So, another weekend, another chance to do stuff on the Ethereum mainnet with the nice low gas fees. I'm still really sure why they are back to decent levels, but it appears that most of the DeFi mania has gone to other places... which makes it a nice experience to use the Ethereum chain again!

So, a while back, I had joined in on the drop of Illuvium tokens that were being offerred to a number of existing Ethereum based communities. It was a "take-action" drop, not one of the spray to everyone who is holding a particular token. In this case, I was part of the Synthetix (SNX) community, and I had seen that if we headed over to the Illuvium Discord server, we could be rewarded with some pre-ILV (which was the placeholder token for the airdrop, which would be converted 1:1 for the ILV token when it actually launched on Balancer).

I decided to take a quick look to see what it was all about... after all, the Illuvium project is a gaming sort of project, and the Synthetix project is one of the older DeFi protocols. I couldn't see what the overlap was... apparently not much, other than the love of Ethereum? What I was quite taken by was the art design of the Illuvium prototypes. Unlike many of the blockchain based games of 2019-20, it looked like a real modern game!

However, if I understand the game mechanics (I don't really, I haven't really looked into it much), it seems like the graphics are a very pretty exterior for game mechanics that are similar to most of the existing play-to-earn games. In other words, gaming as a bit of a cross between work/chore and free-to-play incentives. These are things that have turned me off the idea of blockchain based gaming at the moment... and this seemed to be not that much different. So, I had the pre-ILV (now ILV) tokens and no real desire to use or invest more into the system.

However, recently, the ability to lock the ILV tokens was offered on the game project page, and I figured that I may as well just lock them up for the maximum duration in order to get the best multiplier on the ILV tokens. They were given to me for nothing other than to join a discord, and I have no thoughts one way or another about them... so, I may as well lock them up and see what happens with the project in the coming year or two.

After all, they do have the prettiest looking concepts around... but we'll see if that is enough to beat the early starters, especially Axie Infinity which has gained such a large following. This has also led me to start thinking... most of the blockchain universe is incredibly disloyal... people run from project to project chasing the yields and highest earnings. I suspect that that will be the case for blockchain based games as well (well, we have already seen that on HIVE/STEEM based games). This means that projects need to have some way to retain their user base with some amazing mechanics or financial incentives... and financial incentives don't make for good gameplay.

We've seen that regular multiplayer games goes through hypes and then fall away pretty quickly... those gamers are really fickle. Will we see the same with blockchain based gaming? I think so, except that there will be people holding bags of useless tokens. The only way to avoid this, is to have tokens and assets that are able to be used across games, and not specific to a single game. I know that projects are doing this in the long-term... but these short term, game specific assets are not likely to hold their worth beyond a game's rapid hype cycle.

... or I could be wrong!

Anyway... enjoying the low low gas fees on Ethereum! I hope they stick around after London!

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