I've been a gamer for my entire life. At the age of three I started playing Pac-Man on the Commodore 64, and nowadays I play games on the Playstation 4, PC and my mobile phone. I like games with a good story, interesting combat, or games that require management skills. However, in the past few weeks there's this small blockchain game that got me glued to my phone: Knight Story. A mobile phone game addiction normally is quite hard to combine with actual real work, but for some reason I'm not having any problems.
Addiction much?
Even while typing this, the game is open next to my keyboard. Once in a few minutes a click a few times on my screen, and that's it. The result is that Knight Story has been open on my phone for almost 18 hours in the past seven days. That's 10 percent of an entire week, and 15 percent if I deduct 7 hours sleep per night. According to data on my iPhone this little idle role playing game is the first app I use when picking up my phone 31 percent of the time, only beating by Whatsapp and Twitter.
If this would be any other game I would've been fired by now, warned by my boss or I would've missed deadlines. However, in this case I'm not having that many problems at all. You see, Knight Story isn't the most exciting game on the market, and it's just a fun time sinker that requires very little attention.
I've always been into video games as long as I remember, but the games I generally play are not these type of idle clickers. My games normally require reflexes and tactics. Knight Story doesn't require any of that. All you need for this mobile game is a little bit of time and lots of patience.
What is Knight Story?
Knight Story is made by game studio Biscuit. They are the developers of EOS Knights, but instead this new version of the game is now running on Ethereum. In this idle RPG gamers need to level up their characters, pick up items, merge these items into new materials and create weapons and armor for their heroes. Creating new materials has a chance of failing, losing all required ingredients.
In generally try to check my phone at least every hour, preferably even more often. After approximately every fifteen minutes my heroes have died and I need to restart their quest. If I'm actively playing I will pick up all the materials I need, while passive play will only leave the most valuable materials gathered during the current quest. At the same time players can use found materials to build their village, and leveling up their buildings. A higher level building will give heroes for example an attack or armor bonus.
Reaching goals in Knight Story
After players have fought their way through the first few levels of Knight Story, the game opens up. There are six different enemy types in the day mode, while night mode offers more difficulty versions of the same enemies. Players need to defeat as many as possible. Currently that limit is set to 1000 waves on night mode. I'm not even close, as my knights die around the 250th wave of night mode.
I'm not actively busy reaching a certain wave, as I have no influence on that. Instead I am literally farming. I want my knight to gather resources, and I would try to synthesize these resources into better materials. For example, I want to get more mithryl. This requires three pieces of titanium, but there's only a 9 percent chance that synthesis will be successful. Thanks to a random number generator players tend to fail a lot, and thus this resource becomes valuable. To generate the next level of materials (ademantium) players need three pieces of mithryl, and they will have a sixty percent change. You understand the disappointment when creating ademantium fails and I need to start gathering mithryl all over again. It gets frustrating at times.
Knights Story financial gains
When we're talking about blockchain games, we also need to talk about the in-game economy. Currently approximately 149 ETH ($19000) worth of items is sold per week. At the moment is most expensive items are 0.02 ETH, which is approximately $2.59. Keep in mind, these are items that require lots of time to create. It's therefore impossible to call Knight Story a good game for financial gain.
Biscuit is adding more functionalities in the game. Starting from next week there will be a boss fight. In addition they want to increase the pace of the game, allowing for a faster game experience. Let's see how much the game will interfere with my normal working life then.
Yes
I'm aware that my gaming habit with Knight Story is a form of addiction. Quite frankly I'm happy that this happens to me with this game, and not with a title that requires one hundred percent of my attention. If that would be the case, I'd be in trouble now. I guess this is the lesser evil.
My knights are doing their job, and I'm doing mine. Our work can coexist, even though I need to push them to keep performing like a real manager. We touch base every half an hour to get start a new quest, synthesize some materials and build our village. And I know, I will be playing Knight Story until something else comes along.
Before Knight Story it was Funky Bay, Mario Run, Spells of Genesis, and Score! Match. There will always be a mobile game that's sucking up my time, at least Knight Story doesn't require my full time devotion to make progress.
Posted from my blog: https://www.nederob.nl/2020/01/02/combining-this-addictive-little-game-with-my-work-life/