Hello community! This is a rare moment indeed! Yes, I am posting 🤣 in the middle of the month (and night) - many know I don't post that often, not because I don't find it interesting but because my time has been greatly reduced since 2023, and that's life, and I am ok with it.

This will be (hopefully) a success story about the RinsingStar game I play for more than 3 years (along many other players).

So, without further blablabla 🤣 I invite you all, gamers, content creators, musicians, traders, moms, fathers, kids, cookers, coders, gurus of whatever you want to be, etc... to consume this (long) post as you see fit (to your liking). No rush! Bookmark it if you will... 🙃

It's quite big because I had to go through the needy greedy part that motivated me in first place to play games on #HIVE. 😏 and you might want to know why 😀⁉️ - maybe you felt the same?

Back in the days, while still on the other side, when Hive account@splinterlands (back then called Hive account@steemmonsters) was gaining traction, two games really changed my perspective of how I was seeing this new "yet small" but interestingly unique experience of game developing on chain.

Previously, I have been involved heavily on testing games on EOS (more than 10 games as far as I recall) and WAX (maybe 3 by then) blockchains and it was a bit disappointing (and damaging) to see soooo many fake stuff hurting the technology evolution. If you where too there by then (4-6 years ago), you can potentially identify with what I am saying here too.

(one of my EOS/WAX accounts)

I know that by then, protecting users was totally not a thing and it was more important to foment greed than actually explore the potential of the technology for long term future success (this was NOT part of the mentality of block producers, but instead app exploiters).

But, as I was trying to say, the two ones mentioned were when dCity and DrugWars came into play, and I clearly saw something different happening. And part of that success for one of these games was very clear... follow the community and evolved by the community.

DrugWars decided to stay behind and if it would have not, it would have been potentially a very successful game (like we are seeing Hive account@terracore and Hive account@golem.overlord being, for example). If you are dreaming, I would say it could still be a reality, but in my view the momentum was already lost and in the process, trust damaged, which would have been an important sustainability factor given the right development choices. This was a good example of how the community choices matter.

Although, don't be blind, following the community is not everything! One needs to disrupt using the technology available, teach and/or even cause further change that incentivizes the development of new improvements. Even if they are just MVPs (minimum viable products, for the ones not familiarized) at the beginning.

(back in the days, when my dCity was HUGE for me)

And that was what I saw with dCity. It was clear that the people behind the game (Hive account@gerber and others, you know how much I value what you do) knew a great deal about the technology and how to incorporate the game directly with the community (while teaching whom wanted to learn). Making part of its development (later on) something the community and especially its players, could influence and/or participate on.

The work behind that game, showing off how to make use of #NFTs attributes (properties), with the constructive (minting) and destructive (burning) process, was a game changer for others to open up their eyes to new opportunities (almost 4 years ago).

And for the ones that are not so familiar with those terms, this is basically the evolution of what you knew before as "NFTv1", being just a simple photo/picture, compared with a new state of technology, that by then I called the NFTv2 or "programmable" NFTs, where you could add attributes into, that later on could be used as input mechanisms for whatever you wanted.

All "cryptographically" built into an NFT, and visible to anyone looking at the blockchain. Just genius!

At that particular stage, even if by then I didn't yet understood what I know today, I really felt a start of something new. And that, was what got me hooked into HIVE games! - crap, now you know 🤣

At this stage, the #play2earn was booked to be a huge success, even if most people didn't even realize the tokenomics behind it. This was not so easy to sustain after the initial FOMO, and many (like me) were always concerned because we knew about the idiotic rabbit hole of game scams on blockchains, where mostly every game was an uncontrolled ponzi scheme that once not attractive, it would die (and a new version of it created again).

Lots changed since those ages, but please still be cautious and always DYOR (Do Your Own Research), as true blockchain technology is an open ecosystem (private ones, don't even bother unless you really know what you are doing, and can afford to loose everything).

RisingStar 🤩 was announced, days after the chain forked 😱, HIVE was 😍 born, lot's of questions 🤔 by many (including myself), and the community by then still stabilizing, although just a month in, the obvious announcement came... "Rising Star Now Moving To Hive".

I don't have a clue of how crazy these times must have been for Hive account@atomcollector. But I can guess he has not forgotten them. 😎 - thank you for surviving this long mate!

