R-Planet was one of the first in its class: a blockchain game that allowed the staking of many other projects’ NFTs to earn a tradeable token. At its peak, there were whales clearing inordinate amounts of $AETHER on a daily basis and — at least in principle — making a small fortune in the process.
Then, the R-Planet spaceship flew into a rough asteroid belt. Whales began taking profits, and given just how rich in Aether these people were, it was a cause for concern. As one player mentioned to me, “[the whale] had so much Aether he could have flooded the book every day.”
This was then compounded by some changes the R-Planet developers implemented, resulting in ways to make gargantuan hauls of the token through crafting and rigs, which snowballed and caused hyperinflation, crashing the game’s economy.
It was a real shame, R-Planet was something of a treasure in the WAX gaming space. Its economy was innovative and the concept of putting your idle NFTs to work for passive income is likely to hang around. But, can R-Planet recover from this hit?
Is This ‘Big Update’ R-Planet’s Last Chance Saloon?
I want to start with some praise. I have written several times about rug pulls — and R-Planet has shown zero evidence it is one or ever will be — but also, my regular readers will know I coined “rug slip” and tried to jam it into the crypto vernacular. For a full breakdown via the story of Crypto Mines, click here, but the overview is this: it’s a game that collapses but through developer error, not malicious intent.
When R-Planet’s economy experienced hyperinflation, it wouldn’t have been unthinkable for the developers, WECAN, to pull support for the project and focus on their two other titles, Prospectors and Tribal Books. But they didn’t. Whether they succeed in this economic resurrection or not, I appreciate the accountability and resilience shown.
Whether they can recover with this major game update is hard to say, particularly as someone who hasn’t dumped a whole lot of hours into R-Planet. The footnotes of what is to come are that they are adding a staking hub, the R-Planet DAO, its DAO token $RDAO, RDAO auctions, and metafarming. Unpacking the dynamics and mechanics of all of these is way too long and in places, I’m not certain I even fully understand, so read their comprehensive explanation.
There are a lot of positives in this update and I suspect it has taken a glut of hours to build. Nevertheless, the post does outline a few elements that its players will probably react poorly to. First and foremost is the heavy reduction in mining yield, which the developers said they’d never do.
In fairness, they are well aware they’ll come under fire for this, but state “it’s a necessary change that must be made to ensure the sustainability of the tokenomics moving forward into the next phase of the game.” If that turns out to be the case, or can even go a ways to reversing the collapse of the economy, then I suspect all will be forgiven.
The second (probable) bone of contention is the Claim Limit on mined Aether which will bottleneck how much you can withdraw to your account, regardless of how much you mined (i.e, it’s not a percentage cap.) This has the potential to smooth out the economy, perhaps, and would stop people immediately drawing down large hauls to swap for WAX, if that is something that commonly occurs. Regardless, I can’t imagine it will be well received that there is a new limit on how much you can withdraw of the Aether you mined.
Final Thoughts
I would like to see R-Planet return to its former glory. There were mistakes made that led to the nosedive of its token, but they don’t seem to have been as a result of greed or malicious intent. The developers have poured a lot of effort into this update and it would be a strong positive for R-Planet, WECAN, the players, and the WAX ecosystem if it puts the game back on the right path.
There is one other piece to the R-Planet puzzle that didn’t really fit anywhere else: R-Planet Conquest. It’s a new game that will be a part of the R-Planet metaverse, but as there is no in-game footage, I’m not going to make any comments about it, just acknowledge that there is another arm of the project that could become relevant to R-Planet’s revival.
What do you think? Let us know in our Discord or on Twitter.
