know everyone loves AI right now but after being flagged multiple times on multiple accounts (yeah I will get to that later trust me) and seeing so many other players get flagged I think their "AI" is not trained properly.

Here is my problem with that though. I am willing to bet that there is zero "Artificial Intelligence" being used by Yeomen. Machine Learning Models are not AI. Automation is not AI. Chatbots are not AI.

Does Yeomen have servers that run a instance that is self-aware or has general intelligence? No, then it's not AI. But back to my real point.

My fear here is that the Alien Worlds team has created a Rule Based system that then the Yeomen teams uses in a Machine Learning environment to regularly scan accounts and flag any account that falls into that category.

I know this to be partially true at least because I was flagged twice before and at least back then when you got flagged you had to create a ticket on the Yeomen site and a support person would actually give updates. You would know when it was looked at. You would know why you got flagged. You could even talk to the support person and give reasons or explanations as to why.

I got flagged at 2 separate occasions because my account looked suspicious for how many hours in a row it was mining for. I explained each time to the support individual that I work in IT and I work from home. So I am ask my desk usually for 8-10 hours a day straight. And then each time I got flagged it was because we were moving servers overnight and so I was playing Alien Worlds on that day from about 8am until 4am the next day.

What I explained to the support person was that also after I stopped playing at like 4am, I didn't start mining again until about noon the next day because you know.. I had to sleep. But it didn't matter as it was automatically flagged.

This has led a lot of people in the community to theorize that Alien Worlds just mass flags people to see who complains and appeals and that those who appeal must not be bots. But I think this is also stupid and not giving the team enough credit.

Nobody wants bots and auto miners in their web3 games (well I guess besides the cheaters lol). And the Alien Worlds team implemented a system to try to stop auto miners and bots (a crappy one but at least there is something).

Appealing your Flag/Ban

Since the Yeomen website for Alien Worlds is down since at least the last 4 days the only way you can appeal your flagging is to use the appeal command in their Discord server.

That is the pinned message in the #Support channel. So basically just use the command to submit an appeal. That sounds simple enough and the main active mod in support is XanderC and he seems to think that its so simple and easy and there are no problems with it. I am not trying to attack XanderC at all, he is just a mod that is doing a mod's job. However since he is the most vocal in the support channel, what he says is what I kind of have to go off of.

In the pinned message (that is still up there at the time of this writing) it clearly states that after 2 days you are able to request a "checkup" to your appeal. But when people ask about that XanderC shuts it down.

You can see that when someone asks for a checkup he tells them that just keep trying to mine and if after 2 days you can't mine still then you are banned for life.

Excuse me what did you just say?

There is zero communication to people who were flagged? There is zero ways to check on the status of your support issue? The pinned message clearly states there is a 'checkup' and you are directly disagreeing with that statement? What and who do we believe?

Here is a little spoiling from something I will talk about later in this article. Noodle Farm is my second account. When that account got flagged I knew my main discord account was already previously synced to pzyas.wam so I couldn't use that discord account. So I created an entirely new Discord account to submit an appeal and discuss this issue on Discord. Here is my exchange after waiting the 2 days of my appeal.

Without trying to restate everything there.. this 1 mod on the official Alien Worlds discord is stating that the reason I got flagged will not be revealed to me "due to security".

I am not asking for the specific data points that Yeomen uses with it's "AI" to flag accounts. I am asking for the reason why I was flagged. Did I get flagged because I am suspected of using a auto-mining bot? Was I flagged because they think I am using multi accounts to mine with? Like just tell me the reason I was flagged at least.

But nope, they won't tell you that apparently. I even asked in Telegram and they seemed a little nicer that but still not much luck for an update on my appeal.

From what I can gather, you can play Alien Worlds just fine until your account gets flagged and at which point you are at the mercy of the Yeomen gods and there AI to either reverse your flagging and suffer the fate of being screwed out of all your stuff that is staked.

The "Terms of Use"

Here is where the rubber meets the road. It has been floated as a catchall to people complaining about being banned that the mods through at you.

Now I will give XanderC the benefit of the doubt here because he is responding to everyone complaining about being flagged and he has zero insight or idea to who is cheating and who is a real player and who broke what rules. But it often feels like a cop-out and a cheap response but I am not sure I could do much better in that instance. The actual Alien Worlds team needs to step in though and give some sort of update.

However let's check this Terms of Use shall we and see what it says under Section 3.4 Permitted Use.

In regards to Multiple Accounts:

That is all they say. So it is 100% okay and legal to have multiple accounts on WAX that each log into Alien Worlds. BUT you can only have 1 account that is mining for TLM. That seems extremely fair to me.

What does its say about "bots" or auto mining or using software to enhance your gameplay and give you an unfair advantage? This is all I could find in their Terms of Use under Section 3.4 Permitted Use.

That is very short and leaves a lot to be interrupted but okay, they phrased it that way to be in their benefit so that if they flag someone it has a broad range. In my case though I am not using any software or "bots" in relation to my account so I don't care.

