I used to think that as long as you got your hands on the NFTs in blockchain games, it meant you held the rights to the profits. It wasn't until I really engaged with the land permission refresh mechanics and the script-based occupancy detection in Pixels that I realized I had idealized the on-chain interactions way too much.
At first, I heard others say that as long as you enable sharecropping permissions on your land, players can just come in and farm freely, and I could just chill and rake in the profits. I even picked a spot that wasn't too remote, thinking foot traffic wouldn’t be too shabby. I opened all the permissions and set the commission low, eagerly waiting for the system to run itself, thinking all I'd need to do was collect BERRY every few days. Back then, I naively thought the smart contract would handle everything automatically—players would come, farm, leave, and the profits would just flow in without me having to lift a finger.
The reality hit hard and fast. I logged in two days later and found that there wasn't a serious player in sight; instead, there were two low-achievement accounts just sitting on the land. At first, I didn't get it, thinking maybe the players had to step away temporarily. But after waiting nearly a day, those two accounts were still motionless, neither planting nor harvesting, just hogging the space. That's when I realized they were just script accounts meant to block the plots. I was really puzzled; isn't the contract supposed to automatically release idle plots? I later figured out that the system doesn’t automatically determine and clear idle accounts; I have to manually reset permissions to kick those placeholder accounts out.
I had to painstakingly re-open the plots, and by the end, I was pretty annoyed. I originally thought this was supposed to be automated on-chain profit, but instead, I found myself checking the plots daily, playing a game of wits with the script accounts. The first thing I do every day when I log in isn’t completing tasks or farming materials, but checking for abnormal accounts on my land and manually refreshing permissions. I calculated the time, and just dealing with this extra hassle takes me over ten minutes a day, not to mention the mental energy spent worrying about being blocked.
What really left me speechless was the plot resource weighting and player matching mechanism. I always thought that as long as my land was decent, farming players would come naturally. But after observing for almost a week, most of the visitors to my land were newbie accounts, planting a bit of basic wheat and then leaving, while high-value crops were hardly touched. I initially thought my commission settings weren’t friendly enough, so I lowered them repeatedly, even to the point of almost no profit, but the situation didn’t improve.
I later made a point to compare the popular plots held by guilds and found that the problem wasn’t with the commissions at all. When the system matches farming players, it prioritizes directing active and high-level players to those plots with rare resources and core locations, while ordinary retail players’ lands are at a disadvantage in matching weight. This means that, by design, small players’ plots have a hard time attracting high-quality farming players, and the profit ceiling is locked from the start.
I used to think that the value of assets in blockchain games was secured by contracts; as long as the mechanism exists, the profits are guaranteed. But now I understand that contracts only define distribution rules and don’t handle traffic distribution. Without active players willing to come, and without reasonable matching bias, even the most perfect profit-sharing contract is just a piece of paper. The time I spend maintaining permissions and driving away scripts yields less profit than if I just went out and did tasks like chopping wood.
I've come to terms with it now, no longer fussing over the plots every day. I keep the commission at a very low level; if someone wants to farm, I make a bit of pocket money, and if no one comes, I can’t be bothered. I've completely realized that many blockchain game assets appear to be on-chain assets, but to ordinary players, they feel more like liabilities that require continuous time investment to maintain. Without system-level anti-script protection and a fair traffic matching mechanism, the so-called passive income has been difficult to establish from the get-go. My plot now feels more like a reminder that next time I deal with blockchain game assets, I shouldn't just look at the surface profit descriptions, but also think carefully about the real operational costs and mechanism biases behind them.
