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Prospectors.io | Review
Prospectors.io is a browser MMORTS game on the EOS Blockchain. Where players mine, craft, build, perform tasks and trade with each other with the goal of earning gold in the 19th-century gold rush era.
Everything in the world from the tools, carts, and buildings are crafting by the players themselves. Making this a player-driven economy game. The player has three workers they get to use right from the start. If you are free to play you can perform one hours’ worth of work at a time and paid players can do up to five. The end game goal of the player is to build their way up from gathering with their hands to renting land, building it up and hiring others to work for them with tools.
Early Game
The starting player is quite limited until they buy or craft tools and can take on higher-level jobs. While there are some lower-level ways to gain resource a lot of time will be spent just traveling around and not making a whole lot.
There are a number of resources that can be gathered by hand on unclaimed land. They yield such small amounts compounded with inventory weight limitations you don’t get much. Often times you can find a land renter who is buying say wood and an unrented land with a forest to farm very close to each other. It can be however better to spend the extra time to craft the wood into a wooden beam by hand and sell that instead.
There are also low skilled labor transportation jobs for those who can’t find work or simply lack the tools. These usually pay less than one hundred gold and can be a lot of traveling. For instance, I could pick up a job for transporting clay around. It pays per weight and travel distance while on the job but not traveling to it. It would have taken one of my workers an hour and a half to get there and another ninety minutes to transport for 36 gold after taxes. At the time of writing this, a Certificate cost almost 49k gold to put into perspective how little that amount is.
Another thing a player could do is check unclaimed land and see if there any items left in the storage on that plot. Storage on unclaimed land is free for all and anyone can help themselves. Sometimes an l and renter goes inactive and does not keep up with costs. Other times a player was mass farming first before transporting and taking the risk of using unsecured storage. Other times someone might have just dumped the junk they had on them to free up weight capacity on a worker.
Sometimes a land renter will sell ten-hour tools for around one third the costs of hundred-hour ones. That comes down to cost and if a player can even profit from such a high markup. Sometimes the markets don’t really allow much if any profit for either party involved in such a trade. As such it usually falls on the early game player to just make their own start tools.
If you wanted to craft a single tool yourself say a Pickax that can be used with other tools for gold farming to stone cutting. You would need to go out and gather enough wood to craft two wood beams. Than farm ore, coal, and clay to make six steel blocks. Finally, you would need to craft a single nail from ore and coal. That can take you around a day and handcrafted tools only have ten hours of use.
Being a free player in the early stages of the game can be really slow these days. You don’t add a lot of value so you don’t get paid much for the work. On top of that, there can be a lot of accounts running around trying to work their way up. So while you can make some gold there is also a lot of competition willing to work for next to nothing.
Mid Game
At some point, you have either earned enough gold to buy tools or have crafted your own. This allows you to take higher-paying jobs if you can get one at jobs sites that land renter provide. This can also creations situations where you might lose value by not taking a high enough paying job.
Being only able to work only one hour vs five starts to become more of an issue for the free to play player. There is a lot of labor at the middle ground for this game and I often found it myself not able to get back to back jobs. You might spend two hours getting into a worksite to perform how many hours you can. Once that time is up you have to be around to click and try to perform that job start again before anyone else. More times than not there is a bunch of other people and you don’t end up getting it. This leaving the worker in that area idle for hours or even days trying to get another when you can.
Some jobs also require the use of two tools instead of one. To try and stay competitive and deal with supply and demand of labor you might find yourself holding a number of tools to swap out on each worker. This while also sitting in a cluster of large build-up areas to reduce travel time.
Gold mining which is usually one of the higher-paying jobs, for instance, requires a pickax and a gold pan (the pan can’t be crafted by hand). These tooled jobs pay per minute and right now this particular type is paying around five gold yielding per minute; yielding, 1,500 for five hours’ worth of work. You would also deal with five hours of tool decay and pay taxes on top of that.
If the player is not careful they might take a job and end up losing more from tool decay then they are being paid. There are a lot of unclaimed jobs where no one is really paying the costs the worker incurs. Sometimes they are done this way to allow friends or those who enter into agreements access to a site without the jobs getting taken by others. It could also be seen as an exploration of underprivileged workers. Living wages in this game be dammed!
Transporting jobs can also be leverage using a cart or a wagon. They have increased carrying capacity but only last so many hours for use. They can also cost a fair amount of gold just to get into this level of transporting.
There is also just the player using their tools and farming on unclaimed lands at a higher gather rate than by hand had. The player still, however, has to still transport the goods themselves to someone buying them. Non-land renters lack direct access to setting up their own shops to sell.
The gameplay at this level is quite boring if I’m being honest over the long run. You log in, you look for a job and wait, and you click a job as it expires for another player hoping to claim it. Then you log in later to repeat the process till your tools break. After that, you buy new tools and hope you turned a profit and can even afford to replace them. You are also doing this across all three workers who tend to have jobs ending at different times.
End Game Land Renter
Max risk, a prolonged amount of time of sinking money into operating for that hopefully day of turning a profit. That is what it’s all about in a gold rush. This is also where the game's economy can be seen in full force.
As you might have noticed this entire time I’ve said land renting not ownership. To keep the early players and inactive from hogging all the land it’s a monthly rental setup. Prices are based on how much labor is being paid over a certain amount of time. I’ve seen rent as high as 300k gold per month. Right now it’s sitting at around 150k. There are also player auctions and those can range for thousands to millions of gold depending on what it is.
