How ‘Pixels’ Season 2 Will Improve Ethereum Farming Game—And Why It’s Been Taking So Long

Ethereum– Farm based game Pixels– The hottest crypto game is not Built by Telegram-released a major Season 2 update this week that shakes things up considerably. But you wouldn't know it at a glance.

“Everybody's day-to-day in the game changes a lot,” says Pixel founder Luke Barwikowski. Decrypt Before starting.

Pixels retains the charming retro vibe that the game's title conveys. And it's fair to say that the previous game attracted millions of users in the last few months alone and was attacked by many gamers. But for Barwikowski and his team, it's an attempt to “fundamentally fix some of the issues we've seen in the last couple of years of building a live game.”

Broadly speaking, Chapter 2 is an effort to put Pixel in a lot of depth. As he was before discussed with Decrypt Back in FebruaryPixels have introduced scarcity throughout the economy and added a sense of growth to the various “levels” of devices.

That should run the game on the Ethereum gaming network. Ronin—feels like a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) similar to Runescape or Ragnarok Online.

Coupled with that are the differences between the free-to-play experience that anyone can jump into and the increasingly valuable benefits of owning one of the 5,000 NFT lands. Holders can now benefit from resources generated on their own land, allowing player-led guilds to function and play a role in online play.

In Chapter 2, Barwikowski said PIXELS “starts to shift more revenue to advanced players” – meaning that people who have invested more time in the game will have a better chance of earning PIXEL tokens than newcomers. Dabblers.

At the same time, Pixel doesn't want to kill the game's initial appeal to newcomers, and there are improvements for free-to-play users, such as expandable “spec” farms. But it's all a work in progress as he wants to continue to build publicly and tweak the game as players give feedback.

“The fun part is we don't know what the metagame is going to be,” he said before the opening. “And that's part of the experiment. The team is all-hands-on-board to do a lot of live ops work for the next month or two after release.

Growing pains

Gamers are very emotional – and vocal too. Within hours of Season 2's launch earlier this week, Pixel was fielding complaints about the amount of PIXEL players and how fast player power was dwindling. Since then, the team has pushed out several patches to address common complaints, easing players into larger shifts.

Barwikowski admits that while Pixel has seen explosive growth since migrating to Ronin, it has become increasingly difficult to solve issues in real-time on-the-fly and during construction.

And he admits that the game's sudden success convinced him to “professionalize” the start and take slow, deliberate steps. But that vibe was completely out of step with how Pixels was doing before the boom, and it quickly became clear that it wasn't the right vibe going forward — regardless of viewership.

“For a minute I had this wrong line of thinking, that we need to professionalize the game collection, and because we have all this attention, we need to be like a big company,” he said. “It's been in the last month that I've had a big change in things for us, and it's like, ‘Wait, that's the wrong way to look at it.'”

Pixel started Season 2 “three or four months later than we wanted,” which he says—in what he now describes as a proper state of mind—”is not an acceptable level of speed.”

To make up for this, Barwikowski plans to keep the team as lean as possible — currently estimating a full-time workforce of 19 — and iterate even faster, trying to maintain what he calls a “cowboy mentality” as the startup continues to grow. One of the most successful games built on blockchain.

“If it takes us a month to get a patch out, that's too long,” he said before the launch. “We lose player trust. If we want to meet the needs of our players, we have to get patches several times a week.”

Based on the last couple of days since the start of Season 2, it looks like Barwikowski and his team are living up to that promise of constant tweaking. It's frustrating, no doubt, but that makes things better for developers and players alike.

“It's a high bar we've set for ourselves.” But I think that's really what we all want in the group because it's more fun, right? It's less boring.”

Edited by Ryan Ozawa.