by partiallyZen
Note: I was not paid or in any way compensated by Influenceth for this article. I do own Influence NFTs purchased on my own accord.
After exploding in the past couple of years, Non-Fungible Tokens are commonplace. See Jimmy Fallon/Paris Hilton. Incubated by a worlds’ time at home, the market is quickly growing overcrowded and for anyone who has spent time in this space knows, painful. From FUD right out the gate, to rug pulls and ghosted communities, the NFT world can be ripe with stormy mints and good intentions. Here is where the shadowed prologue ends…
Enter Influence (influenceth.io).
From the team’s homepage it is described thus:
“Influence is a play & earn, space strategy MMO where players own all of their content. Colonize asteroids, build infrastructure, discover technologies, engage in combat. Expand your influence across the belt.” – Influenceth.io Homepage
As an older gamer (30 is older now right?), I have been jaded in the last few years by AAA Studios. Plagued by Terrible ports, graphics card shortages, micro-transactions, and straight-up unfinished releases have left me feeling less than stoked for the vector of that market.
It does not take more than a moment looking through the UI or talking with other denizens in the Influence Discord to feel something different. It is a community that viscerally reminds me of the midnight releases of yesteryear. There is a palpable excitement. The collective ownership of the project by the team and community, the rarity creation, the minting process, mixed with the project transparency of a freshly washed window continues to keep my excitement aflame after these few months.
[Yeah, yeah, yeah, fanboy… But I am here for NFT drops, updates, and Web3 content!]
Seriously take a look at the UI on game.influence.io. The way that it seamlessly blends WebGL with Web3 and some seriously advanced smart contracts. There are so many things that the Influenceth team did right. Things that need to be shared and replicated in the future of Web3 are as follows.
On Minting:
On September 12th, 2021 Influence had their second sale that coincided with the release of their Crew minting process. I was trepidatious as so many mints push the gas price through the roof and leave many smaller fishes (such as myself) to wait, hope, and likely lose gas with nothing to show. We were prepared, however, in the Influence Discord they released easy play-by-play for minting and even pushed an update so that you could research before minting went live. Simultaneously, the community dev Denker created a website for collating the available asteroids. (shout out to adalia.info)
I had around 0.33ETH put away (don’t wallet shame me) and was kitted out with all the knowledge provided by the team to buy a medium asteroid for the headquarters to my cyberverse company partiallyZen Corporation.
Fully expecting to only be able to purchase the one before the gas war commenced, I was pleasantly surprised to see that the UI style minting did no such thing. I was able to secure my medium asteroid (0.1881ETH) for 0.19548ETH (gas included!). It is almost hard to believe in the current gasmosphere but take a look at my transaction here. Instead of the single asteroid, I was able to pick up 5 altogether and with them came Crew mints, but we can talk about that next time.
On Reveals/Rarity:
When you purchase an Influence Asteroid NFT during one of the sales, you immediately receive that asteroid as “Unscanned” and “Crew Unminted”. So included in an asteroid you purchase, you get two rarity rolls. Of which you can do at any time (preferably when gas is low) or as a flipper you can keep them unminted for a boon in sales when the game does release later this year. No wait between mint date and reveal date. Some people like that, but I prefer to make my fortune with my clicks, all sub 1ETH of it. I hope to go into more detail on this process in some future article.
On Transparency:
This factor is possibly something that most impressed me in the NFT space. The Influence team hosts a Rock Talk every Thursday to discuss any new developments, drop some new sneak peeks, and generally get the vibe of the community with an open Q&A at the end. While they usually have answers for most questions, they are clear when they are talking about “possible states” or something they don’t know. They freely admit their lack of knowledge in these situations. Where the team does know, they provide information on time (even far beforehand). When a specific date is established they hit the bullseye. Their team grows steadily week on week.
Notes to upcoming dApps:
I have only scratched the surface of this outrageously deep game but if I can hammer home just one thing from this article it is not to specifically purchase an Asteroid or Crew (I think you should..but not the point!).
For any upcoming dApp developers; be it in the game-space metaverse or even just a standard rarity style art drop, you should seriously consider looking to Influenceth for inspiration on your next mint. The smoothness of the UI/Web3 minting process, the rarity/reveal is up to the owner, and the transparency of the direction of the Influence Team is a golden image to base my personal dApp goals and will be a direct comparison for my future purchases.
-partiallyZen
Koan of the Week:
Mazu said to Yaoshan,
“Sometimes I have him raise his eyebrows and blink. Sometimes I
do not have him raise his eyebrows and blink. Sometimes having him raise his eyebrows
and blink is right. Sometimes having him raise his eyebrows and blink is not right.”