In this game, not all land or resource nods are created equal. While the big money can afford the bigger nodes compared to other players when bidding on them. You also have the exact amount in that claim has a huge impact. The more that gets minded out of a node the less the next action will get following a mathematical model till it runs out.
This also means those with the biggest resources deposits can also afford to pay the most for workers. This could also put them into an economical advantage of increasing costs, offering tools for sale at a much cheaper price and driving out competition.
Unless a player pays the winning bid on an auction for land with the building already on it there is a lot of work to be done first. Perhaps you rented some land with gold deposited on it. You can’t even place a building onto that until after you cleared out anything like a frost. Without a building, you are limited to a single job at that site and with monthly rental costs that are not going cut it.
You will also need to buy up decent amounts of resource and pay for them to be transported to your land. After that, you then hire workers to build that building and it takes a considerable amount of time. A gold mine, for instance, can be leveled up to stage 3 with each one taking 250 hours. The first stage alone requires 2k stone and 200 clay bricks. That’s 190k gold worth of materials at the current market rate and then you have +transportation costs and labor. You also can’t expect to have six workers going 24/7 since the player who gets the contract for it might have to travel hours to performer just an hours’ worth of labor.
I’ve seen a number of plots with building and just the owner trying to do it all. Most of the time when I check back in they gave up at some point. Having enough capital to ensure you can afford this level of gameplay is quite important. Otherwise, you really are just tossing out anything you have earned in-game.
The really smart land renter will rent out an area that has a lot of similar nodes say gold despots for instance. They then will build up mines and produce the tools workers will need and sell to them. A player might need to spend five hours walking to that location. Once they are there they have no reason to leave if wages are worth staying and the tools are cheap enough to keep going. Which tends to be what lures them into the area in the first place.
I myself never got up to this stage of the game. Some have claimed to be pulling out $80 day or more worth. That was, however, months ago when I was playing. Those people are also assumed to have massive operations going.
Cashing In/Out And EOS
This game is on the EOS blockchain but it does not pay out directly into EOS. With the in-game gold, it then can be converted to a coin called PGL. There is a small amount of resource staking to broadcast transactions on the EOS blockchain itself as well.
There is a set in-game conversation rate of 1 PGL per 1k gold. That goes both ways either cashing in or out of the game.
As far as exchanges go I’ve been using EOSDAQ. I’ve not had any issues or silly requirements in the past when using them. There might be other places I’ve just never looked. As always I do not recommend keeping large amounts of coins on an exchange.
At the time of writing this around 54 PGL (54k gold) was worth 1 EOS which amounts to $3.70 according to coinmarketcap. This will change over time. The price itself outside of massive spikes is on a downward trend in the long run and is in the short term moving sideways.
The game was not very resource-intensive to play. I think I was more than fine with around .10 staked to CPU and Net with a small amount in ram as well. As far as an EOS wallet that goes beyond this post and is just harder than it should be. I can’t help you with that part if you don’t already have one—sorry.
Jail And Work Certificate
One of the things the game does at least try to do is combat certain behaviors that are rather ramped in the blockchain gaming worlds these days. They have a jail for more extreme cases. Along with having a onetime purchase for a Certificate that turns a free account into a paid one.
As a gamer who enjoys playing a game instead of botting or running a bunch of alt accounts to try and explore certain things. I rather like seeing an attempt was made. It’s impacts I’m not quite sure how successful or not they have been.
The game itself is a one account policy unless you get special permission from the game developer. I have seen very similarly named land renters and bigger investors that appear to have a number of accounts. They usually set up all in the same area with a bunch of rented land next to their other accounts.
In the jail itself there also seems to be quite a few low items never really got anywhere accounts. Perhaps they were botters or just someone trying to run a bunch of alts. It’s nice seeing at least an area was set up to put players workers in if they end up violating any of the game rules.
You use to be able to have each of your three workers perform five hours’ worth of labor. Not too long ago they also added in the requirement to buy Certificate to unlock five hours and reduced now what a free account can do down to one hour. The cost ended up being the ten-day average price for renting land. That seems a bit steep and quite hard to earn if you are only a free to play individual. At least as land rental costs decline it becomes cheaper to buy a Certificate. In the long run, this seems like a decent option for limiting anyone trying to just spam alt accounts on jobs.
Final Thoughts
I played this game for a little while and never felt like investing to get up to renting land. In total, I pulled out about 6 EOS that I converted into Steem a while back. I was and still am a free to play player but it was easier to earn that amount back than before they required a workers Certificate. Jobs also paid a lot more as well.
The game itself just did not have anything to hold me to keep playing at the level I was in the long turn. Perhaps if I had taken a higher risk and spend some EOS I could have enjoyed the game more with renting land. Either way, I did enjoy checking it out and seeing what the game was about for a while. It was interesting to say the least.
NOT RECOMMENDED
This game is NOT RECOMMENDED due to the high amount of CPU Staking required to play games on EOS. This is an unreasonable burden to be placed on the end-user and has been persistent for quite a few months now. If this game is on other blockchains it is recommended to look into them first. If they seem to have reasonable staking or transaction costs have fun playing.
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Information
Screenshots are taken and content was written by @Enjar about the game Prospectors.io.
