CryptoBlades : NFT Role-playing Game

Blockchain based, play-to-earn non-fungible token (NFT) games have hogged the limelight ever since Axie Infinity changed the lives of thousands of jobless folks who cashed out from the game to pay the bills and support their families. That’s right, putting food on the table for average Joes affected by the pandemic.

I super, duper love the documentary and found it extremely inspirational.

In this post, I share my “Getting Started” kind of guide to the CryptoBlades crypto game. Some questions were asked and this post is the result.

I wasn’t that interested in NFT games initially but the potential role-playing game (RPG) nature of it prompted me to give it a try, since I’m a big MMORPG fan. (OK, not much of any role-playing at this point)

This blog post assumes you have basic crypto knowledge and can hit the ground running. I’ll also be using my sample account to illustrate how the game works via screenshots.

CryptoBlades information

The CryptoBlades game, in its current form, is incredibly simple and basic.

Simply form a team and fight randomly generated enemies to earn $SKILL tokens when you win. More information available at their official website.

• Name : CryptoBlades
• Website : https://www.cryptoblades.io
• Twitter : https://twitter.com/BladesCrypto
• Network : Binance Smart Chain (BSC)
• Token : $SKILL

Important disclaimer

Daily updates, often multiple ones in a single day, are rapidly changing the economy and tokenomics of CryptoBlades. This is intended to stabilize the economy and nudge it towards a more sustainable path.

As a result, plenty of information becomes out-dated fairly quickly.

CryptoBlades Discord has reached its current cap of 100,000 members, so you’ll have to check out Twitter and YouTubers for the latest updates.

The usual warning about crypto being high risk and to stay away if you’re not sure what you’re doing.

Creating a team the right way (est. cost US$110)

A single CryptoBlades account (unique BSC wallet address) can have up to 4 characters.

Characters have an element tagged to them : fire, earth, lightning and water.

For now, just remember that fire beats earth, earth beats lightning, lightning beats water, and water beats fire. “Beats” meaning that when in combat, a bonus modifier is applied.

Fire > Earth > Lightning > Water > Fire

Characters can equip a weapon when they fight, and they range from 1 to 5 star in terms of how powerful (and therefore, expensive) they are. Plus, weapons have a base element too.

To maximize damage output, the character and the weapon should have a matching element i.e. a fire character using a fire weapon. Again, this uses a modifier and the backend is just mathematics.

Mostly important, characters can share a single weapon – so we’ll only need to buy one weapon instead of four. Spend less!

The most efficient way to create a team is to –

Step #1 : Recruit your first character (0.41 $SKILL) when you go to CryptoBlades website. The assigned character will have a randomly generated element – let’s assume that we received a water character.

Step #2 : Buy three additional characters (0.46 $SKILL) from the marketplace. Remember that we’ve got a water character as our first one, so we’ll be getting three more water-based characters. This is such that all four characters can share a water weapon, which we are going to buy next.

Step #3 : Buy one 3* weapon (from 0.21 $SKILL) that is water-based from the marketplace.

At the time of writing, this costs exactly 2 $SKILL which is around US$110 to set up a no-frills team that’s capable of winning most fights.

What you need

As a crypto game native to the Binance Smart Chain, each action requires gas fee in the form of Binance (BNB) tokens. Depending on price, it is approximately US$0.30 per action e.g. recruit, buy, fight, level-up etc taken.

• BSC wallet e.g. MetaMask
• BNB – for gas that is required for each action taken
• SKILL – to recruit/buy characters and forge/buy weapons

Outside of the CryptoBlades game, PancakeSwap and ApeSwap have liquid trading pools to swap between BNB and SKILL tokens.

User interface

With bare-bones features, the user interface is very simple right now.

• Plaza – characters we own
• Blacksmith – weapons we own / forge weapon / re-forge weapon
• Combat – fight to earn $SKILL
• Marketplace – buy characters and weapons we mentioned earlier
• Stake – stake $SKILL tokens to reduce taxless withdrawals from 15 days to 7 days

How to win most fights (secret weapon)

First thing is that a character can have up to 200 stamina at any point in time. Stamina recharge at a rate of 1 stamina every 5 minutes i.e. 288 stamina per day. Therefore, stamina is equivalent to our time resource.

