Free 2 Play Challenge Day 5 - Unexpected Hurdles

Here we are at Day 5 of my starting from zero and growing a Splinterlands and Hive account as a Free 2 Play player.

And... I've hit some challenges. Let's talk about them. And then we'll go over today's progress.

Card Crunch

I'm really starting to feel the crunch of only having the starter set plus 3 cards from daily quest rewards. I'll be making a post after this using the tool from Splinterstats to get an idea of my win rate from last season, which is probably about the same as my current win rate.

But, there is definitely a wall I'm hitting early on in Bronze 3 where I bounce back to Novice and work back up and bounce back and repeat.

Some of this is strategy. I'm a casual player and not necessarily awesome. But, part of it is also not having a plethora of cards to choose from.

Admittedly, it's mostly me not being a good player. When I lose, it's often to other new players using the same set of cards as me. So, I can't use cards as a big excuse. I actually have to "git gud" as the kids seem to say these days.

Resource Credits

Yesterday I talked about Hive, Hive Power, SPT, and SPT Power. One thing I figured I'd save until today to discuss is Resource Credits. And since I'm very low on them, it's the perfect opportunity to address this.

What are resource credits? The simple answer is that it is a resource you have that allows you to take actions on the Hive Blockchain. On facebook or youtube you have advertisers paying companies to keep the servers going so you can do your thing. On Hive, there's no advertisers and no corporations. But the computing power has to come from somewhere.

When ever you post, upvote, comment, play games, etc... you are using resource credits. You can check your resource credits available and time to being full (it takes a few days to completely fill if it's very low) in the Hive Keychain.

When you don't have enough resource credits, you can't do stuff. On day of this challenge I encountered the error that I didn't actually have enough resource credits to post.

So, How do you get resource credits? Resource credits (RC) regenerate over time. And the amount of resource credits you have is generally tied to your...

If you said "Hive Power", you win.

This is part of the importance of powering up. By either buying Hive and powering it up, or powering up your earnings, you enable yourself to perform more actions.

But, if you're free to play or just getting started, you may not have the ability to buy Hive to power up. In this case, your best bet is to take advantage of tools that new Hiveans have to receive delgations or gifts of Hive Power. This is usually just enough to get you started.

Delegations

I was able to delegate myself a little Hive power from my main account to keep the posting coming. But, I'll need to delegate a little more. I didn't delegate enough.

When Hive power is delegated, the use is "loaned" to another party. Its value is retained by the person delegating, and that person can un-delegate to get back the use of that Hive Power.

A little bit to get you started if you've yet to make friends on Hive can possibly be obtained at GiftGiver.site

If you happen to have signed up for Splinterlands through the referral link on my main account, @starbork, let me know and I'll delegate you some Hive Power from that account to get you started posting.

Here's the link to sign up under my main account.

So, since I'm currently at 10% resource credits (not enough to post this article), I'll need to delegate this account some HP from my main. Does that make me no longer Free 2 Play? I'll let you decide. Delegations aren't always permanent. Consider it a loan. And consider it just another reason to make friends in this community by creating value.

Today's progress.

Today I had the earth quest. Though I like playing earth, I really struggled to get my 5 wins today. Nevertheless, I did, and got 8 DEC as my reward from the reward chest.

So, all told I am currently at:

• 53.16 DEC
• 30 Collection Power
• .033 SPS
• 0 SPT / SPT Power
• 0 Hive / .004 Hive Power (+ 5HP currently delegated. I'll delegate more today.)

Reflections so far

If it isn't clear yet, the path to earning on a free 2 play account is incredibly slow. Like everything else, you have to invest a little to get things going. There's no free lunch, as the saying goes.

But that's not the most important observation to make. The most important observation to make would be the value of engaging in the community. That should become more clear in the days and weeks to come in this project.

The big advantage of crypto over fiat is its ability to take a community and transform the value, experience, intelligence, and good will of that community into abundance. For that to work, each person needs to provide some input. It's wonderful.