Sometime between 9 April 2020 and when I made this comment, it was when I started playing this 🎶 game. At the time, the sensation of what this would yet become was completely unknown to me, but it was a new gaming mode of playing something completely for #free that I could use to bring more people to #HIVE - and I was pumped! 😛

🤦‍♂️ and I was hooked again! 😄 - but this time, I had already some "games" experience and it was when I started seeing what HIVE was becoming, and I wanted to help. Somewhere in May, Hive account@forkyishere was born, the "dark" 😈 (more like the naughty part of me 🤣), and this became A new beginning of my dedication towards games on Hive and an opportunity for using them to spread awareness and knowledge about this impeccable blockchain.

I am not a musician and I can barely play a keyboard based instrument, maybe "happy birthday" and one or two simple things I have learned once I was young. Although, music in general is an enjoyable entertainment experience for me, and to support something that at the time could evolve in any direction and was about music, made me feel quite motivated.

As you can, for example, tell by some memories I have somewhere in an older post... from sometime already in July 2020 (on the left picture).

Level 70 with only 1000 fans! LOL

At the time the game was very playable but there were still some bugs that now and then needed fixing and due to all the forking instability also clashed with other decentralization challenges.

But with time, it was getting stable enough for the "masses" that later on came in. And I can't recall exactly when, but around the same time I created Forky, I recall it was when I decided to push a bit harder on my participation within the game. Around this time, when I saw more cards were coming into play that could change the game attributes.

(from the post mentioned above)

Then, more or less after a month, things started to escalate... and there was already multiple people on the chain trying to develop tools and little things that later on helped get the word around. But at the same time, brought some other challenges as we will see later...

(from 17th August 2020 post)

The quickly rising of minutes showed some problematic issues for the balance of the game, and it was not latter then a month after when RisingStar introduced the so called EGO! Among with other details in the announcement of moving from alpha to beta.

With it, things got much better, but not yet out of the crazy zone. It was only after the announcement of the daily HIVE rewards initial drops just before the "Digital" Hive Fest 5 that competition pulled some good damn deserved balance (at least for a good 6 months after Christmas).

Along the way, by the end of the year, one of those tools I was mentioning that helped the ecosystem, beforehand, was for example NFTMart - brought 💪 by Hive account@rishi556 and Hive account@cadawg

I have made good use of that market interface and attempted to show-off some performance benchmarks... even if this is just a tiny thing of how useful it is... for #HIVE gamers! - lots of games supported by this interface right now.

These times marked (in my view) a new stage of the game, and even if until the end of the year most people were busy with their personal lives, I could already see lots of movement from the HiveFest exposure where lots of new users started to notice the game.

It looked so perfect, the rise of HIVE prices only came around February 2021, but until then it was all over the place, SUCCESS, DEDICATION and true Decentralization 😍 Power!

The closure of 2020 was a real social experiment victory and a date to be remembered in history, even if for many years the world does not yet see it that way. 🤟 Hive account@stickupboys

In general 2021 (when I started my Hive-Engine witness node, links at the end of the post) was a very good year with lots of new features added:

• Instrument, Drum and Production Crafting
• Several Rewards Pool Increases
• Adjustments to Printing Limits of several cards (re-balancing)
• More crypto options to buy packs!
• Many Limited Edition cards...
• Introduction of STARPRO
• Music NFTs
• STARPRO only NFTs
• Plenty of Giveaways and Seasonal Editions
• 1000 regular players milestone in mid 2021
• NFTs Blending
• RisingStar merch! (with help of HiveList, and where I bought my red hat)
  
• Participation on HiveFest 6 - where I was virtually present!
  

And many more I am probably missing out...

There's one specific feature launched around mid July of 2021 that I didn't include above (on purpose). Yes, this was the Festival missions!

And by then I didn't even realize the adventure I was about to enter. But I have started doing the missions and getting ONE per country (sometimes more than one, but very rarely).

Meanwhile STARPRO was super cheap (2 to 3 HIVE/STARPRO) and even me seeing some vision of what it would become, I didn't really got greedy by then. I bought a bit, but not enough... for what I was about to find out how much I would need.

(this is a time interval query on my history HE node)

Then, the price of STARPRO kept increasing in 2022 (up to ~10 HIVE/STARPRO) due to the only two methods of obtaining it (and multiple ways of spending it):

1. Buy from the market https://hive-engine.com/trade/STARPRO
2. Use the Music Promoter feature to get STARPRO by burning STARBITS

On top of the fact that some cards could only be acquired using STARPRO.