Each fight costs 40 stamina, and therefore we can fight 7 times per day per character (or 28 times per team of four characters).

In each fight, our chosen character is pitted against a computed generated (think of it as a dice roll) opponent of varying power and element.

Our water-based character has a base power of 3,600 and is able to equip a 3* water-based weapon having a stat of power +377. Now, how does that compare to the opponent that has seemingly double our power? That’s mathematical formula covered in the documentation of CryptoBlades. Remember what we mentioned about elements etc?

In general, a experience point (XP) is directly related to the enemy’s power and actual $SKILL reward received if the fight is won, but does not take into account element bonuses.

To save you the trouble, you can use tools like CryptoBlades Tracker’s combat simulator to find out the possibility of winning each fight.

This is a nice example because we can see that the probability of beating enemy #2 is higher than enemy #1 after accounting for element bonuses, despite the higher power (i.e. difficulty) of enemy #2.

To put it simply, winning a fight is the utmost priority, otherwise no $SKILL is awarded.

The actual fight is anti-climatic because it is just a fancy, black-box dice roll and all we see is the result.

I triggered a fight just to grab the screenshot above and it earned me 0.013 $SKILL.

Gas-wise, it used to be rather costly as each fight requires a transaction fee plus it was clogging BSC network and making it un-useable.

In a recent update, we can “batch our fights” which is awesome since we spend less time and gas fees for fights.

This meant that we can use up to 200 stamina on this one fight – if we win, we win all five. If we lose, we lose all five.

Estimating earnings

To make it simple for you, the CryptoBlades team has a handy earnings calculator that factors in current prices and gas fees.

Increasing earnings

For a level 1 team instead with four characters, the estimated daily profit is about US$7.50 after gas fees.

This translates to a 100% return-on-investment (RIO) of around 15 days ($110 / $7.5) if prices remain stable at current levels, which has plunged to 25% of all-time-high (ATH) levels. Not forgetting that all characters (currently priced at 0.82 $SKILL in marketplace for level 21) and weapons can be sold if we decide not to play anymore, since they are NFTs.

Also, characters earn experience points and can quickly level up in early days. At milestones of level 11, 21 and 31 etc, there is a significant boost to earnings.

Click on the XP link on the right of the Withdraw Tax 15% to “claim” them. This is a manual process to reduce gas fees for multiple claims. Simply claim once for level 11 and once for level 21 as the experience points will accumulate.

Cashing out $SKILL tokens

Earned $SKILL tokens take 15 days before they can be withdrawn without a 15% penalty. Immediate withdrawal incurs a tax, and this number goes down by 1% per day.

Upon withdrawal, trade away using swaps and they turn into beautiful cash.

It is easy to see how a game like this can turn into potential side income by investing a few minutes every day, assuming someone have 5 or let’s go wild – 50 accounts? I always like to be conservative, so I’d assume another 50% drop in price and 50% drop in rewards.

Rewards = 50 accounts * $10 * 30 days * 50% * 50%

That would still translate into a lot of money for clicking around a website.

Have fun!

A lot of the nitty-gritty details (really, just Maths stuff) can be found in the documentation so I won’t mention them here. Check out Melos on YouTube also for his CryptoBlades videos.

For me, the potential of the game lies in the eventual expansions such as raids, guilds, dungeons and lands for grabs. Not sure if I’ll keep playing so I’m keeping on eye on the developments daily.

A lot of variables in-game such as $SKILL cost for recruiting, forging or fight rewards are dynamically adjusted as a result of the price of $SKILL token which causes a high level of uncertainty.

Sustainable, or perhaps not? No one knows.

Disclaimer (Crypto)

The information provided on this website is a reflection of my personal experience and does not constitute investment advice, financial advice, trading advice, or any other sort of advice, and you should not treat any of the website’s content as such.

This is a gentle reminder that the trading of crypto (or digital payment tokens) is highly risky and not suitable for the general public. Conduct your own due diligence and consult your financial advisor before making any investment decisions.

Kevin

Kevin started Turtle Investor when his net worth languished at negative $25,755. His desire to turn things around led him to build passive income from investments and side hustles that pay for his daily expenses and vacations. You can learn more about Kevin here.