Alien Worlds is run by a bunch of children. Now look I have been playing Alien Worlds since January of 2021. I have thousands of dollars from playing this game and even wrote articles about it: How AW made me rich
I have written a bunch of articles about Alien Worlds but over the last 2 years the AW team has truly started to show their true colors. Now the one thing I will say in the defense of the Alien Worlds team is that I am not sure even they expected to blow up as fast as they did. From January to April in 2021 was an insane rise for the game. But that was 4 years ago and they still haven't fixed some core problems.
This article is 100% biased and I know that, so take what I say with a grain of salt. This article is 100% my perspective and my opinions and not personal attacks to anyone who actually works at AW. But here are some problems I have with AW and why I think the entire company/game is run by children!
1) My Biggest Pet Peeve!
This has been a pet peeve of mine for years but it still hold true. Any web3 company/project that has a URL where their customers utilize their product should use that same URL to inform their players of updates and new and changes to the project or game. If I am playing Alien Worlds at https://play.alienworlds.io/ then why on earth do I need to join their Discord Server or follow their Medium account to know what changes are coming to the game that will effect me?
You know it's not rocket science to create a new page like https://play.alienworlds.io/news where you list changes and updates that are coming. It truly is the most simplest thing and yet so many companies don't do it. So many Discord servers are just cesspools of internet idiots and I don't want to be pinged every day about crap I don't care about. I want to be able to just see headlines of changes or updates and to be able to click on them to see more details.
If you use Facebook or Google, or you play Fortnite or Call of Duty, do those companies only post their game/website updates to their Medium accounts or a Twitter account? No, because that would be incredibly stupid and ignorant of them. But for some reason it seems everyone in the web3 space has come to accept this as normal and okay. Its just plain stupid.
2) What's a Roadmap?
The AW team had a roadmap they never stuck to. This look familiar?
Yeah... You remember that thing called "Thunderdome"? Unless you were around in early 2021 then you probably don't. Thunderdome was going to be this big game inside AW where you battled each other and used your minions and weapons and such to battle. The screenshot above was taken in early 2021. You can read more about it in my 7-month AW Review.
I was so excited for Thunderdome. At the time I had so many NFT's that I collected (back then you could actually find NFT's when you were just normally mining). But after years it was just forgotten about. But I still remember AW... I still remember
3) They sold their souls to the devil.
If you know you know! But back in early/mid 2021 after the Alien Worlds game became the #1 web3 game and the price of TLM skyrocketed the Alien Worlds team got into bed with Binance. As someone from North America in 2021 Binance was like a 4 letter word we don't say. That is because due to regulations we couldn't utilize Binance. So with Alien Worlds getting into bed with them was 100% worthless to me.
You could run missions in Alien worlds and it would cost some Binance Smart Chain tokens so it was a non starter for me. The Alien Worlds team sole focus at this time seemed to be Binance Binance Binance. I have no idea what they got from that deal but it must have been A LOT
4) The decided NFT doesn't mean NFT
A non-fungible token it actually fungible after all. Do you all remember LUCK in Alien Worlds? Back in the day the image of a tool meant, that tool has the specific stats that were listed on the NFT's image of the tool. Today? well If you NFT says it has a Luck skill of 5, that doesn't mean anything anymore. Here is a copy and paste from my 7 month review article.
Luck:
-They really screwed up the luck on NFT's. The image of the NFT and the stats of the NFT can't change after they are minted. But Alien Worlds decided to change each NFT's luck on the backend and the formula is not the same anymore. It was simple before to figure out the luck of mining a NFT.
-If you have 3 tools each with a 0.5% Luck and the Land Luck of say 2.2 then your chance of mining a NFT would be: (0.5% + 0.5% + 0.5%) x 2.2 = (1.5%) x 2.2 = 3.3%
-Now if you wanted to know your chance of getting a NFT you would have to find Alien worlds Google Doc where they list each NFT's new luck factor and get then get then figure out your luck chance per hour as now they only reward out NFT's each hour to a select few people.
Yeah the Alien Worlds team decided that instead of changing the backend formula for calculating luck, it would be easier to just say "Hey that tool you bought on secondary market for 1,000 WAX because it had a high luck skill and you wanted to mine more NFT's? Well we are going to totally change that tool's luck # going forward". This is absolutely bonkers to me.