So why did I get Banned?

There was nothing in the Terms of Use that I could find that would have gotten my account flagged. Zero. And to be quite honest I was mining on Alien Worlds on 1 land for the last I don't know how many weeks without issue on this account. I was making maybe 1 WAX per day from mining but it was fine because I was already at my computer and having 1/4 of my second monitor with the AW screen up was fine and I also had a chance to win NFT's from the land I was mining at so it was worth it.

But about a week or so ago I got back into Mission Control. This is a community run website where you can use it to mine in Alien Worlds with some of their clever things. You can find what land is best to mine on, you can use it to figure out best tools to use and all other cool stuff. (also based on the Terms of Use I am pretty sure this violates a few areas but its an officially supported community project so I think the AW looks the other way)

Mission Control has a "Tool Loaning" feature where if you are a little fish like me you can in essence borrow tools to mine with. You pay a TLM fee of say like 2 TLM to use a Legendary tool and you mine 6 TLM with it. So yeah you paid the 2 TLM upfront but you made 4 TLM with it. It's a game changer for the little guys. (This is where the conspiracy theory starts).

I started to use this constantly because why not. I can use super good tools and not have to pay the thousands of WAX for them? Sign me up baby!

I started using the Tool Loaning on January 3rd to be exact. I was tracking every mine I did with it and tracking how effective it was.

This is where I think things started to go downhill for me.

I was a small fish and so I had about idk like 10 TLM liquid in my account. But I needed more liquid TLM in my account to keep using the good tools. So what was I supposed to do? I sent over some WAX to my account from my main account (that was previously banned and never unbanned). I swapped that WAX for TLM and staked it into Mission Control. NOTE: staking it in Mission Control and NOT Alien Worlds.

I then went on a crazy rampage of mining during normal business hours and amassing a decent chunk of TLM. All in all I staked 200 TLM into Mission Control in those 6 days from January 3rd to January 9th.

On January 10th, the day after I was flagged I panicked thinking all my TLM was now stuck. Since it was with Mission Control though I was able to withdraw all the TLM that was still staked to Mission Control and so I got back 164 WAX.

What sucks though is all the rewards I earned from mining were in the 72 hr payout cooldown from Alien Worlds. I still have 191 TLM stuck in Alien Worlds that I can't withdraw because again my account is flagged.

So all in I had 164 + 191 = 355. That is 155 of pure profit from using the Tool Loaning for 6 days. But since 191 is stuck I am really negative 36 TLM from this experience from the initial 200 TLM I originally invested.

I can tell you that I am not flagged or blocked from Mission Control and that is a very clear distinction that I need to make because in a previous account I have been blocked from them and that sucks. Also truthfully you have to pay 50 TLM to join Mission Control so really I am negative 86 TLM from this experience.

There must be something else right?

I thought maybe it was because I send my Alien World NFT's to my alt account, that has to be it right? Nope

Even though people on discord like to say you can't send Alien World NFT's to other accounts, that is A) just stupid and B) not against any rules.

Based on the Terms of Use you can 100% get your account banned, then send your tools to a new account and start mining with those tools. There is nothing against the rules with that. Now if I had 1 account that had great tools and I sent them to 2 alt accounts and mined with both alt accounts then that would be illegal but since I have never mined with 2 accounts that doesn't apply.

Further more the 2 tools that I have been mining with on my alt account.. i bought off secondary with WAX. And what I love about the blockchain is that the proof is all there.

Here is the two tools to even give up own proof lol

https://waxblock.io/transaction/10651e2bbb917773f757ea18d42cc981aea034c7556806621b80db3941e31fed

https://waxblock.io/transaction/21ab96add0ede70b9abed84be2ec82970e7a63a75b6208462d590f70b928614a

So again I have an alt account.

I only mine with my 1 alt account.

I even bought my own tools that I was mining with on secondary.

So someone please tell me what I did wrong? You can't? Yeah that's what I thought.
Another interesting take is what "Saltant" posted on the Alien Worlds Discord in reply to someone posting about Multiple Accounts and how they all should be banned and not allowed to keep going.

So what about the economy then?

Now to bring it back full circle here is my outlook on the current Alien Worlds environment and it's economy.

At the time of writing the TLM Market Cap is over 66 Billion USD dollars... That looks like a cryptocurrency that is doing pretty good.

The 24 hour volume is also over 13 Billion USD dollars.

But the problem is not with the price because I have a theory to the reason this TLM is still as high as it is.

Let's talk about the top 1% - The Whales as some say.

These people have the tools that are worth thousands of WAX, they have the bags of TLM they are staking in game. They are also earning hundreds of TLM each day from mining with their crazy good tools. Shoot they might even be loaning out their tools on Mission Control to earn passive TLM as well. They probably also are the ones who hold the majority of liquidity for WAX/TLM as well.

They are not the problem. My hats off to them for investing early and HODL'ing and reaching to upper limits. Good you for you guys.

