Since I entered the crypto world, I've been watching BTC every day, but today's trend feels like being drunk—$76K bounces a couple of times and then falls back to $75K, just a dollar short of going up! I heard there's a guy in the circle who took a $10 million position with 40x leverage on a short, and in the end, the market ground him into the dirt. Truly reckless!
Alright, no more complaints. Let's continue discussing Pixels today.
To be honest, I didn't think much of the 'fake stone' setting in Chapter 3 at first.
What do you think? A casual game about farming and feeding chickens suddenly tells you—you can bury fake stones in the land of the neighboring guild, and their Yieldstone output drops directly. Isn't this design a bit unethical? I was complaining in the guild channel, saying this thing would inevitably become an acceleration tool for internal competition. As a result, our guild's tactical expert replied to me: 'You don't understand anything; this is called game theory in practice.'
Alright, I’ve been convinced, and I’ve become the designated ‘bad guy’ responsible for causing chaos.
After three months of this, I realized it’s not that simple. You can’t just stuff in fake stones whenever you want—you have to spend BERRY to buy them, and the placement matters. It’s most effective to bury them next to their core mining area, but the risk of being discovered is the highest. The opposing guild isn't a pushover; they will patrol and report. If they successfully report, your fake stone is wasted, and they can recover part of their losses.
Once this mechanism kicked in, the daily vibe of the guild changed. Previously, everyone did their own thing, but now every morning the first thing said in the group is, 'Who’s on duty to bury stones today?', and the last thing before bed is reporting 'How many stones were buried and how many were pulled.' The guild leader’s Excel sheet has shifted from tracking individual output to tracking the patrol patterns of opponents. Is this a game? It feels more like conducting field research.
But here’s the interesting part—Luke mentioned in an interview at the end of last year that after Chapter 3 launched, the single-user activity of Core Pixels more than doubled, and the retention rate was nearly 30% higher than during the pure PVE phase. I didn’t understand at the time; shouldn’t causing chaos drive players away? After thinking it over, I realized: the pure PVE economic model easily falls into the 'grinding' mindset, where you mine your way and I mine mine, competing on who can grind harder. But the PVP chaos mechanism introduces uncertainty—your Yieldstone production today might be cut in half because the opponent buried a stone. This risk forces you to band together with your guildmates, study your opponents, and think about how to create maximum disruption with the least BERRY.
Isn’t this what Luke has been talking about with RORS? Reward-on-Return-Spend—every dollar spent on rewards needs to bring back at least a dollar into the ecosystem. Fake stones consume BERRY, and BERRY needs to be farmed or traded. The process of consuming BERRY itself is the value circulation within the ecosystem. Every BERRY you spend on chaos becomes the motivation for others to defend or counter. The entire economic system's blood flow isn't maintained by the project team scattering tokens; it naturally flows from players sabotaging each other.
Let me share some real data. During the AMA in February, Luke revealed that after Chapter 3 launched, the market acquisition cost for Pixels dropped by nearly 40%. Why? Because the new players brought in by veteran players aren’t coming just for 'mining'; they’re coming for 'our guild to take down the opposing guild.' This kind of social stickiness can't be bought with money.
Every day when I open Pixels, the first thing I do isn't to collect crops, but to check the guild rankings and see the progress bar of the neighboring guild. If they're leveling up faster than us, I start strategizing—should I grind through the night to bury some fake stones, or save up some Yieldstone to boost our guild's output?
The other day, a guild mate asked me if I get tired doing this shady stuff every day. I said I do, but it’s interesting. In the past, when I played other chain games, I was tired because I was afraid of losing money. Now I’m tired because I want to win.
Do you think this means the project team has figured out the economic model?