PlantVsUndead’s farmland was their principal play-to-earn mechanism. You buy or earn a plot of land (a grid) and plant NFT plants in the grid squares. Each day, you water your plants, scare crows away if they come, wait for them to grow, then harvest them for PVU tokens. This process of watering, growing, and harvesting, you repeat, ad nauseam.
Let’s talk about the land. The land is an NFT. A player purchases this NFT, which (on the blockchain, of course) entitles them to a plot of land. Land rarity (common, rare, mythic) determines how many squares a grid has. Common land is not particularly expensive but yields are low. Rare and mythic plots have larger grids (more squares), but they cost significantly more upfront. A typical plot might have between 5 and 9 squares, depending on its rarity. The player then purchases plants, which are also NFTs. Plants also have rarities (saplings, trees, mama trees) and cost more as their rarity increases. Each plot square can only hold one plant at a time, so the player must purchase plants, which are also NFTs.
And then there was also the "sapling" farming component to it. It's where you needed saplings to actually plant crops and the saplings themselves had to be acquired through either opening mystery boxes or breeding crops (or some such mechanic, it's been a while). So there was a separate in-game economy where you would need saplings to farm and it also had some degree of scarcity (artificial I might add) built around it. The players were forced to constantly either buy saplings from one another using tokens or buy new saplings with real money via their NFT marketplace. It was such a classic design for a crypto-game where they timegate multiple currencies such that you are always running short of *something*.
As a note, PVU used what’s known as a “hybrid” tokenomics structure: it had two tokens, PVU, which was an ERC-20 token, and LE, or Light Energy, which is used in game as a “fuel” to water the plants every day. No watering = no harvest. So if you don’t wish to waste resources, you must spend LE every day to water plants, and get them ready for the next harvest. You cannot earn LE (there’s an auto-generation process which is pretty poor), and so you need to either slowly generate it by staking PVU, or buy it on an exchange. In other words, you are forced to slowly bleed LE (LE is burned per transaction) until you can produce enough PVU from your harvests to make the land self-sustaining. Don’t think about this too much or you’ll see the ponzi; the players simply hope that prices hold for long enough for their playtime to turn a profit. This tokenomics structure was fairly typical of 2021-2022.
The *only* thing that worked was the UI/UX and graphics, and that's just because the standard for graphics in crypto-games is so low that I could give any of them a 5/5 score there. The PvU farmland did look aesthetically pleasing (more or less) and your farm setup had this cute Tower Defense style aesthetic to it which made sense since PVU was itself a PvZ (plants vs zombies) clone to begin with. Your farm would look neat enough to where you could take screenshots and feel *safe* posting it... until you realize that you bought hundreds of dollars worth of NFT jpegs of cartoon sunflowers that are now worth $3 in total.
What made the experience more fun was the community dynamic. There were the true believers who would tell you the developers had a vision, that they were actively working on it, that it's a long-term play. On the other end you had people who were calling the game a rugpull from day 1 (likely closer to the truth). Discord was a massive dumpster fire between these two groups arguing and shaming each other at length. In the meantime, the developers continued to release new components: PvP farming modes, more NFTs, various governance tokens. None of which changed the fact that the tokenomics at its very core was *rotten*.
What really killed it is the token price. If you had held PVU for less than 2 weeks, then you would have made an ROI of 2 to 3 months on your investment, and you might have been done. If you held it for any longer, well… you probably are still holding. Player ROI was the entire point of the process for 99% of participants, and once the token price tanked after its pump in late 2021 (caused by everyone flipping NFT land, flipping NFTs in the marketplace, and general meme-market hysteria) then there was no point in anyone playing. Player ROI went from “2 months” to “infinity”, in the span of a few days. An entire in-game economy was generated in short order, an army of players were minted NFT plants and land plots, and then when the price tanked in late 2021, all of a sudden everyone’s ROI became so far out into the future that most players simply gave up and quit. The playerbase evaporated, the marketplace dried up, and while the game continues to run and the servers are still up, it is a completely different game from what it was in peak season. A shell of its former self.
So yeah the whole thing was an absolute clown show. In hindsight it was one of the most glaring examples of how NOT to structure tokenomics for a game. Infinite supply, no proper burn mechanism that made an iota of difference, rewards that were not based on any value creation at all, it was just a ponzi structure where early players got rewarded with new players' money until new players stopped coming. The farmland NFT was merely the vehicle for that structure.
The NFT marketplace for PVU still continues to run, as far as I can tell. Players can still buy and sell land, they can still buy and sell NFT plants. All of the prices have dropped precipitously of course. Now it’s an “opportunity” to get in at low prices (you may still do so), but: why would you do that? Unless you somehow believe that this project is going to pump again. So go ahead, by all means, purchase a plot of land. Purchase 5 of them. Enjoy your plants. Breed new mama trees. Try and flip them. Good luck.
So yeah, tried WetHunt recently and it kinda surprised me, not gonna lie. You jump in, messages start moving pretty quick, and it doesn’t feel like one of those dead platforms where everybody vanished last week or never was real to begin with. I liked that profiles give you enough to work with without turning into a whole thesis, and the chat stuff is simple, fast, a little plain maybe, but plain is fine if people actually reply. Super easy. Honestly the vibe on WetHunt feels busy in a good way, like maybe 20 people are around at any random hour, maybe more, hard to tell, but definitely not empty, and that matters more than fancy glitter features nobody uses. It seems reliable, payments and account stuff aren't weird, which, wow, should be normal but isn't. People seem into it. That's half the battle, maybe most of it.