It's not even the 'middle class' so to speak. The people who have a few okay/decent tools and maybe earning 10-200 TLM per week mining. They are doing good. Good for you guys.

Like in every society, those are are screwed time and again and the lower class of players/people.

If I just read a article or saw a YouTube video about this game Alien Worlds, or someone I know is talking about how they are making $15 a week from selling their TLM and so I want to get in on the action. I load up Alien Worlds and get my stupid free shovel and start mining. I see that I only mine like 0.0001 TLM per mine every few minutes and so I head over to secondary market.

I may buy 2 or 3 tools for say 400 WAX so I can mine more TLM. Maybe I even hear about Mission Control and want to join but I need to pay the 50 TLM fee to join so I head to an exchange and buy 51 TLM for 13 WAX (that the going rate at time of writing).

Well its the 1% or even the middle class that has those sell orders. So they are making the profit.

None of this is wrong at this point though, this is how the economy should work (well maybe not as high of a difference from the 1% top to the 20% bottom but we can't change that now). What is wrong though is that the system and methods the Alien Worlds team has put into place to scan for bad actors is hurting the lower 20%.

Take me for example. I thought making 150 TLM in those 6 days was INSANE numbers and I was so excited. I was going to be rich y'all. But then I got flagged. And as I have stated before in this article there is no real method to address these flags/bans that the little guys gets burnt.

Example 1:
I try to mine today but it says I am flagged and head to a website to submit an appeal. But hold up, that website is down. What do you do?

If you saw this and it didn't work what would you do? Without getting into my biggest pet peeve in web3 you would look around the website and see a "support" button.

Which takes you here:

And you can poke around until you find a "Submit Issue" button which is a link to their Discord server. And to not explain myself again completely all you do there is use the "appeal" command to write to someone and explain why you should not be banned. Then you wait and wait and wait and you will NEVER hear back from anyone. All you can do is keep trying to mine on Alien Worlds until you are able to and the general consensus is that after 3 days you still can't mine then you most likely are never getting unbanned.

Example 2:
You are mining and and it blocks you and you can't get to the website it states so you wait assuming the website will come back online.

And you wait and you wait because looking at this and the CloudFare error you would think this is an easy fix and that the team just needs to fix their web server and it will come back online. But you are going to waiting until eternity.

Example 3:
You are a seasoned player and this isn't your first time being flagged but you also have been around the Discord server some and your name is known to a few and maybe even some mods. You have such a higher chance of your account getting unflagged. If your account was flagged because you mined too much in a certain time and it triggered a flag, then maybe the team is more likely to understand this was a false positive.

Maybe you are even in the upper or middle class and the support teams looks at your account and what you are bringing to the community as far as TLM 24hr volume or whatever and they unflag you.

In Example 2 you have a zero percent chance at playing again and getting any staked tools back and any unclaimed TLM back. They are just gone. You are out of all that WAX.

In Example 1 you could say there is a 50/50 chance at getting unflagged but I am willing to bet it's more of a 30/70 chance and 30% chance at getting unflagged.

In Example 3 I am willing to bet its a 100% chance to getting unflagged or honestly even if you don't you have so much TLM and tools liquid that it doesn't even matter because you are still out the door way richer then when you started.

I think the method they use to flag account is flawed so badly. I think they truly have very loose guidelines on their so called AI to scan for accounts that its swoops up so many legal players. The best analogy I can use is massive fishing vessels that use drop net fishing and then bring up all other fish and sea creatures in their nets that they didn't want and die along the way. They just say oh well and toss their dead bodies into the ocean. To them the amount of fish they caught outweigh the harm they did to the innocent creatures. The bots and illegal players are the fish that they caught, the dead by catch are all of us who get caught up in their terrible system.

Here is a comment a troll (or maybe just a completely uninformed person on the discord server) sent during my conversation with them.

... I get it guys. That sucks. BUT what so many people are not understanding is the environment they are in.

1. According to the Terms of Use, it is 100% okay and legal to have multiple accounts just so long as you don't mine with more than 1 account.

2. The drop net fishing system in place catches so many legal users but upper management is okay with that loss on their books because business carries on as usual.

And I agree if someone breaking the Terms of Use gets caught and then just spins up a alt account and transfers all their stuff they have left over and start mining again illegally, that is annoying. But that is the cost of business. You can't have a perfect world. If you try to have a perfect world you are going to make it worse then leaving it as an okay world.

The system in place bans so many legal players that there are only 2 logical reasons that it is still going on.

1. The Alien Worlds team knows this and is okay with it

2. The Alien Worlds team has no idea how many innocent people are affected.

Both of those reasons are scary because its negligence by the people running this company and game.

To end this rant of a post off.

The Alien Worlds team is not doing right by its customers and in turn if negatively affecting its game and economy. I strongly believe the only reason TLM and the secondary market of its NFT's are still doing as well as they are is because of the 3rd party community projects surrounding its IP. If the Alien Worlds team is not careful this very delicately balances ecosystem they have going is going to sway to far to one side and come crashing down faster then lightning.