Probably most of you have seen this update announcement in EOS Knights about two weeks ago:

This will be a bigger update of EOS Knights and we better hope it has a ton of positive impact on the game.

What will change?

From a game mechanics point of view, not so much. There's gonna be a weekly dungeon ranking event, much like the (almost) weekly craft challenges. Depending on how this will be designed, this may improve the attractiveness of dungeon fights (I still don't really think they're great), but I personally don't think they will change much. Let's move on.

Dynamic rebirth cooldown

In order to "prevent bots" the time you need to wait after rebirth to rebirth again will be a random number between 2 and 30 minutes instead of 120 seconds every time. I don't really see the point how this will help against bots, but I also don't know why you'd try to prevent bots in a blockchain game; it would be as if you'd try to ban voting bots on Steem - good luck with that!

As an effect, it will become more difficult to rebirth for certain material. Whenever material like diamonds or ruby are needed in a craft challenge, their price skyrockets. This is because it is very difficult (especially as a higher-ranked player) to get material that is as bad as those; even after 120 seconds your worst material are often already better than emeralds or rubies. At 30 minutes, no chance of course.

Apart from that, it doesn't seem like this will have a lot of an impact either, as advanced players wait longer than 30 minutes for their knights to rebirth.

Free EOS accounts

There we go! Now this is interesting. Finally, new players can just get an account. This has been a bit of a pain so far. It won't solve the entire pain (new players still need to get EOS tokens bought and CPU staked), but it's a good step forward. Let's hope that a lot of new players will join the game once this is in place; however, as there's no free-to-play mode and you definitely need EOS to get started, conversion will probably not improve that much. Let's see, it's definitely a good idea.

You'll need to use your Facebook account to register for a free new account via EOS Knights. I suppose this is intended to prevent or reduce spam or simply players claiming dozens of free accounts. In any case, the number of new accounts provided by EOS Knights will be limited on a daily basis (maybe something like 100 per day or so).

REX support

This is very vague. It could help with getting resources, but it's hard to tell.

What REX is? It's supposed to become the resource exchange native to EOS and it's been proposed by Dan himself. It's not live yet, so let's wait a bit to see whether the integration with REX will actually help EOS Knights get over one more hurdle when getting started.

EOS Knights plans to provide a bit of CPU staked whenever you purchase Magic Water. At the current CPU price, it's not really necessary, but this may become relevant once the network gets busier again.

Marketplace fee increase

The marketplace fee increases from 3% to 5% in order to pay for the new accounts. If the new accounts actually do attract a lot of new users, this pretty steep raise may be worth it, but right now it kinda seems like squeezing players. I won't rage about it because I don't think it will change much for myself, but overall this could reduce liquidity on the marketplace in the longer run. Maybe this is a good thing, though...

Global drop rates

Depending on the factors used here, this will probably have the biggest impact.

With more players reaching certain floors, there's more and more material of certain rarity being mined (and therefore offered on the marketplace). And if the number of newer players doesn't grow quickly enough, this can lead to a substantial decrease of prices in the marketplace. EOS Knights is introducing a global drop rate factor to limit the total number of material of certain rarity independently of the number of players. It will basically reduce your individual drop rate when there's too many players on similar floors.

What to do now

Get prepared for the update. Indeed, we've been seeing a slowdown in user growth, and at the same time item and material prices have dropped, showing in the overall daily volume transacted via EOS Knights

(source: Dappradar)

That's no coincidence.

So the hope is that two things will happen:

• User growth will accelerate again
• Marketplace prices will stabilize

Both effects should lead to higher volumes again, and a generally higher demand for material and items on the marketplace.

How can you prepare for this?

I've been keeping my most valuable material and items for the last week in anticipation of higher prices some time after the update. Right now it seems most players are trying to sell whatever they get as quickly as possible, resulting in a decrease in price of individual masterial up to 60-70% within two weeks, e.g. being the case for Lapis Lazuli.

I'm still waiting for the prices to go down a little more and will buy into advanced equipment for my knights right before the update to generate the maximum impact. My floor record has been stagnating because I stopped buying, but I hope to get a 1000-1500 floor boost once I level up most of my equipment.

Let's get the party started

Let's hope the update is on time and has the above mentioned impacts of increasing prices. This will make the game more attractive again, and we may be able to see a new world record for "most players of a blockchain game" some time soon. So far, Crypto Kitties has had most people playing back in December 2017, at slightly below 15k users. Still a bit to go, though...

P.S: I was very happy about getting 230 upvotes on my last piece and being curated by @c-squared and @archdruid, but especially about the comments from players asking questions. Thanks a lot! Maybe we can beat that this time again :-)