I was quickly realizing that I was not able to follow up every game on HIVE and because the year in question (2022) was starting to signal me warnings of things that eventually happened in 2023, free/available time started degrading. And therefore I opted to reduce time on certain things, but still be around as much as I could.

So, I stopped watching trading stuff on regular basis as I used to, and decided to optimize by mostly put everything in POOLs. You might recall me being around 50% of the SWAP.HIVE:STARBITS pool for a good while, until more people joined (including Hive account@risingstargame). Thanks to Hive account@beeswap, everyone can now see more clearly who's contributing via https://beeswap.dcity.io/pools (👪):

Also in the Q1 2022, other things such as the Star Fan Club were added and created additional pressure, with another need for a little STARPRO as requirement to run the Promote Fan Club mission.

There was by then a LOT of indicators that STARPRO would face a lot of pressure, especially if these missions/cards would start showing some metrics. Which by the way, was the case after wee while.

It was then, that I decided to board into a new strategic 💖 adventure. And before another round of Festivals started, onboard onto a 3x missions per country (3 STARPRO per country).

This meant I was committing upfront towards 3x52 STARPRO (😱156😱) for 1 year without knowing where exactly STARPRO was going to end up. Gosh... my predictions were sooo BAD! 🤣🤦‍♂️ - and yes, if was smart I could have saved lots!

The end result was that I managed to get 3/4s of the way pretty much at less than 10 HIVE per STARPRO, but then, people made my life so hard, that the rest of the way through was like 😋 everyone was purchasing STARPRO like maniacs!

Either way, the time has arrived... and this is the last week! I can finally post about this, because I have already the required STARPRO to complete everything, and eventually also realized others might be doing exactly what I am doing. Speculation yes, but from what you see in the above STARPRO/HIVE graph, and also taking some stats from the "Music Promoter" lower competition, some people got to the point I got. Another round? 🤣 - you never know right?

Don't get fulled like I did in 2022. 😄 I will not fall again for the same mistake!

Either way... this was a fun competition, and I am happy it was hard. Otherwise it would not have been this fun, probably. Even if most people think its all about money, I will tell you, it is (because that's part of the incentive), but its also so much more than that! And if you don't get it, you are missing the point.

Do you see these beauties? That's right... I am going to blend 3x FTB5's and then from those further blend them into 3x FTB6's! 😈 - this line was made by Hive account@forkyishere 🤣

What do you need to go this path, you ask? First, you need to blend all the cards (1 for each country) from each Festival geographies into the respective FTB1, FTB2, FTB3 and FTB4 #NFTs (shown bellow). And then you will be able to convert 4x of those into a single FTB5 The Risers, card (also show bellow).

Then, you will need to have purchased VIP GUEST passes for the next transformation. And for each FTB5 you have, blend it with a VIP pass, into a FTB6 magnificent card!

I have estimated that the 3x FTB6 #NFTs I will have in addition to the one I have already, to cost approximately a maximum of 800 HIVE each. Since each has 25k FANS/SKILLS, that's 32 HIVE per 1k FANS/SKILLS + some luck and IM. Probably too expensive for the FANS and SKILLS alone, but a card that many would crave for! 😋

Note, that price of STARBITS and STARPRO is constantly changing, and these prices were what I think I spent (estimate). This can change... along with the game mechanics.

I don't know yet what I am going to do with my 75k FANS and SKILLS 🤑 but I have 3x FTB6's potential ones for sell. Any buyers? 😏

Limited Time Blends? Damn... I am late again! 🤦‍♂️ - that's a good sign 🤣

😉

Have fun! Thanks for 💪 reading up to this point... 🤗

(noting that I am deliberately tagging some people here that I deeply respect, I apologize in advance if I have to correct any content in the future that will "ping" you unnecessarily)

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My 🖐️ motivation!

Have fun, good luck on all the gaming, learning, and when/if you are up to it, teaching new things to newcomers, and showing them how interesting is this place.

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Hive account@forkyishere 😈 (Hive account@forykw dark side) is a character I created, which emerged from Crimsonclad imagination 🙏 while dwelling over the dark dungeons of Discord chat levels.

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