You can't mint out thousands of NFT's and then all of a sudden say to your community "hey all you guys who won or bought those blue colored "rare" NFT's, they are actually common now but the image of the NFT will still show it as blue/rare. WHAT? Excuse me?
5) You get a Ban, You get a Ban, EVERYONE GETS A BAN!
Now I get it. There are probably thousands of bots playing Alien Worlds. I don't doubt that. I don't have a problem with the Alien Worlds team trying to stop those bots or even trying to stop people from multi-accounting. I could not even begin to tell you how many times I have been banned from Alien Worlds.
Look I am a real person (not computer program here. I have NEVER multi-account'd. I do not cheat or game the system. If I had to guess I would say I have been banned maybe 20 times. But this last time was the last straw.
I work in IT and I work from home. So that means I am at my desk for hours and hours and hours and not just the normal 9-5 working schedule. I also occasionally have to pull all-nighters for work to fix various servers and systems. I have been flagged a few times by their anti bot whatever detection system. I would go and submit an appeal and they would tell me that it's because I was playing Alien Worlds for something like 20 hours the day before. I would explain to them what I just explained to you and they would unban me. I learned that I had to stop playing Alien Worlds by 6pm regardless of the day because I didn't want to get banned again and have to appeal.
I have gotten banned and then a day later I was magically able to mine again. With zero explanation as to why. I also got banned and appealed and they stated they would unban me but to follow the terms and service of the game. They wouldn't tell me what I did to get banned or anything. Just that I need to play by the rules...
There is a long running suspicion within the Alien Worlds community that the Alien Worlds team just randomly bans accounts to see what real life human appeals it and maybe if they appeal it then they know at least its a person behind the account (they still could be using bots or whatever but its a lazy method to weed out massive bot accounts).
This last ban was the last straw. To give 100% honest context to the context my main WAX account got banned from Alien Worlds with zero reason why and zero reason to why my appeal was denied oh IDK months ago. So I said F you and stopped playing. Well it took me a little while but eventually I wanted to start playing again and maybe earn from NFT's from artists for mining at specific lands. So I created a whole new WAX account and started playing. I was mining like 0.001 TLM per mine or something stupid but I didn't care about the TLM it was the NFT's I wanted. Now fast forward to about 2 weeks ago.
I just got back into playing with Mission Control where you can do so much more with your AW account. And I was making a decent amount of TLM from there. It was great. Then about 48 hours I tried to mine and it gave me the following error:
Well that website is down currently so you can't submit an appeal there like I used to in the past. The only way you can appeal this ban is to join their Discord and use the appeal command in their support channel.
I submitted my appeal and its been crickets since. The mods just say "well the only way to know if you got unbanned is to try to mine again and see if it lets you". I know they are just mods for the Discord BUT if this is the supported method to appeal bans then have some more concrete info. It's Discord for crying out loud. Use a bot that has a ticketing system and that way the people who appeal have a ticket where they can write all their proof in it and then a team Member can contact them and let me know why they were banned, if they are unbanned or if they are NOT going to be unbanned.
Right now I have no idea if my appeal has been looked at and they decided to not unban me. Or if they just haven't gotten to looking at my appeal yet.
This is ridiculous. And there are a lot of people who seemed to have gotten banned 2 days ago and yet there is zero official word from the Alien Worlds team (or maybe there is on their twitter or medium or whatever other stupid account I have to follow to stay up to date on this crap).
So yeah I am beyond fed up with Alien Worlds as a whole. I strongly believe the ONLY reason they are still around is because of the secondary community. There are a few community 'games' built on the Alien Worlds NFT's and its TLM.
Without them people would have no use for TLM anymore and no use for the crap NFT's that are worthless now that they printed like money in the early days. I am just honestly impressed that at how poorly they managed this game that it is still around.
And I know what you are thinking.. well TrocProcLock you are still playing Alien Worlds so its not all bad. No it is all bad and I was just putting up with their crap because I would sell off the tiny amount of TLM I got and would keep the NFT's I got from various community run programs.
But playing Alien Worlds isn't worth the abuse anymore (not like I can anyways).