The focus of this article is acquiring buying power in Splinterlands, but I will start by talking about another game. For two and a half years I've been playing League of Kingdoms. LOK is a game where you can build a kingdom and gather and harvest resources which you can potentially sell in a public market. It was my lockdown game. I played LOK while listening to endless podcasts on all kinds of topics. LOK has a massive bot problem, and bots are forbidden in the game. There doesn't appear to be much ability or will to tackle the bots. Bots are gathering most of the resources and selling them at rock-bottom prices. Still, I can amass resources (stone, lumber, corn, gold) and mint them into NFTs and sell them in polygon markets. They sell for Matic. A few months a go, in the 'bubble' 10,000,000 resources sold for one Matic. Now the going rate is 0.3 Matic.
I use the Matic to buy credits in Splinterlands. The process is kind of convoluted. The Matic are stored in a Metamask wallet. I have a Nexo account. I send Matic from Metamask to Nexo on the Polygon Network. Nexo has two wallets. The Matic go into my savings wallet. I move them from the savings wallet into my credit-line wallet. Then I swap the Matic for USDT. Then I swap the USDT for Tron. Which I use to buy credits in Splinterlands.
I know the industry is in its infancy. But it's all too complicated, isn't it? I don't imagine blockchain games gaining wide adoption while there are so many tokens, so many networks, so many bridges, so many hoops to jump through, so many opportunities to make a mistake and potentially lose everything. What do you think?
If anyone knows a way to switch assets from Ethereum Main network to the Polygon Network without incurring insane ETH gas fees, please leave a comment. I'm not holding my breath for Ethereum 2. I think I'll die of old age before that emerges from the woodwork. Even if it arrives, will it deliver on its promise?
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