Blockstars v0.4 (Now Busking At A Street Corner Near You)
Starting now, your Blockstars can earn you $ROL when you send them out Busking — no more relying on airdrips or winning contests! Busking is the first gameplay feature where the Blockstars you manage can earn you $ROL in the game. If you are not sure what $ROL is, read our post on I Love $ROC and $ROL.
Origins of Busking
I’ve been reading a lot of comments from the community that the term “Busking” is new and many of you saw the term for the first time in our Whitepaper. Here’s some knowledge drop. According to the Oxford dictionary, Busking is the act of:
perform[ing] music or other entertainment in the street or another public place for monetary donations.
Although this term may have become somewhat obsolete in modern day usage (at least with our community members), the act itself is very much alive and relevant. Many famous musicians — Ed Sheeran, Tracy Chapman, Janis Joplin, and Rod Stewart just to name a few — started their careers buskin’ and grindin’ their way to stardom. Many of these musicians survived on modest busking earnings and used the earnings to cultivate their musical skills. Busking also gave these nobodys the opportunity to grow their fame and be discovered from their very humble beginnings.
Similarly, Busking in our game is a great way for unpretentious Blockstars (read: low stars and affordable) to earn $ROL and fame. All Blockstars can Busk and earn $ROL, but in the true spirit of management simulation games, you must find the optimal times and locations where it makes the most sense for your Blockstars.
How to Access Busking
You can play this feature by connecting your wallet and visiting Your Blockstars page. From there, click the “Actions” button and select Busk. Remember, you must have a Blockstar and your Blockstar must be idle before you can start Busking. If you don’t have a Blockstar, acquire a Blockstar to start playing today!
Earning $ROL
Like Practicing, Busking incorporates a few inputs from you. The two main inputs, besides of course selecting the Blockstar you want to use, are location and duration. One big difference between Practicing and Busking is that you can only Busk with your Primary musical instrument. You can play around with the different variables but in general, premium, higher traffic locations and longer durations will generate more total earnings. You can always see a breakdown of total Spend and Earn at the bottom of the Busk dialog.
Moar $ROL, how?
As you start playing around with different combinations of Blockstars, locations, and durations, you may start to see different earn rate patterns. When I say earn rate, I mean the amount earned over the amount of time and not the total earn value shown in the dialog. Here’s some insider information to help you think through how each lever impacts earn rate performance.
1. All skills matter. Unlike with practicing, all of your Blockstar’s skills are used in calculating the earn rates. The reason for this is because busking is meant to be a feature that benefits more over time as your Blockstars increase in skills. As they become better performers and more famous, they will attract larger audiences and earn more $ROL. Not only do all the skills matter, but your Blockstar’s starting star level also matters. If your Blockstar is already a relatively famous performer and has a large(ish) following, they will start out earning at a higher rate. Now of course, if you are managing a more established star, you will also be paying them a higher salary to perform. It all comes down to a game of economic balance.
The last clue I will leave you with is that there are a few skills that matter more than the others. If you listen to our last AMA or scavenge through Discord, you may find out what those specific skills are…
2. Durations and personalities. This is the first feature where your Blockstars’ hidden personalities matter a lot. We will have more on personalities in another blog post, but for now I will leave you with a little breadcrumb on how it factors into busking earn rates. About half of the Blockstars in the Foundation collection have an “Assertive” personality. These Blockstars are self-assured and refuse to stress themselves out. Therefore, they do not push themselves too hard when it comes to performing outside of their natural potential talents. What this translates to: if an Assertive Blockstar is born with high potential, you can probably expect them to have higher stamina and earn more when busking longer durations. What do you think happens with medium or lower potential?
3. Musical Skills and locations. Another combination to explore different mixtures of is musical skills and locations. You’ve probably already seen patterns of this with Practicing. With Busking, some locations and musical skills will produce better earn rates; however, the same combination may not be the optimal combination when it comes to collecting XP. This is where your game strategy comes into play. Are you optimizing for earning or for XP?
Salaries and %cuts
So many firsts and here’s another one. This is the first feature where your Blockstars’ %cut may come into play. More famous Blockstars will cost you more to manage. We’ve been slowly introducing the idea of salaries in the last few releases. In the Stars and Stats release, we exposed the 9 salary groups in the Foundation collection. After that, we shared the actual daily salaries of your Blockstars in Practicing and let you put them into practice. Adding another layer with Busking is the concept of %cut. As many of you may recall from the whitepaper, you pay your Blockstars either their daily salaries or a %cut of their total earnings, whichever is larger. Since your Blockstars earn $ROL when they busk, the %cut may now come into play. The best way to show how this works is through an example.
Take a look at Blockstar #13. You can see that this Blockstar’s daily salary is 2,349 $ROL and their cut is 88%. This means that you must pay this Blockstar *either* 2,349 daily *or* 88% of their total earnings, whichever is greater. Let’s say you send this Blockstar to the Garage for a day and you earn 2,763.3 gross earnings — the 88.1% cut of this would be 2,434.5 $ROL. You can see that the 2,434.5 %cut ends up being higher than the 2,349 daily salary you’ve already paid your Blockstar when you sent them busking. Therefore, when they return, you would get the salary you’ve already paid them “refunded,” and you would instead pay them their %cut. This is all a lot of boring math, so we’ve simplified everything for you in the Busk Complete screen. For those who like digging into the details, you can expand each section to get the exact breakdown of what is happening.
In this example, you can see that this Blockstar busking at its current skill abilities and with the combination of location and duration I’ve selected barely ekes out a positive return. Very few (highly starred and expensive) Blockstars will get these types of results, but for those that do, it may be more worthwhile to practice now to level up or wait until better locations (and future earning features) before sending them off to make money.
XP, XP, XP
Not only will your Blockstar earn $ROL from Busking, but they will also earn XP. The primary purpose of Busking is to earn $ROL, but when your Blockstars put themselves out there, they become more famous and celebrated. More fame means more social media followers and bigger audiences when performing. This is the only way (for now) for you to make progress on skills like Fame, Social Media, and Gigging.
This is Early Game.
Busking is an early gameplay feature and it is vital for early success.
Busking is the action an individual Blockstar can take by themselves that earns them $ROL through public performance. The amount of $ROL earned is not meant to be significant because this is only the start of the journey for your Blockstar. We will be releasing a similar feature, Gigging, once your Blockstars can form bands (read more about Bands and Skills here). Gigging will allow your Blockstars to earn much more $ROL through performances together.
Oh, and there’s more.
We love surprising, delighting, and adding unexpected polish whenever we can to level up the experience. This release is no exception. In addition to this big feature release, we’ve squeezed in 2 polish items that will hopefully make the game more enjoyable.
1. We’ve made the “in action” indicator pulse, so that you can easily see (and feel) when your Blockstars are working. From the list view, you can quickly check the progress of your Blockstar’s current job when clicking on the pulsing indicator.
2. We’ve animated the progress bar when your Blockstars complete their tasks. This way you can see how much XP is earned more clearly and it makes it easier to interpret when your abilities increase.
Join Us!
This is just a teaser of what we are up to! If you are intrigued by Blockstars, be sure to read much, much more about the game design, tokenomics, and development roadmap in our whitepaper, come and chat with other community members in our Discord and follow us on Twitter. If you want to join the team, check out our job openings here. We will also be posting news about upcoming features, roadmap progress & important events regularly right here, on our blog.
Sherrie Chen | @sher_nft| Chief Product Officer | Blockstars
